FIRST: Sorry the audio is crap. Second time ever using OBS and I think it pulled both my desktop audio and game audio, which made the sound horrendous.

Second: This is a very rough, uncircumcised video of me running a t16 map with my home-cooked build: the blade blast of unloading (BBU) impale surfcaster.

pob: https://pobb.in/fa4WQBcMF0NH

reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/1j4h2gh/impale_blade_blast_of_unloading_surfcaster_my/

Cleared a t17 with it before getting the level 4 empower in my current setup and fixing the mana issues. Will be continuing to improve the build as I get money to replace all the rare items.

Essentially, I put down 5 arcanist brands at the beginning of the map, then just cast 1 brand every ~1-2 seconds to maintain 5 as you dash. Those brands cast blade vortex constantly, which you blow up with BBU.

Click BBU when near 10 stacks (you should be generating ~20 stacks per second with my setup). 10 only increases the AOE, we deal our full dps at 7 stacks, so even casting at 8 stacks is not really a dps loss.

I use the flesh/flame jewels for demolishionist trigger bots, which triggers all your brands twice, then it triggers your brand recall twice, which then triggers your arcanist brands twice AGAIN, for 20 total blade vortex per second (5 x 2 x 2). Might actually be faster than 1 second, but thats the idea. Which means you can cast BBU about twice per second as long as you have this arcanist+blade vortex setup. I don't even look at the stacks anymore, they are almost always at 10 as long as you maintain the brands. I just do the following: Cast brands - dash - cast BBU - repeat. If something is tanky (einhar beast, boss, unique mob), i'll stop casting brands (they last ~8 seconds) and just hit BBU about 2x per second to dps them down.

Each stack hits for ~300k, and impale stacks to 7 (each impale deals reflected physical equal to 15% of the hit). This means once you've cast a 10-stack at a target one time, your dps is fully ramped. Impale is 105% of the damage once stacked, so after our first cast its 600k dmg per stack, per cast (roughly 12mil dps before impale: 600k x 10 x twice per second max reasonable cast rate). Thats ~25mil dps with impales (so after your second cast). And i've got 8 levels and a ton of upgrades I can still make (Mageblood eventually, fix quality on shavs ring, get third cluster jewel maybe, upgrade all rare items as mine are bargain cheap crap).