I’ve been trying to figure out a void gauntlet setup that’s effective without using void blade and it’s extremely difficult. One of the things that should make it more reasonable to not take void blade is the Gllimpse of the Void passive in the Decay tree, and it does in fact work without void blade. Basically, if you use Petrifying Scream and Orb of Decay, you can pretty consistently get your 4 stacks to proc Glimpse of the Void. Your rotation then is something like Petryifying Scream > Orb of Decay > Detonating Orb > heavy attack to reset CDs > Petrifying Scream > Orb of Decay. This gives you a good amount of damage, but it’s really only doable in PvE since you can’t expect enemy players to stand in a ball for you for a bit and then let you also land a heavy attack.
The only reasonable way to use Glimpse of the Void in PvP is via void blade, just like with the Voidcaller passive, which is sort of annoying. I like void blade, but I don’t like feeling like I have to use it to have any hope of being able to do even moderate damage with void gauntlet.
My suggestion would be that instead of having the Void Essence stacks disappear after such a short period of time, make them simply permanent so that you can make use of the final passives in each tree no matter what abilities you’re slotting. The only difference would be how quickly you can proc the final passives, but non-void blade builds would then be much more reasonable to use even if not optimal for damage.