huntress feedback

Dear community and developers.
During season 2 I played a lot of huntress and she's my favourite class, even before monk!

First, I would like to share, what I enjoy about the huntress class.

1) variable combos
Instead of merely repeating fixed combinations of skills (A->B), there are often multiple ways to follow up a skill in a meaningful way. I wrote a guide about such a combo playstyle here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3758090
My essential takeaway is that the game becomes significantly more fun, if a variety of skill combinations is available to choose from when engaging enemies. Ideally I could be thinking about on what to spend my energy charges on, how far to charge a whirlwind, when to debuff an enemy with blood hunt and so on and those decisions would have an impact on how well I handle different combat situations. These quick micro-decisions make combat more fun for me.

2) responsiveness to what is happening on the screen
There are some mechanics that allow the huntress to respond more to what is happening around her than other classes: parrying, using elemental surfaces to enhanche whirlwinds, quickly dodging a boss attack with disengage... Such responsiveness makes the gameplay more enjoyable contrasted to merely treating the enemy as dummy with lifepoints I target with damage skills.

3) individual fun skills
There are some skills that just feel good to use. My favourite skill is rake: I like moving around with it, that it encourages disengaging and reengaing, waiting for the bleed to tick down and exploding it via blood hunt is fun and I enjoy triggering "whirlwind lance"-tornados with it.

4) hybrid playstyle / engaging-disengaging
I find the hybrid playstyle of being both melee and ranged more fun than being just melee or ranged. Instead of lets say constantly kiting as a ranged player, I can have a more varied engagement/disengagement gameplay with the huntress and get rewarded by it mechanically.

There are however also negative points / what I did not like about the huntress:

1) the balance feels off
In practice the most efficient playstyles were often the most boring ones: spamming lightning spear was more efficient than elaborate combos. Once the player damage gets high enough a single rake kills common monsters so quickly that it doesn't feel like a bleed playstyle anymore. Combos break down, because I deal too much damage as a player and the initial skill already kills the monsters.

2) the gameplay becomes worse once the player can generate frenzy charges too easily
The more fun gameplay is to play around both gaining and spending frenzy charges: be it via parry + disengage or electrocuting an enemy and benefiting from the related spirit gem and then deciding on which skill to spend the frenzy charge. When a player can generate frenzy charges too easily, lets say via Kitoko's Current both the gameplay around generating the charges and the decision on what to spend them falls away and it becomes trivial.
I would also prefer cull the weak to be removed for that reason.

3) the enjoyment of parrying varies depending on the boss fight
With the current parry implementation, there are some bosses that are quite hard to parry, others that auto attack constantly feel too easy to parry (it's easy to generate frenzy charges this way, but it also feels more unengaging to parry an easy to parry unimpactful auto attack). Ideally every future boss would be designed with parry in mind and old bosses would be slowly adapted. Some video games like Sekira have incredible good feeling parry mechanics.
I believe here is much gameplay potential if one would take the time to really think through which boss attacks should be parryable and why. There could also be a reward for "perfect parries" of non basic enemy attacks or mechanics like a boss has a 5-part attack chain and the player gets rewarded to parry lets say the first 3 attacks -> then dodges the rest of the attack chain due to his heavy stun meter being nearly full -> then the player gets a reward for having absorbed that many damage via parry (to some degree certain support gems already work like that, I haven't tested how impactful they are and I don't remember a boss that is intentionally designed around that). As QoL change the heavy stun bar should be more easily visible.

Last but not least, I have some feedback regarding individual huntress skills:
1) The twister combo (fully charging a whirlwind -> adding an elemental surface -> barrage -> twister) feels too static and long to execute. It also feels too random: sometimes it clears the screen effectively, sometimes the twisters go to nowhere. My spontanous idea for this would be to shorten the combo by generating always the same number of additional twisters independent of whirlwhind the stage. In addition to that once the skill generates more than X twisters, it would generate a single large twister instead - scaling in power with the number of twisters that would have been generated otherwise. Using barrage could be a main way to achieve that. This twister would have a more predictable movement - moving clearly into the direction of the skill cast and bouncing off the wall similiar to a billiard ball. It could cover less AoE, but with more focused damage compared to having a lot of twisters.
As QoL improvement there could be something like a macro for barrage: if I want to use barrage with only a single skill anyway, I could create a "barrage -> twister" macro and put that onto my skill bar.

2) Tame Beasts animal companions feel much less exciting than they could be.
I would have prefered a smaller selection of tameable animals, but to have more development effort put into them: they could have an active skill (e.g. a charge attack toward the huntress), some could allow riding (and a different active skill while riding them), more predictable balancing instead of random modifiers and in general a design that intentionally complements the huntress playstyle in some way. Maybe there could be an ascendency focused on a cooperative playstyle together with the animal companion including commands to give the animal.

3) the frenzy charged Glacial Lance AoE feels to large

4) Some skills feel to me like the could fit another build archetype they currently don't scale well with: e.g. Wind Serpent fury and rapid assault would fit well into elemental huntress builds. The latter could burn instead of bleed. Now I also don't want to take those skills away from physical / bleed builds, but in general there seems to be more of a scaling issue with huntress due to being melee and ranged, physical/bleeding and elemental/burning. Maybe even more nodes could be themed around more generic scaling like attack power or ailment duration instead of the more distinguishing scalings like physical/elemental damage. Or there could be individual solutions like a support gem to "turn bleeding into burning".