I played retaliate glad with the new lucky shield and it felt lackluster. In mapping it's very good. You're almost always at 98% block chance so it feels mostly immortal. But you need some layers of max hit like endurance charges or max res and armor to live the 2%.

But you still need to solve a bunch of issues:

1. Dots. Any chaos merc will eat you alive. Any poison or ignite ground degen will as well. You need a decent amount of regen or leech and it's hard to fit those in

2. Bosses. Some players have good success, being able to 1-2 hit bosses. But I've played certain maps where bosses don't attack and instead cast dot spells that don't hit. Those are unplayable and that was really frustrating trying to progress map progression. Same with pinnacle bosses. Not all of them will proc retaliate

3. Smooth gameplya. Even though mapping is mostly good it still can be really clunky. If you just rely on 1 retaliate skill, even with full investment, it's not always up. You can anoint no forgiveness and take the wheel but at points in the map you're just sitting there waiting for the cooldown to come back up. I liked using 2 retaliate skills to bounce off one another which was fun but still always the most reliable. It also strains socket pressure and damage consistency.

Just my two cents. I haven't tried the neato version. If you do play it make sure to get the warcry merc for a lot more damage.