[2.3] NeverSink's Oro's Flicker Slayer ♦ "The Accelerator" ♦ High clear, tanky, affordable



Is this build still viable in 2.3


Yes!!! It even got a lot stronger.

Here's the list of buffs/nerfs:

BUFFS: The slayer ascendancy class received massive buffs all over. We are now immune to bleeding, the life leech got massively buffs and we also get access to an additional ascendancy point, which gives us sustainable onslaught and quite an improved culling strike.

NERFS: None! We're doing awesome.



Note: You can receive information about updates/progress on the guide, lootfilter, stream and videos/projects, by checking out my twitter or or ask me questions or watch me play this or other builds on my stream on my stream.

IMPORTANT: If you have questions, please ask them here in this thread or on my Twitch stream. I'm NOT answering build-related questions in-game and rarely check PMs! I hope you understand. Also please don't sell and trade items here. Thank you.



Hello and welcome to my guide.

A little bit of background: I've always been intrigued by the unique sword Oro's Flicker Strike. It has one of the highest DPS numbers in-game, yet only deals fire damage and comes with an array of different interesting and original affixes. I told myself "I HAVE to give this a try". So I finally did... I've spent some time theorycrafting, researching and crunching numbers and the result is AWESOME. The character resembles is something you'd see in animes and samurai movie.

Your character moves and attacks so fast your filthy non-chosen-ones enemies can't even see you. You don't look back, then sheath your sword and they fall into pieces... destroyed by your assault of awesome moves taught you by the legendary Sensei you're avenging. MAYBE I got carried away a tiny bit. In Path of Exile terms that means automatic target acquisition comfort, high damage, high AoE and amazing clearspeed. This build is also equally good against single tough baddies and at AoE clearing.

On top of the amazing clearspeed this build has 3 major upsides: it has a budget start-cost that can clear a lot of content easily, it's VERY tanky and there's still room and items to grow if you want to invest into this build.



PROS:
  • Very stylish and fun gameplay. If you like kill bill, you'll love this.
  • High clear speed. Automatic target acquisition comfort with 15+++ attacks per second.
  • A real powerhouse. Destroys single targets and crowds both
  • Can run most map mods
  • VERY tanky. 6500+ life, fortify, enfeeble, armor, arctic armor...
  • Stun immune, yet can still evade
  • Massive, augmented life-leech
  • Takes full use of it's ascendancy class (100% of all bonuses are useful and "impact"-full (heh))
  • Budget start (1-5c). Full equipment (excluding 6L/headhunter) costs 2-5ex.
  • Moves/attacks so fast it dodges most attacks
  • Only deals fire damage and penetrates a lot of fire resists. Warning: hot stuff.
  • Dual curse
  • Culling strike


CONS:
  • WARNING: VERY fast, please be careful if you're suffering from epilepsy/seizures. (check videos)
  • Can't run reflect maps
  • Needs to swap to a different attack for Argus/Atziri (ignite immune)
  • Sometimes a bit laggy (25 blink strikes per second kind of cause this)
  • Very chaotic movement at times, can leave behind single mobs
  • "Porcupines" are a threatening enemy.




Mechanics:

Path of Exile has one rule - prioritize defense. If the defensive mechanics of a build fail, the build is bad and you should feel bad. That's why this setup relies on several combined defensive mechanics to protect your skin.

Defensive Mechanics
We get up to 6500-7500 life. This should make you immune against pretty much every single one-shot with the possible exception of core malachai smash and vaal smash (which are NOT meant to be tanked). You can even go hardcore if you're brave.

Now some of you might say "but this is not enough without mitigation" and you'd be right. However, we DO have this mitigation in form of blasphemy enfeeble, armor, arctic armor and fortify

Defenses:
  • Arctic armor (~13% damage reduction + conditional chill)
  • Fortify (~20% damage reduction)
  • Armor/Evasion (+can run flasks to boost those)
  • Enfeeble with 10% curse effectiveness. Massive 30-40% practical damage reduction (+accuracy, crit reduction)
  • 3 (with direct access to 6) endurance charges and a level 20 immortal call
  • Increased maximum resistances with ruby and vinktar flasks, 1 dynamic flask slot for Granite/Stibnite/TasteOfHate


We combine this with our massive lifeleech, stun immunity and attack-displacement, which causes you to dodge most attacks and recover ~25% HP per second (+regen +flasks).

So what CAN kill us? Elemental reflect maps can. Don't run those. Also porcupines. If you're running a high tier map with porcupines, use your enduring cry all the time. Hugging their on-death spike novas is a great way to get bursted down, without enduring cry. Some maps can also add elemental damage to their novas. The elemental damage is less deadly but can bypass immortall call. Don't autocruise with flickerstrike here or use leapslam. On hardcore I'd abandon a T10+ porcupine map with ele bonus damage + more than 1 other damage modifier.

What else? Getting smashed by T14 vaal, while ignoring his ~5 seconds wind-up attack. Stupidity mostly.

tl;dr: You'll be just fine.

If you're curious about finding out how this build works mechanically and where it gets the damage from, please check these 2 spoilers:

Flicker Strike mechanics
Tanking damage is all good and fine, but how do we kill the bad guys?

Flicker strike usually only attacks one target, has a 2 seconds cooldown and just causes a "poof" in most builds.
Well the answer is: sustaining frenzy charges.

Flicker strike bypasses it's cooldown if you gain a frenzy charge.
We're running the Sword Oro's Sacrifice, which grants us a frenzy charge if we ignite the target.
We ignite the target in 35++% of all cases with one attack and we attack 3 times, wich a single flicker strike (multistrike)
We also gain frenzy charges by killing enemies (we're using bloodrage for that).

We also splash our damage for "free" by using the impact node from the slayer ascendancy.

The result is a setup that generates more charges than it consumes (and can keep flickering for 30-60 seconds on single targets without running out of charges).

Damage Mechanics - how to vaporize baddies
This explains our attacks, but does not explain our damage.

Our damage mostly comes from our sword Oro's (designed by the supporter: Oroboro - thank you dude).
This sword can have up to 774 DPS. The only items that exceed this DPS are mirror-level items, that only exist in the standard league and are unobtainable without years of gameplay and currency farming.

That being said Oro's DPS is elemental, which is harder to scale and is subject to fire resistance.

However, with our skilltree we have access to up to 15% penetration + our fire pen gem + flammability, which negates or at least reduces the resistances by a lot. We're also taking advantage of elemental overload (which we trigger easily with the boots enchantment and 10+ attacks per second) and the weapon elemental damage gem, that grant us 2 massives MORE damage modifiers. This is complimented by 300-400% increased damage from the tree and several strong attack speed boosts (multistrike and faster attacks gem). Flicker strike also receives a MASSIVE attack speed boost from it's internal MORE attack speed boost and our 5 frenzy charges. Also the 5 frenzy charges provide 20% MORE damage and 20% increased attack speed.

Finally we didn't even talk about our items. We get a lot more damage from our rings, amulet, belt and kaom's heart (armor).

Is this enough? Yes. However, let us go one step further. We take full advantage of our flasks. We get over 50% MORE damage by using "vessel of vinktar" (shock, +some flat ele damage) and 15% MORE damage from atziri's promise. We can also run a silver flask and vaal haste for even more attack speed. Oh and we also ignite targets, which deals a lot more damage than you'd expect (due to double dipping scaling). Also we get culling strike, which pretty much is a 10% MORE damage multiplier.

Is this enough?! Hell Yeah. However, we can still take it one level higher by using the gloves "null and void". With these gloves we gain the rampage effect, which gives us damage and speed, if we kill enemies in a quick streak (you have to at least one baddy every 8 seconds to keep it up, which is VERY easy). On top of that we also get some nice gimmicks from the gloves and the rampage effect explodes in fire novas, detonate dead explosions and other cool effects every ~50 kills.

How does it all add up? I'm not even sure... it's not easy to calculate the real DPS of flicker strike accurately. However, it melts bosses within seconds (check the videos). I suspect that the DPS is somewhere between 350k and 800k DPS depending on your equipment and enemy resistances (with charges and flasks, without any snowballing).
not enough?
However, IF you can afford it and think your poor PC and eyes can handle 20-40 attacks per second without melting (mine can't, but I'm still doing it), you can go one step further and ascend once more, by adding the headhunter belt (WARNING: rare, V E R Y expensive and not required by any means). At this point you won't be dealing with the average endgame-slayer any more. You'll rise above and become a legend, the legend everyone fears, the legendary super-slayer (sorry, silly reference).

Frankly, it'll just cause your character to take a gallon of crack, steal rare mobs mods and will cause your damage, speed, attack speed to skyrocket and is super annoying if you steal shroud walker. Also everyone will envy you and random people will try to scam and lend it from you. #justheadhunterthings





Video material:

Full video guide! - this covers pretty much everything we'll talk about here in video form. It also includes full clears of several T8-11 maps.



Other things:


I livestream every monday, thursday and saturday at 20:00 GMT +1 and participate in all major PoE event. I'd be honored if you'd join us to have a chat. You can also ask your questions about the build there. Expect PoE, maybe some other games and zee English mixed with german accent.


If you want to stay informed about the updates on this guide and my other PoE projects, streaming, filter and videos, feel free to take a look at my twitter.


If you're looking for a new lootfilter (the one used in my videos), you can find it in the thread above.



The skiltree is mostly focused around fire damage, ignite chance, fire pen and life (lots of it). We use the jewel node in the duelist area in order to convert the passives Destroyer and Wrecking ball into fire damage.

You want to have this skilltree ready by level 68, so that you can start using Oro's sacrifice:



This skilltree will allow you to clear dried lake and low maps very easily and level up rapidly. I recommend the following endgame skilltree:



You can invest further nodes into more life, charges, jewel sockets or the fire damage cluster in the witch area.


BANDITS:
  • NORMAL: Help Oak (+40 HP)
  • CRUEL: Slay All (+1 Skillpoint)
  • MERCILESS: Help Kraityn (+1 frenzy charge)




There are several good ascendancy class choices: slayer, champion, chieftain, juggernaut, berserker, elementalist and even trickster all provide strong bonuses to our gameplay.



However, after some evaluation I found the slayer class to be the superior in most aspects. The slayer class saves us 1 skillgem (impact node), further enhances our lifeleech, gives us some damage and attack speed and finally grants us stun immunity, while preserving our chance to dodge. Some ascendancy classes may an edge to other bonuses (berserker deals more damage and elementalist can shock without vinktars), but overall I feel like the slayer gives us a strong very well rounded kit to play with and I recommend using it.

Please don't PM me ingame with filter/guide questions, post them on the forum, after reading the FAQ.
Last edited by NeverSink on Jul 19, 2016, 3:33:54 AM
Last bumped on Sep 11, 2017, 8:52:00 PM


Let's take a look at our skillgems. You can probably guess that Flicker Strike is our main attack. You need at least 4 links for a good experience, but 5 or 6 are obviously better.

Use the following gems in your main link (inside of Oro's Sacrifice):


You can also replace the fortify with something like chance to ignite and keep running the fortify in your leap-slam link, but I feel like our frenzy charge sustain is good enough anyway.

Speaking of which: this is our leapslam link:


If you don't have a 6L yet use fortify instead of blood magic here. We don't need blood magic, but it prevents you from running out of mana in low regen maps where you jump around a lot. The enduring cry can be moved to another link.

The enduring cry is VERY important by the way. You want to use it in maps with "porcupines" all the time (the spiky bird-kangaroo things that explode in spike novas) to increase the duration of your immortal call. This is our immortal call/vaal haste setup:


I recommend running a high level immortal call/CWDT setup. Finally the final link requires the unique Heretic's Veil and the Dual Curse node in the skilltree. The final link is:


I recommend reserving your mana for Arctic Armor / Flammability / Enfeeble. This setup grants us the defenses we need to survive most situations, while also boosting our damage. Finally we also run blood rage to sustain frenzy charges and for the extra attack speed. We need the unique heretic's veil to run all 3 gems, until then, just skip enfeeble and run blasphemy.

I also recommend running one of the following gems in the offslot: frenzy/iceblades/molten strike/wild strike. You want to swap them with your flicker strike quickly for Argus/Atziri/Malachai (those guys are immune to ignites). You can also use those effectively for levelling.



RESPECT THE FIVE GOLDEN RULES:
  • GET MORE LIFE - Try to get life in every rare item. Replacing some items with uniques without life is OK, but you need to compensate the HP. A dead slayer doesn't do much damage.
  • CAP RESISTANCES - 75% fire/cold/lightning resistance are your goal. You don't have to hit it instantly, but if you're dying in cruel/merciless and have negative resistances, you know what you got to do.
  • DON'T NEGELCT YOUR ATTIRBUTES - Depending on your setup, you'll want up to 155 int/dex. You want to get at least 20-30 dex/int from your rings/amulets. You can save valuable nodes by optimizing your equipment a bit more.
  • DON'T GO OVERBOARD ON UNIQUES - Unique items often provide great advantages. Yet they come at a great cost: most of them lack defensive mechanics. Using too many of them WILL often get you killed.
  • IMPROVE YOUR FLASKS - Having high quality, adjusted flasks and the right unique flasks often means the difference between life and death and can more than double your clear speed! Take care of your flasks!


the weapon - the only thing you need to start

+


This sword with at least 4 links (you don't need 5 or 6).
Yes it's that cheap. You can absolutely start playing maps with only this sword and slowly farm all the other items (that are not too expensive either in total).

helmet


I recommend using the helmet Heretic's Veil. This allows us to run two blasphemied curses at the same time, without the need of the blasphemy gem or any mana reservation reduction. There are other ways to achieve that, but I like this one the most. It also saves us the sockets (and we really need those)

body armor



I don't think I really need to explain it. Tons of life, fire damage and some amror on top. THis armor is just perfect for us. It's also become increasingly easy to afford (~1ex). Alternatively you can also use a rare armor or bellyof the beast

gloves


These legacy gloves are awesome. The rampage bonus causes us to accelerate with every kill (you also get a sweet kill counter) and increases your speed/damage. It also triggers some fancy effects. You'll love those and it encourages you to play better.

Also they give quite a bit of life

belts

There are 3 options here.



Doryani's is the checapest option. All of it's bonuses are super useful and the only downside is: it barely gives any life.

A good rare belt is slightly better. It provides all the bonuses of Doryani's (except for the ignite chance) and can also give quite a bit of life.

Finally the best option is headhunter... but it's VERY expensive and NOT needed by any means. However, if you do have it, you'll love it, the destruction and fun it causes is insane. It also helps with the dexterity needed

remaining Items

Rares! You want to use quite a few rares so you can cap out your resistances


You want the following stats:

-Life
-Resistances
-Some dex (around ~30)
-300-400 accuracy total
-Weapon elemental damage
-Attack speed

flasks


The 2.3 update did a lot of good for us. We now get free onslaught half of the time and bleed immunity, which technically saves up a whole flasks. This allows us to have more diversity in the flasks we run.

So here are the flasks I recommend:

1 - Life flask with anti-freeze
2 - Granite Flask with more Armor
3 - Atziri's Promise
4 - Ruby flask - with Shock removal/immunity
5 - Vinktar's - with flat lightning damage on hit




jewels

You absolutely want:


Every other jewel is optional. You're looking for the following combination of affixes:

+ max% life
+ fire damage
+ attack speed with swords

+ melee damage
+ general damage
+ increased maximum armor
+ mana on hit
+ dexterity/int is ok
+ attack speed with two handed weapons
+ attack speed
+ chance to ignite

examples:



If a jewel at least has 3 of those bonuses it usually is pretty good. Especially the bolded ones.

enchantments, corruptions and optional stuff

1) We want the War/Spite/Reflection enchantment on gloves
2) We want the increased crit chance enchantment on your boots to increase your chances of triggering elemental overload
3) Ideally we want flammability/enfeeble curse effectiveness. Leap slam curse effectiveness or flicker strike bonuses are also neat though.

If you want to go for absolute maximum optimization, you can also try getting your gems to 21, by corrupting them (faster attacks is better off getting 23% quality instead).

You can also try corrupting your kaoms for +1% maximum resistances if you're crazy enough.




My Equip+Gems



LEVELLING:
  • WEAPONS - Use two handed-weapons while levelling, grab wrecking ball + destroyer in the duelist area fast
  • SKILLS - Use molten strike and any AoE skill (I like sunder). Molten strike will still scale with your fire damage.
  • PASSIVES - You CAN also skill one of the 3 weapon wheels+resolute technique left from the marauder (sword/axe/mace) to accelerate the process. We don't need our respec points otherwise, so it's not a bad idea.
  • MAROHI ERQI - Buy a Marohi Erqi for a few C if you can afford it. It'll make your progress to 68 faster
  • OFFSLOT GEMS - You want to level a flicker strike, fire pen., weapon elemental damage, blood rage, arctic armor and flammability in random sockets/offslot while levelling.
  • DIFFICULTY - Overall I didn't feel like levelling was hard, nasty or complicated.




COMPILATION OF RANDOM ADVICE:
  • HOW TO SURVIVE REFLECT - This seemed very hard to me at first, but it turned out to be fairly easy: ruby flask + enfeeble blasphemy + arctic armor + fortify + life leech. This will not make reflect harmless/ignorable, but it will allow you to survive reflect rares without issues. I still do NOT recommend running reflect maps
  • MOLTEN STRIKE - Argus and Atziri can not be ignited. I recommend swapping flicker strike to molten strike in such cases.
  • USE YOUR COOLDOWNS - Always, always keep your enduring cry on cooldown if the map has those exploding... bristlebacks? Those strange things that explode in spikes. Also use your vaal haste it provides a significant clear speed boost. I don't think I have to tell you to keep your flask buffs up.
  • THAT FIRST STRIKE IS IMPORTANT - Once we're flickering, it's very very hard to die. We have crazy leech, constant flask uptime, high defenses etc. However, there is one weakness you should be aware of. We're only stun immune and bleeding immune when leeching, so don't do anything reckless like RUN into groups of mobs (you can also use one of the counter-attack gems). That being said, the chance that this is an actual danger with our level of HP is very low
  • READ MODS - Yes this is somewhat hard, but it's also essential. Necrovigils require you to stop flickering, refresh your flasks on reflect mobs, be careful about on-death effects, such as volatiles and bombers.
  • DON'T BE AFRAID TO EXPERIMENT - Want to try out Emberwake+The taming? Do it. Test out items, maybe consider using death's door, somehow grabbing vaal pact. Try your own skilltree variations. Consider other ascendancy classes. Path of exile is about the PATH not the result. Be creative and enjoy the game


Please don't PM me ingame with filter/guide questions, post them on the forum, after reading the FAQ.
Last edited by NeverSink on Jul 19, 2016, 3:33:28 AM
"
Credits wrote:

IMAGES:

All content, pictures and content created and written by me. I've used some of GGG's game art to create it. Also in order to create the imagery, I've been using the following things:

- Thanks to ObsidianDawn for providing the awesome Arcane Circles Photoshop Brushkit that I've been using for the images!
- I also used the Fractal Brushset by "above-and-beyond" (check out his DeviantArt)

SPECIAL THANKS:

- Special thanks to: Haggis and Tobnac
- And of course to GGG and their amazing game and support

Please don't PM me ingame with filter/guide questions, post them on the forum, after reading the FAQ.
Last edited by NeverSink on Apr 16, 2016, 1:50:35 PM
reserved
Please don't PM me ingame with filter/guide questions, post them on the forum, after reading the FAQ.
Last edited by NeverSink on Apr 16, 2016, 1:24:28 PM
Awwwwwwesome! Gonna run this build after work!
Nice work here!
RAAAAAAAA!

(╯ಠ益ಠ)╯︵ ┻━┻ ︵ ǝ︵ o︵ d

I'm out.
Dang, this build could be exactly what I have been looking for. Question: do you think this could be uber viable? I know you are still testing, but just curious how you feel at this point in time.
I've been 83+ oro flicker myself for some time but I stopped playing it because 100% elemental dmg to reflect mob is too much. How does your build deal with ele reflect mobs? Running high phys dmg char with hatred already can be dangerous but 100% is fucking huge. I lose about 70% of my hp with minimal 4link cyclone spin.
"
Savorrow wrote:
Dang, this build could be exactly what I have been looking for. Question: do you think this could be uber viable? I know you are still testing, but just curious how you feel at this point in time.


I don't think so. Atziri is immune to ignite and we need to ignite to keep our flicker chain up. Without it, we lose a lot of power. We can do normal atziri without any problems by replacing flicker strike with molten strike/frenzy/wild strike, but I think that's not good enough for uber atziri

"

I've been 83+ oro flicker myself for some time but I stopped playing it because 100% elemental dmg to reflect mob is too much. How does your build deal with ele reflect mobs? Running high phys dmg char with hatred already can be dangerous but 100% is fucking huge. I lose about 70% of my hp with minimal 4link cyclone spin.


This seemed very hard to me at first, but it turned out to be fairly easy: ruby flask + enfeeble blasphemy + arctic armor + fortify + life leech. This will not make reflect harmless/ignorable, but it will allow you to survive reflect rares without issues. I still do NOT recommend running reflect maps



Also the guide is ready :) Just a few minor things left to improve :)
Please don't PM me ingame with filter/guide questions, post them on the forum, after reading the FAQ.
Last edited by NeverSink on Apr 16, 2016, 2:14:18 PM
Hi thanks for sharing this look so fun!

I'm actualy lvling a duelist i'm lvl 38 using ice crash to lvl up. Have you an advice/idear for speed lvling? what skill you used for lvling? unless its a respect char ^^'

Thanks and fly safe.

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