When dealing with melee Rogue’s/BM, Puncture is weaker than Flurry in almost everyway (note that for ranged Rogue/Marksman Puncture has the ability to pierce unlike Flury, the piercing ability is pointless for melee weapons). Here are the rough points of what (to me) makes puncture weaker
- Its scaling with attack speed is much worse than Flurry, in fact its so bad that until you get a lot of AS it feels like Puncture does scale with attack speed at all
- To make puncture more unique than Flurry, one could do something similar to Tempest Strike whereby AS scales another stat rather than attack speed, i.e. DoT duration for something more unique. Alternatively another idea is to make puncture deal increasing damage for each time the same target was hit by puncture (which also makes sense theme wise since you are opening a punctured wound more and more).
- Due to the way DoT’s work, generally speaking its almost always better to apply more stacks rather than fewer stacks that are stronger (for poison this is definitely the case). This makes Flurry almost always a better option for any Bleed and/or Poison based (on my latest Bleed based BM simply exchanging Flurry for Puncture doubled the DPS even though arguably Puncture is meant to natively be the bleed based skill). Note with bows this is less of a problem because at least you are hitting multiple mobs due to the inherit piercing mechanic.
- Puncture has a lot more “useless” nodes such as Penumbral Ambush or Mutilate. To make things worse the Scalebane node sits behind one of these useless nodes, i.e. Penumbral Ambush.
- Bloodthirst has QoL issues when it comes to conversion because even though it works for bleeds caused by Puncture it doesn’t work bleeds caused by other skills (evne if you have the debuff). Although technically correct, this makes uniques such as Troaka's Teeth - Unique Nomad Quiver - Quiver - Last Epoch Item Database weaker. I suspect properly fixing this would require a bigger change.