2.2 [ASS] I have special eyes. ~ A 2Handed CoC Flickin' Build ~ Unlimited Blade Works.

Hello and welcome to CoC Flickin'

Ever wonder why the assassin's eyes glow a bright blue hue?
It's because he watches smurf p... Plays my build*

It's no lie that Flicker Strike and Cast on Crit have been around for awhile and both of these gems have a particularly terrible reputation for causing "eye cancer." Well, I've never been one of the people who think that! I think Flicker Strike is perfectly tolerable personally, others might get motion sickness and combined with Cast on Crit... yeah I could see how this build isn't for everyone, but it's fine for me, and I have had a fucking lot of fun with it so far.

I've tried Terminus CoC Flickin' before, it was terrible, I didn't think the build was practical at all. There wasn't enough crit. The damage and defense suffered so much just trying to get the crit up... so meh I stopped trying and I never tried to do it again, until THIS happened...

With the Ascendancy expansion the Assassin sub-class has brought in a whole new & refreshing age of viable cast on crit builds. Flicker Strike is subjectively one of them. When linked with Blade Vortex and Blade Fall even a low dps weapon like the Terminus Est becomes a clear speed beast.

- Unlimited. Flicker. Striku. Never stop Flickering; no matter if it's a 6 player party or a massive boss! Death. Is. The. Only. Off. Button. On. Me.
- Great Clear speed, moving through a map at the speed of a 0.08 second Attack Speed!
- Strong Single Target without having to swap gems or use another ability.
- Tons of Power & Frenzy Charges with 100% uptime!
- Surprisingly more of a tank than expected with effective use of FLASKS and leech!
- Flicker Strike is it's own brand of "Manual Evasion", You'll be moving so quickly through giant packs of mobs that their comparatively slower attack animations will rarely connect with you!
- It's a super budget CoC build! You literally only need a Terminus Est and Tabula Rasa.
- My Flicker Strike does almost 40k in a Cast on Crit setup by itself! so.. Pretty good dps in a two link! When you factor in what the triggered spells are doing, the dps numbers easily break 200k.
- It just looks cool. It's super fun for that reason .. if you like 'flash stepping' around your enemies and summoning a bajillion swords in the process.

- Flicker speed and utility comes at the cost of having lower damage & Defenses than Cyclone...
- Multistrike Flicker Strike is unpredictable... If you have to watch your positioning in a particularly difficult ground targeting boss fight then you're better off swapping to cyclone for it because Flicker Strike is just going to get you killed.
- You're gonna be facetanking 99% of the time with no stun immunity. Thankfully our Blade Spells' damages are staggered and will typically leech you back up to full even if you're stunned by a half-hitter.
- It's a CPU-Check, as with all Cast on Crit Builds.
- Requires some Vaal Orb corruptions to get the most out of it.
- You might be prone to motion sickness.
- No Shield for extra defenses (makes things like low life and CI harder to get into)
- No Whirling Blades (Lightning Warp is a decent substitute though!)
- Low Levels of Life requiring a close attention to preemptive flask-usage
- Smoke Clouds suck. We're not fakener, we're not using a hits can't be evaded dagger and as such when we get blinded we have a higher chance of dying due to relying on leech. Could possibly run Poacher's Mark to help out here but I have currently never experienced a death that resulted from a smoke cloud. It just lowers clear speed a little if anything. Hopefully one day we'll get a good unique that makes us immune to blind. (based prophecy is giving us an immunity to blind accuracy necklace) T uT I'm probably going to use it!

Blade Vortex
We use a self-casting blade vortex that generates power charges and frenzy charges for us when we start Flicker Striking, the rate that they hit at makes it possible for us to just wind 6 of them up then charge into a pack. This self-cast blade vortex is very important for our build, not just for charge generation, but also for burst damage! We might not be the ideal candidate for Self-Cast Blade Vortex but we do have crit cap AND the potential for TWO 6 Links! Which means, eventually, we can front load ALOT of damage with a 6Link Blade Vortex... Even a 4Link was working pretty well for this before I got my corrupted 2link...Terminus. Ideally, we'd have a perfect Terminus (180% phys) with +1 Power charges so we can vorici craft it to a 6Link then put our Cast on Crit Set-up there while using our chest for the insane off-color requirements that 6Link Blade Vortex would be asking for.

LVL1 CWDT Blade Vortex + Pcoc + Blind keeps our Power Charges capped *if we're taking damage* even when using Warlord's Mark and Blind because well. . . eventually you'll have about 3k'ish Evasion and in more difficult maps you'll probably want to run grace instead of hatred which will almost triple your evasion rating so blind kinda doubles that, resulting in some pretty substantial evasion without using flasks or specializing into it that much. I am not currently running this version because my sockets are screwed up. So Instead I'm running a generic cwdt immortal call because my helmet is where I house my self-cast ice golem for the accuracy increase...


The Blade Vortex in our Cast on Crit set-up usually sits at around 10~20 active blades, depending on the rng of CoC, the number of mobs there are, and how quickly we kill them, so we can use our 11second self-cast Phase Run to "hide" ourselves in the middle of tough fights like Atziri while our Blades continue to deal crits and regenerate charges for us without having to recast anything and break the phase run, giving us time to plot and scheme, muwahaha, this BV also does some pretty good damage and it works really well with Flicker Strike considering that there's never any frivolous casts, nothing is wasted aimlessly, you always take the blade vortex cast with you to the next group of mobs that you Flicker into! So, think of it like a 360degree No Scope Melee Splash that... deals about 100%~150% more damage than your single target attack does. :D


The Blade Fall in our CoC set-up is for damage: Single Target & AoE. Simple. Same would be true for EK, no special purpose here, just damage... Also it looks awesome. Flashing around at the speed of light as ethereal swords rain down from the sky impaling hordes of enemies leaving behind a Graveyard of Kebobs.


Auras and Flasks
We use Hatred & Atziri's Flask to buff all of the Physical damage we're doing, Your flicker strike alone will be doing upwards of 50~60k DPS with Terminus Est, with the rest of your abilities factored in: 150~200k dps is probably a low guesstimate: It's a lot of damage.

You can exchange Hatred with Grace if you need more defense in harder maps. Or you can swap it with Haste if you're simply spamming "transmute-and-go" maps or if you're farming Cadiro, more movement speed never hurt! :D

In the future I will be replacing my life flask with a Taste of Hate to further improve my defense and offense with this build. I only get frozen when I open up freeze boxes anyways, so why not. Taste of Hate kind of counters freezes, too, right? Who needs life flasks anyways! lol.. Seriously though, I never use that seething flask anymore...

I won't use an extra physical Vinktar's Vessel in my normal set-up. It's just not worth it, it eats up too many flask charges! Though I might carry one along with me for tough boss-fights since it would increase my damage significantly.

I currently run Warlords Blasphemy for the Endurance Charges it provides and the life leech... and I avoid Curse Immune maps like the plague. I could just swap to the life leech gem but eh. For easier content I use Assassin's Mark Blasphemy for more damage and rely solely on my Atziri's Flask for life leech (and since we're doing about 45% chaos damage with this flask up it's more than enough leech for most situations I feel)



Gloves & Attack Speed
Maligaro's will help you reach the crit cap without a +1 Terminus alot sooner and gives much needed attack speed, shadows of dust are good if you want to rampage and/or need a little extra crit multi/mana leech. Facebreaker are ideal for DPS. Can't beat 90% Crit Multi, my dps went up 20% when I swapped to them from my Shadows and Dust, but a nice pair of rare gloves work, too, if you want more defenses! Prioritize Attack Speed and Accuracy with the Rare Gloves; Life, Evasion, and Resistances are considered bonus for this slot imo, but it's up to you how you want to play your character.

Speaking of Attack Speed...we need a lot of it. The idea is to get your attack speed as close to 0.05 as possible so that you can crit at the speed of the internal cooldown for cast on crit. Frenzy Charges give us 14% increased attack speed each, so reaching 0.05 is definitely going to require some +2 frenzy darkray vectors and amazing rings/gloves. The build works fine at 0.08~0.15 attacks per second but to really push it we need as much aps as possible. Putting Faster Attacks in your CoC set-up instead of Increased Critical Strikes might be an option once you're crit-capped without it but honestly.. being crit capped without it takes ALOT of investment, and it just doesn't seem like something we can afford.

With Blood Rage, Haste, Vaal Haste Active I'm at around 0.08 aps and sit at 0.11 without, both scenarios having 5 Frenzy Charges...
BUT!

Jewels? Inspired Learning!
With 2 Inspired Learning Jewels I can get much higher APS <eventually I'll want a headhunters but yeah... cadiro ain't bein a breh>

Witch, Shadow, and Templar Jewel Sockets are great spots to put these in, the shadow jewel socket is the best. Just do it. At least two of them make a huge difference in mapping. Stealing speed buffs and soul eater buffs give us an insane amount of attacks per second, helping us attack at the rate that our cast on crit cools down.. And that's not all you can steal with these things...

Are you WTB Substantial Physical Damage Aura to buff all of your skills fucking substantially? Hell yeah you are! Rare Mobs have a monopoly on this but inspired learning and Headhunters are the little stainless steel thimbles that allow us to sew the tyranny by stealing park place, flipping the board, and collecting 200% increased physical damage! Well it's more like 30~50% more Physical damage, either way your dps shoots up alot when you take one of these. It's just hands down the best jewel you can use with this build until you get a Headhunters.


Low-Life?
Eventually I'm going try and go low-life with this so I can run some additional defensive auras and gain a larger life pool for me to tank hits to and leech up. The damage from going low life with pain attunement is not substantially larger than what you get from a +1 Tabula Rasa, so making the swap isn't going to concern me until I want to do Uber or some crap... but I'm going to need near perfect ES gear in my Helmet, Gloves, and Boot slot... If I can't reach 6k ES then it's not going to be worth it. I would prefer to hit 7~8k but eh... we'll see what happens. and I'll make a build update once I'm rolling in that kind of exalts! ^_^

Accuracy
Hits can't be evaded so try and get as much accuracy as you can on Helmet, Jewelry, and Gloves if you're not using Uniques. Excess Dex is a good thing.

Marylene's Fallacy?
I don't know. I don't think so. We would need roughly 475% Increased Critical Strike Chance to offset the less crit deficit? That's just not reasonable for now. This item is more suited towards Assassins who play with traditional crit weapons like wands and daggers.

Movement Ability
Lightning Warp is back baby!
With our frenzy charges up we have just enough cast speed to make this faster than quicksilvering around. Unfortunately we would have to use blood magic to sustain it for more than 5 consecutive casts so I'm simply going to hold on to my quicksilver *For now* and save the socket.

but do_odle-sinpie... reflect?
granites and bathsalts flasks + life leech and vaal pact is enough to keep you from being pooped. Once you get lightning coil all you really need is the basalt flask to mitigate enough reflect damage, so if you want to further improve your damage mitigation at that point you should try to grab phase acrobatics...which would encourage you to drop your granite flask for something even more beneficial...if you want to feel totally confident in reflect maps. Otherwise just avoid reflect maps and use your flasks when you see reflect auras, ez pz :D

Life Based Skill Tree:
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAYAALDYotmEojIyyBRMjhCS9W_ZhmqMvG8WvyaVD6th4m1sJIs2PbVI7LDDOlWFnaobyIwLKjily2yMz93jhLl8YqzxiisKDdEOSLTFES9d8mNDEZbC7CoLBx5_xgW1cFKVLqKjjb_w1cHzD8RRR0lRlSA7fDB8N9Q-z97451QtH7jKjX3I3O0_veakeCT9TLMj9sHV_94EB9Afl5Ugbk2Sg9sfAu_rUlNQMFXGNsU9X9te2CSnCJ2uGmzkIjbpKU8kqmu37DiePBZvhX062IKbhXuMduNqJy8BkZo7ZlSQVS3Sn98aOO98PAXAZgSzrfGiABhdj_pcQFS9Fe2Wi9W5AAA=

You can drop as much life as you think you can get away with. Personally since I'm playing in softcore I've dropped down to 120% life in favor of damage. **i've since gone back up to 170% as I was struggling to survive my "alch and go" lifestyle T ~T <...volatile bloods>

Higher Life Potentially Hardcore Version (basically 30% extra life and acro but less damage):
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAYAALDYotnIFPVvaowWvyaVD6th4m1sJIs2Ped0tUjssMM6VYWdqhvI6NaMC5u1Kjily2yMz93jhJsmBbW5fITFYqzxiisKDdEOSDIBjb8RL13yY0MRlrIZUUfUIyoLBx5_xs96MHw31D7P51QwcXBSlS6io2HrjX3tP73mJP3dqPDVwfMPxHpTI_b_3kt4SVGVIDt8TZI6Qi0fTLMEB9AfIG6D2x8C7-tQMFXGg_fbXhEtfIPr7prgHNwy0UWdjxpFR1NStQTAZuQiBLOt8SlPGmyiABhda7fsODbphX062IV7JKonLwGRZlQWb5BVLdLjaho4uMo=
I would swap out Granites for a double evasion roll Stibnite, Quicksilver with an Adrenaline Quartz Flask, and the Atziri Flask with an Anti-bleed Jade and just put life leech in place of Increased Critical Strikes Gem, keep the Basalt Curse Immune Flask. Get Lightning Coil and Taste of Hate A.S.A.P. and as always: cwdt immortal call :T

Potential Low Life or CI Build:
I won't recommend this until I try it.

If you're softcore;
Passive In Normal, Passive or Attack speed in Cruel, and +1 power charge from merciless.

If you're hardcore and not planning LL or CI;
Take Life in Normal, Passive in Cruel, and +1 Power Charge in Merciless.
Drop life for passive if planning LL or CI. <or respec it later>

If you have a +1 Power Charge Terminus and can reach crit cap with only 7 Power Charges then pick up a Frenzy charge from merciless instead for more damage and attack speed. It's not impossible to crit cap with just 7 power charges, it's just really expensive.

There's just no other option here. MAYBE you could get away with doing a Scion Assassin+something else but you really need the glorious base crit that Assassin offers.

We take Deadly Infusion for Crit Chance and Multiplier then Grab Toxic Delivery for the Extra Chaos Damage gained from Physical. With Atziri's Flask up this build is doing an extra 40% Chaos damage from all physical sources which is then scaled by the dual starting nodes from shadow.