Self-curse Temp chains without Headhunter - 20 ex budget

PoB: https://pastebin.com/aJ84mkbF

#Intro

This is a build for all those players who have wanted to get a headhunter-like experience but never been able to save up enough to actually buy one. Although my bow is pretty great, all it gives me is a little more damage. To account for having a worse bow, in the showcase I used a 5l blade vortex, which loses me way more damage than having a bow without crit multi & strength gems.

One of the pros of this build over the assassin HoA is that you don't have to recast blade vortex very often. Due to the way self-curse temp chains works, your blade vortex ends up lasting 20+ seconds per cast. Also, I think the assassin version is extremely meta and therefore a lot of the gear is overpriced. Calamitous visions has dropped a ton, but the synth rings are still really overpriced (though technically not necessary). This build is squishier and a little bit awkward at the beginning of the map, but once you start rolling, you start rolling HARD. You can juice your maps much harder than this showcase (legions for example give you a lot of buffs), and you can also just do alch and gos.

Biggest con for me has been having difficulty farming t1 crafts. Takes too much time, and the monsters dont give buffs. On the other hand, higher tier fields give you shit loads of buffs.

#Mechanics

This build uses 3x inspired learning to get an effect akin to headhunter. Normally you would use headhunter alongside the inspired learnings, but I wanted to see how the build would fare without headhunter at all (and I don't have the raw currency for a headhunter).

We use self curse temporal chains + solstice vigil to reach the cap of 75% reduced rate of buffs/debuffs expiring. This is essentially skill effect duration except way, way stronger as it applies to EVERYTHING. Flasks, vaal auras, blade vortex, and most importantly stolen rare monster mods will all last 4x longer. The self curse is applied by herald of thunder + curse on hit temp chains socketed into shackles of the wretched.

This league, self curse temp chains basically has to be done on occultist, though technically cospri will on another ascendancy could work. To be honest, I think even last league, occultist was the best choice for self-curse.

In order to cap out temporal chains, we need a lot of curse effect (175%). We get this mainly from 3 medium clusters, annoint, ascendancy, and some points on the skilltree.

#Gear Breakdown

#Upgrades

Obviously, headhunter is the big one. For smaller ones though, you can get a lot better large clusters, and awakened skill gems as well. You can use one of the HoA rings, but I don't think it is worth it. I think end game, you would want awakened curse on hit + swap to frenzy on hit chest rather than the + curse/spellcrit.