Any reason not to take Barrel early as Vanessa? Also, suggestion to split up Vanessa's shield and poison spam.

Barrel with almost any random assortment of non-weapon items, even all at bronze, is basically guaranteed to get you to 5 wins "all by itself", especially if paired with Life Preserver. Just get a board with these and then you can spam exp events for several days with no care in the world. Basically no weapon builds this early can ever keep up with you, you hard counter burn builds and Life Preserver with even just a mediocre healing item is enough to stall out and win in the sandstorm against early poison builds.

Not to mention how easily it transitions into arguably the most powerful Vanessa build right now, poison + shield spam. And the worst part about that is that the best counter to shield spam IS poison spam, so you constantly get mirror matches that are utterly boring. It's like the game is built around a rock, papper, scissor system, but you created a rock-scissor with the only common "weakness" being that it stalemates with itself.

Personally I would like to see Vanessa shield and poison synergies split into different tags. For the sake of argument, let's say tools, but I could see a synergy around slow or vehicles etc as a possibility. Rework Barrel so it only triggers off of tools and rework Turtle Shell and maybe even Pearl so that they're no longer aquatic and make them fall in line with this tool/whatever synergy instead.

This way, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to do both poison and shield spam, you'll have to make some sacrifices, which every other build has to.

Now me saying this doesn't mean there aren't other build that also needs adjustment. That's not what I'm saying. But right now, I'm talking about this one and how I think it could be made better and more interesting and how that would benefit the health of the metagame. That's it.