This is a proof of concept for a build (first build!) I've been working on since the new Guardian minion announcement.

This uses the line "Minions explode on death, dealing 100% of their maximum life as damage of their chose element" on the new elemental relics from the guardian ascendancy as the core concept. Mechanically we're triggering the explosions using the combination of Necromantic Aegis and Tukohama's Fortress to give Blood Magic to my minions. Since the relics use 50% auras, they spawn with 50% of their life reserved, which is low enough to trigger minion instability, causing the relics to explode for 133% of their max life instantly upon spawn. With >30% global CDR that's 4 explosions per second (assuming optimal procs).

How do we get optimal procs? No idea, so we punch fast and hope. Zombies/Spectres on 6-link (we want tanky and attack speed for more relic procs) and CWC SRS (free infernal legion in helm) with Cyclone in order to maximize APS while synergizing with minion instability.

Minion life/damage scaling comes from gear+tree, with the bulk of it from using Formless Inferno and minion res gear. Purity of elements/fire give tons of life (and damage) to my permanent minions like Sentinel, but I don't believe they affect the relics since they die instantly. Double curse setup with ele weakness/flammability on arcanist brand along with fire exposure gloves and scorch on boots. The bulk of damage in this build is fire damage, and we're getting somewhere in the neighborhood of -90% fire res from curses/debuffs.

Anecdotally I'll say the damage feels really good, for my first build I've made from scratch. Worse part of the build is fighting individual tanky normal/magic enemies, since we can't proc relics on them (aka tota).

For defenses, we try to run a decent amount of armor since we need unwavering stance for the stun immunity. We're basically block capped thanks to Guardian ascendancy and glancing blows, and we don't care about the damage taken on block because of the mega sustain we have with ~70 life on hit (weapon implicit + watcher's eye) for a ~12aps cyclone. Anything that doesn't one-shot us probably won't kill us.

T16 map https://youtu.be/65UcNMkiXKU (video quality not the best... rip) POB https://pobb.in/6CXIf_UKq-WA

Definitely still a work in progress so certainly looking for advice/ideas. Need better phys mitigation so hoping to craft a phys taken as fire chest to take advantage of the 85 fire res. Also, not sure if it's worth a cluster setup or how to rework the tree to fit.

Also also, POB doesn't seem to have an option to display relic explosion damage (is there a way to request features?). Best I can tell it's around 2mil dps, not including relic explosions. I'd guess total dps is in the 3-5mil range.