Flicker Strike Suggestions

I'm currently playing flicker strike and while it's fun, it can be a bit frustrating.


Currently, the way flicker seems to work, is that immediately after flicking to the first target, the skill attempts to spend all your power charges. It then repeats based on the number consumed and at the end, if you have charges leftover, it'll try spending them again and repeating. This goes on until either you run out of charges or have no valid targets left.


This is a lot of fun as you can get around 70% chance to not consume charges, letting you teleport all over the place after pressing flicker strike once.


However, since it attempts to spend all your power charges at once, it does mean that if you flick to an enemy that's on its own and kill it, you spend all your power charges, but get no more repeats (because there are no targets to repeat on). So you end up spending a while building up your stack of 7 power charges, flick into a pack, only to have the random targeting take you to a skeleton sitting in the corner, ending the chain and eating all your charges in the process.


It just feels awful. If I use flicker strike on the skeleton standing alone, then yeah its a skill issue and I wasted those charges, but thanks to the random nature of flicker strike, I'm occasionally forced into that bad feeling without any control over it.


So my suggestion is this: rather than spending all the charges at once, have flicker strike spend charges one at a time. So it'll hit the first enemy, spend 1 charge, flick twice, spend 1 charge, flick twice, etc. That way, if you flick to the lonely skeleton, you only spend 1 charge and not all 7, preserving 6 so you can walk back to where the rest of the enemies are and continue your wild flickerstrike adventure.

This also has the benefit of smoothing out charge consumption chances since you're rolling consumption way more often. Roll the dice more often and the variance goes down. And since the skill already loops if you have charges remaining, it otherwise works exactly the same as it does right now.




My other suggestion comes from something that happened when playing falling thunder: when using falling thunder, you have a wind up period where you leap into the air before landing and actually using the attack. The skill only checks your charges at the end, so you can line things up with profane ritual's duration so that you gain your charge just before you land, getting the benefit without needing to wait. It felt really sick to do, and it would be cool if flicker strike had the same property. Flicker strike prevents you from gaining charges while in use, but if you just delay that effect during the windup until after the first strike lands, it'd have the same feel as falling thunder. I get why you might want to prevent flicker from gaining charges while teleporting to make sure it eventually has to end, but during that windup, it should be "safe" to allow charge gain there, no? And while not super commonly used I think it could add a little "oh that was cool" moment.



Also, it would be nice if the targeting was just a touch smarter/more consistent.

There's that undead swampy graveyard map where zombies spawn in the swamp and walk to land. Flicker strike really likes to target those zombies, but they're not in a location where I can teleport, so I end up just stuck teleporting against the edge of the map doing nothing while the zombie slowly shambles forward.

Against bosses, I find that I teleport in place a lot. Which while cute in its own way to just sit in place wiggling a bit and doing tons of damage, is plays significantly less into the flicker strike skill fantasy compared to having the character teleporting to random sides of the boss. (if the worry is about the camera shaking a ton, have it center on the target of the teleport instead of the character itself. it'll be indistinguishable against groups and avoid jitters when repeating the strikes on the same target)

Finally, there's the rare modifier that makes nearby allies immune. That mod is very annoying as flicker since the immune allies are still valid targets. I want to focus down the rare in the middle, but the flicker gods have determined I must instead spend all my charges hitting the invulnerable white crab.