Help me out with this build

https://www.poeplanner.com/AAkAAREACRAAAIX53YuMSpjMZpRcwGYEs6IA8B88Be98n9-aO4Kb7SBX4nflMolo8nwOp1VboEPITwTGrgxfHKdTpdhNlKDaYhhWaHT56PKXm12omnvDWlJKyL68guSQEYqv9MZFCjXWMZ6mVzrh8kX-Cti9NZL-j03jrj5nm-RRUEfvDhQgXz8aPvIvfLgpLvZIjM_EWD38WGPG2EGHr2wLYfGsVw3zm2hl893462RSTjIX4Sb4E0zBo-JhMHdZ_pd5CZY5DusJgIp2K_dNJJtBdCftBg7UfAn23HPE9n31xBWvpxzOK1ANzf5UPC2DX4PMtz7ZYa2Nz352rDrYJy-QVRo4e26XIcF8hwcAwYRT7_3e3AAAAAAA

Head: The Formless Inferno
Body: The Brass Dome
Hands: Meginord's Vise
Feet: Kaom's Roots
Belt: The Magnate
Amulet: Bloodgrip
Ring: Pyre
Ring: Pyre
Weapon: Hezmana's Bloodlust

5L Hezmana's Bloodlust:
Red: Molten Strike
Red: Melee Physical Damage Support
Red: Added Fire Damage Support
Red: Elemental Damage with Attacks Support
Blue: Chance to Ignite Support

4L The Formless Inferno:
Red: Vitality
Red: Herald of Ash
Red: Leap Slam
Blue: Enlighten

4L The Brass Dome:
Red: Increased Duration Support
Red: Melee Physical Damage Support
Blue: Added Chaos Damage Support
Green: Vaal Double Strike

4L Meginord's Vise:
Red: Decoy Totem
Red: Increased Duration Support
Blue: Increased Area of Effect Support
Any: Portal

Jewels:
Wildfire: West of Marauder start near Juggernaut
Wildfire: North of Marauder start near Dynamo
Anatomical Knowledge: next to Scion start
Anatomical KNowledge: next to Scion start

Notes:

For defense the build combines the ample armor of the Brass Dome with the armor bonus from The Formless Inferno for stacking fire resistance. With 160% increased armor on the skill tree and over 100% fire resistance also increasing your armor, you should have about 20,000 armor total. (I think)

You also have fantastic life regen with 10% from the skill tree stacked with Vitality aura, Bloodgrip, Meginord's Vise, and having a totem active (Chieftan ascendancy).

Your clone from Vaal Double Strike is considered a totem by the game, and provides you with the 2% life regen from the Chieftan ascendancy. It's invulnerable for it's duration so it's a reliable way to get the life regen bonus when you're under heavy attack.

Changing maps will deplete your Vaal charges, so you also have a Decoy Totem to get the regen bonus. I'm not sure if you can have both at once, or if one would despawn the other.

You have very little mana however thanks to Hezmana's your attacks don't use mana. Your only mana using skill is Decoy Totem.

For offense you are increasing the number of projectiles on Molten Strike through the Deadeye ascendancy and two Wildfire Jewels, giving you 5 bonus projectiles without decreasing your damage like a LMP or GMP support gem would. This is good because burn damage is based off of damage dealt per hit, and you will be doing lots of burn damage with the over 200% ailment damage bonus from the skill tree and the burn damage bonus from two Pyre rings.

It should be fairly affordable. The Brass Dome is the most expensive piece and it uses a single 5L which could be acquired with a Jeweller's Touch prophecy.

I am a little worried that it might not have enough maximum life. Is there a way to check how much life this character would have?

What do you think?

I know I could just copy someone else's build but I like making my own. But I haven't had much luck with endgame content so far. Would this build work?

I prefer to use all unique because I have terrible luck finding good rares. Trying to craft them has sucked a lot of my money and I got frustrated and left months ago because of it. I'm thinking about coming back and want something that won't require exalt crafted gear.

Can't go super in-depth at the moment, but hopefully I can go in-depth enough to stop your return from sucking. A few critical notes:

1.) Vaal Double Strike is not a totem, and does not benefit from totem nodes. I have no idea why the wiki calls it a totem, but a few recent-ish threads went up about this confusion and it was provably proven that VDS is not a totem. It doesn't benefit from totem modes, it doesn't benefit from totem count. it's not a totem, it's not a minion, it's not a clone, it's not a pet, it's not any-goldurned-thing except "Your Double". So you'll need a proper totem to gain totem benefits, which is fine since you have one.

2.) Do not ever use 'Just Uniques'. Are you playing SSF? I'm not sure why you would think that rares are prohibitively expensive; it's perfectly possible to assemble a setting of beginner mapping gear for all of one chaos orb per gear slot. If you can afford five or ten chaos per slot, which is easy enough to do over time, you can actually score some pretty solid gear. Yeah, you gotta pay through the nose for the really top-end stuff, but you can generally get gear that's ~80% as good as the multiple-exalts top-end stuff for a tenth of the cost at best. Those last few percentage points are by far the most expensive ones.

I don't know if you're aware, but PoE Planner lets you monkey with gear now, as well. Try this: TREE. Go to the 'Equipment' tab and you can rig up your equipment as you like, then the 'Stats' tab shows you what you get. You end up with 5.2k health, not one single capped resist (lightning resist is almost negative, and this is assuming every single unique in the build is perfectly rolled, which they would not be), and less than 20k armor.

5.2k Life is tolerable, if low for a lot of folks' (overblown) standards. It's not ideal but it's tolerable. Uncapped resists are not tolerable, especially a nearly-zero Lightning resist on a Brass Dome build. 20k armor is not remotely enough armor to qualify as armor.

I'd look into some buying guides for acquiring cheap starter-endgame rare gear. You can keep a few choice uniques, Hezmana's Bloodlust is actually pretty damn nice for an intermediate-stage axe, but this approach is...flawed, sadly. And I say this as someone who loves mixing up interesting uniques and always ends up using more of them than I should.

Why is there a penalty to all the resistances? I thought they did away with merciless difficulty? Isn't the entire game on normal difficulty now?

The entire game is one difficulty, yes. There's a specific boss, however, which you fight at the end of Acts 5 and 10, which inflicts a permanent debuff to your character that subtracts the resistances directly from your sheet. After act 5 your character's base resistance level is -30%, not 0%, and after Act 10 your base resistance level is -60%, not 0%. This is baked into your character now, which at least means no more 'Subtract 60 from your hideout resistance tooltip" tomscrewery.

The same debuff increases the soul cost of Vaal skills, as well. I believe death penalties are dependent on what level/act of zone you're in, though they're also the same in endgame maps. Effectively, nothing's significantly changed for the endgame.

That's really disappointing. Adding resistance penalties to Cruel and Merciless was a crutch to validate the repeating the first 4 acts. Now that we have 10 acts, they should make the monsters in acts 5+ tougher and remove the resistance penalties.

It's harder for newbies to gear up when you force them to stack elemental resistance on every single piece of gear this way.

Think of all the fun and varied builds we could have if we only needed elemental resistance on two or three pieces of gear.

It really isn't a requirement to have resists in every gear slot. With passives, jewels, and two-toned rares, it's not really that difficult in most cases to max resists at each difficulty tier.