https://pobb.in/GTZNNbONJOFT

------ this is not a build guide ------

Background: Have played Lightning Tendrils of Eccentricity as Hierophant multiple times in the past, and really liked it. It pushes out insane amount of damage with reasonable investment. Thought it would be an interesting off-meta starter for anyone interested in the playstyle. Watch this video if you want to get a feeling on how this spell is played, although video features hiero archmage version: https://youtu.be/50dOW8MfXHI

Skill: Lightning Tendrils of Eccentricity makes the spell always crit on every 6th cast. This is extremely strong paired with marylene's amulet! It feels really good once you've surpassed 10+ casts / second because than it takes only half a second to proc the crit. With 3.26 the crit now occurs every 5th cast (pob not updated at time of writing), giving the skill a 20% damage increase and making it enjoyable even earlier when you don't have 10+ casts / second.

Defenses: Wanted to play archmage initially but figure the mana cost would be too annoying to handle on a league start setup so pivoted half way creating the tree and noticed that keeping some mana scaling + Mind over Matter might actually be pretty decent defensive-wise when paired with block.

New Righteous Fire of Arcance Devotion: this gem pairs really well with the playstyle (currently 25% more cast speed in config as PoB hasn't been updated yet) and is easy to sustain with Golems.

Thoughts on League start: Not saying this is the best league starter out there but I think the new golems make Elementalist a very smooth and generic starter class and the Ascendancy adds a lot of value later on, too, when you swap to Eccentricity. The current version of the build appears to be very flexible:

- Missing a cluster jewel? Take other efficient nodes on the tree before you've obtained one.

- A lot of pressure on the gear? No worries, attributes and a lot of resistances already covered by the tree - will be very reasonable to gear up.

- Unique items are actually cheap early on, so don't need to worry about prices too much.

Have thrown this together in ~1 hour so not that optimized yet. Happy to see what changes you'd make in order to make it more efficient.