It's said that glory is found through suffering. Then it only makes sense to choose the most painful and horrendous league starter to attain the greatest glory possible! (Surely that's how it works.)

So here's my simple guide to the worst league starter—Oni-Goroshi Cyclone/Blade Flurry/VENGEANCE, starting from level 1.

(This is a serious build, by the way, which I will be league-starting, even if it's playing into memes, so plz don't remove mods)

I'm sure it'll be worth it KEKW

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1. Create 4 or so characters. Start the game and kill Hillock. If he's not Uber Hillock (dropping Oni-Goroshi), then log out before going into town. (If you go into town, you can't farm Hillock, which means you can't get Oni-Goroshi the 'natural' or 'masochistic' way.)
2. Kill Hillock over. And over. And over. Let your rage consume you. FEEL THE HATRED OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS (of killing Hillock)! Do so while cycling through your characters, since it takes time for the zone to reset after you log out on a specific character. Probably do this for around 15+ hours until you find Uber Hillock.
3. Finally find and kill Uber Hillock and obtain Oni-Goroshi.
4. Equip Oni-Goroshi onto a Marauder; we'll be going Chieftain.
5. Now it's time for our GLORIOUS EVOLUTION into ETERNAL GLORY, by which I mean leveling using only Oni-Goroshi. Only Oni-Goroshi. My build guide includes no gear, no clothes, no rings of power—just you, your sword, and slowly, gloriously burning to death. LIKE THE MARTYRS GLORIOUS IN THEIR DEATHS FOR ALMIGHTY GOD! (The benefit of this, of course, is that any gear you get is an added bonus—and thus is not necessary. The build just works off of the passive tree and skill gems and main hand weapon!)
6. You'll use some gems (Molten Strike into Cyclone for Oni-Goroshi damage + Vitality gem to regen Life and Precision gem so you can actually hit things with your sword) and you'll take some passives on your Passive Tree, but nothing else is required. I already did all the mathemagic, so none of you need to worry. That's why the "Level 10" gear set is just the sword and nothing else. You may need to use some Chromatic Orbs to reroll Oni-Goroshi's socket colors to fit our supports better, but that's not super required either.
7. You won't die to "Her Embrace" with this build. For the most part. Between levels 10 and 20 might be sketchy, but once you get Vitality (gem reward once you reach The Lower Prison and talk to Nessa), you're set.
8. At some point, you can get VENGEANCE against Hillock by equipping the VENGEANCE gem. It auto procs when you're Hit and actually scales really well with our build, even getting to nearly half of our Cyclone damage. And since you're here for the suffering, you expect to get Hit a lot.
9. Proceedeth unto ETERNAL GLORY by leveling up to 70 using the passive tree and gem guides (shown for every 10 levels). You'll be keeping the same gear, though (hence why I only have a level 10 gear guide—it's just Oni-Goroshi). White maps through yellow maps is actually pretty survivable + solid damage—looking at around 100k+ damage on white maps, still wearing only Oni-Goroshi. If we throw on some basic gear (see the Medium-Tier gear set), we get ~300k damage on Cyclone plus max resists & around 10k max hit taken for phys/ele/chaos. Plenty fine for white maps.
10. But does this scale into red maps? Oh yes it does! It scales right off the cliff through your six portals! No, I jest just a little bit—we have a rather special setup which we plan to build into. We take the Abyssus helmet for big damage, but then all physical damage from hits will be taken as elemental damage (via a number of things: Purity of Elements Watcher's Eye (2 mods req.), Cloak of Flame, Taste of Hate, Tasalio from ascendency. Then we grab Transcendence with some Armour stacking, and we have some pretty absurd tankiness: over 100k max hit and effective Life for everything besides Chaos. If we throw on our Molten Shell, we can even tank 1 Hit of Memory Game (though according to PoB's calculations, you need to tank 3 to survive it, which we cannot) if we use the High-End Gear. Plus High-End gear nets us 3mil+ mapping and 4mil+ Guardian/Pinnacle solo target (really closer to 5mil+).
11. Re: cost of gear: Medium-tier gear should be real cheap, if you even need to buy it. Most gear pieces are literally just Life + resists and nothing else. High-End gear is more expensive: basically tosses on one or two extra mods to the Life/resists from Medium-tier. These are assumed to be average tier rolls. To make the build's tankiness work, we need: 2 mod Purity of Elements Watcher's Eye (equivalent ones were selling for like half an exalt last league, so not super expensive), Militant Faith - Maxarius (literally was 5c last time I checked lol), and Taste of Hate (also just a couple of chaos), and Cloak of Flame (might be more expensive from the changes, but probably still cheap? Since it's a lower tier unique with higher drop rate). Survivability is quite cheap for us. For damage costs, it gets a bit higher for some, still low for others: we scale crit a lot via 3 Grand Spectrum Cobalt Jewels (couple of chaos), Abyssus (1c max), and cluster jewels (these would be the only expensive part potentially: 1 large Attack cluster, 1 medium Fire cluster, and 1 small Determination reservation cluster). So in total: almost all gear is just some chaos. It's very cheap besides a couple of damage spikes. I doubt the prices will change much, but given all the economy shakeups this league (RIP my beautiful Exalted Orbs; I always exalted whenever they dropped, but no longer!), we never know for sure.

Gameplay: we cyclone, we occasionally drop Totems, and we click Infernal Cry when we want big pack to go boom. If you want a more thorough explanation:

Simple gameplay, though a little more active than just holding down left click: you can either find space for a Guard skill (like Molten Shell) and stick it on left click (a good idea, so it auto procs for free) and then hold down Q for Cyclone.

Then use WERT for, respectively, Infernal Cry, Ancestral Protector, Ancestral Warchief, and Vaal Ancestral Warchief.

You hold Q until you hit a big pack. You click WER to throw totems down and infernal cry, you spin, you click WER again for another big pack, you spin, etc. If you find something tanky, you press WET (meaning you press T instead of R) for Vaal Ancestral Warchief for bonus damage.

Path of Building: https://pastebin.com/vC4VPicm

This build actually took a lot of work, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how tanky it looks and the damage it scales into, even though it's the most meme build I've ever made (and I've made a number of meme builds - just look at my Crusader themed build).

I will probably be league starting this, unless they reveal something in the next week that changes my plans (or some random redditor comes along and points out something I missed, messing up the whole guide). I'm considering streaming or documenting this journey of suffering, though I doubt anyone is interested in watching Hillock die all Friday night lol. Let me know if y'all have any questions.

Don't start this, by the way, if you're looking for a fast clear or a meta build or anything really strong. It's none of those things. It's not even a trap build—I've been very honest in my PoB calculations. It's just designed for suffering. BUT THIS SUFFERING WILL BRING ME GLORY!

EDIT:

Review of the build: I posted my review of the build in the build thread here. As expected, it wasn't a very good build, lol. It requires a costly gear upgrade to move from early maps to late maps/bossing, so you'd be stuck farming early maps for certain key components (the costly one being the Watcher's Eye for our damage conversion—the build simply can't handle physical damage, and also needs pretty high level to have the passive points to get all the Life increases we need). But if you can get those gear upgrades, then it probably isn't bad at higher tiers of maps.

Main problem is getting the 10+ Divines needed for the Watcher's Eye (see example Trade search query here). I was surprised at how much the price jumped for those mods; when I checked for those mods in Sentinel, they were well under an exalt, so I thought I'd be able to farm for it pretty easily even in white maps, but now they're like 20x times what they were last league. Probably because we're early in the league, and those mods got a lot more valuable thanks to the Cloak of Flame buff & perhaps other conversion strategies that players are using now.

I didn't want to try and farm early maps for like 10 divines, given I still haven't even gotten one to drop yet, so my little experiment ended there. Leveling was quite a breeze, though. Not much gear required besides the sword. Though optional gear is cheap: Cloak of Flames for easy survivability, and maybe some Life/resistances on whatever you can pick up off the ground.