[3.25] Holy Flicker Strike Necro [League start > All content] All content is done. PoB updated
" To be honest, i never use it, always flicking, even vs bosses ^^ But i go check FaQ ;) |
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You thought me dead?
Ha! I kinda am, after grinding 18 divines for Kingmaker (thanks ggg) However! I bring good tiding. I finally managed to make crit work even better than before. And now even I can say that I’m happy with the build damage ( but only damage) There were several major changes/upgrades that you, who still reads this guide, needs to be aware about So here we go Boots.
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This is a simple one. Fractured +2 Minion gems mod. It only comes from delve. Why we need this? Tree reasons. We want +2 minion gems to massively increase the life of AG to make sure it won’t die even in Uber encounters when his regen is disabled and he has Sirus corrupted blood all over his face. We want +2 minions gems because combined with amulet +1 all skills and scepter +1 all skills – we reach a threshold of getting and extra Specter. And its VERY useful – read below. We want +2 minions gems to be FRACTURED so we can easily craft move speed and chaos resist on boots with a chance to get a decent life roll too. Being a delve mod – also lets us use Eldritch orbs to get Brittle ground still. Raise Specters
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There is an update on specters themselves as I was using a bit outdated info. 1) They of Tul only provides 15% attack and spell Avoidance, 10% chill, and spawns totems. No damage reduction. They of Tul is still mandatory if you wanna do Sim30 or Ubers. That 15% might not seem like a lot but combined with your block it literally makes a difference between doing something deathless or dying 6 times. The totems he spawns also have some ungodly agro mechanic that keeps monsters attacking them over you, they also have pretty much infinite life. 2) Demon Harpy. The new info on it – it only increases damage by 30%, but stacks 2 times. So having 2 Harpies is very much advised. I do. I can’t say I feel a huge difference, but the numbers don’t lie. This makes 3/3 specters slots. With boots from above we can include 4-th one. For now I’m using Power Charge monkey. Might switch to Frenzy charge monkey later. Still playing around with it. Removed Discipline + Enlighten and Watcher’s eye
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While Discipline felt pretty good, I didn’t feel it was good enough for the amount of investment. 2 gem slots, extra button to press, Notable on Megalomaniac and Watcher’s eye mod just felt too much for too little so I cut it out entirely. With extra gem slots from Discipline removal – I managed to fit in the final and the biggest upgrade. Second Offering – Spirit Offering For the crit build – having Spirit Offering adds whooping 30+% DPS But how can I ever make it work? Well, there was some hoops and loops to jump through. Belt change
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Good bye Stygain, you will always be missed… Belt is not replaced with Making us able to have both max block from Bone Offering and massive damage boost from Spirit Offering. Since the belt is super common – the corruption is extra cherry on top. Fitting it in - was not easy. You really start feeling the lack of resistances and life pool went down by a fair bit. But in return – 60% crit, adding a lot of consistency to the damage. Desecrate change
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How can you trigger 2 offerings if the first Offering that will trigger – consumes all corpses? Our friend Divergent Desecrate got our back! With 60% chance to spawn extra corpse (further boosted to 140% by Ashes of the Stars) it makes it so there always will be a corpse left for Spirit offering to consume after Bone Offering east 5 other corpses. However, that is NOT enough to keep 2 offerings uptime on 100%. To reach 100% uptime on bosses specifically we gonna need to have Trigger spells on 4 second cooldown. With 8 second cooldown you have about 1-2 second downtime. With things listed above – the damage got to the VERY satisfying point. However, survivability lacked slightly. I felt like I need just a little bit more. Not a lot, but just 10-15% more life to survive savage situations. And that’s what I’m working right now, fine tuning the build with a little bit extra protection, perhaps at cost of a DPS Animate Guardian upgrade
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Fortify. Who doesn’t want Fortify. Everyone wants Fortify. It alone can pretty much cover all my needs in protection. But thanks to GGG – Kingmaker now costs 17+ divines. Is it worth getting it? Prolly not. You don’t need it unless you plan doing uber content. And even then – you don’t need it desperately. For me – I think its too convenient to pass up. Culling strike, extra crit, rarity and Fortify. It really doesn’t matter how much it costs when it’s a BiS And now since I have the reliable source of culling strike – time to change AG gloves. Sticking with Corrupted Blood choice – because of all the clips of AGs dying to CB. It’s a delve mode. Grab it, slap Unnerve on top of it, craft chaos resist and you are done for good. Megalomaniac change
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With Discipline gone and Culling strike added via AG, time to change Megalomaniac. My choice – Vicious Bite stacking. Every Vicious bite adds 6% MORE damage to the build. The rest notables I decided to put in survivability. +1 all resists and life on hit. Pretty good. War banner change (in progress)
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If I feel that Kingmaker and extra life from cluster is not enough – I might remove War Banner entirely. War banner does provide about 7% more DPS, and that rather nice (2.5 mills of damage at this stage), however I can see myself replacing it with Decoy Totem instead. Simply because it makes bosses THAT much more easier. Gonna see about that. TL;DR
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30% more damage added at cost of the belt slot. AG further upgraded with Kingamer. Discipline is gone. Build feels great but a bit squishy. Working on fixing that.
Current build
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https://pastebin.com/fkCiMYnD
Current items
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New AG items
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Videos deleting bosses in 0.5 seconds may come soon. |
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Hey, I'm currently making items for your build, played it in archnemesis and that was amazing. What do you think about this shield? Is it good enough for this build or should i keep trying to get t1 crit + block chance?
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" Well it kinda depends. The +1 is really not that important honestly, and having a rare shield REALLY makes you squishy as is (at least in uber content). I'm currently thinknig to bring Dawnbreaker back, but yeah, I would try to roll a spell block if possible. But you can try it as is. Maybe look for Megalomaniac with extra block notable, or bench craft a block if possible. Last edited by Fire_Archer#4037 on Jan 8, 2023, 10:28:46 PM
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The time passes fast and its seems like my Relic saga is coming to an end.
I can finally say I'm actually satisfied with how the build turned out to be. Its almost as powerful as before the massive nerfs to minions, maybe just slightly less tanky. Uber Maven is down, and with the damage I managed to dish out I have no doubt the other ubers will fall just as easily. Now the only few things left for me is to grind 40/40. Few more adjustments has been made including a fun one, so I need to talk about those.  First things I wanna talk about is Life Flask. Life flask
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I decided to swap Forbidden Taste to a regular Life Flask and there is several reason for that 1) With the inclusion of Unique Belt - capping Chaos Resist became much harder. Its still possible, but I personally can not be bothered. Forbidden Taste require you to have capped out Chaos Resist and even then it will damage you through all the regen. Damage in turn will stop your ES from recovering, stop Lethe Shade from resetting. Chaos Resist is also often lowered by things like Altars - then the flask will literally kill you. The upside of it - full heal + Phasing. Its good, especially phasing, but not good enough. 2) With the including of Rumi (another unique flask, that I'm trying to get rid of, stay tuned) - we lost valuable implicit that could previously be used for say - removing ignites. Such an implicit can be obtained on a life flask to compensate for its loss. 3) An unexpected discovery. Turns out, with Harvest rework, intentionally or not, you can now HARVEST CRAFT LIFE FLASKS. This is insane. So let me introduce to a new member of the build 15 uses instant heal flask Behold! It feels really good to have it. It fully heals if I take a big hit, it outheals most degens, it removes ignites at will. In boss fights you can use it like 15 times. Simply great. Still miss phasing tho. The next thing I wanna talk about is crafting the ultimate weapon. I got lucky with a big drop of 20 divines today, and that just meant I need to burn some divines. There are several ways to craft an BiS weapon, and they are all heavily rely on RNG. I decided to go with the LEAST RNG one, and still failed the craft about 20 times before getting it. The Weapon
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Behold! The base itself costed me 15 divines. The idea is to get Trigger on 4 second cooldown - to have 100% uptime of Bone and Spirit offering. Over 60 and about 50 been used to have a weapon with 1 preffix and 1 suffix + veiled one. Once you hit the veiled suffix and annuled any garbage mods - the RNG time. You need to Unveil the Trigger mod. And if you don't - you start all over. Tip - craft Veiled suffix (I chose damage per power charge) before unveiling - to make sure the choices would exclude your crafted mod from the list. Once you hit +1 all spells and Trigger 4 on as a clean base - you simply Multimod Hits can't be evaded (this will save you 2 passive points on the tree AND (and its important) allows your static strike and flicker strike to crit) Minion damage - for more damage Don't forget that you can always use https://www.craftofexile.com/ to experiment, check you RNG, or maybe find a better way to craft this weapon. Please tell me if you do, this crafting was terrible... I feel like Vennto that one time. Now to the fun part of adjustments. Divergent Holy Relic change
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Just like it says in the guide, if you have 29%+ Ashes of the Stars AND 23% quality Divergent Holy Relic you can go galactic and have 5 Nova explosion per second.
You can NOT activate the explosions with Static Strike (even at lvl 20/20) this often. But you know who can? Vaal Flicker Strike. One ultimate ability to rule them all. Also having Static Strike active while using regular Flicker Strike will add up an extra explosion too. So on paper having 23% quality is better than having lvl 21, assuming you have 20/20 Phantasmal Static Strike and flickering, but more about below. TL;DR - changed Holy Relic gem from 21/20 to 20/23 Leveled up Static Strike to lvl 20 And now some sick theorycrafting Vaal Flicker Strike, Multistrike and Silver Flask change
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Because Holy Nova can now activate 5 times per second And because new belt + Ashes of the Stars add a little bit of dexterity to the build, I find it possible to replace Multistrike with Faster Attacks. Why? Becase Multistrike DOES NOT support Vaal gems. Faster Attacks on other hand - do. What this means is - you will flicker strike faster. This alone is not enough to push trigger rate to the limit. But here is where Silver flask comes in Turns out 10% attack speed + Onslaught is enough to get EXACTLY 10 attacks per second on Vaal Flicker Strike. And that in turn means - ever second hit will cause 2x Holy Nova Essentially making pressing Vaal Flicker Strike on a single enemy/boss look like this  Theory PoB - https://pastebin.com/M3j9VLTJ Future plans There is not much left for me to write, but a lot to do. Crit build is certainly the way to go still. So the guide needs to be heavily adjusted and reformed to include crit version progression. I also gonna need to test when is the optimal moment to go from non-crit to crit. And how much gear do you need to start feeling good. I guess you can expect 1 more Back in Time info post (for those who doesn't know its the post where I regress the items and skill tree as much as possible to see when I can do juiced up t16 maps comfortably). In terms of the league itself - I'm just gonna grind 40/40 and test more ubers. Max out on attack speed for Vaal Flicker and test that. Can't wait to share the videos of it deleting bosses, but sadly life keeping me away from making those for now. I hope you had a good read. Please do tell if anything I need to add to the build. Any and all feedback is always welcome. TL;DR
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Added life flask, crafted big weapon, will replace Multistrike with Faster Attacks
Vaal flicker strike is amazing addition to the build Killed Uber Maven, damage now 40 mills. Vids and Back in Time post soon (?) Current Build
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PoB - https://pastebin.com/NhQfh1sX
Gear |
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The league is almost over for me, and its time to relive the –worst- happiest moments of the league again – leaguestart.
 By going back in time and reducing my power to the league start levels and see how much gear would I need to feel relatively comfortable doing juicedup t16 maps. But this time – with a twist. To change a timeline, instead of doing the usual build start, I’m gonna bring back the crit version and see if crit with no gear can still pack a punch. This time conditions are following: 1) Tanky maps mods Things that would make the game feel harder. For the most part this build struggles with damage early on so things like Extra energy shield, Physical reduction, extra life is what I was looking for while rolling the maps. 2) Atlass passives To simulate the maximum difficulty the following passive points were taken on atlas - All Map Modifier Effect passive points to further increase the power of tanky mods - All Essence mods – to generate extra tanky extra powerful rare monsters - Beyond monsters – for tanky regular monsters to see how clear feels - Eater influence and altars - Harvest and Abyss for even more regular rare monsters 3) Maps The maps used for tests were T16 City Square – testing semi-narrow comfortable layout T16 Cemetery -testing uncomfortably open layout T16 Minotaur – no mods rolled. Testing raw boss damage and ability to do bosses early on 4) Reduction in passive points All previous times I did the ‘back in time’ post I was cheating a little bit by not removing extra points from a tree. This time – everything is legit. The build I was using had about 20+ passive points not allocated. Build that was used. Lvl 78 Necromancer - https://pastebin.com/71X5RUsJ Items that were used. The results
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Well what can I say. It okay-ish.
Clears all layouts comfortably with the help of vaal flicker. Had no problem both tanking and killing unrolled Mino pretty fast. No problem doing harvests and abysses, including abyssal deeps Lich. Huge problems with dealing with Essence monsters. Died 2 times during tests, both to the essence mobs with 3-5 Deafening essences. However, I was not using taunt totem at the time. On top of that it takes forever to kill this kind of monsters. Disclaimer
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Its hard for me to properly estimate the early game experience like that.
Looking back to this league early posts of progression – I can see that even with having 0 big drops till lvl 92, I still managed to save money and grab better gear than I have in this test. Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that such atlas setup is not something you will get early league. Its a lot harder than it should be for the sake of the test. The crit build, while making job done, is not that much stronger than regular non-crit build early on. The damage is about the same and you would have to deal with having no belt slot. That being said – its scales much harder with upgrades. The other thing to say about it – when it crits, it hits real hard. And it feels pretty great to just randomly delete a fat rare of your screen. The key moments
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1) As per usual – the best upgrade you can ever get is lvl 21 Holy relic gem. Or lvl 20 Divergent Holy relic. This is the first upgrade priority. 2) Gloves. Asenath is really good. It makes progressing and making currency for upgrades a lot faster. On top of that Legion is made a lot more common with recent atlas changes, so even early league this gloves are not that costly. I’d say its worth getting it for around 1div-1.5div equivalent even if its all your savings. It will earn it back. 3) +1 socketed gems Tabula is pretty much mandatory. There is also a new corruption outcome that grants +2 socketed minion gems. If you can snipe out something with 6 links like that, that would be great too. 4) +1 all skills amulet is pretty good to have. The other mods are irrelevant. 5) The damage is not amazing but its clears trash well. However, if you feel like you struggle with single target/rares, you can trade AOE for Inc Crit Chance gem, adding up extra 30% damage 6) Shield is a hard topic. During tests I didn’t feel like I need extra tankiness from Dawnbreaker/Magna eclipsis and instead could just go with a crit shield. I think I will stick with that. TL;DR Crit from the start - okay. Around 3 mill DPS with trash gear to reach the comfort zone. You really want to have +1 chest and lvl 21 main skill gem. And that would be it. Gonna finishing the challanges grind. Will try to make a new detailed pob with gear progress for a crit version. If anyone trying this one out have questions - feel free to ask. Other than that, going radio silence. No more posts for a while. |
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Its me again with a sanctum farm post.
So I only have 2 challenges left, and both are sanctum related as I wasn’t doing the mechanic all too much. Everything else were done solo without trading for services, so its safe to say this build did all content in the game pretty well. When it comes to sanctum, however, while this build can certainly do it, the hardest challenge – no hit run, is still out of my reach. I think its nearly impossible unless you get some ungodly luck on the guard types that spawn over the course of your sanctum. So today I will bring you 2 more PoBs that I messed around with while trying to make something no-hit-run viable. As always – the solution to no-hit run is, of course – damage. Therefore all defenses were sacrificed to try and reach the full oneshot potential. Suffice to say that didn’t work out. Still, it was a valuable experience – at least for me – to see how far you can push the damage and how much you need to stay (or in my case – not stay) alive. So pretty much every version of the build had the same issues
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1) Delayed damage.
Because of how relics work, when you flicker strike/flame dash/shieldcharge it takes about 0.5-1 seconds for relics to catch up, and during that time, the first Holy Nova triggers behind you. Sometimes it reaches enemies. Sometimes it doesn’t. Not a problem in maps, but in a no-hit run you can’t have delayed damage as a melee character. 2) Not enough damage with a single hit This build cause lots of hits of medium sized damage, so one hit doesn’t hit for all that much. Combines with what is listed above it creates a situation when not only you might miss a first hit, but the next hit won’t even kill a guard instantly. 3) The build require setup The setup is not big, and normally (mapping/bossing) you would not even notice it but you need to: - Activate Spirit offering if its not up - Place Brittle ground under enemy feet - Cast a curse that would trigger Assassin’s Mark that can only be applied to one enemy - Get power and Frenzy charges of your monkey specters/ Assassin’s Mark - Get Harpy Specter to apply the debuff All that usually happen in a span of 1 second. Not good enough for not-hit run though. 4) Build is too squishy You still need to do maps somehow to farm sanctum runs. And even if you don’t, there is still an issue of dealing with sanctum last boss in the off chance she will pull the last attack off before you burst her down. Invest in damage too much and the build falls over And so the results of no-hit runs were not great. And very confusing. I’m not sure what causes it, I assume something from the list above, but here are my observations and conclusions.
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- Sometimes you legit oneshot the guards, the other time they take no damage for like 1-2 seconds. - Because of such a weird interaction the difference between 80 mill dps, 60 mill dps and 40 mill dps is pretty much not noticeable. - Its also not noticeable in actual bossing, it never felt like having more PoB DPS make me do bosses faster - The sanctum is not too hard for the build in a crit version. No boon run, no recovery run, regular runs were all doable. You might get hit like 4-5 times per floor, but it will happen. - The version I came up with first feels the most comfortable. You only need to swap gloves and 1 support gem to turn it to bosser/sanctum runner, it has inspired learning going, can do ubers and doesn’t die in maps no matter what eater altar mods you pick. However, if someone wants to theory craft a bit – here are results of my researches. Build #1 – full glass cannon 80 mill DPS. https://pastebin.com/SEmZjDSs No life, no protections, only can exist in sanctum, and pretty bad there too. Build #2 – half glass cannon 60 mill DPS https://pastebin.com/eXFxQYxR More or less balanced out, but still very squishy for mapping. No life, no ES, low resists for altar farming. No inspired Learning. |
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can i ask why there is a faster attack support with a million quality on it? and why its there at all?
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" Because PoB can't properly calculate Static Strike beams triggering Holy Nova frequancy. So instead I make PoB think that the attack speed of regular static strike/flicker strike hit is optimal for maximum trigger rate. |
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A little bit of the end league update time
So... I've been trying real hard to push up the squishy glass cannon version to the limit. Because, lets be real. Deleting uber bosses before they manage to pull off the mechanic is fun. What is not fun, however, is that if you do that, you get your ass cheeks clapped by trash mobs. And oh man I've been trying combination after combination of different items, jewels and skill trees over and over, but nothing really managed to pass all the tests. Which are: 1) Trial by mapping Just your regular 4 sextant, 4 scarabs alc and go. The squishier versions that were reaching about 2k HP were dying a bit too often on those. 2) Trial by Uber bosses. Namely - Uber Sirus, Uber Maven and Uber Shaper. The goal was to keep damage up high to compensate for a fact that you can no longer tank the UberShaper Slam. 3) Trial by Simulacrum wave 30 And this is where build fell off miserably. You can have millions of damage, but 98% damage reduction crit resistant, phys resistant, extra life enemies just do not care. Waves 28-30 were taking down the spec after spec as there was no way to have tankiness up and not lose too much damage to start failing Ubers at the same time. So… sadly after all this tests I will have to take an L on this one. Too many nerfs to the build really pushed it off of Simulacrum. You still can do 30 waves, and even do them deathless if you use the tanky version of this build, but it will be painfully slow. You can also do them on the squishy version if you swap from War Banner to Decoy Totem, but there is still a good chance you will die anyway. TL;DR – the adjustments made to the build makes it great uber killer, good mapper, meh simulacrum farmer. The changes done to the build:
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Removed Glorious Vanity – straight up minus 1000 ES.
Added Elegant Hubris with 3-4 Slum Lords – extra 9% DPS per each + massive scaling on Athenas explosions due to minion damage increase. Removed Inspired Learning – very sad about losing that one, but there is no room to fit it in. It just costs too many passive points, and there is not enough passive points already. Cutting life to fit it makes you too squishy, so I had to say goodbye to it. Minus move/clear speed in maps. Added more life nodes to keep the build at at least 4k Life. The result is.. I’d say overall I’m happy with it.
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It sucks that I can’t reliably do Sim30 without dying, but killing Uber Maven before she casts balls or memory game is kinda worth it. Killing UberSirus during his Everlasting Fire casts feels great too. Mapping also feels fine as
I don’t have to stop for a second on rare monsters. Deleting high rolled invitations also feels nice. Just like the old days. On top of that I’m not using any impossible to get items either. Triple Slum Lords should not be too hard to get with PoB scouting feature. I got mine jewel for 5 divines and it’s a 4 Slum Lords + 1 Aura damage node. Kinda an overkill. I also tried out new flasks. Progenesis and Oriath’s End. Oriath’s End straight up doesn’t do anything on this build. Progenesis is nice but unnecessary. It’s a a better version of Leech 15% damage from hits flask. Still, extra 20-10%~ ish damage reduction is always welcome. So that would be it. I don’t think I can add anything to improve this further. All I could do is to make a map-road on how to get to this end point. But that is for the future, If I won’t get lazy. The end point PoB:
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For clearing: https://pastebin.com/xs1tjkQX - 20 mills
For bossing: https://pastebin.com/JiR6xfwQ - 50 mills The difference from the last build – 20% less EHP, 40% more damage, and a slight loss on clear/move speed. Honestly, both old and new builds are good so pick your poison. Last edited by Fire_Archer#4037 on Jan 22, 2023, 3:14:21 AM
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