Penance brand as hierophant using the reworked arcane surge on the cheaper side.

Just sad that Penance brand is not much used and overlooked over the past several leagues, currently only 6 visible on the poe.ninja crucible ladder including me. It's often seen as a scaling build only used with great investment or with an aurabot. Bonus point, the mtx is wonderful and penance brand is one of my favorite skill. I understand it's hard to make it feels good and you can feel discouraged when you first try it but with a good understanding it's lovely to play (but beware you need to click a lot), in the showcase I move constantly but in normal mapping not with 8 mods -15% max res and 4+ altars you can take quite a beating.

Farming altar with wandering path following SnooBAE85's strategy. Low investment, growing hordes and random rusted scarab + we sustain our own map / sextant and chisels / vaal orbs. On 8 mods map we have between 70-84 pack size, and an additional 40% increased pack size of influenced monsters

https://pobb.in/ms7fyn5SRsw3 (mostly perma flask in mapping as shown but I just checked diamond and wise oak considering they have 20 and 15 charge to use and 9.2/10s duration it's hard to have them fall off)

Penance brand is a skill that scale mostly through high cast speed in order to stack high amount of charges while lowering the duration to make it explode faster (1.056s on my case). New arcane surge gives 20% cast speed which is increased by our ascendancy also some nodes on the tree (can even use Kurgal's gaze to scale effect with hypnotic jewels). Crucible node 25% effect of arcane surge is also used on my wand.

In the "showcase" I'm playing in a map with ailment immune monster and 71% life as extra es (we reach 50% shock in single target on rares easily, on some lightning and shock res mob it still reach around 15-20%. I put 20% on the pob anyways it doesn't really matter for penance brand as it's quite hard to understand the true dps). We have -15% max res and some extra speed mods on the map. But we can take some hits if not too crazy with the altars (don't be me I only read the upside part) thats why you see me put a portal in the middle of the map it's my survival instinct, you are mostly safe if you don't play like a madman.

Offence wise we are crit capped thanks to hierophant min power charge and some tree investment we have 5min power charge.

Defence wise, I invested a bit on the tree, going for spell suppression cap, MoM and some mana node. We have 4k life + 3k7 mana unreserved, 75% chaos res 4 endu charge and some phys as ele. We also use arcane cloak on the left click close to 65% uptime. Freeze can be an option with call of the brotherhood but I don't particularly feel the need, especially considering how often I run maps with ailments immune mobs.

On the Recovery side we have vitality + leech for life (and the life flask instant on low life but w/e) As for mana we have clarity and 10% recoup but the main thing is 10% mana when a brand expire on an ennemy which happens a lot. (also 14% chance to gain 10% on skill use with the watcher eye but its just a bonus) We also use 2 remarkable cluster node to get 70% chance for extra brand helping a lot to cast 2 brand on pack or rare (and making our mana regen that much better). I tried agnostic but wasn't impressed by it sadly, unsurprisingly less life recovery on map mod scaled with effect in the atlas tree makes it impossible to regen life that way while still losing 20% mana per second.

I'm using cheap gear (in my opinion) I crafted the wand, the boots and both rings. Random amulet and cheap belt / helmet. The corrupted gloves cost me 10c, I bought the body armour for 50c I believe and 6L myself using tainted currency / colors (best colors would be 6B and dropping inspi but its 1/700 to hit with tainted chrom), that's the main currency sink. Bought both medium cluster for 40c each the main mod is remarkable, brand loyalty is a bonus. All my jewels I bought day one or two for 10c max each to make sure I would cover my res early, I like to use dual res jewels to help with gearing my starter. You could definetly use 2-3 crit multi mods jewels, crit amu and double wand with better mods to scale it much further. Bought the shield for under 100c (cant remember it was the first thing I bought day two, without crucible tree on it quite happy with the crucible nodes on it) I'm not optimizing it much more, it's just my starter to farm altars / maps early before switching to my main build.

I played it non crit at first so even cheaper (random 6l rare with spell supp craft no life for 15% mastery. Same for gloves just spell supp, life and rolled myself lightning exposure on implicit). Was using ascendancy divine guidance and sanctuary of thought going with high duration of arcane cloak etc... Tankier but far less enjoyable. Thanks to Holy Conquest it is able to clear easily packs but you will suffer on some resistant rares / crucible even with the same farming strategy

Side note before going for heist cache nodes I used blight nodes its quite relaxing after the spam. Thanks to wandering path you have tons of mobs spawning in each wave, some lucky chests and on top of that 80% reduced cost for creating and upgrading your towers, it's silly.