Hi all, was having fun trying to play this game less seriously than I do PoE by making my own build but I feel like I’ve really hit a wall. I tried to plan everything out from the beginning and make smart choices to make this build work but I’ve taken it as far as I think I can.
After a lot of trial and error my plan was to make a Void Knight 2h staffer that focused mostly on boosting Void Damage and Attunement to use both Erasing Strike and Abyssal Echoes. I was hoping to stack a lot of Abyssal Echoes DoTs, then use Erasing Strike to get a kill to pop a void rift chain that would trigger the rest of the Abyssal Echoes, and then also use Erasing Strike to help bossing.
The biggest problem is mana and health. Mana being the larger of the two-- originally I thought after enough grinding I could take Void Well to loop mob pack kills into more free casts, thus gaining tons of stacked x8 casts of Abyssal Echoes shooting out of me at all times. However then I found out it has a 10s cooldown and my dreams were shattered 
Now I don’t know if I should keep pushing on ahead, try and recraft all my gear for as much mana reduction as possible, or just give up. As it is Abyssal Echoes doesn’t do great damage unless you cast it a TON of times and it’s just too mana expensive to do so. I haven’t taken the -mana cost +delay between casts node yet because my damage was already quite weak unless I got multiple casts of Abyssal Echoes on enemies, but maybe that would make all the difference? Somehow I doubt though I will find a sweet spot between mana efficency and fast damage to not just make me wish I was playing Captain America instead
Secondly I feel extremely squishy. This is my fault for not taking enough defensive passive points and I haven’t capped out my GB or CA yet but I’m not done the campaign yet either. Just within the frozen area I am getting shotgunned down by mobs pretty much on sight. Because DoTs lifesteal in this game I thought this would be pretty exploitable, but even with moderate investment into lifesteal passive nodes and taking Anomaly Time Bubble to give myself even more leech, I feel like it is a struggle to get through even these easy campaign maps.
I felt like everything was coming together in the build so perfectly- that I was really taking advantage of all the interlocking possible pieces to make a really powerful build that synergized with every piece of itself, but more and more I’m starting to feel like everything is anti-fun, from the punishing mana costs to nodes that don’t quite do what you need them to do to get synergy going, I feel like I can’t play the game unless I pick very specific skills and nodes that the game is actually balanced around. If you use a skill the small dev team hasn’t had time to balance yet you just lose 
Is this the case or is there still a way to make Abyssal Echoes work? Or is it time just to go reroll lol