hey all - thanks for all the discussion on my last post and the great ideas. let's get the obvious stuff out of the way:

1. t16 modestly juiced cemetary gameplay (including grabbing an accel shrine and immediately ripping it to a chaos ritual - i am NOT capable of dealing with chaos damage at this point)

2. pob. i'll go into it later, but that modest 1m dps is more like 3m when you include tornado and ngamahu's rotating buff. yes, we're only taking 94% of phys as element, with taste of hate up. sue me.

3. yes, overinvesting in 'phys taken as' hits diminishing returns, and transcendence's -15% max res is a very significant hit. i don't think i'm done with this build yet, but i will be moving away from the shield, helmet, and transcendence in favor of 90/90/90 res and a more modest armor pool to protect from phys hits. i'm also planning on dropping the boots, belt, body, and gloves for crafted rares to fix our chaos res, boost our single target potential, and maybe get some decent flat life lol 4k isn't enough even with this much defensive investment.

so i ultimately decided to go with chieftain for this build and scale herald of ash for damage. this let me wear asenath's gloves for juicy screen pops and use a phys spell interaction i've been very interested in - etheral knives + tornado.

so while i took some cues from u/thatsrealneato's awesome tornado build (the divine blessing tech is 100% his), rather than use my tornado as a primary damage spell, i extend its duration as much as possible and use it to charge up with EK and more than double my single target dps.

with 4.95 EK casts/sec and a 3.42sec charging period, we're stuffing 16 knives into our tornado, which means (on top of its base ~100k dps) it's dealing 1.6 knives per tick, 4 ticks per second, 6.4 knives/second which is more than we're dealing by holding right click. it also gives us 9 seconds of uptime for 4 seconds of casting which isn't exactly totem tier but better than you usually get for selfcasting. and if you tornado during your Ngamahu's rotating buff window, it will hit based on the buffed damage dealt. that's why with proper play our dps can get closer to around 3m and frankly it feels even better than that.

assorted thoughts:

• omniscience is busted. 99% all res and pen + giving us access to high dex/int skill gems is just amazing. it has great synergy with formless inferno and helps us get to nearly 100k armor just standing around in hideout. look for those % attribute corruptions on jewelry because they're crucial for pushing high numbers.
• brutal charges were kind of a band aid fix for low dps. although arn's anguish is a very solid belt for our build with all sorts of stats we like, it means we're wasting half of valako's ascendency since we don't have endurance charges to lose. one option is to use arohongui's ascendency instead, along with a blade blast totem or something similar. ultimately i couldn't spare the slots and it sounded kind of clunky, plus the small node on the way to valako makes it much easier to sustain brutal charges in combination with Enduring Composure (because i couldn't be fucked to warcry every 8 seconds). obviously i'd rather run headhunter or mageblood but i'm not that rich.
• and the reason for all that is because i solved my mana issues with lifetap on everything so i can hardly spare a slot for a warcry let alone a 4L totem. honestly flesh and stone is basically useless and we could probably drop all those lifetaps for a high level clarity instead.
• getting a decent single target pair of gloves i can swap in for asenath's seems like a good idea for bossing
• i was pathing all the way over to EO before i got this sceptre. i think it was probably not worth it.
• high regen is a super nice defensive layer and maven can eat a dick every time she turns mine off.
• use a pierce gem for EK until you get medium clusters. single pierce enchant is probably not worth, but it took 6 uber uber labs just to hit that and i was tired of running it.

for all its defensive investment the build still, predictably, has moments where it's very soft. you can see in the video i get one shot by a chaos ritual hazard and i take a 'boss poisons on hit' altar just to demonstrate how much we have to be on top of that (cemetery boss also has a physical degen you can see in action). elemental degens can be deadly even with loreweave to fix our res and high regen. all that said, when transcendence works, it works. i facetanked uber uber izaro while chain-running gift to the goddess for the enchants you see in the pob. i facetanked all sorts of boss slams (although many of them are still instant pops). volatile flameblood, lightning mirage, and strongbox ice novas tickle. triple beyond is ezpz until bameth shows up, then it's real shit. the damage is on the lower end of feeling great, but it's close enough that i'm confident i can get there. as i said, i think this build has one more stop before i'm done with it, to take advantage of the crazy 90/90/90 res you can get if you're not a stubborn asshole who insists on forcing transcendence.