[2.0.4]PewPewPews Official Flicker Strike build!

Made it to merciless fellshrine using this build and the gear limitations are definitely starting to show. I know melee builds are usually very gear heavy but i'd say it's even worse with this because you pretty much have to 1-2 shot things even in merciless.

I don't have any of the recommended uniques and I do about 4k dps right now and struggling to do even fellshrine. Normal packs are fine, it's the blue packs and some of the shrines that give me trouble. Even with full 7 frenzy charges 4k dps is not enough to take down any blue pack without running out of charges making the fellshrine grind super slow and inefficient. So to anyone trying this out my recommendation is at least 5k dps minimum by act 2 merc or you're gonna be finding yourself not doing a whole lot.

Also as one would expect you will desync doing this. A lot. So just something else to keep in mind. Other than that i love this build. Very fun and when doing well you clear areas in a few minutes easily.

@AratemusoAkiyo: kinda sleepy right now, but will add a tree progress thing somewhere tomorrow :)
As for the rest of your questions: Cyclone + Life Leech + LGOH is enough. Check out This vid around 1:04. I get hit, and got struck dumbfounded since he didn't want to Flicker. Took me a sec to realize that I ran out of charges heh. Those guards took me down to half HP. You can see how fast I got it back with just Cyclone :)
And that is on a small pack.

Acrobatics is nice, but I personally don't really like it to much. I tend to spam my granite flask every now and then. I guess I could swap out the granite for a jade flask, and go full evasion. But meh. Honestly, I don't really need it. I guess it's nice to pick up for HC though :)

@Assi: Good farming locations for the chaos set:
- The Area before Sarn Encampment(Forgot the name); careful for the Unique boss, even though you can keep flicker striking while being snared, he still packs a punch.
- Vaal Pyramid: If you have good resistances/life, farm Vaal while you're at it
- Crypt: I remember leveling here on my first Flicker Striker untill lv 72 or something. God, I love that area.

Recommended to have around 3K DPS at least(without charges).
Which leads me to..

@Senai: I am doing another Flicker Striker, on Dominus. Just to see how it is to level one if you don't have the luxury of items. I am doing a slightly different build, but my DPS was around 2 - 3K in act 2. I had no problems farming anything in there solo(even though my res was kinda... crappy, so I elemental damage tended to kill me quite easily).
The only Unique I got is the Blood Dance. At that time, I had weapons around 200 dps each(I believe they were worth around 4 - 5 chaos a piece)

And one-two shotting... Well, I haven't been doing that for a while now. I usually Flicker Strike once into a group, Cyclone a bit to get them low, Flicker Strike again, so the first enemy dies, and then just snowball until the group dies. I have enough charges to keep on Flicker striking. The only blues I don't always kill are the massive ones. Even so, A combination of Cyclone and Flicker Strike is very effective, even if you need way more hits then 2, to finish off a mob.

What do you have linked to your flicker strike? And what about Cyclone?

Yea, Desync is a problem sometimes. It is infuriating when I die due to it, even so I feel this build is less Desync heavy then most other melee builds. Simply since Flicker Strike Snaps to a target. So even if your target is on another location then the ones on the server, you will still Snap to the target, even though you are heavily desynced. I use Cyclone a lot, so maybe that is why I don't notice the desync to much: if an enemy is out of range, I just cyclone a little bit closer so it won't.

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Appels_Zijn_Gezond wrote:

@Senai: I am doing another Flicker Striker, on Dominus. Just to see how it is to level one if you don't have the luxury of items. I am doing a slightly different build, but my DPS was around 2 - 3K in act 2. I had no problems farming anything in there solo(even though my res was kinda... crappy, so I elemental damage tended to kill me quite easily).
The only Unique I got is the Blood Dance. At that time, I had weapons around 200 dps each(I believe they were worth around 4 - 5 chaos a piece)

And one-two shotting... Well, I haven't been doing that for a while now. I usually Flicker Strike once into a group, Cyclone a bit to get them low, Flicker Strike again, so the first enemy dies, and then just snowball until the group dies. I have enough charges to keep on Flicker striking. The only blues I don't always kill are the massive ones. Even so, A combination of Cyclone and Flicker Strike is very effective, even if you need way more hits then 2, to finish off a mob.

What do you have linked to your flicker strike? And what about Cyclone?

Yea, Desync is a problem sometimes. It is infuriating when I die due to it, even so I feel this build is less Desync heavy then most other melee builds. Simply since Flicker Strike Snaps to a target. So even if your target is on another location then the ones on the server, you will still Snap to the target, even though you are heavily desynced. I use Cyclone a lot, so maybe that is why I don't notice the desync to much: if an enemy is out of range, I just cyclone a little bit closer so it won't.

Then maybe it's not so much dps than weapon damage because im using 100~ dps axes. Maybe I should cyclone more because i certainly don't do it a whole lot as I pretty much had zero problems with hp and killing things prior to act2 merc. Right now I have Blood magic, melee splash and multistrike linked to flicker and cyclone is the recommended LGoH and health leech.

I guess i'll try to find new weapons before continuing on.

100 DPS is not much. There is a very easy, and cheap way of getting better weapons.
Find out the highest dps weapon(In your case, one handed weapon) you can carry at your level, then go to the highest area you can farm effectively. Just grind until you one of those weapons(white).

Use one Transmutaion orb on it, to make it blue, and then alterations, until you get a 80%+ phys roll, or a combination of high flat(ele)DPS/Attack Speed. It should give you at least a 150+ Dps weapon that way :)

I made a quick vid how I play when you can't two shot stuff around you. Might be worth checking out :)
Uploading as I'm typing it, will post a link once it's done ;)

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDhk_zjKwFQ

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Rixieness wrote:

Hi! I agree that apples are healthy :)

I love your flickering. I'm trying it out, and I'm mid twenties now. Read about mana problems in here, so going to try to fix that in the future. Guess I'll keep you updated or something :-p

Ok so, I've have reached lvl 55. Someone had to carry me through Cruel, because my flickering wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Had a hard time at the coast in Merciless, so I checked my build with yours again. Solution: Multistrike. Bought one. Changed some gems around, took some others out and pretty much have what it is supposed to be.

I am not using Blood Magic however, because I still have the feeling I'm dying pretty quickly. Thing is, with the flickering going way better, I run out of mana again. Should I just apply the Blood Magic? I have about 1800 health right now... I'm on my way to three more life nodes, but that is going to take about 5 more levels...

Also, no clue how you are able to run three aura's... I used to have clarity running, but took that off to run Hatred instead. How the hell is it possible to run more? Blood Magic again?


Tips?

I would say Blood magic wouldn't be too much of a problem. 1.8K life is enough to sustain a 100 life flicker strike, since you get a decent amount of lifesteal back. Make sure you are using both multistrike and melee splash though.
If you find it to risky, see if Mana leech works. You might need a quality mana leech to keep up with the leech, but see if a non Q mana leech works before you start investing in a Q one :)

As for the aura's: right now, I only run 2 aura's. I have 3 aura's equipped since I switch from time to time. I use Grace and Hatred usually, switch out to purity for hard bosses, even though, from the next patch on, I probably drop Purity as well(no max res, so no use)
Note, I have my aura's socketed with a reduced mana gem. If you do as well, you should be able to run multiple aura's :)

Hey OP +1 on the awesome built you've made.

I just wanted to share my personal experience with lvling my flicker so far and it has been pretty good although I felt quite weak against merciless Vaal oversoul, looking forward to my meeting with Piety -.-'.

Anyways my experience with lvling really starts to kick in once you combine flicker+melee dmg+splash+mana leech. The issue however remained on the leeching not being instant which means the character often being on a "cooldown" while getting the mana up and thats when I'd cyclone around like a manic (it being linked to a BM gem). Ofc like OP said, you can hook flicker to a BM but doesn't it also suffer from the 20% leech max issue?

So without a BOR or Soultaker available for a long time, it was kinda rough.. until I stumbled across this beautiful ring:



This permits you to do a almost non-stop life/mana gain with multistrike as the gain is instant and when OOM do a cyclone and get a full mana bar again. If you can get one cheap I'd recommend trying it out while you save up BOR/soul taker. The huge tradeoff is being much weaker as the resistance on the ring is low and you can't use the other slot :/.

Anyhow thats all I had to share, thanks for posting your built OP!

PS: I noticed your codt+molten+enduring combo on your recent vid, any thoughts on sharing that concept + how the recent nerf affected that?

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fallen_heaven wrote:

Hey OP +1 on the awesome built you've made.

I just wanted to share my personal experience with lvling my flicker so far and it has been pretty good although I felt quite weak against merciless Vaal oversoul, looking forward to my meeting with Piety -.-'.

Anyways my experience with lvling really starts to kick in once you combine flicker+melee dmg+splash+mana leech. The issue however remained on the leeching not being instant which means the character often being on a "cooldown" while getting the mana up and thats when I'd cyclone around like a manic (it being linked to a BM gem). Ofc like OP said, you can hook flicker to a BM but doesn't it also suffer from the 20% leech max issue?

So without a BOR or Soultaker available for a long time, it was kinda rough.. until I stumbled across this beautiful ring:

This permits you to do a almost non-stop life/mana gain with multistrike as the gain is instant and when OOM do a cyclone and get a full mana bar again. If you can get one cheap I'd recommend trying it out while you save up BOR/soul taker. The huge tradeoff is being much weaker as the resistance on the ring is low and you can't use the other slot :/.

Anyhow thats all I had to share, thanks for posting your built OP!

PS: I noticed your codt+molten+enduring combo on your recent vid, any thoughts on sharing that concept + how the recent nerf affected that?

Or you could just use blood magic with a little bit of LL on 1 ring if needed. Blood rage provides you with LL as well. Which you should be using anyway.

Just tested out blood magic instead of relying on mana, works pretty sweet. Theres barely any noticable hp-drawback due to the life leech of blood rage so its quite self-sustainable, better than expected. Although using a BM gem does lower my dps by 1,3k in my current setup.

Guess it comes down to whether your rings provides more dps benefits than > thief's torments+extra dps gem on the flicker setup as we need fast kills to keep flickering.

Btw for survivability, what would suit this build the best:

Cast on damage taken with:
enduring cry + immortal call + increased duration

or

enduring cry + molten shell + enfeeble?

Considering we only got 3 end charges I'd lean towards enfeeble for surviving?

Update again. I'm now level 63. I recently added blood magic to the flicker strike and mana problems evaporated. Cyclone has life gain on hit, which ups my life. Flicker doesn't use mana so it regens when not using Cyclone. Works good.

Although now that I'm on my way to Vaal Merciless, having trouble with standing still too much and taking immense hits. I have around 2.5 health, but two hits from a blue bear and I die. I stand still because either of desynch, lag or running out of frenzies. The latter doesn't happen too much any more, since I can have max of 6 frenzies now, but in reality, there will always be a moment when I stand still. And sometimes I just die in half a second. Also, cyclone doesn't always work properly. Pressing the button, but still standing still.

Conclusion is that standing still means I will die...

I guess I'll go do some more farming.