[2.2] Flicker Strike Duelist - a detailed guide (new league viable)

As someone who loves Flicker-Strike and spent hundreds of hours trying to create a viable Flicker-Strike build after some heavy nerfs I am happy to welcome you to my guide!

I am not going to explain the mechanics of Flicker-Strike in depth, but here is the tl,dr:

- auto-sustain frenzy-charges (and in best case power-charges too)
- do as much on-hit-dmg as possible to achieve this
- bypass the 4-second cooldown of Flicker-Strike reliable enough so you wont stop
- benefit from a fast clearspeed and a funny gameplay

So how do you achieve this? Obviously going crit. "Crit?!", I hear you ask? "But why are you not starting as a Shadow then?". The answer on this is simple. Because we cant allow ourselves to wear a Tabularasa (in the name of survivability) and in a new league, 6-linked chests are kind of expensive AND the more damage-links you have to Flicker-Strike the better, we need something that adds an additionial link to our setup. You see where this is going right?

The "Impact" node of the ascendancy-skilltree of the slayer-class does exactly that. Effectively a 6L setup in a 5L chest (that are easy to obtain with a little bit of time investment) but im going to explain this further later.


Pro and Con


Sustaining frenzy-charges:


Sustaining power-charges:


Skilltree:


Explanation:


Gear:
[spoiler]
Helmet: In order to reach enough damage to keep flickering without a mirrored dagger, you have to wear an Abyssus. After hours and hours trying to work around this I came to the conclusion that I have to live with 40% increased physical damage taken or even more. Damage-wise, the bonuses of this helmet are huge. (Keep in mind: the faster your attack-speed, the more you benefit from the added physical damage. The higher your crit-chance, the more you benefit from the crit-multiplier.)


Chest:
There are several options here:

Lightning Coil for obviously life, evasion/armor-stats which both boost your armor and the twenty-something percent less physical damage taken (it simply converts a portion of the physical damage you are taking into a damage-type that is easier to mitigate (75% lightning resistancs versus the lower 50-60% phys reduction) to take advantage of this you have to absolutely cap your lightning resistance).

Daressos Defiance for life, dodge, life-leech, evasion/armor-stats and the onslaught-mechanic for a further damage boost (which you dont'really need to be honest).

Cherrubim's Maleficience for the best possible life-roll, also evasion/armor-stats and a whopping 100% increased life leeched per second, which is a blessing for a character that needs fast life recovery and revolves around leeching from his insane amounts of damage. (my personal preference)


The rest of your gear should:

1. most importantly cap your resists
2. provide you with as much life/evasion/armor as possible
3. (optionally) should have crit/accuracy stats for squeezing out damage

unique options are:

Gloves:
Maligaro's Virtuosity, Facebreakers

Boots:
Blood Dance, Atziri's Step (if you take Acrobatics)

Dagger:
For leveling I would recommend Mightflay and Mark of the Doubting Knight until you got enough currency for a Bino's Kitchen Knife. After that you can upgrade your dagger for relatively cheap in a new league for a 220+ DPS version (keep in mind that base-crit tops attack-speed here in almost every case). I got mine for 40 chaos (roughly 2,5 hours of farming).

Flasks:
As always: take one or two "of staunching" flasks preferably with a "Surgeons" prefix for always keeping them up (especially with the help of Poachers Mark). The new Basalt Flasks with the "experimentors" mod grants almost 8 seconds of 20% physical damage reduction which is a good counter for the Abyssus mechanic. Lion's roar provides you with a good amount of extra damage if needed and the "Granite" base makes it a perfect fit into our defense too.

IMPORTANT:
Gear with evasion-stats gets double-scaled due to Iron Reflexes and therefore has a bigger impact on your defense than armor-based gearpieces.

My own gear:

[/spoiler]

Gem setups:


Stats:


Videos: (ain't clickbaiting you into that spoiler, they are coming soon)


Special thanks to my friend Boomstick who has that much patience with a guy that desperately tries to revive Flicker-Strike and helped me with hours of theorycrafting!

It's funny, i had exactly the same though as you, going crit flicker, but i went to the exact opposite, with a crit staff build with Hegemony Era (But I still got 6 frenzy charges with Acrobatic). Hegemony Era + Increased critical chance and 5 power charges are easy enough to crit cap, and you shouldn't need power charge on crit (meaning you can get fortify or another dps gem like WED)

Also, you should remove the added fire damage and get a Physical to lightning gem.
You lose a few elementary % (14), but you gain 2 majors things:
-Shock, so you get 50% more damage
-The fact you are dealing more elemental damage than physical, which is especially important against reflect while wearing an abyssus.


And for the choice between Ice bite + assassin's mark and Poacher mark, don't forget you lose around

Oro's flciker is amazing as well! Im running that now, I have never had so much fun!

Gladiator is a good alternative to slayer.

Outmatch and outlast gives 25% for frenzy on kill, which combines with blood rage, is enough to sustain FS.

You can then choose to enhance blocking, or if you have a bleeding weapon, extra damage.

There's no impact, so the melee splash gem is required.

To see gladiator bleed flicker in action, see my build, Infernal Combustion

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