Cast on crit hexblast oracle

This is my pob: https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/charizord-8664/character/Andacle

I wanted to make an off-meta caster oracle that can use something other than covenant. I see oracles with atziri's splendor on poe ninja, but I don't really see how they actually sustain life or mana costs, so it may just be for tooltip. I wanted to make something that actually works.

I took inspiration from the zero duration titan. We can use time of need to sustain our life costs. With all reduced duration nodes and a palm of the dreamer with -13% duration, we get 85% reduced duration. Oracle lets you path to some nodes more efficiently (e.g. around scarred faith), so you don't need to spend as many passive points. Time of need has a bug where you can socket in Hayoxi's Fulmination and Overabundance 1 for 50% reduced skill duration (I also tried swift affliction 3, but that didn't seem to work). Along with compressed duration 2, this lets time of need proc every 0.46 seconds. Not as good as a titan, but it may be good enough for us.

I opted for a curse setup with doedre's undoing. At this point, I thought I could also make hexblast work instead of comet. Hexblast has higher base damage but isn't as spammable. The way hexblast works is it explodes curses only if at least half the duration has expired. Since we have low duration, I wanted to try putting hexblast into cast on crit and make it proc off my self cast curse (I chose despair since we can take dark entries to level this and hexblast up).

Unfortunately, there isn't really a good way to find out how long it takes cast on crit to trigger a spell to see if hexblast even triggered. In the tooltip for "trigger", it says it happens immediately, but there still seems to be a small delay. I don't know the exact number, but from my best guess, it's around 0.04-0.08s. If we can get our curse activation and duration down, then hexblast can proc reliably. The way I tested this was putting withering touch with cast on crit hexblast and checking if things get withered.

To get curse activation down, we use the unique boots windscream. From my testing, you want curse duration around 0.08-0.15s to reliably proc hexblast. To get curse duration down, we can use the node "master of hexes" around whispers of doom. This unfortunately brings the curse duration down below zero, which doesn't work with cast on crit hexblast. There are a few alternatives. One is don't use palm of the dreamer, which makes your curse duration 3%, you may still need compressed duration (you could also use a palm with exactly 2% reduced skill effect). This increases the time of need duration though. The other alternative is to use a time lost jewel with small passive skills grant 2% increased curse duration and take 6 small passives (normal jewels aren't good, they give back too much duration). This lets you keep the small duration of time of need, while still lowering the curse duration enough.

The final setup feels nice and fully takes advantage of the oracle ascendency with 8 keystones and inevitable crits. However, I would say bloodmage is still better and is meta for a reason.

However, if you want to try something different, the most important gear are:

1. -13 skill effect duration palm. More spirit is better (you can get up to 145 with double socket and double corrupt, but there doesn't seem to be any on the market)
2. time lost jewel with small passives grant 2% increased curse duration. Ideally other useful mods as well like double crit damage bonus if you can find them, but they are really rare or expensive.
3. You can wear atziri's splendour, temporalis, or any other chest. You aren't tied to covenant anymore.