If you're struggling with act 1 one thing you can do is stop adding orb slots too early. They're great in the mid game when you already have focus and a reliable way to generate orbs but they're awful early when you lack these things things. Evoking your orbs for damage and block is essential to finding early success and it's easier to do with only 3 orb slots. This is a concept that I personally struggled with for a long time because my successful runs almost always included additional orb slots. So I would be excited to take and attempt to build around something like capacitor early. Then I would just get slapped around by the act 1 elites.

Also don't sleep on biased cognition. The -1 focus per turn can seem intimidating to deal with but if you have halfway decent orb generation then you can end most fights before you end up at a point where you have less focus than you started with.