This league I killed 7/7 uber bosses in HCSSF for the first time. It was a bumpy ride over 3 different characters, but I'm quite proud and wanted to share my experience with each of the builds that helped along the way:

Earthshatter Jugg

After dropping a Mageblood(!), shitting my pants and being scared to equip it for way too long, I made a tanky Jugg with good enough damage, which did the bulk of my t17 farming.

Best part of this build was the thickness, at the cost of the warcry spamming playstyle being a bit clunky. I tried Ground Slam but felt like Earthshatter was necessary to make up for the lack of damage on Jugg ascendancy.

I was surprised how good Ashes of the Stars was when I got it. All the warcry speed from quality let me drop Admonisher anoint for easier suppress cap, and I'm not certain but it felt like +1 Earthshatter spikes was giving more overlaps.

I killed Uber Shaper and Uber Eater with this build (my first ever hardcore ubers kills), before getting clean 1 shot through charges/fortify to a volatile in t17. I had no idea they did such insane damage, lesson learned and never ran that mod again. RIP Mageblood.

POB: https://pobb.in/koMsBnc3I4W7

YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r2G13EBYss

Archmage Ice Nova Hiero

After a couple days of depression after the Jugg rip, I ran it back on Hiero. Progression/general mapping was super smooth with Ball Lightning of Orbiting & Frostblink of Wintry Blast linked to Archmage. I tried a shield variant at one point but the extra damage and cast speed from the second wand felt a lot better to me. Swapped to Ice Nova for bossing, which was easily 2-3x the damage. Biggest issue I encountered was mana recovery. So few sources of base mana regen in the game. Perhaps should have run clarity and mana recovery rate on chest implicit. I also think a focus trigger helmet to automate sigil/frost shield/curse would have made bossing a lot smoother.

This build took me through Uber Cortex, Maven, Awakener, UElder, and felt pretty safe almost the whole time. Big mistake was not switching GMP -> Greater Volley for bosses, reducing my overlaps (whoops). I thought this character was going to bring it home but I unfortunately died to Uber Exarch ball phase.

10/10 build and so fun to scale. Heavily recommend.

POB: https://pobb.in/53q4Fztg9eOb

YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0iYZjKG1fE

Molten Strike of the Zenith Slayer

With just one boss to go, and many hours in POB despairing at just how hard it is to get tanky against Exarch balls, I made a character just for him.

Sione's Ambition anoint was really helpful for making the clear feel tolerable on this build compared to say Lightning Strike. The damage felt a bit weird with the way Zenith works, but overall it was worth it for the high damage, recovery, and tankiness. There was a lot of room to grow with this build, especially if I had made a better sword or found enough Power Runes for the return proj enchant (ended at 8/15).

I had to farm so many Sanctuaries to get another set of Exarch fragments. Honestly the T17/uber fragment system feels insanely punishing in HC and especially SSF. 'Farm for 45 minutes to drop a map -> spend 50c rolling it safe -> almost die anyway -> drop the wrong fragment' had me feeling like Sisyphus.

Although most of my mapping was with a standard armour/evasion/suppress rare chest, for the final fight I switched into Loreweave+Transcendence and Iron Reflexes. With all conditional buffs up I could tank close to 20 balls. The minotaur does a ton of damage but a lot of it is converted to fire, so I was still tanky enough against it despite losing a lot of PDR. The setup ended up feeling not so amazing in practice between using Enduring Cry on CD to keep up charges as well as maintaining Fortify/leech through the ball phase but it ended up getting the job done. Such a rush to achieve 7/7.

POB: https://pobb.in/KRPX4EMLDFM8

YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR9gl1CcMFg

Hopefully this was helpful or interesting to someone!