Ascending Items are Items used to get Perks. Wanderer’s Cap has Exp Gain on it. I think it is the only Item for all Classes that has Exp Gain on it.
basically an Ascending Build has +200% Experience Gain (6 Quest Stones). or an Eternal Wanderer’s Cap (+30% Exp Gain) and 5 Quest Stones on the other Items. Ascending Builds are made to kill monsters fast around floor 100-110 (experience from monsters stops going up at floor 100. so unless you are trying to get a certain item on a higher floor, it is better to stay on those lower floors) and to gain Experience without dying a lot or spending a lot of time killing monsters on higher floors that give the same experience as those on the lower floors.
you could use Ruby to put +15% Exp Gain on each of your items, but that only gets you up to +90%. you could add Quest Stones until you get the +200% Cap, but that is taking up a lot of space. better to use up 6 spaces with just Quest Stones. also, unless you have a ton of Ruby’s, it is better to save Ruby’s for other useful affixes.
just so you know, there are 6 Perks, and after you get each Perk, you go back to level 1. you don’t lose your items, but you can’t use them until you get to a level that is half of the level of your items. your Stats go back to level one but you don’t lose any Skill Points you have earned. you need double the experience you earned for your first Perk to get the second Perk. and triple the experience for the third Perk. plus 5 Million Gold times the number of Perks you are getting, so 5M, 10M, 15M, 20M, 25M, 30M.
take a look in the Codex > Dictionary > Perks to see what kind of benefits you get from Perks.
Accomplished first and Fortunate second. Accomplished helps get Skill Points faster plus rewards from Feats faster. also helps with Ascending in many ways. Fortunate is a good second Perk because it gives +200% Gold Find & Luck over Cap and +5 Pick Up Radius. it means you can take Luck & Gold Find off of your Gears and focus on killing monster fast, and still get some extra Gold & Luck.
Enshrined and Dealer third and fourth. if having an extra Shrine and all Shrines boosted sound good, then Enshrined third. if you need lots of Gold, then Dealer Third.
Hunter and Treasured fifth and sixth. at this point, do you want to get more Eternal Items to use or convert to Ultra Rare Crystals, or more Epic Shrine Guardians spawning at the Shrines when you activate them? Treasured can help improve your Builds, where Hunter helps with getting more Experience from those Epic Shrine Guardians.