[3.7] Tidebreaker Slayer Flicker Strike | League start viable | Stunlocks | Updated with some videos
 INTRODUCTION Hello friends, RisingWaters here and I'd like to share with you a creation of mine. I've been a fan of Flicker Strike ever since my first time playing a few years ago. Due to the nature of frenzy charge generation, we were (prior to 3.7) very limited in weapon choices. Now with the changes to Flicker Strike and it's inherent generation of charges directly on it, I decided to experiment a little bit and this is what I came up with. I ended up being able to switch to Flicker and level with it starting at level 18 (previously, earliest I would switch would be 38 due to multistrike). Hope you enjoy it as much as I have. The basic idea behind the build is to use a slow, high base damage 2H mace as our main weapon and offset the slow attack speed with the incredible attack speed bonus' from frenzy charges, flicker itself, Melee Splash or Shockwave, and Multistrike. Due to the nature of the "slow" high damaging hits from a mace, we are able to stunlock almost anything we don't outright kill in one hit due to the Flicker attack speed hitting and stunning faster than the stun wears off. I checked poe.ninja before I started this, and currently I am the only person in the league running anything like this. Bonus points for originality? xD VIDEO Atziri first attempt, deathless - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7614_BIWIZ0 Chimera First attempt, deathless - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/447110845 Hydra kill, deathless - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/447110844 Phoenix first attempt, 1 death from my stupidity xD - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/447110847 Tried Shaper and I'm an idiot apparently, but am fairly confident once I do the mechanics better I can do it deathless. It's user error that's holding me back at this point lol More video clips to come soon Overview Pros: + Flicker Strike + Slayer leech/overleech + Stunlocking + Very fast map clear speed + Decent survivability + Immune to stun and bleed + Phys reflect immune + Culling strike + Can league start with it Cons: - Flicker Strike - Expensive to min/max - Squishy to start off with SKILL TREE STUFF Pastebin for build: https://pastebin.com/nF60VsEv Ascendancy Points: Endless Hunger -> Brutal Fervour -> Overwhelm -> Headsman Brief note for leveling: Endless Hunger is nowhere near as good without Brutal Fervour. That said, I put my first set of ascendancy points into Overwhelm, then when I finished my 2nd lab I respecced the points to be able to get Endless/Brutal. Then put my 3rd labs points back into Overwhelm. Bandits: Kill all for 2 points LEVELING TREES Level 20 https://pastebin.com/6dLstrBt Level 40 somewhat https://pastebin.com/gycvgCKr Level 60-ish https://pastebin.com/kN6yGwBs SKILL TREE EXPLANATION The first thing we are going to head for is downward to pick up Art of the Gladiator, then left to get Bravery and Master of the Arena. We head next to the right and towards Vaal Pact. At the time you pass by Weathered Hunter, check your chance to hit. If its somewhat low pick up an accuracy node. Keep an eye on it every few levels and if it drops below 90-95% at any point you'll want to pick up one more of the accuracy nodes we have throughout the tree. I picked up Vaal Pact and the life/mana leech node right below it before heading to the left and right to get the life nodes from Golems Blood/Thick Skin. If you are having Mana issues early on, I suggest getting some of the mana leech nodes below Vaal Pact just until you no longer need them. I picked up Titanic Impacts for the Crit multi/accuracy but held off on getting Savagery til later on when I could actually generate charges reliably. I also held off on the jewel socket above Weathered Hunter til I picked up a jewel worth socketing. The next thing I went for was Soul of Steel for some early survivability. I went next for the surrounding nodes of Stun Mastery, Bloodless, and Dismembering before heading to the upper left of the tree. The reduced stun threshold and Endurance Charge on stun from Stun Mastery is very nice early on when your damage output isn't quite as fast. On your way up, if you are feeling a little squishy snag Steadfast on the way up. I am saving the Marauder life wheel for last but if you feel like you are lacking, you can always head that way sooner. At this point, head upward and pick up Warriors Blood, Heart of the Warrior, and Born to Fight. After that continue up the tree on the path to the left of this. Skull Cracking allows us to drop the Bane of Legends Ascendancy and still have culling strike due to us using a mace, which lets us pick up the Overwhelm Ascendancy for the crit bonus. While pathing through the tree, My main objective outside of life/survivability nodes was to pick up as much crit/multi, melee/phys/mace/2H , and reduced stun threshold nodes as possible. I checked the pathing and the percentages for each node and am pretty sure its very close to as optimized as I can get. If you see anything that might be a better choice or better pathing, please let me know in the comments. UPDATE I messed around with the legion jewels a bit and found something kind of interesting that I'm messing around with.  So I bought about 15 of the Elegant Hubris Timeless Jewels (Cheaper currently to just buy new ones than buy Divines to reroll the same one) Finally found one that had %frenzy charge on hit, but also had stuff nearby that wasn't garbage. I'm not sure if I'll be keeping this permanently, but I'm enjoying it so far. I will say 2 things though on this. To be able to get the 2x %dmg per endurance charge nodes, I had to drop a bunch of other stuff. With the damage being linked to charges now, it's really good when you have charges but really bad when you don't. I'll more than likely be dropping this once I get a Farrul's Fur because I feel like that will smooth out the frenzy charge generation enough to not need the extra from this, and will free up 17 points. SCREENSHOTS SKILL DPS  *Disclaimer* This is min/max'd full buffs, with melee splash taken out for single target, and not sustainable for longer than a few seconds. This is more reasonable for what you will have 90% of the time. - no rage - no Berserk buff - no phase run buff - only flasks, a totem out, and charges you will have near 100% uptime on  *Disclaimer #2* Keep in mind that this is still with full min/max'd gear. DEFENSE  *the degen is from having Blood Rage buff up GEAR AND EXPLANATIONS Tidebreaker
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 Why Tidebreaker? The massive flat damage, along with us scaling crit allows us to easily stun almost everything. The slow attack speed is meant to offset the large damage of it, but we bypass that by the huge attack speed inherent in Flicker builds. The built in endurance charge generation is amazing, and also with it being a 7-link weapon for our flicker, the damage is phenomenal. Endurance charge on stun does more than just give you charges as well.  It also gives a MORE damage per endurance charge multiplier, but reduced stun threshold as well Starkonja's
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 Why Starkonja's I ended up trying out Abyssus first, with the assumption that the massive amount of phys damage reduction we have would be enough to offset the increase from it. This was not the case with the Legion rares. The huge amount of damage it adds was nice, but I was consistently getting killed by Legion monsters so I ended up swapping over to a Starkonja's for the defensive aspects and the extra life on it. I have not missed the damage loss from Abyssus at all TBH. Farrul's Fur
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 Why Farrul's? I had considered things like Bronn's Lithe for the damage (Flicker is a movement skill) I ended up going with Farrul's because of the life on it mostly, but the Aspect bonuses are amazing as well. The charge generation will help smooth out dry spells with frenzy charges as well. The removal of the mana reservation for the aspect also allows us to run Pride and a Herald and still have enough mana for flicker.  The only thing you will have to do is find a way to grant yourself aspect of the cat. I will be choosing to go with a beastcrafted mod on either my ring, amulet, boots, or gloves. Whichever you have an open affix on. All of this said, I still can't afford one xD I've tried out a bunch of different armors so far. Rare's with life/armor/resists, Kaoms, Belly of the beast would be a good option, Loreweave isn't bad either. One thing I landed on that I'm currently using and really like actually is The Perfect Form.  The free Phase Acro is really nice, and a very noticeable change in survivability. The free arctic armour is also nice as well. While you are using Flicker, you are considered stationary so the dmg reduction buff's from this apply (the pantheon ones as well if you decide to use those). Mark of the Elder
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 Why the Mark? I wanted to have all 3 types of charges, and we already had the frenzy and endurance charges. The last one left was power charges, so I had already planned on using a shaper ring with assassins mark on hit as a power charge generator. This one just made sense because we were already using a shaper ring. The %life is good, flat damage, and up to 80% attack damage. Perseverance
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 Why Perseverance? I really like this belt actually, and this is the first time I've used it. It fits so well in the build. The armor, evasion, resists, % life, and the % attack damage are nice but the real workhorse of the belt is the last 2 lines. You stun literally everything you hit so you permanently have fortify without having to have it in your main links, or constantly using a linked leapslam to keep it up(I checked to see if you kill something in one hit if the fortify still applies and it does. Even if you oneshot packs, you still get the buff) On top of that, because you pretty much have a 99% uptime on Fortify, you also have Onslaught which is amazing. *one thing I have noticed is that you don't see the buff for onslaught at the top of your screen, just the fortify buff. You do however get the effects of it though* I ended up corrupting my belt and got 15% all res as an implicit. Due to the cheap costs of the belt, it's probably worth vaal'ing them til you get something nice. The other gear slots for your other ring, amulet, boots, and gloves will just be rares. Ideally Elder bases with some form of % dmg added as extra, attack speed, crit multi, life, resists, and movespeed on boots. One of the items you will need to Beastcraft the Aspect of the Cat on A good craft for gloves is % damage while leeching as well Flasks
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The unique flasks we will be using are: Lions Roar  Armor and melee damage Sin's Rebirth  Evasion, Unholy Might (30% of phys as extra chaos) , and Ignite/burning immunity Atziri's Promise  Chaos Res and phys as extra chaos Taste of Hate  Cold res is nice, but we are already capped anyways. This shines from the phys as extra cold, and the phys taken as cold Our last flask will be a Diamond flask. I usually prefer an experimenter's prefix for the increased duration, but any will do. We are looking for a "of heat" though to remove freeze. With this flask setup we will be able to remove and immune to freeze and ignite, but also bleed and stun immune from ascendancy and poison immune from pantheon JEWELS
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From making multiple different jewels in path of building and trying them out, the best/most optimal jewels you can get are crit. multi jewels. If not that, flat added damage, attack speed, crit chance, and % damage mods are all viable options as well.
Best case scenario, I would be using something like this:  The other jewel you will want to pick up is a Transcendant Flesh  If you socket into the passive tree on the left side in the jewel socket right above Juggernaut, it is in the radius of not only all of the minor nodes, but the new Utmost Might wheel as well. This placement ends up snagging 130 STR for it, which gives us 5% more phys reduction and 70% crit. multi. LINKS AND GEMS *disclaimer - don't mind the low levels and quality on the gems, still leveling at the point I'm making this Main DPS Setup In the weapon you will want to use: I've been playing around a lot with Shockwave support lately. I'm actually having a ton of fun with it. There are some interesting interactions between Shockwave support and Melee splash. Shockwave IMO is a little better than Melee splash if you have to pick one. The lower attack speed of the build makes it so that the 1 second cooldown isn't too bad, but Shockwave hits everything including the initial target plus has a damage bonus instead of a reduction where as melee splash only hits the surrounding targets, and for less damage. I leveled for quite a while with it, more on Shockwave futher below in the leveling section. For single target stuff you might want to consider dropping melee splash for a different support like Maim or Fortify depending on what you are fighting. The build also uses Blood Rage to generate Frenzy charges As a sidenote, You are going to want to get Flicker to 20% quality as fast as possible to help out with charge generation. With the new changes, at 20% it will give you an additional 5% chance on hit to gain a frenzy charge. The degen from blood rage is offset by the overleech from Slayer so you don't even notice it. You don't need to specifically link it with anything, so just stick it in any open socket you have Secondary DPS Setup This is what we use if for some reason we run out of frenzy charges and can no longer flicker temporarily on a boss fight. or Linked with Depending on how well the stuns work on endgame bosses, I might end up swapping to heavy strike for things like Shaper. As of right now though I'm currently using Frenzy for the charge generation. Totem Setup Due to us using a 2-hander, we get 2 6 links. In your armor, you are going to want to have your totem setup. Unavailable With this totem setup, this is what your totems can get to.  Thats per totem, and you can have 2 of them out at a time. In addition to huge damage, the totems also grant you a 32% MORE melee damage multiplier as well while they are out Defensive setup Vaal Molten Shell is what I ended up going with due to the large amount of armor the build is running. With the rework to it in 3.7, it's actually very good and has saved me quite a few times. I ended up changing this to actually have it in a CWDT setup, I leveled it to 20 as well and it has been working pretty well so far. It will trigger the normal version of Molten shell if I take about 3/4 of my HP. Mobility Setup I have actually settled on Leap Slam now, and holy hell its amazing. The guaranteed stun on the initial hit is amazing for being able to set up that first pack with flicker and not having to worry about not starting off your charge generation. Aura Setup Pride is very nice for the more physical damage multiplier We actually dropped Herald of Ash completely. Explanation below. Originally we were using a Precision locked at lvl 1, I found out that if you drop Herald of Ash and level up Precision, a few things happen. Precision actually gives you more dps than the herald did, but you also get accuracy from it so that allows you to drop some accuracy nodes on the tree. This allows you to allocate some points into life or more dmg nodes, so the benefit is two-fold. Golem (I actually did drop the golem, but if you want to continue to use him and don't mind constantly resummoning him, go right ahead) Considering dropping this due to how often he dies, but currently I'm running with a Ice golem for the crit chance and accuracy rating. I just have to recast him 2-3 times a map due to him having such a low life pool. LEVELING/LEAGUE START So I started out as Frost blades/Ancestral call and whatever links I could fit any added damage supports in. You will end up having mana issues early on, so getting some mana leech and a Praxis as soon as possible or some form of mana regen is going to help a ton. Once I got to level 12 though I started trying out Chain Hook and had a blast with it. Due to me using maces anyways it worked out. At level 18 everything changed though. I picked up shockwave support and started messing around with it and actually realized that it will let me have the area of effect similar to melee splash but with a damage bonus instead of a reduction. The downside is there is a 1 second cooldown on it and you can only use maces and staves. We were already using maces anyways though, so I threw shockwave support in some links with flicker strike when I hit level 18 and tried it out with Blood Rage that you get at level 16. I was actually able to sustain flicker for the most part and start leveling with it at level 18. The soonest I'd ever been able to prior to this league was 38 when you get multistrike. I ended up getting a Hrimnor's Hymn for like 1 chaos and then upgrading it with the prophecy at lvl 36 to Hrimnor's Dirge. I used that all the way up until level 65 for Tidebreaker and didn't have any problems. A bonus about leveling with 2H maces is that they are incredibly cheap. Some other really good uniques I picked up for leveling along the way that I would recommend outside of the obvious ones like Tabula, Goldrim,and Wanderlusts, were Daresso's Salute, Oskarm, Death Rush, Praxis, and Dream Fragments This build will feel kind of clunky til you hit lvl 38, when you can start using Multistrike. The functionality of Flicker COMPLETELY changes after that, so just hang in there til then. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop a post here I also stream 5 days a week at https://twitch.tv/risingwaters_ 8pm - 12pm CST Mon-Fri Feel free to stop by if you have any questions or want to see the build. I'll be playing it for a majority of Legion Thanks for checking it out! THE END Last edited by RisingWater#6545 on Jul 2, 2019, 12:42:59 AM Last bumped on Aug 12, 2019, 9:11:57 AM
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Very interesting flicker build, I love the stun aspect of it! I'm hoping you are able to upload some videos soon :)
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" Thanks! It's like 4 in the morning here and I have to get up for work in 2 hours xD Didn't think it was going to take as long as it did to make the guide. When I get home from work tomorrow I'll either put some videos up, or just take some clips from the stream. There should be some stuff on there by tomorrow though. Here's one to hold you over til I get some real videos though https://clips.twitch.tv/BlindingSleepyPheasantUncleNox?tt_medium=clips_api&tt_content=url |
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Can this build be played in a group? I know a lot of flicker builds can't be, but this one looks really unique so I thought I would ask.
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The problem with most other flicker builds is the insane attack speed so you get so far ahead of everyone else that there's no reason for them to be there.
This ones attack speed is quite a bit slower. I've had other flicker builds that used swords before that got north of 13 aps, this one as you can see in the screen shots in the damage section is sitting at somewhere between 5 and 7 aps depending on buffs. I don't want to lie to you and say yes though, because its still pretty quick. I think it does help that its a little slower for party play, but it really depends on who you're playing with and if they can keep up or not |
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Looks very promising, its damage output must be insane, how does frenzy charge upkeep work? I'm running terminus flicker and if my crit goes below 40%, flicker stops from time to time on 1:1 situation and I want to insure 100% upkeep at all times
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Honestly things don't live long enough to need to worry about the charge generation.
The 25% on kill from blood rage and the 20% from the flicker itself has been more than enough so far. I'll update you once I get deeper into the content though. I would imagine though that even t16s are going to melt |
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how do you keep up frenzy charges on a pure single target boss?
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So far the 20% charge generation on flicker alone has been enough, and the stuns on them last long enough that if I run out I have enough time to smack them with a frenzy a few times and they stay stunned.
I would imagine once I get a farrul's it will be even less of a problem. As of right now though the stun's are whats making it work. If you scroll up a little bit, theres a clip of me fighting a boss and I stunlock him to the point he cant transition. I'm able to just continually flicker with the 20% and not run out. Last edited by RisingWater#6545 on Jun 15, 2019, 9:42:20 PM
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I like this unorthodox take on flicker strike!
" I think it should be stressed in guide that flicker should have close to 20% quality. I didn't have it and always ran out of charges on bosses. |
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