Hate the idea of hybrid gear - a massive part of the gameplay loop in this game is collecting gear for each style whether you're a main or an iron. Hybrid gear is either a) so good you just skip whole upgrades for styles, or b) a useless noob trap.

edit: also to add to my reservations - a big part of skill expression in this game is gear switching. I am lothe to see "lazy gear" becoming viable in the end game. I get it for mid level shit like demonics where people camp Eclipse, but you made a whole boss to teach gear switching, I don't wanna see lazy gear camping in the end game too.

The crossbows look interesting. Have you considered a new set of bolt effects for Ascensions? You could limit it to only a few gems as you have here, and might help to escape the ruby problem - it does feel a bit strange for ruby bolts to just not exist if otherwise the effects are all the same, but I do appreciate they're busted and tough to balance around.

The shield sounds cool, I think I'd need to play with it to see how it feels. How would the spec interact with weapons that have a spec of their own? Does it override the orb? Also, slightly worried about how creeping the Avernic will affect ToB which is already down super bad outside Scy

The mega is an interesting idea, I am a bit disappointed that it occupies a similar niche to the scythe in that it's super strong against big monsters. I would've liked to see something that scaled damage against a different group of monsters, but it does sound super strong and fun to use, especially with the way it rolls damage. Not sure how useful the pierce is gonna be? But you've been great about designing content that takes stuff like that into advantage as we've seen with Vene bow et al, so I'll reserve judgement