Untested Update for 3.18 - https://pastebin.com/Jk9j1CcL

I have not tested the above PoB. It should be a dramatic improvement in survival as its converts a lot of ele to 90% chaos resistance (and also has 90% chaos resistance). It loses about 40% of the DPS from the original, but honestly, that hardly matters as it is still >40M DPS. This is also a slight overestimate as punishment would not be active all the time. If anyone plays this and it sucks, please let me know, I'd love to iterate on it with you.

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This is NOT a starter for 3.18

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This is my Phantasmal Lightning Tendrils Elementalist. It's been one of the most fun characters I've ever played, particularly while mapping. The combination of very high DPS (>50M DPS) and extremely fast cast speed (~0.75s) makes for a very fun build. I tuned the version below to be weighted extremely heavily towards single target DPS. It isn't a functional build for many things (and its quite bad at simulacrum) but it absolutely murders the shit out of bosses like Sirus. I don't have most of my faster kills recorded, but the final phase is down to around 2-4s. You could easily produce a character that was much, much more tanky while losing 50% of the DPS and I did something similar while leveling.

POB: https://pastebin.com/hdje8h8r

Updated Budget for 3.18: 25-30 ex depending on if you have enlighten/empower and how finicky you are about large clusters. If you were diligent and thrifty you could do this for 10. A caveat – I wouldn’t offer some extremely strong recommendation about building this. It is very fun, but it is only functional if you don’t mind using portals and have no interest in Sim 30. There are definitely better builds, but this one can do all the content other than Sim 30 with a little help from the portal generator.

Videos: Note I am a pretty average player, these aren’t to be emulated.The Feared - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XU7Z7p-u1E&t=7s – should’ve been Deathless but Shaper clipped me. Would’ve been easy to finish Chayula otherwise.

The Twisted - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL7K2JqKRY8 – quick and easy.

Elderslayers all at once - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3in_j5vOzyQ – got a bit brassy trying to facetank and ate it once, but the DPS is so solid they fell over shortly after.

Quick hydra map - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMwNuwXAq4o – I was around level 90 when I did this. This is a slightly more defensive setup too with more block. Good example of why this is a fun mapper. Headhunter would be awesome for this.

Why the build works:

1. Lightning Tendrils does 3 pulses of normal damage and 1 pulse of big damage. This got buffed recently and the big pulse is pretty strong. Phantasmal Lightning Tendrils reduces the damage of your "normal" pulses and increases the damage of your "strong" pulses. What this means is that your damage comes in big chunks. For characters that shock, this is nice, and gives max value shocks in addition to being a straight DPS upgrade. Pause the videos and you will see 60% shocks on many end game bosses. DPS is average of 3 normal pulses and 1 strong pulse, or around ~0.39*strong pulse damage for a fast calculation (not a calculated value, just an estimate). Around 55M above. I have PoB'd it up to 100M but probably wont act on that.
2. Carried by Omniscience (and Purity of Elements and Annihilating Light). There have been a ton of Omni builds posted, everyone knows how good it is. Omni is the buff self cast needed. It's gonna get hit somehow, but if it doesn't it will be extremely expensive at the start of next league because it is every bit as powerful as people say. Purity of elements + Annihilating Light round out your resistances, provide a ton of DPS/needed suffixes and ailment immunity. Purity of Elements remains an absolute unit and an S Tier aura for any build that uses a lot of suffixes (attribute stacker, crit).

Why (people think) Channeling Sucks and Phantasmal Lightning Tendrils (PLT) - The blueprint for how to fix channeling spells in this game.

PLT solves 90% of the issues with channeling in this game, which could broadly be defined as backloaded damage, while also maintaining some sort of identity. It is my sincere hope that GGG looks at this at some point and realizes why skills like Divine Ire and Incinerate are inherently flawed in the current environment. Why is PLT better than most?

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1. extremely reliable "upfront" damage - Between the quick cast time and the decent damage at the start of the cast you can actually hit things before they hit you. You will commonly see people say "channeling sucks because you have to stand still" or "...because you have to channel". If you look at the Hydra map above, you will see I basically just zip things for about .1s and then go. It's fun as hell.
2. Damage weighted to channeling though. PLT also does about 6X damage on a "strong" pulse. This means you are substantially rewarded for constant channeling. This is how it should be, but this process takes .32s or so on my build, and would take 1s or more if I was using Divine Ire or 12 stage flameblast. The difference in the amount of damage you take between casting for 0.08s and casting for 0.5 or more is a very large amount and its commonly the difference between 0 and “however much that pack of mobs hits you for”.
3. The “channel and release” skills i.e. blade flurry or incinerate are further mired down by additional layers of clunkiness. If it takes an AI to produce top level DPS, then it just doesn’t really fit an ARPG well. There has to be some push towards moving some of the damage upfront or balancing these skills differently.
4. Sadly, to a lesser degree, physical melee builds shares this issue when you start talking about things like impale. Pride + impale takes a bit to hit max DPS. This is the opposite of what makes sense to me? It’s another reason (of many) why melee is broken too. Channeling spells and melee both need the same help imho.

TLDR: Reduce the number of stages for all channeling spells while keeping DPS neutral. Fewer stages, same DPS. Maybe fix impaler too. Kamehaha-ing shit is a fun idea, but is functionally broken.