[3.20] Ephemeral Edge Flicker Strike Trickster - Super tanky mapper

Conqueror map showcase - Not gonna lie, I basically never record myself playing PoE, and you can tell I was a little nervous for this - it was the first thing I recorded. I completely ignored altars, missed stuff trying to go fast, and generally looking sloppy. But, you get the general idea of a 98% quant delirious map here, and a particularly uncharitable one - 100+% extra damage as fire, 42% life as maximum ES for monsters, monsters gain endurance charges. Notice too that I stand in an explosion from a chest, and yes it hurt, but I instantly was topped back up and good to go. I picked this to show it can handle tougher content, not necessarily to show off "smooth".

Pure Uul-netol breachstone - because people will ask, I did this because I had it on hand, and I was out of Chayulas. The chayulas look pretty much identical - pure breachstones are _very_ easy. This is more how your average map looks in terms of 'smoothness'.

The Hidden - Turns out Tul kills totems with his vortex, which slowed down that last kill a bit. Otherwise, though a bit of a softball invitation at only 55% quant, this was smooth.

Sirus - Great fight except that I ate the "you go real slow now" beams at the end, and the final phase took a long time as a result.

I love flicker strike, and always have. But, anyone who knows flicker knows that it has a habit of killing you real quick in some circumstances, because you can't super control where you're going. This league, I wanted to make a version of flicker strike where you basically didn't need to worry about that, and you could just take whatever abuse and be totally fine.

Originally I was looking at energy blade so that I would be forced into really high ES on a CI build, but then I found the new Ephemeral Edge, which is almost identical to energy blade for our purposes, without the downside of cutting your ES pool in half. After all - 20% of 100% is the same as 40% of 50%, so I went with the option where you get to keep your ES pool.

I'll explain more about the offense and defense later, but let's look at pros and cons for now:

Pros:

- Super Tanky. On my current setup, I have 1.2 million eHP in POB; even the budget version has 600,000+
- Elemental ailment immunity, reflect immunity, stun immunity
- 100% movespeed or so
- It's flicker strike, which means most of your mapping life is spent zoomin' and feeling incredible
- Great at maven invitations (though not maven herself), pure breachstone farming, simulacrum farming, or anything in that genre
- Can get started quite cheaply - really just need an aegis aurora and the ephemeral edge

Cons:

- It's flicker strike, which can give some folks headaches.
- It's flicker strike, which means that it straight up can't do maven (the beams murder you on the brain phase because of the no regen)
- The budget version will have a tough time on single target DPS - this is fixed with investment though
- Crucially, Sanctum is in hardmode while playing flicker. again, fixed with high investment and lots of DPS, but you will certainly struggle on sanctum before you have enough DPS due to the lack of being able to effectively dodge while doing damage. Better than many melee skills though because of the inherent 'slipperiness' of flicker bouncing all over the place.
- The upper end of the build can get expensive - Awakened multistrike, Oriath's end, +1 max frenzy implicit ring, double-elevated gloves, etc.

The tankiness is coming from Aegis Aurora combined with Iron reflexes, along with Trickster's built in ES leech. Between those things, along with the large ES pool, the build is very hard to die with - You've got 100,000 armor, 50/50 full block, and high resistances, plus beyond getting 2,000 ES back whenever you block because of aegis, you're constantly leeching 2% of the damage you do, and it's like slayer overleech, so it is *always* present. We are also of course CI, meaning that we're totally immune to chaos damage.

On the QOL side, we're completely elemental ailment immune thanks to stormshroud and two chance to avoid shock affixes on boots and the helmet (or alternatively, on an abyss jewel). Additionally, we're stun immune due to the unwavering stance implicit on synthesized boots, which I've found is really important when playing vaal flicker, because one single stun in the course of your vaal flicker and the whole thing is cancelled. Especially for single target, that's a big deal.

Ephemeral Edge adds maximum lightning damage, and so in order to capitalize on that, we've completely thrown crit out the window, and gone for Resolute Technique, Precise Technique, and the lightning mastery which makes your non-critical hit damage lucky. This actually accounts for about a quarter of our DPS on my current POB setup!

For damage multipliers, we have awakened lightning penetration giving us lightning exposure, which is applied at -18% because of a mastery; we have intimidate on hit on gloves, which is another 10% increased attack damage taken on enemies, and we have pen + damage on a watcher's eye. Beyond the 40% more damage from precise technique and the 33% more damage (currently) from the polymath ascendancy node, the rest is just scaling flat damage from maximum ES on ephemeral edge, and wrath.

Finally, a note about Frenzy charges: You might wonder how we're handling frenzy charges on a flicker build that isn't using one of the common frenzy-gen tricks, and indeed, we don't really have any tricks! The flicker gem itself has a 20% chance to gain a frenzy charge on hit, and the sword mastery has an 8% chance on hitting a unique. Additionally, we have the node that gives us 25% chance to get a frenzy charge (and an endurance charge) on block. Beyond that, though, if ever we run out, we have the frenzy skill linked to culling strike, which I use to finish bosses anyhow, but can very quickly get us back to max charges. It's extremely rare you need to use it, especially in mapping, given that if you jump into a pack, you have not only 4 chances with awakened multi-strike, but also those 4 chances multiplied by all of the mobs you hit with splash. The net result is that I jump into a pack and I'm basically at max charges.

Getting this build off the ground is relatively cheap - about 5 divs or so at current market prices. In order to get started, I would suggest the following:

- Aegis Aurora
- Ephemeral Edge, ideally with the resolute technique corruption
- Level 3 enlighten (4 is _much_ better if you can get it, but not strictly necessary)
- 6-linked bronn's lithe
- Shavronne's revelation ring

That's it! The bronn's lithe can be a little tricky because it requires 4 off-color sockets. The easiest way to do this, IMO, is to craft 3 red sockets on your bench, and then hit it with vorici in betrayal. As long as even one of your green sockets turns white, you're all set!

From there, your next upgrades should be awakened gems: Specifically elemental damage with attacks and lightning penetration will make a huge difference because that gives you exposure and reflect immunity.

Beyond the basics, the build has many expensive upgrades that can take you to basically "as much investment as you want". Currently, I'm a little over 80 divines in, although at current market prices, it would be closer to 100, I think. The biggest spends are OPTIONAL, but they do make a nice improvement when you get them. The three biggest offenders are:

- awakened multistrike
- Oriath's end
- +1 max frenzy implicit ring

These are luxury items, and you DO NOT need them to play the build.

All other money is spent on crafting. You will see in my POB that the double-elevated gloves are expensive to make, for sure, and of course the helmet and boots can basically always have higher rolls and be better, so they will take as much re-rolling as you want them to.

I levelled this character as a poisonous concoction build, and switched to flicker right around early maps, around level 70 - as soon as I could equip the aegis aurora. Frankly, that might be a bit *too* early, but it did work for me.

Notably this was NOT my league-starter - it was my second build of the league, and I'm not sure I would recommend this as a league starter. With low investment, your bossing won't be great, and given at the start of the league you want to be killing bosses for voidstones, you'll be slower there for sure.

Bandits: Kill them all
Pantheon: You'll want Abberath as your minor for the burning ground immunity. Major is up to you, but you don't actually need brine king because we're already stun and freeze immune, so whichever of the others you feel makes most sense works great! Honestly, not too important overall for our build.

There's only three!

- Enemies steal Frenzy charges on hit (this is impossible and feels terrible for flicker)
- No leeching - the hardest part about this is actually the mana, which normally we leech. If you swapped in an enduring mana flask, maybe, but honestly - not worth it.
- No regen - this is the same, but much easier, than leech. The annoying bit is mana. Although you do leech mana, this will prevent you from flame-dashing between packs smoothly. If you never use your mobility skills and only attack, you'll be okay, but a mana flask can help here too. Honestly, though, I just roll over this one, because I can't be bothered to swap flasks.

Everything else is good.

monsters get %increased phys as extra [element], particularly when combine with reduced armour and block chance can be a little rippy, but honestly it's not really noticeable most of the time.

I've included all of this directly in my POB guide! Please do check it out right here: https://pobb.in/GckiFxzZ4Jm5

If you scroll down on pobb.in, you can see the notes there, but also within POB if you check it out. I have detailed notes on the gear choices for each of the items there, and rather than re-write it out here, I'll just direct you there!