Getting hit with large attacks such as chargers, certain RG attacks, or shock tower without stone gauntlets stacks will kill you. This is normal.
Dune dervish and sand dweller reflect projectiles. Bone spear and the seasonal bonus lightning proc count. For bone spear, you can either choose a different skill or don’t cast when they are around.
4.5-6 minute RG kill times are normal without pylon support. This is partly because stricken’s ICD is desynced with our main attack due to swift harvesting. From what I understand, this means we typically stack stricken only once every other attack. EDIT: As shown below, this is not true, however, we still have a hard time killing RGs without additional support from Leger’s Disdain and density.
However, stricken is still the better choice since we can scale our damage with density. Unless of course, you opt for a seasonal bonus RG kill… This config requires hundreds upon hundreds of keys typically though.
On your higher pushes, you will indeed require RGs that spawn adds or pylon(s) that can give some extra mobs via nemesis bracer. On the absolute highest pushes you might even need some combination of both.
Elite affixes that spawn from the end pylon even can help or ruin your run: illusionist and horde are amazing, but wormhole, Frozen, knock back, Vortex, and nightmarish can be bad.
RGs that move around too much or Teleport regularly are worse in general.
I have found 4stack Nayr’s with Blood rush, FoT, Stewart’s, amazing help in allowing more situations to work out (limits RNG).
However Unity can also be a really good choice this season because you can Tank those 5+ elite stacks more easily, allowing more devastating use of the seasonal bonus in tight areas against them.
Edit: one thing to note here is that a lot of what is considered tanky with LoD Poison Scythe is actually just high recovery. Leech scales it’s returns based on Simulacrums health, not player health. And your own leech attacks only return 1%, not 2%. This is why you usually won’t survive without the sims. It also means that if you aren’t consistently applying and hitting enemies with leech, you may die.
Guide: https://youtu.be/CJlIESvVj-A
Leech mechanics: https://youtu.be/NNRXoug-lL8