edinburgheagle

Real life =/= great gameplay. Yes, in reality one or two hits tend to decide most fights, but if PoE played that way the variance of every battle would be huge, and the outcome would depends less on player skill than on random chance. All that would accomplish is a lot of reloading autosaves and hoping for better dice rolls. Action games like dark souls can employ very lethal attacks because player skill can mitigate against damage, but for a 3rd person isometric RPG it would not be much fun IMO.

Might is pretty important for most DPS characters, yes, though IMO high dex can work too as long as your weapons and talents can get past opponent's DR. For a low might cipher I would suggest going down the debuff/charm route with high int - that seems pretty viable to me - but perception and resolve are very tanky stats and don't have much value on a ranged character. As far as focus generation goes you perhaps picked the wrong talent - Biting whip scales extra focus based on total damage rather than number of hits and thus favours slower weapons. The talent you picked works *very* well with a blunderbuss (each shot counts as 8 hit chances) and fast weapons/dual wielding.