Hegemony's LLD Pillar of the Caged God Marauder

US Season 1: 3rd Place
EU Season 1: 5th Place
US Invitational Invitee

Ignore bear/fire trap/guardian setups. Hatred/Herald of Fire are the only two buffs. Swap 1 Ample of adrenaline flask for fast chasing power housing. Focus on flickering with a single flicker! Do NOT use multistrike! Multistrike gets you into too much trouble with engaging in opponents that you are unfavorable with. Avoid all cycloners if possible unless they are also 2h and you have the bigger stick! Taste of hate can be nice for a lot of good burst damage against mirror matches or other deadly opponents! Sometimes it just takes a really good burst so that your opponent has no time to react with flasks. Taste of Hate gives you the extra mitigation and damage in a heated battle between multiple opponents.

I never find a reason to whip out the bow in this event. Its honestly just very clunky to be multitasking in a chaotic arena with your slow bow attack speed out. Its more like a tactical advantage when there isn't a lot of chaos in the arena. The reason I use the gloves that are crafted is mainly because people usually have ample warding flasks to remove the curse, and i do SIGNIFICANTLY more dmg with the gloves!

General Strategies and Tactics in this Event:
1. Bum rush Kill any witch!
2. Bum rush kill any templar!
3. Stay away from players with perandus + tempest shield (you probably have a 30-40% win rate unless their gear absolutely sucks!)
4. RUN AWAY against ANYBODY with FACEBREAKERS (Doesn't matter if he's punching spinning or charging, you will die!)
5. Molten Strikers can sometimes be beaten. Since you have an area advantage, try to run adjacent to them not inside of them. Use the Cyclone Area to your advantage and really pay attention to your pots!
6. Chase down any archer with flicker+cyclone combo. If he manages to break out of your stun, Leap AHEAD about 6-7 body lengths of where you think he's going, so that you leap slam on top of them. If they lay traps and stand really close to them, try to land next to or on top of them so that they ignite to death from the Herald of ash overkill. Traps have like 1 hp so its all overkill damage!
7. Use brightbeak + perandus shield to run away from the counters to your build, and hope that you get ported when you're out of flasks to avoid death! Won't take long.
8. Avoid putting up auras when you spawn and there are melee's on top of you, pop a sprint flask and gtfo then put up your auras elsewhere!

Flask Setup for Blitz:


This setup is very similar to the FFA setup. Only using guardian as an option becomes more viable. The flasks are generally the same. Movement speed adren flasks will get you to your opponent quicker and get you out of nasty/sticky situations with swiftness so that you can heal up! The gem setup is slightly different because i DO use fire trap multitrap to douse opponent traps that are any threats, and I use bear traps to constrict and counter other cycloners. Whenever you know your opponent is a cycloner, you should keep in mind the key to winning is catching them in a good bear trap. Sometimes that means baiting and running around a little. Be very very clever with your bear traps. Opponents cannot spin to win under the duration of a bear trap! Inc duration Bear trap in this case is your ticket to victory. Don't worry so much about bear trapping archers, they are swift to get out and run much faster than you with smokes/blink arrow. Just focus on sticking to them with pursuits of flickerstrike and cyclone. Letting a ARcher/trapper set up again will drastically slow you down and give them more advantages. Try to end the battle within 15 seconds of the first engagement. In Blitz fights, I find myself rarely using my bow swap, because most people play very aggressive and yolo. Curse immunity with lots of flasks are pretty much a given. Therefore its not that rewarding to use the curse on hit gloves, go for quick high dps kills with the rare gloves!

General Strategies and Tactics in this Event:
1. Taste of Hate when you know you have a solid lock on your opponent. MAKE sure you get the first hit in with flicker! This is to initiate a stun on your opponent and get that cyclone rolling with taste of hate.
2. Generally avoid using the bow as you're probably wasting time trying to play strategically when you just to brute force burst them down
3. always throw fire trap/multi trap to douse opponent spark/fp traps
4. Answer trap for trap (keep in mind you also have bear trap)
5. When fighting facebreaker, just yolo and go die.
6. When fighting a sword/board duelist that uses cyclone, try and trap him in a bear trap so you can get the win!
7. Sword/board geared moltens are pretty much a death sentence. Pop taste of hate and your healing flasks and hope for the best

Since the majority of the time, I struggle against tempest shield perandus or block based users, I spend most of the time Trying to keep my distance and landing a curse on hit puncture before I engage in crazy amounts of cyclone burst. The idea behind this is to create dps bursts so massive, your opponent can't flask through them. Tempest shield really hurts when your attacks are very rapid and you're also taking reckoning/riposte/vengeance hits! Catching people in bear traps, teeing off on them with deadly puncture arrows that slow them down definitely helps.

General Strategies and Tactics:
1. Do not use taste of hate unless you are 100% sure you're going against a freeze pulse trapper or a cycloner/facebreaker.
2. If you are using Taste of hate, you only get 2 charges and then it wont fill, so swap the flask out immediately for a charge recovery Life flask of something after you have consumed ToH.
3. Keep mobile when fighting turtle trappers, Keep their traps in mind on a cooldown and memorize where they are placing them. Answer trap for trap, let them leave their trap territory and then go in for the kill with a snap flicker and cyclone.
4. Use Cold Snap whenever possible with a bow to freeze/slow them in place and fire off some shots. The temp chains on hit makes this a really nice feature with cold snap.
5. Try to cold snap on cd to slow down your opponents and hot swap to a fast flicker/cyclone
6. Taste of hate will be your strong rounds, if you're fighting a counter, take your 1-2 victories and then draw out the rest of the matches, swap to brightbeak/perandus take off your hatred and run tempest shield/blind. and bear trap multitrap with or without inc duraiton to slow them down. Practice drawing out matches after you have solidified the first 1-2 rounds. It can be very rough in certain small maps!
7. Use Freeze/cold removal pots instead of using dream frags. Even with freeze immunity, the temp chains/chill is just way too strong and puts you in nearly frozen animations. You have to have plenty of charges for curse/freeze removal because the way they get their kills is locking in place to throw more traps on top of your face!