I think I ruined my Ranger in PoE2, need advice on how to proceed.

Hi all,

first time player of this genre basically, but avid MMORPG player otherwise.

I have a lvl 36 ranger that currently is struggeling hard to kill the last boss in Act 2.

The last 2 maps (Dreadnaught) I can basically clear in no time with eyes closed while cuddling with my dog at the same time, but the moment I enter the boss room I basically am dead within a few hits.

Not only am I squishy as f*ck, but I suddenly not seem to deal any damage anymore...

I think one mistake I made is going full evasion on ranger. It's on 71% currently. Should I have added armor as well? I went for a poison build with pathfinder.

As for skills`? My highest DPS on any skill is around 400ish.

Other bosses have been a walk in the park with this build and the act 2 boss is the actual first boss I really struggle. Have been trying for 2 days now but I most times cannot even take more than 5% of his HP before I get basically 1 or 2hit.

What do?

Fuest off, I generally always have some energy shield on me since I spec more into intelligence. However, you should have some dmg mitigation on. You will get hit at some point in the game

Second,do you have lightning resistance on for the fight? I had 50+% when I did it the first time.

Lastly, I do majority of my damage with my normal auto attack. Support gems for poison and attack speed. Normally I do all lightning but it doesn't work against him as much unless you have exposure.

If you get a flask that gets charges per second that's helpful as well.

At the Act 2 boss, I also had a lot of evasion, like ~81-84%. Also my lightning resistance was only around 20%. I did have some trouble surviving when I got hit by lightning skills, admittedly, but knowing the tells for attacks helped a lot with simply not getting hit by attacks.

But for me, I also had a damage issue starting around the Titan Grotto boss until I realized a couple of things: 1) my bow didn't have good damage stats and 2) the skills that I usually relied on were more for clearing mobs (I was using a lot of lightning rod + lightning arrow + stormcaller arrow)

Without knowing more info about your Ranger, I'd ask the following questions:
1) How much +damage did you get on your passive tree?
2) How much damage does your bow have? (for me, I only had around up to 53 physical damage + 20-something elemental from runes)
3) What skills are you using to take down single targets (e.g., bosses) vs groups?

Join up with someone similar level makes things 10 times easier...