Casting feels terrible.

Lich -- Unholy Might -- Int/Mana stacking

First off contagion, plus whatever x spell you'd like really, feels decently good I'd say up until cruel. Afterwards however, when you begin to look for anything that will help scale DMG and into endgame you begin to run into some enourmous problems.

First glaring issue I have is gloves seemingly always providing me with an attack modifier essentially doing nothing for me unless I want to be forced into melee again.

- Spirit and cost of spells is stupidly high.
I want to use a wand and shield. Wand for spell modifiers' added damage. Shield for block chance. So no sceptre and don't want to run minions unless I had leftover spirit. I'll definitely never have leftover spirit for even one minion unfortunately because I want to try a Cast on Crit for the first time in my build. + No crafting bench to fix this by adding spirit to my body armour.

- I tried respeccing a number of times and just disappointed myself when looking at either how far I needed to travel across the skill tree to achieve what I wanted. And evem tried running a similar build from the last league using blasphemy and hexblast. Sadly there's a delay for some reason now which makes the whole "combo" crumble.

- Armour and ES defence layers as everyone knows is great if you want to die. Compared to Evasion/ES.

- Remove the movement speed penalty for Armour, if I have the strength to wear the gear why am I penalized on movement speed.

- I could just copy a build but I've never copied a build and never want to. For me it just strips the fun away.

You should try wand/scepter or want/focus. It is better than shield. The skeletons have shields and can block damage for you, if you can control them well, you won't take much damage.The only way I am playing shield on a lich is with Infernoclasp for Arbiter for the max fire res. and hopefully corrupt to max ES.