Alternative subtitle: Lightning Strike is better

Distant follow-up to my MS paint build

PoB with most buffs turned off to avoid PoB warrior syndrome: https://pobb.in/s95XfdB4LTx8

Buffed melee skills! New Warden ascendancy! New tinctures! New (old) Vaal Pact! Might as well try them all at once to save time!

This is a homebrew I decided to leaguestart after reading the Warden ascendancy. Most of the nodes scale in effectiveness with attack speed, so I went with Cyclone of Tumult which has 300% more base attack speed just built-in. About halfway through yellow maps I realized that Mahuxotl's Machination (MM) might fit well in the build and more importantly cost very little on trade.

While I took this build to 40/40 challenges as a "minimum viability" threshold, there's some serious jank involved accommodating Vaal Pact, and Cyclone is a "true" melee skill that struggles with positioning. I wouldn't recommend following this exact build but rather use it as inspiration if you're wondering about MM. My nightmare is that there's a very simple solution I've overlooked, but as of right now content that doesn't allow you to attack constantly to keep leeching (e.g. Uber Sirus) is nearly impossible. On the plus side some stuff is very easy given the defensive capabilities of Mahuxotl's Machination.

Quick run-down; MM is a unique shield that grants a bunch of keystones, effectively the following:

1. Instant leech with melee damage, but no life recovery except through leech.
2. All damage bypasses ES, no ES recharge/regeneration, ES ticks down over time, and life leech recovers ES while on full life.
3. Half of all elemental damage is taken as chaos, and +5% to maximum chaos resistance.
4. Filling your energy shield immediately depletes your ES and grants you +5% to all maximum resistances.

MM is often combined with Tempered by War to convert all elemental damage to chaos and fire damage, allowing you to ignore lightning and cold resistance while gearing. This makes Replica Abyssus pretty viable, and also lets you basically ignore effects that penetrate or reduce maximum lightning or cold resistance. Shaper balls have 25% cold penetration? Insignificant!

On the other hand, having no life recovery is incredibly inconvenient, especially considering how good Blood Rage is for boosting attack speed. The solution I came up with was to have Rise of the Phoenix in weapon swap, with Blood Rage socketed my main weapon. Swapping deactivates Blood Rage, removes MM's limitation on recovery, and grants ~180 life regen per second from Rise of the Phoenix. Works well enough.

The PoB provided has the gear that I finished with, most of it crafted. There’s definitely optimizations to be made, for instance Ashes of the Stars would boost my attack speed to astronomical heights if I can find stats elsewhere.