[3.5] Soul Eater Flicker Strike Physical Slayer

All my gear cost me approx. 10ex (4ex terminus 6l, 3ex loreweave, 1ex inspired learnings and then global 2ex for all the others cheap items. But i craft them and got lucky for ex. on the gloves. i Would say you should not spend more than 15ex.

With a 5l terminus and some random rare chest with nice resist (like that you need less resist on other items so you can get really cheap one) the only expensive thing is inspired learnings. It's good enough until t10.

You can swap ancestral call and ruthless when you want better clear / one target boss.

The build is ok without the soul eater effect, that way it's more reliable and safe. For higher tier maps, the soul eater effect doesn't allow you to do a lot of pack at once because you need more than one hit against rare monsters, However, that's very powerfull against special spawn (Strongbox, abyss, ...).

The mechanics of taking damage let you reduce the impact of the "increased physical damage taken" by building additional physical damage reduction. That's why a lot of my stuff is helping with physical damage.
If you have say 75% physical damage reduction against a 4'000 physical hit. you take only 1500 damages (1.5 * (1-0.75) * 4'000).

I use static strike to let the fortify effect last longer and help generate frenzy charges against single tanky targets. Blade vortex on cwdt can generate frenzy charge too.

Flicker strike can seems clunky if you don't know that when your mouse cursor is on the not walkable object, it stops. So simply put your cursor at your feets to avoid that when you are in maps with a lot of walls.

When you use your flasks don't do it too early as the end of the previous flask will reset the soul count during the new flask effect.

The gear was focused to reduced the impact of the maximum number of map mods.
-#% to maximum resistance, loreweave doesn't care.
-reflect, with slayer doesn't care about physical, brutality doesn't care about elemental
-no regen, you already don't regen life, just keep your flask for the mana before engaging monsters and don't waste it all with leap slam.

Nasty map mods:
-life leech, quite annoying but doable until t13 using life gain on hit instead of another support. Very rare so you don't see that often.
-reduced life recovery, the most annoying, you need to play safe as that hurt a lot your regen.

Blood Aqueduct

Toxic Sewer (with low budget)

Sulphur Vents (day2 of the league)

Elder Arsenal


Guardians:
Lair of the Hydra

Pit of the Chimera


Focues blood aqueduct (see below)

Major: Arakaali
-Capture Arachnoxia for the big increase in life regen with the immortal call / blood rage setup.
-Capture Shock and Horror is nice too as you don't have protection against shock.

Minor: Gruthkul
-Capture Erebix, Light's Bane for more tanking.

Use cleave then sunder to level.
First lab: Headsman.

When you reach:
-level ~55
-blood aqueduct
-cruel lab (go for Impact)
You can equip terminus est and soulthirst and start farming blood aqueduct for lots of xp. I've stay at blood aqueduct until 68.
then merciless lab with Bane of Legends (it's only for the next lab and help with boss when you don't have a lot of stuff).

End the acts, kitava shoud be piece of cake.
Start mapping until you have the trials.

Then the tricky part, the first uberlab run, as you won't have the perma leech for the traps, so be carefull and take your time.
The last encounter against Izaro should not be hard as you have a 20% culling strike.
Then you can respec Bane of Legends and take the fours points to get Brutal Fervour (and vaal pact).

To go even faster to farm blood aqueduct one can use Solstice Vigil and self temporal chain to get longer flask. Swap brutality with ruthless and your totem setup to "herald of ice curse on hit temporal chains" in the gloves (Shackles of the Wretched). Put kaom's root. You are ready to "one flask" the whole blood aqueduct.

You need some changes but as it's a lvl 61 zone you don't care about a lot of optimisation so it's not a problem to get a stuff that do the thing. However, the overall speed increase is only marginal as you spend more time with loading and choosing who betray who. Nevertheless it's fun.

I've put videos of blood aqueduct with this setup. I've could got more attack speed, for ex. using vaal haste but it probably doesn't help that much because you can't really control you character as you should with that much attack speed.