[2.3-2.6] Budget Hardcore Abyssal Cry Berserker

This build excels at clear speed and tank on a serious budget. If you're just starting out in a hardcore league or you need a cheap character to save up some bank for your future plans, this guy's your man.

The build does well against large packs, especially when the mobs have varying amounts of life (eg. beetles standing next to bears) this allows you to kill instantly groups that would give other builds pause. Conversely, the build is slowed down by isolated blue packs with lots of life.
No other mob groups slow the build down - it can usually wipe the screen with abyssal cry followed by a single flame surge. This includes rares and map bosses. (see 2:21 and 6:18 of the video above)
This build has excellent sustain in the form of 3% life & mana leech, 7.9% life regen per second and 25% life & mana recovery on warcry. This is more powerful than a seething divine life flask on a 2 second cooldown and makes smothering and even stasis maps trivial.
Also since abyssal cry wipes corpses you won't be saying she corpse exploded the corpse of the bwoss! (except abyssal cry doesn't destroy unique corpses so still be careful)

Elemental reflect maps are fine as long as you don't hit too many mobs at a time with flame surge - I usually lose a link to be safe. Probably don't run reflect + minmax res. While mods that improve mobs' tankiness won't affect abyssal cry they will increase the number of surges required to trigger it so too many tank mods can get tedious. The enfeeble map mod actually does gimp the damage of abyssal cry by a fair bit so that can be really unpleasant to run. The only mod I won't run is hexproof but that's just because I don't have the balls to run without enfeeble & temp chains.

There really aren't any serious downsides to the build. It's very easy to play, really satisfying, super cheap. It would make a great league starter or just something fun & interesting.

Cherrubim's got a huge buff in 2.6, now it's a hidden gem that people haven't caught on to (yet). So the build has got a sweet ~60% increased chaos damage mod but now the chest costs a handful of chaos instead of <1 like before. This buff will make it much easier to reach 100% abyssal cry damage without good jewels - at a higher level and with expensive jewels, however, I would swap to a carcass jack since overcapping your chaos damage does nothing but increased aoe will always improve your clear speed.

The Consuming Dark saves us a skill gem on abyssal cry, it's also a fairly significant damage up on flame surge as well as reducing reflect damage taken. This is an important unique because it allows us to run abyssal cry on a 4-link while using every applicable damage support gem - this means that when you have the money to increase your links they are reserved for flame surge without losing any damage on your cry. On top of the fact that Consuming Dark allows 30% of your increased chaos damage to apply to flame surge.

Bino's is huge for abyssal cry. Since damage is caused by mobs dying, those dead mobs will also spread poison, meaning two stacks of the same poison are coming from each enemy, effectively doubling our poison damage. This is especially effective against rares & bosses who will have tons of adds dying around them.

Abyssal Cry > Increased AOE > Void Manipulation > Less Duration
I don't know why people don't run less duration in abyssal cry builds, I've done a little testing and it definitely seems to affect the damage. Conc. effect is not a good choice because abyssal cry kills enemies that it hits regardless of their level once it has "enough" damage and conc effect reduces the number of enemies that are hit as well as the number that are tagged by the initial cast. Bosses will take more damage without conc since it's easier to hit them with the whole pack.

Flame Surge > Conc. Effect > Elly Focus > Controlled Destruction
I haven't done any testing but I assume your fifth & sixth links would be spell echo & faster casting. The reason we're using Flame Surge is that it does fire damage so it's affected by the consuming dark and the arsonist nodes on the skill tree, it does area damage which we're scaling and, since it has a small area it has great single target damage. The best way to trigger abyssal cry is to kill one enemy and slightly injure another (because the aoe will do ~ 80% of a mob's health - the poison will finish them off but we'd rather not have to wait) it's very easy to hit about two enemies in a pack with flame surge.
I've got ~15k tooltip deeps with a level 18 flame surge in a 4-link - this would be 22k with on-fire enemies. There's a lot of room for improvement but really no need for it. This, I feel, is why this makes a great hardcore build.

Fire Trap > Cluster Traps > Inc AOE
This is to trigger the 50% more damage for flame surge. It isn't very good. Traps get destroyed and the damage is minimal, it's probably more reliable to just use flame surge instead. You'll only occasionally chuck fire traps against bosses or tough mobs.

It's worth running blood rage for clear speed, it'll only halve our life regen and the 12% more damage will affect abyssal cry.

I'm also running a fairly standard CWDT - Immortal Call

This is for a level 90
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAECAMbYWGPDaL8Ip209_H37JDfg2IzP9khfPxo-FCB8uO8OKS5QR_GsVw3ZYdIh85utjRku8kFoZc9-J-2CB3asxPYGDtl8r6fGrtR8HM4LYTwtDF8J9itQr2yDX4PMHKcNzWjytz5Tpf5U8B9Bh_4KogD56PJF2L0Esxg8OuE1ksBmvSemV_6PPAVFRxhWkzpN45_f73wy0Qhn6-4VuJrgpwgc3MhbRZ2PRtgkjxqWMlNSm6E2xVZIGGofAngvBAd85YPbTLNYB1XGRX7QH5eVOlgOXO_rUlNq-j1fl_RtGQj0wFS86mpDUfvNFh8Y
oak - kill - kill take a bonus frenzy charge if you like.

For ascendancy points, it's very important to take War Bringer asap, not only does it potentially double your clear speed in maps - since abyssal cry's cooldown is sometimes the only limiting factor in your speed - but it also provides insurmountable sustain when levelling. After war bringer I took pain reaver on cruel and rite of ruin on merciless but war bringer is the only important node, the others are just preference. Cloaked in savagery and aspect of carnage both help the build in their own ways, take your pick.

Since it's hard to find chaos damage near the marauder, we're scaling abyssal cry with jewel sockets.

The only stats that scale abyssal cry are chaos damage, area damage and damage damage. This is what we're after, these jewels are fairly mediocre but they do the trick.

We're taking every area node on the tree. ((even the terrible scion ones) EVEN after 2.6) I know this sounds awful, especially since the aoe nerfs but remember that increasing your damage doesn't actually help the build's clear speed once your cry one-shots an enemy - or even two-shots, given a nice pack density. The only thing that increases your clear speed is the coverage of abyssal cry, if you kill an enemy and it was outside the radius of your cry or if you kill an enemy and it was slightly too far from the next then that's the end of your chain reaction fun.

Besides the area nodes & jewel sockets we can spend the rest of the tree getting defenses, I've gone for dual curses to run enfeeble & temp chains on blasphemy - this feels awesome, I totally recommend it. I've also grabbed the flask nodes near the witch because they're good.

Since we're running so few uniques we have a very easy time capping resists, this means we can get more valuable mods like chaos resist and 30% movespeed. I would love to get a helm with 25% or 40% increased abyssal cry damage and we could definitely afford to lose resists on our helm, unfortunately nobody sells them.

We also need dex for our chest & a few gems so it may be better to use a jade amulet than a deadhand talisman. If you want to sink currency into the character, on top of linking your chest it's possible to get a chaos damage mod on your jewellery using an essence of envy.

Since most of your damage is coming from jewels you can level as anything you like and supplement it with abyssal cry. If your damage is low it means you need more jewel sockets, buy a few cheap damage jewels for whatever skill you like.

It's a good idea to level using a skill with a wider aoe than flame surge since abyssal cry won't wipe the screen on its own until maps. Personally, I used earthquake with a 2h axe, if you prefer spells firestorm or flameblast work well with the arsonist and amplify nodes we're picking up on the way.

Abyssal cry is still great at these levels, especially after normal labyrinth when taking the berserker ascendancy and the war bringer node at which point it will fix any mana issues and grant some very effective healing. Either way, abyssal cry will help kill any mobs that survive your aoe.

Be fluid with your skill point allocation - if you need more damage, take some jewel sockets or area nodes, if you need more life or armour there's plenty around. Choose what you want most at the time.

First and foremost, corrupted bloodline. Because we kill the whole screen at once, most bloodlines mods don't even trigger (obelisk, necrovigil, legacy-of-who-cares, union of souls) unfortunately this means all corrupted bloodline stacks appear simultaneously, combined with the lag spike that abyssal cry causes, I imagine this will straight-up one shot me if I don't have a staunching flask up. which is why I run staunching on quicksilver AND a life flask.

Since most packs wipe almost instantly, It usually feels safe enough to run facefirst into packs - this isn't helped by the short range of surge. If I can't trigger abyssal cry quick enough all the mobs will get a chance to melee me in the face. I can envisage a big pack of blue hexproof skellington bears instantly killing me through my fairly average 4.5k armour.

While reflect shouldn't be an issue, I have had a couple really close calls in reflect maps. Specifically against lots of little mobs all getting hit by surge together. If you wanna play really safe, reroll reflect maps but they're fine as long as you're careful.

The small area on surge means we're basically playing melee, this makes it difficult to get away from volatiles. Careful in minmax res maps.

Abyssal cry is still poorly optimised, while the spike of lag is usually short as you can see from the video, sometimes it can be a few seconds long. Mercifully, this only happens when you kill everything so you should be fine but lag is always dangerous.

Of course, as everyone who plays hardcore knows, you're not going to die to something that you know you might die to, but this build does a good job of minimising the number of threats.

Essence Drain variant by Dreschau