I unfortunately had a relatively small amount of time this league but I really enjoyed what I got to play. I wanted to make a video/guide/something about hiveborn and Reliquarian way earlier but just got too busy.

POB link for character: https://pobb.in/M6DuvaZYAs72

In general hiveborn is pretty okay. A solid off meta option for tinkering with, probably close to skeleton mages in my eyes. Better than some options, worse than most popular things. Covered in frost is a pretty rare debuff so I think they have a lot of utility in cold convert minion builds. Unfortunately that isn't much of a thing anymore. Zoo is just not in a great spot because Hallowed Monarch is so strong and Spectres are the main thing that deal cold damage. Maybe some weird Animate Guardian build or a BAMA could use them as a support minion but I think their best use is just as the main damage dealer in a Zoo build.

Scaling crit with the Reliquarian was fun but obviously not possible after this. I also had a lot of fun with the defense setup, getting double brass dome. I used a minion bow at league start with the widowhail node letting me get block capped with rearguard. Felt like Tota again, then they came out with Tota again.

I don't think the Queen's Hunger playstyle is likely to ever really work. I think there's a delay between hiveborn's trigger and the minions spawning, and there's also a delay between queen's Hunger triggering and Hiveborn Triggering and then the minions spawning. They get out of sync really easily and you wind up without any hiveborn at times. Maybe on sabo where you just summon all the Hiveborn at once with triggerbots it could work.

I have no idea how common a +4 support Venarius Astrolabe is going to be, I bought mine for like 200 chaos since I guess nobody really thought about it. My gear was better before I swapped to astrolabe for the most part but again, no time. I normally wouldn't want to showcase a mageblood build but mageblood was pretty affordable this league.

I don't expect or even really recommend anybody play hiveborn but if you do necromancer is probably your best bet. Sabo seems like potentially a comfort pick with CDR and triggerbots but the right side of the tree is different and therefor I hate it. I hope anything about my character can inspire you on your jank journey. I was really surprised that even at the end of the league I didn't see anybody really talking about scaling these guys.

The SUPER SECRET TECH is REAL. I show it off poorly in the video because I made it in like 2 days with a concussion.

Essentially when you spam an offering with hollow effigy anointed so you don't need a corpse and linked to hiveborn the summon hiveborn support spawns a corpse as part of it's code. I'm pretty sure the gem is just a modified version of the graft skill that also summoned hiveborn. They applied brittle instead of covered in frost and some minion giga chads might remember that you could make that corpse a spectre that was really strong. They removed that interaction in some patch notes and I couldn't get this corpse to be targeted but I am crippled so maybe somebody else could. That corpse isn't a normal one though that would get spawned by unearth or other skills though. It is a real, natural corpse. You can use detonate dead of scavenging on it, which I do in the video using kitava's thirst. I have no idea what the corpse is, how much it can be scaled, or if this is even remotely usable but it is extremely cool to me and I think I'm the only person who knows about it. Please correct me if I'm wrong and people have already talked about this.