[1.0.5] Death's Oath Staff Marauder - Flicker Strike/Cyclone (with a video)

Build's Highlight

High Armor (~14,000)
Very high chaos resist (60%+)
High Life regen (5.4% of life per second) and life leech (11% with blood rage)
Decent Life (4700+)
Decent Evasion (~4000 to ~8000, with or without Grace)
2 Auras (Determination and Hatred/Grace)
Nice dps. ~18k dps with 5L Splash Flicker Strike or ~14k dps with 5L Cyclone

Build description

I wanted a character who receives the full benefits of the Death's Oath Astral Plate :



So I created a life-based melee marauder who use a Staff and use one of the following skills : Splash Flicker strike, Cyclone and Sweep are all working nicely with the build.

Fow now, I call him the Death's Oath Staff Marauder (Updated for patch 1.0.5)

Why a melee skill ? Because, to really benefit from the area of effect chaos dmg from the Death's Oath chest, you need to be in melee range of the enemies. My first pick for the character was Melee Slash Flicker Strike. Not only because its one of the best "in your face melee skill", but also because its best used with blood rage : a skill that fits well with the Death's Oath chest. After all, if you find a way to protect yourself against the Death's Oath poison debuff, you also protect yourself against blood rage (or vice versa).

To take care of the Blood Rage/Death's Oath chaos dmg, the character gets a total of 5.4% life regen (from 5 passives) and 60%+ chaos resist from gear. This allow him to run both blood rage (for flicker strike combos) and use the Death's Oath chest without taking much chaos dmg.

To increase the Death's Oath chaos dmg, the character use the vulnerability curse which increase degeneration dmg by 40%. Vulnerability also make monsters take much more physical dmg.

To take advantage of that, the character use almost exclusively physical dmg (other than the Hatred aura).

To get frenzy charges from blood rage, essential to flicker without cool-downs, the character ideally needs to kill monsters in 1 shots. Also, Flicker Strikes with 20% quality provides +80% increased critical chance. To fully benefit from those two elements, the character use a Staff. Staves, being 2h weapons, have very high dmg output, enough to one shot white monsters. In addition, they have high natural critical chance so they benefit more than any other 2h weapons from the flicker strikes quality bonus.

Being a staff user and a melee character, the Death's Oath flickerer pick up many staff passives that grant block%. With a 12% block staff, the character can reach 27% chance to block at level 85. 29% chance to block is possible at level 86. 35% with a 18% block staves.

[1.0 Edit : The new build do not take the block passives. Instead, I suggest to pick up the Blunt trauma Notable (Knocks back enemies if you get a critical Strike with a Staff. Defensively, its arguably just as good as an extra 12% chance to block. And offensively, its much better.]

Finally, to fully benefit from the high armor of the Death's Oath chestplate, the build pick up many armor passives and run the determination aura. The character can easily break the 10k armor barrier (I have 14k) and, as a result, has very high physical dmg reduction. The character also use Molten Shell and Enduring cry for the extra physical dmg reduction. Finally, the Death's Oath flickerer has a nice amount of evasion thanks to the optional Grace aura, some evasion gear, a decent amount of dex from passive and gear and some evasion passives (+56%).

At level 84 with a 400 dps staff (with 6.68% local crit) and average gear, Flicker Strike supported with critical dmg, critical chance, melee physical dmg and melee splash dmg deal around 18k dps (with 4 frenzy charges). Single target skill is frenzy and could potentially reach 30k+ with a 5L.

At level 84 with his current gear, the character has 4700 life and 250+ life regen per second (Patch 1.0.5 numbers). With chaos resist of 64%, Blood Rage deals 64 chaos dmg per second and Death's Oath 162 chaos per second. That means +22,6 life regen per second despite blood rage and Death's Oath. The 11% life leech provided by the chest (5%) and blood rage (6%) is almost exclusively used to leech back any dmg done by monsters.

When to use Cyclone instead of Flicker Strike ?

Those numbers are true in normal maps. In "Vulnerability", "Reduced maximum resist" or "Reduce life/mana/es regen by 50%" maps, you actually take chaos damage every second if you use both Death's Oath and Blood rage. My solution : I don't use Blood Rage in those maps. But since Flicker Strike is unusable without Blood rage, I use Cyclone instead. I simply replace the Flicker Strike gem (green) with the Cyclone gem (green) and the melee splash gem (red) by the added fire damage gem (red). Cyclone is also an excellent Flicker Strike replacement in reflect physical damage" maps. Since Cyclone is dealing reduced physical damage at a much higher attack speed, the high armor of the character is much more effective against its reflection (the added fire helps too). So, in the end, 4 different maps mods kinda forces you to use Cyclone instead of flicker strike. Since they are very common mods, I estimate that I'm using Cyclone half the time and Flicker Strike the other half. Both skills works well. On paper, Flicker Strike has a higher dps Output. 18k dps vs 12k dps for Cyclone. In reality, Flicker Strike is only slightly faster to clear maps.


Passive Tree (level 85):



Gear and skills setup:


Auras

Hatred and Determination. For harder content, I can swap out Hatred for Grace.

Offense:

Cyclone (supported by Increased Critical Damage, Increased Critical Chance, Added Fire Damage and Melee Physical Damage) : ~14,000 dps

Flicker Strike (supported by Increased Critical Damage, Increased Critical Chance, Melee Splash and Melee Physical Damage) : ~18,000 dps

Frenzy (Supported by Multistrike, Faster Attack and Melee Physical Damage) : ~18,000 dps

Defense:

Life : ~4,700
Armor : ~14,000 (55% physical dmg reduction)
Evasion : ~4,000 without Grace (32% chance to evade). ~7,800 with Grace.
Block % : 12%

Curses:

Vulnerability and Enfeeble.

Vulnerability is the perfect offensive curse because it increases both the poison cloud from the Death Oath chest and the physical dmg of my attacks (cyclone, frenzy, flicker strike). Used for most content.

Enfeeble. For bosses that hit particularly hard. Especially the ones that deal elemental damage.

Bandit rewards (my choices):

Normal : +Life, resists or passive point.
Cruel : +18% physical damage, +8% attack speed or passive point.
Merciless : Frenzy charge

Uniques

If you don't want to lose too much time shopping for chaos resist on rare gear, there are now nice unique options that fits with the build very well :

Death rush ring (Up to 33 chaos resist)

Ming's Heart (up to 63 chaos resist)

Devoto's Devotion
(Up to 25 chaos resist)

Geofri's Crest (Up to 30 chaos resist)

Gameplay Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rtC5q-z13I

Old pre-1.0.0 video. At level 79 in a level 70 map, using Flicker Strike.

I don't think it'll be easy to get that many resists from gear, but my main concern is physical reflect. You should consider getting an elemental attack.

"

Novalisk wrote:

I don't think it'll be easy to get that many resists from gear

Its not easy but not because its expensive. Simply because it takes time/dedication to find the perfect items for the slot and then manage to meet the player that sells it. But after about 2 weeks of playing that character and getting gear for him (thanks poe.xyz!), I'm now at 63 chaos resist with 5 chaos resist pieces (belt-27, boots-29, ring-25, helmet-25 and amulet-17).

"

Novalisk wrote:

my main concern is physical reflect. You should consider getting an elemental attack.

First, the build provides lots of armor via gear, passives and the determination aura. Second, the build provides -30% reduced extra damage from critical hits. Finally, with 4 endurance charge, I get an 16% extra physical dmg reduction. Add a granite potion, and my physical dmg reduction % can reach pretty high numbers. My evasion (35% chance to evade) and block chance (25-27%) also helps against reflect.

So, what I'm I doing when there's physical reflect rare around ? I target that rare with my single target skill : Frenzy. Frenzy is linked with faster attack, melee physical dmg and added fire dmg. So a big portion of its dmg is fire dmg (added fire dmg) and cold dmg (Hatred). Also, the critical dmg multiplier of frenzy is not high (only 233%). At that point, Life leech (12%) is enough to heal the reflected dmg. Once the rare is dead which doesn't take long, I can resume flicker striking the pack. I could also just stay in front of the target and let him die from the Death's Oath Poison Aura (close to 1k dps if the monster has negative resist). But I don't really need to do that.

What happens if I'm careless and I flicker strike right into a pack of physical reflect monsters ? It happened a couple of times and I don't die from 1 or 2 hits. Usually, I can easily recover from the mistake : I leap slam away, drink a granite and jump back in to kill the reflect rare with frenzy.

Velkor this build just seem impressive. I'm inspired by your creativity :D

Staff also have the advantage of blocking :)

"

Harmster wrote:

Velkor this build just seem impressive. I'm inspired by your creativity :D

Staff also have the advantage of blocking :)

Thanks ! And the build is impressive. I'll post a gameplay video soon.

to the guy askin about reflect. glacial hammer, mele splash, multi, ele proliferation. with no ele nodes it will freeze ur reflect packs and the boss. 50/50/ damage with no ele nodes mean no fear to either reflect.

Alright, I just added a video on YouTube. Its only a 2 min gameplay video in a level 70 map without any editing, so don't expect anything fancy. However, I think it gives a good idea of what the character is capable of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rtC5q-z13I


When I recorded it, the character was level 79 with the following gear :



If I had gloves and boots with higher life and a right ring with life, my life total would be closer to the 3800 life that I was theorycrafting the build. Right now, my life is only at 3563 and my chaos resist at 64%. Without bloodrage or the Death's Oath debuff, my life regen is 199 per second. Blood rage does 48 chaos damage per second while Death's Oath does 162 dmg per second. So when the 2 debuffs are active, I'm losing 11 life per second. No biggie. I'd need to get 204 extra life or +2% chaos resist to completely offset it. But Its not my priority. My priority is to get more accuracy (probably from a new helmet) because my chance to hit is only at 85% (against level 79 mobs) right now.

For the record, my evasion rating sits at 4000 which gives me a chance to evade of 35% (vs lvl 79) while my armor is at 10500 (with a lvl 17 determination aura) for a physical resistance of 55%. So, 71% with 4 enduring charges. I haven't check with a granite potion, but according to my calculations, a granite would add 9102 armor, enough to reach very high physical resistance.

Finally, at level 81, my chance to block will be at 25%. At level 79, it was still only 15%.

I just wonder if you get any benefit with Life steal from this chest. You are already using blood rage which is 10% life steal with quality. With 4k life your max life regen from life steal is 800hp/sec, so with bloodrage only you need 8000DPS to reach the cap. I don't see any other reason to use that chest than life steal. Ok +50 all stats is nice, +15% AS too, but I would prefer +100% resistances instead. This build works but it's just a step to get a really good rare chest imo.

And that build has a huge drawback, you can't MF coz you need perfect stats for other parts.

"

CookieVortex wrote:

With 4k life your max life regen from life steal is 800hp/sec, so with bloodrage only, you need 8000DPS to reach the cap.

Yeah, I easily reach the life leech per second cap since my dps is already at 16k and I expect it to be close to 21k (including 4.2k cold dmg) at level 85 when my gems are maxed out (including quality) and my last few passives are taken. And that's without counting the vulnerability curse that adds 44% to the physical portion. Also, if I'm attacking multiple targets, that dps can be multiplied several times.

So yeah, I easily reach the max life leech per second. But all the extra leech is not lost, it still applies overtime so it helps when I'm not attacking. Also, if I'm running a low life/mana regen maps or vulnerability maps (higher dmg taken from blood rage and Death's oath) or other crazy mods, the extra life leech is even more helpful.

And you mentioned it, there are still many other good reasons to use the Death's Oaths : the huge amount of armor being one of them. Also, for my build, the attack speed, the strenght and the dexterity provides a huge dps buff. The dexterity also provides +10% evasion. The Int allows the use of the vulnerability curse and provides a little bit of extra mana. The Astra Plate implicit mods provides +12% to all resists. Finally, the 450 chaos damage to nearby enemies (630 dmg with vulnerability) is also an extra dps boost for the character. The fact that it bypass energy shield is another plus.

Does the 120% chaos resist you need to get from gear prevent this character to be a good mf character ? I don't know. I'll let you judge. But if you get the max chaos resist mod (30%), it only takes up 4 mods over a total of 47 (without counting the chest). Also, since I'm running purity, get +12% resists from the passives (I could easily get another 12% nods if I was willing to sacrifice some dps) and another +12% from the Death's Oath, I don't need that much elemental resists from other gear.

Have you tried running Blood Dance boots? You lose a bit of DPS but gain up to 7% bonus HP regen. With just Blood Rage, you typically bounce around near max Frenzy stacks, so with the Blood Dance frenzy charge on kill, you should be topped off almost always (except for maybe rares and unique mobs).

+50 stats also seems pretty damn cool for a PotCG build, which I'm running. I'll have to try picking up a Death's Oath.