I have whittled my ideas for Blade Vortex down to my favorite idea, the Blade-mancer:
By starting witch and taking Necromancer as my Ascendancy class, I get access to 30% increased Skill Effect duration, "Your offering skills also effect you," and some decent cast speed/damage. Maximizing Skill Effect duration allows for up to ~12 second Flesh or Bone offerings on 3 corpses (~23 seconds on 10 corpses), and 15 second Blade Vortex uptime.
Now, using Flesh and Bone offering means you get 35/34% Block/Spell Block, 30% Cast Speed, and 29% Movespeed. With all my cast speed I think I should be able to reach ~5 casts/second on Blade Vortex. Meaning in the perfect scenario there would be around 5 seconds where all 50 blades would be active.
While routing the tree, I found that I could pretty easily attain:
Now, for a weapon I thought Cybil's Paw would work best as long as I prioritize keeping up Bone offering (which shouldn't be all that hard). With 30-50 blades up while I move and vacuum packs in I should be gaining a lot of life.
I will also need 1-2 Elreon rings to negate the cost of Blade Vortex and prioritize mana consumption with other auras/skills. For auras I selected only Hatred and PoF. Hatred helps both Animate Weapon and Blade Vortex, and PoF is necessary to sustain RF.
Here are my ideas for skill setups:
You might be wondering why I am using Controlled Destruction over Added Fire. The answer is simple. I don't want to crit since Hatred will shatter corpses meaning less uptime on my Offerings. The 100% reduced crit chance Controlled Destruction offers will lower my crit to 0% chance since I don't pick up and other crit.
I think my main issues will be burst physical damage that gets past my block/fortify, and losing Bone Offering if I'm going to slow. Damage seems promising. I really love the idea of the build and how it will revolve around weapons fighting for me as I whirling blades through packs.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns on my version! Like you, I know the skill tree could be changed, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed ;)