tl;dr still quite strong on a NOT 100s of exalts budget. Need 15 ex still to comfortably start.

Budget PoB (no expensive corrupts, ~15 ex) : https://pastebin.com/PRcm9bVy

My current PoB (25 ex investment): https://pastebin.com/ng38CUmg

#Intro

Hey all, Zaedulus here. I've seen a lot of comments and questions thrown around about herald/aura stacking, and the general consensus seems to be that while it is still alive, it is only feasible at budgets of hundreds of exalts. However, through my own experimentation and experience building a herald stacker last league, I decided to try to make it work on a much smaller budget.

While theorycrafting, I decided that the minimum budget I would recommend for starting the build would be 15 exalts. Here is a gear price/budget breakdown.

Gear | Price | Notes ----|-----|----- Saqawals | 2.5 ex | Buy a 10% rmr base, 6l either manually or through harvest Prism Guardian | 15c | I bought determination corruption for 2 ex, but realized now that it was a mistake since grace corruptions sell for like 25c Alpha's Howl | 5c | Next upgrade would be +2 aura or aoe gems. Actually makes a nice difference. Cost me 1 ex for that 2x CotB | 70c x2 | I paid 50c for each base, and catalysted it up myself. RmR Amulet | 2 ex | Very easy to craft, cost me 1 ex but Ill round it up in case bad luck. Belt | 75c | 35c for base + spam def reforge or fossils for t1 % es. Then just craft on aspect of the avian. You could continue harvest crafting from there, but I left as is. Nebulis | 20c | Cheap this league. Cast speed/implicit not important. Buy one with sum of lightning/cold dmg above 38. Shaper's Touch with ele weakness | 30c | Surprisingly cheap for ele weakness corrupt, which is pretty huge. You could go maligaros and spec out of elemental overload, but then you wouldn't get the curse implicit and would have worse defenses for a small damage upgrade Voices | 70c | Its dropped since I got it 2x Large Clusters | 20c x2 | Could technically have anything, but I looked specifically for ones with relevant rolls (int/es on small passives) 7x ilvl 68 Medium Clusters | 100c x 7 | Huge part of our investment. The one part that remained just as expensive, or rather became even more expensive than last league as ilvl 84 bases are rare and they need 6 passives. Skyforths | 15c | incredibly cheap. Need it for the huge amount of rmr, though unfortunately we do lose our regen RmR Jewels | 10c  | The bare minimum is 3 to reach CI/prism guardian threshold.

As can be seen, a lot of the gear got WAY cheaper due to nerfs decreasing popularity. In particular, a lot of the corrupts on things like alphas howl and conq efficiency got much cheaper.

#Skill Gems

For support gems, I keep energy leech/spell echo/inspiration always.

I chose to go Spark for clear, as I was relatively easily able to fit in malevolence, even in my most budget version. The other support gems are faster proj and pierce or awakened fork. Faster proj makes a pretty huge difference clearspeed wise, and with all your skill effect duration, many sparks have time to hit multiple enemies if you give them the time.

For single target, I make a gem swap of spark/faster proj/pierce to ball lightning/slower proj/cold pen. It has absolutely insane damage.

This time around, the build is way less socket starved due to not needing to run 5 heralds. To be honest, you don't really need to have any corrupted items granting skills in implicit, and I would not recommend investing into things like CotB that have that (there are tons of other things you should prioritize first). As such, not only do you have the sockets for malevolence, but you also can save some mana using enlightens in the right place.

Using the extra slots, I have also been considering running vigilant strike + the vigil combo, but would need to use 4 points to get a viable jewel socket for the str threshold. You could also run cwdt + desecrate + offering potentially.

For auras, I literally run everything that somewhat works with the build. Flesh and stone costs a lot to slot in and doesn't add much (no aura tag so no extra phys reduction/cast speed), so don't worry if you can't fit it in. I also passed on heralds since they don't count as auras and hence don't get tagged by guardian/necro ascendancies. I'd recommend running every aura included in the budget PoB though.

A side note on the defense auras: discipline, grace, determination. Each of them is target exaltable on shaper base, and can also be gotten as an implicit on shield corrupt. As such, we will ideally have grace on shield implicit (cheapest), discipline in alpha's howl (+ levels), and determination on our amulet (filling it out).

#Mechanics

The core mechanic behind aura stacking this league is to understand the thresholds. The biggest threshold is reaching 300% increased aura effect. This will make effects like necro and guardian's per aura buff jump up a level (3% phys reduction per aura -> 4%). As a side note, you need at least 275% aura effect to get 90% all res from your purities, but this is a less important threshold since we plan to go over it anyways. You get 57% aura effect from the tree + might of the meek, which leaves us with 243 to get from our clusters. Long story short, this is very difficult to get without some combination of super good clusters, 3 passive voices, and high level as a guardian, so I went scion for the extra skill points. Scion also has more damage due to necro giving her a hilarious amount of cast speed. I also opted for a voices + 2 large cluster setup (7 mediums) since 2 voices was not enough but 3 was too many skill points and overkill.

By default, a 6 node cluster gives us 30% increased aura effect, for a total of 210% from our 7 clusters. To make up for that extra 33, we want some combination of first among equals (+4), replenshing presence(+2), and 25% inc small node effect(+4 to +5). The easiest set up to get that extra 33 is to have first among equals on every cluster for 28% increased aura effect. Then, you get that extra 5% aura effect by having some combination of repleneshing presence and inc small node effect in addition to first among equals on 2-3 of your clusters.

One trick my setup uses is the same I used last league, which is having both CI and prism guardian. Essentially, if you reach 75% reduced mana reservation (instead of 76 which was required last league, but is now fixed), then Prism guardian makes socketed gems free, which allows you to 'reserve them on your life' even though you are CI. This is pretty huge since it lets us reserve 3 of our 50% auras for free (implicit corrupt doesnt count as socketed in prism guardian unfortunately).

#Crafting

I wouldn't recommend crafting the large clusters, just put a search out and buy something.

For medium clusters, alt spam till you get first among equals, repleneshing presence, or 25% inc effect. Then aug/regal and pray. Ultimately though, since many of your clusters only need one of those, it is pretty easy crafting.

For ammy: buy shaper base. Scour, quality to 20. Alt spam (NO augs) until you get RMR. I chose to use a super regal (+4 mods), but I'm not sure if that was better or worse. I'd avoid using a normal regal though since it removes 5% quality; just use some form of harvest regaling. After that, fill up prefixes with easy to remove non/def things, and then aug + remove/add def until you hit the aura you want determination, grace, or discipline. Determination is best here, since discipline can benefit from + levels hugely and grace is cheapest to get on shield. After that, remove the bad prefixes, craft 20% es, and then optionally aug def in hopes of flat es. We can make okay use out of % evasion and % armor as well.

#Upgrades

One of the biggest pros of this build is that you can dump as much currency as you can into it and it just keeps getting stronger. Things like 3 passive voices are great chase items, and a single well crafted medium cluster jewel runs for 80 ex+. If you get past all that, then you could start getting 1 passive voices and an explodey nebulis. Realistically, you probably won't make it nearly to that point, but having the path exist is exciting.

For cheaper upgrades to start, a +2 alpha's howl is pretty huge and not too expensive this league. A aura corrupted on your prism guardian will also save a jewel socket. Just buy the cheapest one; grace costs 25c while determination costs 2+ ex and determination also costs 2+ ex. Other than that, you can incrementally improve upon your clusters and jewels. Rather than having random mediocre RmR jewels, start getting actually decent ones. Buying level 21 aura skill gems is also a good and easy strict upgrade. Awakened spell echo is way cheap relative to last league and a sizable DPS upgrade. Awakened fork is great with spark for clear speed, but honestly spark already clutters the screen a lot so I decided to stick with pierce.

I recently purchased a discipline es on hit WE, and it has been doing good work so far (5 ex for just that mod, i paid 8 ex to get phasing & bleed immune as well). None of the content in the video was using this watcher's eye though; you can tell since I'm not just permanently phasing.

After that, you can look into upgrading your ammy to have some damage mods like + lvl gems and ele pen.