PoB: https://pobb.in/BbKpcLJN0bfX

Mercs with Doryani's, Wrath and Zealotry gave me an idea to gear a character as tanky as possible and just crutch on the Merc for damage. I didn't want to do another ES attack build because I made one last league. I settled on a PBoD Hierophant.

Motivation for Hierophant: I want to hit 90% PDR so I can run Transcendence. The easiest way to do this is to stack endurance charges. Ralakesh got nerfed so I wanted to try another alternative: stacking minimum endurance charges. Hierophant comes with 4 from Conviction of Power. This gives me the ability to hit 12 minimum endurance charges with 2x Grand Spectrum (6) and 1 on each ring, freeing up the boot slot. This lets me run Annihilation's Approach, a fairly unused unique. Adrenaline gives 10% PDR, a lot of damage and cast speed which is very nice for PBoD. Additionally, Hierophant has Sign of Purpose, which is honestly a very underrated ascendancy point for PBoD (I'd say it's 25% more damage straight up, feel free to correct me on this).

With the endurance charges, adrenaline, Watcher's Eye with Determination mod, a strength-base shield and a helmet with the PDR delve mod, I now have 79% PDR. The remaining 11% PDR is obtained from a Militant Faith devotion mod (5%) and Pantheons (1% Lunaris, 5% Gruthkul). This allows me to run Transcendence and not worry about physical damage. Of course, we pair Transcendence with Loreweave. The damage reduction is additive with endurance charges, so realistically even though I only have 70k armour, I already have a base of 48%, and that armour only needs to account for up to 42% additional EDR. To deal with the Chaos weakness of Loreweave, I use Searing Purity FF jewels.

The weakness of this build is of course DoTs. Loreweave caps me at 78% resists and Transcendence doesn't affect DoTs. Rational Doctrine helps by giving me Consecrated Ground for regen, and also giving me ailment immunity via Militant Faith devotion mod, and also partial curse immunity (which I hit fully with 2x corrupted jewel implicits). On top of this I take a lot of increased life regeneration rate on my gear and the tree. To top off multi-hit defence as I have no avoidance or block, I use Defiance of Destiny (previously I used an Eyes of the Greatwolf which had no issues until I started doing T17 Risk maps). I had extra gem slots and I often have spare mana, so I opted to add in a CwDT-Enfeeble setup (CWS + Immutable Force wasn't as reliable because I literally don't take enough damage often enough to get stunned). Other weaknesses include suboptimal clear (less sources of explode and lower brand attachment range compared to Focused Amulet builds), and heavy Merc reliance (if Merc dies, you basically lose 95% dps).

At the end of the day, this is still a PBoD build. If a situation seems too dangerous, it is a viable option to just sit behind a wall and offscreen. This has been pretty reliable.

The cost of my original setup which was Titanic Wisp Exiles viable was 1.2 mirrors: https://pobb.in/VOl_SZM6o66v. Since then, other people have started playing it and some of the uniques have become slightly more expensive. If you add in the mirrored dagger (which is there for explode), the total cost of the build is around 2.5 mirrors.