[3.0] Burn Baby Burn: Oro's Flicker + Self-proc Vaal Molten Shell Slayer

BURN BABY BURN: Oro's Flicker + Self-proc Vaal Molten Shell Slayer







Table of Contents:
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Videos
  • 3. Equipment
  • 4. Gems
  • 5. Passives and Character Options
  • 6. Mechanics
  • 7. Leveling and Progression
  • 8. Links



1. Introduction
Spoiler
Welcome to the guide!

This is a build guide for a slightly atypical Oro's Flicker Strike Slayer. The build focuses on using a few different mechanics to supplement its Flicker Strike damage by proccing the explosions from a high-uptime Vaal Molten Shell very quickly, while also leeching HP at an extremely high rate.

You might enjoy playing this character if:
  • ...you like playing Flicker Strike.
  • ...you enjoy builds with a lot of moving parts that depend on somewhat fiddly mechanical interactions.
  • ...you want something with high clearspeed, but you're tired of Vaal Pact.


You should probably avoid this build if:
  • ...playing Flicker Strike makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
  • ...you want to excel at killing end-game bosses (the build can scrape by killing Guardians, but its reliance on Vaal Molten Shell for peak DPS means it struggles on bosses with multiple phases).
  • ...you're looking for a good starting character (the build requires two league-specific uniques, one with several off-colors, and a Guardian-only unique, making it a poor choice for a league starter; it's also a touch mechanically complex, making it perhaps not the best choice for new players).



2. Videos
Spoiler



3. Equipment
Spoiler
Uniques:


Most of these items are required for the build to work. The main exception is Sibyl's Lament, which can be replaced with a rare ring, or perhaps a Malachai's Artifice with your golem socketed in it, if you don't mind being somewhat more vulnerable to elemental reflect.



Rares:


Since we use so many unique items, we need to squeeze as much life, resists, and mana onto our rares as we can (in that order of priority).



Flasks:


The first flask (Seething Divine Life Flask of Dousing) is required; the others are more flexible. The Wise Oak is the best available unique flask for the build, but balancing resistances for it can be a pain, especially with so few slots for rare items.

Freeze removal and curse removal are the two most important suffixes on our utility flasks, especially now that the Warding suffix works on curses from map mods. The Quicksilver could easily be replaced with another flask, since we mostly use Leap Slam for movement; I just find it to be a nice quality of life boost.



Jewels:


Sacrificial Harvest helps with Vaal Molten Shell uptime. Fireborn allows the Duelist 2H nodes (Destroyer and Wrecking Ball clusters) to apply to our Oro's damage.

The rest of our jewels are used to finish balancing out our resists for The Wise Oak, grabbing a little life, mana, attack speed, and damage where we can.



4. Gems
Spoiler
Gem links listed in order of importance:

Chest (6-Link): Flicker Strike - Multistrike - Chance to Ignite - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Fire Penetration - Immolate

Weapon (6-Link): Vaal Molten Shell - Concentrated Effect - Immolate - Fire Penetration - Increased Duration - Elemental Focus

Any 4-Link: Cast when Damage Taken (1) - Firestorm (8) - Curse on Hit - Warlord's Mark

Any 4-Link: Leap Slam - Faster Attacks - Fortify - Ancestral Protector

Any 4-Socket (pair of 2-Links): Cast when Damage Taken (20) - Summon Lightning Golem (20); Vengeance - Blind



I recommend prioritizing linking your chest over your Oro's; better to have a 6L Flicker Strike and a 5L Vaal Molten Shell than the other way around. When coloring the chest, make sure you're aware of the Vorici Jeweller method; it will save you a substantial amount of currency.



5. Passives and Character Options


6. Mechanics
Spoiler
Oro's Sacrifice + Flicker Strike

This combo should be familiar to anyone who's played much, as it's an entire build archetype. Flicker Strike requires Frenzy Charges; Oro's Sacrifice gives you a Frenzy Charge whenever you ignite an enemy. Since we're igniting enemies constantly to keep up our Frenzy Charges anyway, that opens up the opportunity to use...



Ignites + Eye of Innocence + The Rat Cage + Vaal Molten Shell

Eye of Innocence deals 100 fire damage to you whenever you ignite an enemy (remember, we're igniting enemies constantly in order to keep flickering). The Rat Cage converts 10% of fire damage taken into physical damage. Vaal Molten Shell explodes every time you take any amount of physical damage.

Put those things together, toss in a low-level Firestorm, and you get a bit north of 20 Vaal Molten Shell explosions per second. With a 6L Vaal Molten Shell, that's a lot of damage.

But while we're dealing fire damage to ourselves anyway...



Eye of Innocence + Mokou's Embrace + instant flask of Dousing + Slayer leech + Soul of Arakaali's first upgrade + The Flow Untethered

Eye of Innocence deals fire damage to us, but by itself it can't ignite. We solve that with Mokou's Embrace, which gives +25% chance to be ignited, meaning we're more-or-less constantly on fire.

The Soul of Arakaali pantheon power, once enhanced with its first upgrade, gives 50% increased recovery of life if you've stopped taking damage over time recently. Crucially, it doesn't care how long you stopped taking damage over time for. We pop our Seething Divine Life Flask of Dousing, removing the ignite on us. Since Eye of Innocence is dealing hits of fire damage to us a bajillion times per second, it comes right back, but that doesn't matter; as long as we removed it for even an instant, we get +50% life recovery, which bypasses the leech cap.

(You might have seen this combo recently using Blood Rage + Immortal Call; we're just doing the same thing with ignite and an instant Dousing flask instead.)

And while we're at it, we won't say no to 2% fire damage leech, a bunch of increased damage, and some increased attack speed while ignited, plus another 20% increased life recovery and some lovely clearspeed goodies from The Flow Untethered that stacks with the Arakaali buff.



7. Leveling and Progression:
Spoiler
Our early nodes give us easy access to life, damage with two-handed weapons, and an early Frenzy Charge; this means the character is fairly easy to level as a standard melee start.

I recommend the following main skills during early leveling:
  • 1-11: Cleave.
  • 12-27: If you feel like it, switch to Sunder, which requires an axe or a mace. If not, nothing wrong with sticking to Cleave.
  • 28-66: Add an Ancestral Warchief to the mix; no need to stop using your own melee skill of choice, though.
  • 67+: Grab your Oro's and start flickering.

Your tree at 67 (when you should start using Flicker Strike) might look something like this. If you can't yet afford the Fireborn jewel, your 2-hander nodes won't apply to your Oro's damage (they're phys-only); in that case you might use this one instead.

Ascendancy points should be allocated to Bane of Legends, Endless Hunger, Impact, and Brutal Fervor, in that order; this will let you get high-uptime onslaught early on when what you want most is speed, pick up Slayer leech around the time leech starts to be useful, grab splash damage right around the time you start using Flicker Strike, and save stun immunity for end-game, when it matters most.

Don't feel like you have to rush into the full version of this build right away when you hit maps - this tree functions perfectly well as a normal Oro's flicker build, and you can play it that way for as long as you like while you save up for The Rat Cage (including coloring and linking it) and the other more expensive bits.



8. Links:
Last edited by Twirlip on Sep 15, 2017, 2:33:39 AM
Last bumped on Apr 21, 2018, 3:05:22 PM
(Formatting now fixed!)
Last edited by Twirlip on Sep 15, 2017, 12:55:12 AM
pretty sick build. bookmarked for future leagues
IGN: EchelonTL, neophyte
Guild: Team Liquid
hello... 1 question.. i am duying at tier 11 maps ++ .. 2- 3 times everytime.. but i have better stats then you have on the gear!? what am i doing wrong???
"
simarillion wrote:
hello... 1 question.. i am duying at tier 11 maps ++ .. 2- 3 times everytime.. but i have better stats then you have on the gear!? what am i doing wrong???

Hard to say for sure without more info (can't see your character tab), but some guesses:

  • Are you remembering to apply Fortify? 20% reduced damage taken is a lot. Normally you can keep this up without thinking about it just by Leap Slamming into packs as you move around, but on longer fights (like against Harbingers, since you have to wait for them to summon stuff), you might need to remember to use Leap Slam once in a while to keep Fortify up even if you don't need to go anywhere.
  • Are your resists balanced for The Wise Oak? Since both Oro's and The Rat Cage have increased fire damage taken on them, it can be pretty easy to get rekt by a bunch of fire damage at once if you don't have some additional mitigation for it. If your resists are balanced, The Wise Oak provides both penetration and mitigation for fire, but if not you have to choose between them.
  • Do you have Warlord's Mark on your Firestorm? I originally thought I'd be able to skip this and put Chance to Ignite on that setup, but with 90+% ignite chance, no endurance charges, and no leech on the Firestorm besides the base 2% from Eye of Innocence, I would occasionally ignite an entire pack at once and instagib myself with Eye of Innocence procs (not 2-3 times per map, though, that's a lot). Switching to the gem setup in the OP resolved this for me.
  • Are you remembering to use your life flask as a buff flask, not just an oh-shit button? Remember that in addition to its instant heal, it gives you 50% increased leech for 4 seconds whenever you use it.
  • How are your life and mana totals? You mention having better stats on gear, so this probably isn't the issue, but good to check. Also, just to be sure, you didn't like forget to allocate MoM or something did you?

If none of these are the issue, I'd be happy to take a look at your character to see if I can spot what might be going wrong, you'd just need to set your characters tab to public in your account settings.
Last edited by Twirlip on Sep 19, 2017, 9:05:14 PM
Hello, thank you a lot for awesome build. I got few questions:
Why not blood magic?
Is firestorm needed? We can replace for other curse?
Chest gear is really hard to find, no one sell it on poe.trade now.
hi.I'd want to know if the unique armour is necessary. I have a 6L belly of the beast and it can also offer high max life. Or the "-50% fire resistance" is necessary for igniting?
I tried the How to Flicker, Terminus est edition guide, it was good, but too weak against the bosses because of too difficult stacking of crirical chance, also, because of Kaom's had quite enough of life. Another bad thing of that build was pretty not enough life leech without Atziri's Acuity which is reeealy too expensive.
Having invested about 350 chaos in that character using this build, I got this:
lvl:82
Life:3735
Mana:1619
Avg damage: 3728 + molten shel (in fact alot more)
Resistanses: 76% each (111% with oak)
Missing links at shell and flicker right now, but im too poor for 6l
Current gear:
Spoiler

I have also added
at the socket before the Acrobatics and allocated Herbalism, Heartseeker and Survivalist so that it works.
What is yr opinion about it(setup in general and jewel in particular)? Flicker clears map so fast, so little hh is quite useful i think, but maybe i should aim for more +life nodes?
Last edited by Yzzzzi on Oct 27, 2017, 4:56:54 AM
"
khachavippoe wrote:
Hello, thank you a lot for awesome build. I got few questions:
Why not blood magic?
Is firestorm needed? We can replace for other curse?
Chest gear is really hard to find, no one sell it on poe.trade now.

You could probably make a good version of this build with Blood Magic. I haven't been able to put one together that gets a higher total life pool than this one does with MoM, but it's entirely possible it could be done.

Firestorm isn't exactly required, but it's an easy way to proc a whole bunch of ignites per second, which ups our VMS damage significantly.

Yep, getting the chest is a pain in the butt, because it's Torment league specific, which means most of them are coming from Time Lost Relic or similar. I bought mine for about 55c early in the league, but coloring and linking it was the most painful part of gearing this character.

"
chm0523 wrote:
hi.I'd want to know if the unique armour is necessary. I have a 6L belly of the beast and it can also offer high max life. Or the "-50% fire resistance" is necessary for igniting?

The chest is absolutely necessary for the build's main trick to work. It's not the "-50% to fire resistance" doing the work, though, it's the "10% of fire damage taken as physical damage."

The way this build works is:
  • You Flicker, igniting on pretty much every attack, plus extra ignites from your CwDT Firestorm.
  • Every time you ignite something, Eye of Innocence deals fire damage to you.
  • A portion of that fire damage is converted to physical damage by The Rat Cage.
  • Every time you take physical damage, your Vaal Molten Shell procs and explodes, dealing lots of fire damage in an area around you.

You can make a good Oro's Flicker build without The Rat Cage, but the trick that makes this build tick requires it.

"
Yzzzzi wrote:
I tried the How to Flicker, Terminus est edition guide, it was good, but too weak against the bosses because of too difficult stacking of crirical chance, also, because of Kaom's had quite enough of life. Another bad thing of that build was pretty not enough life leech without Atziri's Acuity which is reeealy too expensive.
Having invested about 350 chaos in that character using this build, I got this:
lvl:82
Life:3735
Mana:1619
Avg damage: 3728 + molten shel (in fact alot more)
Resistanses: 76% each (111% with oak)
Missing links at shell and flicker right now, but im too poor for 6l
Current gear:
Spoiler

I have also added
at the socket before the Acrobatics and allocated Herbalism, Heartseeker and Survivalist so that it works.
What is yr opinion about it(setup in general and jewel in particular)? Flicker clears map so fast, so little hh is quite useful i think, but maybe i should aim for more +life nodes?

Headhunter (or Inspired Learning) sound pretty rad for a Flicker build; I'd be interested to hear how it works out for you.

Your life/mana total looks pretty low (only a bit above 5k total). I'd probably drop a few damage nodes for life nodes for now, and then work your way back into damage stuff as you level higher. You might also consider dropping Sibyl's for a decent rare ring, and just remember to be careful about reflect; reflect protection is great, but it's not worth much if you're dying all the time anyway because you only have 5.3k life on a melee build.
Last edited by Twirlip on Oct 28, 2017, 1:57:16 PM
This is a cool as heck rehash of the old VMS builds. Although there isn't very much "Vaal molten slug*" action going on. *(Where VMS is procing enough to leave a "slug" like trail behind the character)

If I'd ever do this build again, I'd def want to try it out as a flicker toon!

My old toons gear fron Legacy league, it probably can't do t16's anymore since ember-taming was gutted. Which is why I'd probably go your version of the build; My version relied on being able to kill bosses in the duration of a single VMS, and without 3000% increased damage from ember-taming, well the damage just isn't there anymore. :(
Spoiler
Last edited by djfang on Oct 28, 2017, 9:56:40 PM

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