[3.24] Holy Flicker Strike Necro [League start > All content] All content done. Rant time.

All but one challenges I did were completed solo and self farmed.
Even the lvl 100 one. I was considering to just go and buy 5 waves, but I got banned from TFT so I just farmed it in maps. 1% per map at lvl 99 – aint that bad.
I did cheated once – buying out a harvest boss because I spent 2 weeks farming harvests and could not find one. But that’s about it.

Another thing I wanna talk about is uber bosses after farming 100 of those for challenge.

Uber Shaper – prolly the easiest one of all in terms of accessibility and difficulty. After few tweaks to the build slams are tanked, beams are tickling, bullet hell is blockable. Tedious long run to get to the boss on other hand, but great loot with 15 ex jewels and fragment. That’s the boss I farmed the most.

Uber Uber Elder – fairly easy not much different from Shaper fight. Elder doesn’t really do anything important. You can even facetank his ring-nova explosions if you want.

Uber Cortex – super easy, fast but cost a lot. I don’t think there is anything there that can do significant damage. The degen zones are solved with tweaks below.

Uber maven Maven – dangerous fight. Not to you, but to your AG. Her attacks disable regen on your minions. It was several times when my AG went to half HP or less. Fight is relatively fast though, but not really rewarding.

Uber Sirus – similar to Maven. With tweaks to the build you are pretty safe in that fight, but the stacking beam debuff combined with corrupting blood killed my specters several times and almost killed my AG once. The fight is easy, but there is no way you wanna do it risking to lose AG. And you can’t disable AG too, because you REALLY need the effect of Garb at all times. Plus – rewards are very much nonexistent.

Uber Eater of Worlds – easy fight but boss does a lot of damage. Namely a lot of lightning damage – something we are vulnerable to. You could equip Topaz Flask for the fight – and I did. It helps. But most of things you block anyway. Rewards are nice, fight is super fast, but it’s a bit of a waste. Its just better to roll the invitation then do the uber version unrolled. And rolled one can get dangerous really fast.

Uber Searing Exarch – undoable. And I figured why. Turns out Holy Relics that stick to you by your sides have a pretty big hitbox. So there is no way to properly do a ball phase. Your combined fat ass will just not fit in the gaps Maven creates. You need to find holes 2 or even 3 balls wide, or else the ball explode against your relic, killing you. 5 portals, even non uber version.



The other thing I wanna mention Is how I feel about the league and game in general. I think this would be an accurate representation. It was not happy times.
And the fact that I’m grinding 40/40 and lvl 100 INSTEAD of playing the game kinda shows how boring it was for me. I am not happy with what has been done to the game, not happy with sentinel league and not happy with the direction game is going. And this is just my personal subjective opinion, so like everything I say it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Skin of the Lords keystones revisit.

Contestants – Wicked Ward, Lethe Shade, Imbalanced Guard.

Imbalanced guard.
Earlier in the league I made an error on how PoB calculates Imbalanced Guard damage reduction. In a few words – its much less powerful than I thought it is, but still pretty good.
Gives 13% - 5% (if using Determination) damage reduction up to 50% against big hits. Really good if you are not using any extra armor bits – you have 50% reduction against pretty much everything and have no need in determination or armor flask (although flask can make things much better early in the league).

Wicked Ward is okay-ish but doesn’t feel that great. Still it does help keeping ES up sometimes. Most of the time its not active, and when it is, you lose HP faster than ES so not great either way. Messes up Vall Discipline too if you have it ( you recover less ES per second). Still better than nothing.

Lethe Shade is insane on all bosses.
It’s a bit confusing how it works so here is an example. If you are standing in shaper beam, for the first 1 second you take 50% less damage from the beam. Then you take full damage. The effect has no cooldown and can be activated again instantly as long as you stopped taking damage overtime. In other words, if you just move in and out of damage zones, you be pretty much taking no damage.
This proven to be insanely good on most bosses. Because most bosses have degens that otherwise melt you. Shaper beams, anomalies, Elder decay zones, Cortex gravity wells, Maven beams, Sirus cancer-fire ground and vortexes.
Having Lethe Shade made me go from 5 portal Uber Sirus to deathless.
But you lose phys reduction from Imbalanced Guard. Unless you use determination. I think it’s the best option anyway.



Auras
First of all – mind that getting Ashes of the Stars unlocks you the ability to use one extra aura. It should be Vaal Discipline at all times as it gives you extra 750+ ES, a button to fully restore ES while taking damage and boost up ES regen out of combat.

The thing I was experimenting with was swapping Zealotry to Determination
This makes you lose 25% damage.

Did I feel the dps loss – yes, but it was not too big of a deal. It does make bosses use their primary mechanics twice instead of once though. So overall I think damage is more important to have.

You only can do the swap in super end game after you got Ashes, would not want to drop damage before that because you don’t get many.

What is more important than raw damage loss is - loss of consecrated ground and going down to 90% crit chance on relics. Its pretty bad. No regen for AG, and you want crit chance to be as high as it gets.

In return Determination gets you – 15% damage reduction against big hits – doesn’t make a difference tbh, those big hits either kill you or don’t, regardless of determination. If you survive - you’ll have 200 hp left vs 100.
That is because you convert phys into ele before armor reduction. And then w/e is left is reduced by armor.

But also you get 20%+ phys reduction while mapping. This is both good and bad – again – you convert 35%~ish damage into elemental and then 65% gets reduced by armour.

In relevance to the keystones you have – if you prefer using something other than Imbalanced guard – you get something like 25% extra phys damage reduction from Determination.

In conclusion – pretty much good form mapping to make sure you don’t die, and only after you got Ashes. I guess for pushing level 100? Maybe playing in HC.



Guard skills

So the interesting (and a bad) thing I figured out when testing different guard skills. Primal aegis takes damage before guard skill. That means if you have say 5k Molten Shell shield and 2k Primal Aegis, and take 2k elemental damage – your Molten Shell will not take damage at all. And your Aegis will break and go on a 5 second recharge timer.

Because of that Molten Shell sucks ass. Even with Determination. Cooldown is too long and big hits doesn’t break a half of its shield. So value is wasted and you have nothing for protection for 5 seconds. Its too much time. When your Primal Aegis breaks you NEED something else to be active and protecting you while it recharges.

Immortal Call. Sound really good on paper, feels really good on bosses, okay in maps.
Unlike other guard skills it makes you take less damage instead of giving you a shield. This is both good and bad.
Why is it bad:
1) Primal Aegis. When something hits you and you have Immortal Call up – instead of breaking your Aegis, it will damage it, leaving it say at 700 hp value. This is terrible, because you’d rather want it to break and recharge to full value, instead of sitting at 700 getting recharge interrupted by any follow up damage.
2) Recoup – taking less damage mean you recoup less. When Steelskin absorbs 2k damage – its damage taken – you recoup it. If you take 2k damage LESS from a hit it’s the damage you didn’t take.
Its not a big deal, however, I never felt like my regen suffers from it. I still go back to full fast without any life flasks.
3) The duration is too short.

Why is it good:
1) It reduces damage over time. Its nog a huge deal as Lethe Shade got your back, but still nice.
2) It scaled with enemy damage. The more damage you take the more value you get out of it. That being said – you should not even be tanking big hits. Just git gud and dodge those.
3) Cooldown and duration makes it perfect for endurance charge generation and consumption.


Steelskin – perfect in every way. Combined with endu charges makes you really tanky. Don’t need bleed flask. Duration is enough to use 2k hp fully, and have it again when you need it. Feels the best, even though not as good against big hits. You still don’t die from those, you just left with much less life.

In conclusion – just use Steelskin unless you want to make ‘tanking uber shaper slams’ montage. Otherwise use Immortal Call. But best see for yourself.


Summary – the build I’m ending up with is Lethe Shade keystone, Steelskin guard skill, Zealotry wins over Determination but I might use Determination just for mapping, idk.

PoB https://pastebin.com/2vuX4mnx