So, re-totaling everything with some updated numbers:
The altar gives:
About 2x damage directly: +4.5 tiers
Extra orbs: +1 tier
Extra toughness: lets us pick up, generally about +1 tier of damage. But Raekor could probably drop Esoteric for Zei at much lower paragon, which would be ~2 tiers of gain. Same if you go for Shi Mizu.
Critical hits grant resource: +0 for Frenzy, + 0.5 for Leapquake, Slam, and HotA, and +2 for Rend (which will probably be able to pick up BR: ItF). The big winner is Raekor, which in high density will be able to spam consecutive boulders from an Oculus circle. +2-3 tiers.
Damage debuff potion: +0 tiers
Triune ring potion: +1-2 tiers
Pylon/shrine potion: Assuming you don’t get both a shrine power plus the Power pylon power… In an average situation, you’ll also get about an average 25% buff from the Power pylon ability, though of course you could win the lottery and get it for all 30 potion uses, which would give 53% uptime on the ability, equal to a ~5 tier buff. So about +2 tiers average, + 5 tiers max (unless FoT doubles the 16 second duration to 32, in which case you could get 100% uptime / +8 tiers)
For shrines, Frenzy will pick up about 48% extra damage from the combo of Frenzied + Empowered shrines, worth 2-3 tiers. Leapquake gets almost nothing from Frenzied, but a good bit from Empowered… I’m thinking these 2 shrines give about 2-3 tiers to most of our builds, between higher uptimes, extra attack speed, and direct damage via Crimson, where applicable. Wastes could actually run without Zodiac, if you get lucky and have an Empowered shrine most of the time.
So this potion power probably gives about 4-8 tiers of power.
Total buffs seem like they are in the 15-20 tier range, depending on the particular build… that’s a lot!