Level 97 Crit Cyclone Champion^3.22

Notes

General plan:

Pillar looks to be <1c even on leaguestart
The Magnate looks to be 65c day one, but falling quickly.  Should still be your second buy - it's a big deal.
8 passive Staff and Mace clusters can be expensive if you need a high-level one... but for getting started, we just need ilvl 75, which were 10c a few days into the league (poe.ninja isn't showing me enough pricing data to be certain as to how they'd be at actual start, but you'll have other things to worry about before getting this anyways)
Next is probably to fit in all the auras.  There's a few ways to go about this.
- Enlighten's going to be expensive, but you'll want one eventually anyways.
- There are MRE clusters - because we only need 2 passive, either level 50 (Uncompromising) or 68 (Destructive Aspect), it shouldn't be *too* expensive, but it does take up passive points and a jewel slot.  I'm expecting even with gg gear we'll need at least one, though.
- Get a better helmet - something with Deafening MRE and an MRE eldritch implicit.  In the past I've solved this with Devouring Diadem, but that's likely to be too expensive to be practical at this stage.  Would Alpha's Howl work?  Haven't tested it.
- Temporarily switch to the Aura ascendency node.  This is slightly better if you're not counting on Adrenaline uptime anyways.
- Do some partial combination of the above and drop Blood and Sand for now.  Not only is Pride more powerful, but next step is a watcher's eye for impale count to keep scaling Master of Metal, so it's doubly important we get it in.  In this PoB I did 2 MRE clusters because I was unsure about my Enlighten situation, but we'll need to eventuall to reclaim those passive points.
Impale Count watcher's eye.  Even better if we get a useful second mod, but that's not necessary for now.  Goal is to pump the flat damage for Pillar.  If you aren't 97 by this point, you'll probably have to get an enlighten and a better helmet first to reclaim those passive points (and a spare jewel socket)
The next big upgrade is a Second Sight Brutal Restraint, to get a big chunk of crit, but to be able to support this, we're probably going to need better gear.  More MRE, get that Enlighten, that sort of thing.  If you're ok with having to pass through rare monsters repeatedly, brittle ground boot implicit is good damage, but it's kind of annoying to use, so I've omitted it until higher investment.
- If you're going to upgrade only two things, my recommendation would be Helmet, to cram in more MRE, and Amulet, so you aren't annointing a complete piece of junk.
- To be clear, I purposefully chose to PoB in the shittiest one I could find.  DO NOT USE THIS NUMBER.  Do your own homework.
Beef up the rest of the rare gear.  Here's where I deal in the britte ground nonsense.  Still should be fairly achievable, once you have the resources to do some basic crafting.
- Gloves are probably next, because there are two available sources of added flat phys here.  This is probably the first thing that might be questionable on a budget, but "get a fracture and then essence spam" will probably get you most of the way there.
- For rings, Amethyst if you care about chaos res, Steel if you just want damage.
-- I'm sort of splitting the difference here, but it would probably be better in terms of maximizing catalsysts to get "all attributes" on one ring, and "strength and resists" on the other.
- This is where I finally give in to brittle ground.  Helps a lot against the enemies you most need help against.  It's off in the config by default.
- Body armor's wierd.  It seems to me, based on looking at this, that we're better off without any life modifiers, but that leaves a lot of prefixes that don't do anything, expecially considering that we want %attributes (a crafted mod) as the suffix.  I'm including two choices, the correct of which will depend probably on the cost of Awakener's orbs.
-- First is a normal eldritch armor (2-A).  I chose very offensive implicits, but you could go block and determination effect, for all I care.
-- Second is an awakened... monstrosity (2-B).  This one is probably better after you have more strength elsewhere, but I think it loses out to the first one for now.
--- The craft, in case anyone's confused how I get there:
--- Woke together elevated Elder %Str and elevated Warlord all res/max res (you could do attack cost too, but we don't really have an issue with that I don't think).  You need an open prefix and suffix.  If not, yolo annul time.
--- Suffixes can't be changed, harvest reforge crit guarantees base attack crit.  50/50 to be t1 or t2.  I chose t2 here to be conservative.  You again really want an open prefix (though if you don't get one, it's not the end of the world)
--- Suffixes can't be changed, harvest reforge fire guarantees physical damage from hits taken as fire.  Again, 50/50 t1 or t2, and I chose t2 for conservative's sake.  You could go for veiled mod after this as well, via Aisling.  All gonna come down to taste.
-- Third is just the second again, but with Redeemer Aura Effect instead of ele res cap.  Make of that what you will.  Craft works the same way.  Seems better on paper - I figure it depends on how good the max res ends up being in practice.

That's as far as I'm willing to plan ahead, but there's still lots of room to take this further:
- Fix MRE without one of those clusters (Enlighten 4 and a better helmet implicit?  3 passive 35% increased effect MRE cluster?)
- Better watcher's eye
- Better Brutal Restraint
- Better rare gear (Synth implicits?)
- Do we want to FF/FF anything?
- Any tree-borrowing shenanigans with Impossible Escape?
- Get a tempering orb hit on Pillar?  This is going to be expensive, but could be a big deal.
- GG double-corrupt on The Magnate?
- Do any of the tattoos do anything for us?