tl;dr- HoT + Omni seems pretty busted! Probably because Omni is busted. I don't think omniscience is going to be the same next league, so if you're interested in building HoT, I'd recommend trying it this league. Rough cost estimate to do this is 70-80ex. You can get started with the build for 10ex if you want to, you'll start with around 1-2m DPS at that price point. This should be enough for standard t16 alch + go eldritch altar farming strategies.

~~PoB here: https://pastebin.com/LwTz5HfU~~

Better PoB here: https://pastebin.com/guYEkwvM

Hi all,

This league I ended up rolling an EO/non-crit HoT autobomber because I wanted to test out annihilating light and omni and I loved my past experience with EO/non-crit HoT autobomber in Expedition league. needless to say omni + annihilating light are difficult to build around, but provide plenty of damage scaling. I lurk around a lot of the HoT autobomber threads, but I wanted to do a showcase to be a bit more proactive in helping others. I also always learn something when I do a showcase, so if you see something that just doesn't make sense or looks incorrect, please let me know. Also special thanks to /u/anne_dobalina , your write-ups on HoT are still insanely valuable despite some of those posts being more than a year old. Huge thank you, super helpful.

TREE

I like where my tree ended up, here are some thoughts on what worked for me:

• 2x Split personality is the equivalent of 4x T1 or T2 stat rolls on your gear with how I have them setup on the tree. I think that this is insanely efficient and you should try to figure out how to run them.
• Corrupted Soul, is mandatory IMO. You need to somehow reach ~960 life recovery/leech cap per second without corrupted soul to make the build feel comfy, with corrupted soul you can split ~480 life recovery per second and ~480 ES recover per second. Splitting up the leech requirements in this way is so much more solvable for the build, especially with omniscience.
• I've tried a bunch of cluster configurations, I think this works the best, 1 Dark Messenger, 3 Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, 2 Empowered Envoy, 1 Doryani's Lesson, 1 Brush with Death, 1 Enduring Composure are the important ones. Overshock is also a really solid DPS node.
• Light Eater + ES leech mastery is a huge boon for ES leech. Even with my config I only have around 250 ES leech (I'm using a belt mod to compensate for the rest).
• +1 max endu charges seems like a no-brainer
• Whirling Barrier is surprisingly good with the staff + rumis! The mastery is also a ton of ES, it's more ES than pathing to comparable nearby ES nodes.
• I use a thread, a lot of people run a Unnatural Instincts in this slot. I always feel like this item never does enough to merit the price, and thread saves just a ton of skill points if you're going golems. Also, fun fact, annihilating light makes the thread only -4% all res.
• ~~Deep Thoughts + Mana Mastery is enough for 2 cwdt loops, but you'll never have mana. It's solid for 1 cwdt loop, but I still find that I can't take my Immortal Call & Flame dash off of lifetap.~~ See new PoB.
• Unnatural Calm is another node I don't see enough people taking. Lowers leech requirements by reducing the total damage from Storm Secrets. Also gives a bunch of ES.
• The lightning mastery is obviously huge for our damage, because I'm using thread for Heart of Thunder, I took another lightning wheel for the mastery. It doesn't have to be Static Blows, you can take any lightning wheel you want.
• The two small nodes leading up to Carrion are almost as good as brush with death, but only for life recovery. Once you allocate Corrupted Soul, you really do need to swap over to brush with death.

ITEMS

• We're using primarily uniques, there's not too much to talk about, but I will go over some of the common questions I get.
• Storm's Gifts, a lot of people ask why I don't use the Eldritch prolif gloves + exposure. I think eldritch gloves are okay, but not great. If you do use eldritch gloves, you should be using them because you just don't have enough omniscience, that you need some the extra suffixes to keep your res in-tact. Otherwise, Storms Gifts are just superior. HoT and Inpulsa have a very symbiotic relationship. You want your Inpulsa to kill the majority of the screen so that your HoT can focus on bosses. In the clips you see that half of the screen will disappear then the beyond bosses will die shortly after. This is only possible because I have Storm's Gifts to proliferate shock endlessly, allowing Inpulsa to chain explode. Without chain explosions, HoT cannot focus on bosses, which makes you more vulnerable, which makes the build feel potato.
• Atziri's Promise is maybe contentious. I mostly just want an amethyst flask and Atziri's Promise seems better than a generic Amethyst Flask. I've seen a lot of people use Cinderswallow here to help with the recovery and mana + onslaught. I think this is correct if you can somehow find another 35 chaos res, but I have not tested it yet to be sure.
• +1 Inpulsa is roughly a 20% damage increase for me, these are expensive though, 20-30ex. You should know that a +1 socketed gems Inpusla is nearly twice the damage increase of a +2 Duration/AoE Inpulsa (these are also going to cost you 15+ ex for a 6L). You want a 6L because you want to put your HoT + empower in here.
• 50% frequency Storm Secrets are max DPS, but they're not much better than 47%+. Try to maximize the roll for your budget, you can also try to find some with decent Int rolls. Ideally these would also have increased % stat corruptions, but getting these with good rolls costs a fortune.
• The betrayal belt mod "Regenerate 150 ES per second when near a rare of Unique enemy" is a simple and easy way to get a ton of ES recovery. We take somewhere around 480 ES damage per second (in reality the average is a bit less due to IC) when firing on all cylinders. This belt mod means we recover around 400 ES/second when near rare an unique enemies. Which is still about 80 ES/second shy of equivalent, but keep in mind that we're also using brush with death to handle any lacking recovery.
• Conductivity Storm's Gifts are very QoL, and also functionally very good upgrades, but they are expensive. They are far more effective at spreading conductivity than your cwdt (I think these might also not cost mana? I'm not sure). It also allowed me to consolidate down to 1 cwdt loop. I would buy these eventually, but you don't have to start with them. I used 5% increased intelligence, 13% cold/fire res storm's gifts for a long time.
• My belt was 10ex, and I bought it as is. I did use a crusader belt for a long time, I just bought a crusader exalt for 60c and spammed dense fossils until I got this and it worked really well until I could afford a good DPS/Attribute belt: https://imgur.com/a/qWlajw3 . There's also a crusader suffix that I did not hit on that belt that will increase your ES leech recovery directly, that is ~~arguably~~ certainly a better mod than the % increased ES mod. If you're crafting your own gear, keep an eye out for both mods.

SKILLS

• Not running Hypothermia is questionable. Hypothermia over Cruelty is a more damage, but only if the enemy is chilled. I'm not confident enough in my cold snap keeping everything chilled, but it's possible that hypothermia would be better than cruelty. I think if you want to do bosses and use hypothermia, you should try to fit a chilling presence + overshock medium cluster. You could also swap to Algor Mortis in this case (or eldritch/stat gloves), they are insanely good for bosses.
• Anomalous golems + IC are really cheap and much better than the default quality.
• Phase Run + non-cwdt IC is a non-bo. The most annoying thing with the build is trying to cast both phase run an IC. having IC on m1 means it will regularly cancel phase run before it's off CD. Second wind helps a little bit, but it's still frustrating, especially this causes you to die. It might make more sense to just move IC into the cwdt loop.
• Div purifying flame is a pretty big damage cwdt utility spell. When paired with enhance it's 9% damage increase. Lv 4 enhance would take it up to 11%.
• Storm brand helps to lock down an area. You'll see me throwing down storm brands on Harbingers to just keep the area cleared. It's very sticky and effective. It also has a really shit cast time. Faster casting support is extremely recommended QoL here. Alternatively you might be able to get enough cast speed if you can reach the Crackling Speed wheel to drop the faster casting support. I would drop Static Blows if you want to do this and reallocate the mastery from the Crackling Speed wheel.
• Cold Snap for frenzy charges + chill. I somehow got my Storms Gifts for 3ex, so with 4 frenzy charges I'm never dropping this from my loop.
• You might consider dropping phase run and adding an innervate support + culling strike support to your storm brand. This is something that I've generally considered at several points.
• EDIT: A friend mentioned that the "10% damage taken recouped as mana" mana mastery was really good. I tested it and it's really good. So I took the opportunity to drop lifetap and put an enhance on IC + phase run, AND go up to a 4L storm brand. The desync between Phase Run and IC cooldowns are worse now, but the extra .4s of IC uptime should be way worth. Plus you get innervation and cull now, so this should be a huge win.

I think I'm mostly settled on the build now, I might rebuy my clusters to try to sneak a bit more chaos res, but otherwise I think this is about as good as I can get without spending more time farming than I care to. Please feel free to shoot me any questions! I may try to record a Feared whenever I attempt that. I'll do it on this character, I'm pretty sure I can do it with this much damage, scoured.

EDIT: Feared down, 1 death- https://youtu.be/p5fZbne7EZc