Quick Showcase: HoP Poppin' with Bex's hat (budget friendly!)

https://streamable.com/11y5jm

Build concept

Use Maw of Mischief's "Death Wish" to pop your minions and ignite prolif from them

Minions are Heralds of Purity which auto-sustain and have very high life with gem level stacking (150k~200k), plus the occasional skeleton

We go Necro for Bone Offering and Essence Glutton, as defenses are MoM/Agnostic and Glancing Blows with on block recovery

We use Heartbound Loop to automate a bunch of stuff on CwDT, including: EE, cursing, corpse generation, offering, tempest shield

Numbers

In the video I (think I) have 2.5~3 mil ignite DPS, which can be pushed to 5ish with more investment

I have 6.6k ehp (4khp+2.6kmana, 40% mom), Agnostic with 1.5~2k mana regen, 75/60 GB block recovering 400hp and 250mana on block, and blind on most of the time

https://pastebin.com/0gbBjDfY
(Death Wish is was not well supported in PoB, so modeled with DD - same scaling off 6% corpse HP while DW is 13%. Also has a 10x(minions popped)% multiplier, so ballpark is between 2 and 3 times the DD number. Will update later with actual DW which is now supported)

Budget

Only prerequisite for the build is Maw of Mischief and Heartbound Loop which costs a few c each, plus cinderswallow urn (whithout which you get red burns/ignites which clash terribly with the green explosions, simply unplayable) at 50c and Rumi's at 10c.

Things you also really want include a +1all/+2duration pair of gloves (typically Hands of the High Templar) at about 50c, a Foible (15c) and a Cloak of Defiance which does not need to be linked, so that's nice (10c).

Most expensive parts could be cluster jewels, I spent 150c on a large and 30 or so on each medium - but the build works fine without them.

All other rares and jewels I'm wearing are in the 10-20c range, for a grand total of 450c or so spent (say 500 if you include altQ gems and stuff).

The build should function well enough to do red maps comfortably on a 2ex budget. Feasible in SSF as maw has a fairly common card and HBL drops a lot (but maybe you don't want to go momgnostic then because cloak and foible can be a pain to get).

Playstyle & comments

Just need to tap (0.15s cast time) death wish to pop a minion and clear a pack, keeping the channel only on multiple packs and bosses.

Pretty hard to get HoPs to run to enemies fast enough to clear well, so I mostly flame dash past them and pop behind me - HoP leash range is fairly low, and we're tanky enough to be able to afford it. You can also double-tap DW which will usually pop some random minion far away, spawning a fresh one on you, and popping that one with the second click.

Skellies are mostly just there to get the first kills to summon HoPs, and to fatten explosions on bosses (death wish has 10% more damage per minion popped) but you can also summon them on top of packs if you need to be cautious or HoPs refuse to go there for some reason.

Ignites make the skill a lot more usable than straight hit scaling IMO, I've seen a few videos around here and that looked awful to play tbqh.

Also all the supporting shit (EE, etc) which a lot of ignite builds have to hand cast is automated, so that's nice - this is essentially a 1 button + movement skill build, which is pretty comfortable to play. You do have to pay some amount of attention to flasks and positioning, but that's about it.

Defenses are good enough to stand in the middle of porcupines in hard maps and not care.

Further optimization / alternatives

Could probably be a trickster without all the corpse shenanigans (but I wanted to see how necro mom/block held up after the multiple nerfs - it's quite fine IMO).

With better rares I could squeeze in Replica Emberwake which is a casual 30% more damage (the duration is not that much of an issue with a fair amount of it on the tree, circling oblivion, alt deadly ailments, etc).

I'm still missing some levels, weapon could easily be 10-20% more damage, 21/20 HoP, generally borderline garbage rares, etc.

Replica Kaom's could be good here but I like having a lot of stuff on cwdt.