[3.24] Holy Flicker Strike Necro [League start > All content] All challenges done. Adjusting build

Grand Necromancer is an auto include. Frees up ALL the desecrate slots letting you include an automated Guard skill, third offering, or w/e you wish for yourself. Maybe golem with feeding frenzy. Maybe shield charge so you can 4 link static with AOE and duration for QoL. Get it in global 6666 or from someone in discord.

Warcaller and Specteral leader both options to consider to buff your own attack and move speed. I don’t use them (yet) but something to keep in mind.

Guilded arach – increases damage enemy take from chaos by 20% amazing for poison version of the build

Syndicate Silencer – 20% shock trap with 30% reduction to action speed – amazing for poison build, bad for flicker version.

Moontouched miscreation – stops all the healing – great for dealing with expedition healing, maven healing, conq ground healing – people forget about this one – its amazing when you don’t yet have huge DPS and enemies just heal up.

Range/poison version is better than melee at avoiding damage. Obviously, duh. And while in the most content this is not a problem, this is absolutely a problem in T17 and possibly sanctum (haven’t tested). And whats more important is not just avoiding damage as a player, but also avoiding damage done to your minions (more about that in rant).

Range/poison version is better than melee at keeping DPS uptime. Enemies cant avoid damage when its from stacked poison and because you are sniping them from range. While with melee version – they can just move out of your static strike range and you stop doing damage to them.

Poison DPS is mechanicaly better than phys DPS because it can not be reduced twice. Its… convoluted concept on how damage reduction work and how armor works, to keep things simple – when enemies have some form of damage reduction, suppress, less damage taken, immortal calls – poison would still do damage to them where Phys would be greatly reduced almost to nothing.

Poison DPS feels on par with Phys DPS on high end. That is a bit weird (and is noticed by other players) – it feels like it deals too much damage for some reason. Still from my feeling, if you don’t take uptime into account, Phys does more damage, although not by a huge amount

Poison damage is also delayed. That rare monster that you would one tap with phys will take 3-5 hits before poison stacks and kicks in.

Ranged playstyle feels a bit… clunky compared to static and flicker. While its pretty cozy to hit enemies from range, you need to stop entirely to perform a ranged attack. With static/flicker you are constantly moving.

Surprisingly enough, even on open layouts, I felt much more faster and fluid with shield charge/vaal flicker moving from pack to pack, then with ranged skills that could kill packs before I saw them. This could be a personal feeling though.

Poison also require less auras, but instead require more jewel sockets. This is a buff. As in sockets are easier to come by then reservation.

Lancing Steel of Spraying – the standart that everyone uses. Causes lots of hits, but has fair bit of a spread so not all projectiles hit the target. Makes you stop entirely to use it, but has a little bit of lingering duration after. Requires sword or axe – so you don’t get cool mods. Requires a fair bit of attack speed to not lock you in place for long.

Rain of Arrows of Saturation/Vaal Rain of Arrows – feels much better then Lancing Steel. Causes more hits, the damage zone stay for much longer. Vaal hinders enemies, even bosses locking them in place. Rearguard provides block values similar to using a shield. Having a bow grants you another 6 link and greater minion damage rolls on 2h weapons. Downsides are immense though. Being bow is still rather squishy compared to shield. You don’t get aegis recovery. But the worst part about it – no shield charge. And no real movement skill. If someone finds a way to make this version move around fast – this would be amazing. I could not.

Rage Vortex – also feels very good. Big damage zone, lots of hits, sticks to the enemy. Two problems – axe and sword required – no good mods. And rage generation. Could not find a way to generate rage to activate the vortex. Low key pondering to try out Ascendant with Necro-Berserk, but it’s a terrible idea. Kaom gloves also do not work since relics no longer provide hp regen. If there was a way to generate rage this would be amazing. So keep an eye out for that.

Honorable mentions
Rage vortex of berserking – not really ranged but it’s a better static strike. Namely because of bigger AOE.

Bladestorm – creates a damage zone up to maximum of 3. Pretty bad – very slow hitting even if 3 zones are stacked. Duration is same as Static, but can be placed under enemy and left there. Not great for now, but can be used to brainstorm something with it for sure.

Storm Rain – works, but trigger rate is kinda low. Range is low too. Didn’t play a whole lot with it since RoA is soooo much better.

The answer is simple – Pride and Brittle Ground. You need to be literally under the enemy to apply Pride aura and brittle ground to boost crit with your boots. You can not do that from range, losing like 2x of your damage if not more.

Playing melee(static) poison is also weird because – why would you play melee and put yourself at danger when you can… not do that. But I tried it out and it works – with the downside that it takes several hits to get poison going so it feels slower than just pure crit hits in most content.

There are several things that are bad and they influence each other. So I’ll start from afar.

REGULAR CONTENT – IS BAD
Scarabs and content changes – are terrible. How is that related to the build? Im getting to it. But for me the base game content feels worse than ever. You can not alc and go. At all. You will just not sustain maps and further more – you will get nothing in returns for doing that.

I don’t think it was ever the case in all the time I’ve played.

If you are not putting all your atlas points into league mechanic that generates raw currency – you just never gonna get anywhere.

To make things worse – if you are not putting all your points into 200% map mod effect – you will run out of maps faster then people who roll for nameless seer.

And here lies the biggest problem. By doing so… you ramp the difficulty up by a lot. 80% Phys damage reduction, 100% suppress, 100% reduced recovery – you name it. On top of that – forced league mechanic – it doesn’t add much difficulty, honestly but it still adds up.

All this adds up to the point where this build no longer feel comfortable to play. Even with recent buffs, even with 3x relics and all the extra damage we got. Even with QoL new specters – its just not enough to take on the difficulty GGG is slowly pushing since Archnemesis.

Honestly few days ago I was seriously thinking to archive the build because of that.

The platoe between league start and end game grows ever more, and items that make this build feel good become more and more rare.

Ashes being moved to Uber drops. Skin being so rare its impossible to get for WEEKS. Dragonfang – 15 divs.

And without those items – this doesn’t even feel like a real build. Not even Asenath pops can carry it with how hard game got.

And if that was not enough – Guard skill removal. You like dying all the time to bleed or just to big hits?

Oh you wanna lower the difficulty and farm white maps to get some currency for the items that are not even on the market yet? Don’t worry – all the white map farming strats are nerfed too! Can’t wait till they delete tujen as well.

Wanna lower the difficulty by not taking 200% map mods? Sure! Just use scarabs to get that loot power back! You only need to trade for them for 3hours!
Ah surely you can farm those yourself. Oh boy you can! You farmed over 100 scarabs! Good job – lets see how many of those related to mechanic you wanna run – its 3.

END GAME CONTENT – IS BAD

T17 is cancer for this build. You can do them, sure. Its not even too hard, given you avoid certain mods. But at its core its still cancer.

First of all – its not balanced around minions. Enemies damage and HP (and that’s is the bigger problem) are so overturned that they just straight up kill AG who can afk sleep in Sim30. It very much remind me ToTA league mechanic.

Remember that HP? Well almost every enemy in T17 have corpse explosion. It can be just ability the enemy pack uses, it can be on death effect, it can be Archnemesis mod on rare monster. Thing is – it onetaps 60k HP AG with max res. Just straight up – deletes him from existence. Your relics too. And your specters. And yourself.

For the same reason – T17 are not balanced around melee. We are melee. And minions. You see where this is going. You charge into a pack only to explode to on-death effect of 50 projectiles shotgun.

The gear you need to have to even remotely able to do those is way more than you need to do ubers.

For this build statement that ubers are a joke compared to T17 – is fully true.

Even T17 bosses themselves are harder than ubers – flooding arena with degen zones or one shot mechanics that are almost unavoidable from melee range.

UBERS ARE BAD
Mostly because of T17. You’ll have to run those for a while to get a full set of fragments. But also – because of the loot tables shift from regular bosses. Moving build enabling items to content that you stop playing the game after is like evolving but backwards.

The build is fine actually. Still does all content including new one. Its terrible at it, but it does it. I have no doubts its gonna be nerfed eventually.

It feels terrible to play at certain point of the midgame progression because of how much difficulty of the game ramps up and how exceptionally rare powerful items are.

I would not be surprised if someone would try the build, get to the wall of first multi divine item and just drop it. And I won’t judge them. Its not a good build if you need that much to do so little.

I know from experience how to push it to the limit and what to upgrade first – most people prolly wont.

So even with all the buffs this received – and even with it able to do all content, I am not happy with the build.

I can still recommend trying it – and I can still say at least SOME people had and/or having fun with it this league. This warms my heart.
So there we are. Rant over.

T17 is still cancer – the hardest challenge to beat. Its doable, but its not comfortable. Remind me a lot of sanctum.

Essenced bosses were really hard. To the point of almost killing my AG (pre ugrades) hard.

Simulacrum seems alright with buffs to relics but still would not recommend. 5 rewards on average.

Sanctum – still suffering from the same problem as T17 – not balanced for melee + delayed damage = bad. Phys relics do have a bit of a time to warm up the pride effect and brittle ground and harpy to apply the debuff and punishment to kick in at half HP.

Something I missed is insanely strong item for AG now – because of how new Bone Barrier works. Bone barrier gives minions huge energy shield, and Mask convers that energy shield to something like 60% of life regen per second. I don’t think I ever saw AG taking damage ever since I put it on.

That being said – it only provides survivability and no other benefits, while other options – Leer cast/Rare helm (full DPS), Ylfeban's Trickery (Balance of DPS and survivability via curses) provide a lot LESS survivability but have other beneficial effects.

Ylfeban's Trickery specifically was enough for me to play in T17 maps, although I saw AG getting damaged a lot still – and that’s not a good sign.

Mask is interesting also because it means you could drop corrupted blood immunity from gloves and do something fun with that. Gonna mess around with that later.

This one is… questionable, but it’s an easy Band-Aid fix that lets you use ranged attack to trigger Holy Relics. Im gonna be real with you – I have no idea why it even works, but it seems to hit a lot of times in sequence BUT only if there are multiple enemies.

Its very bad against single target. But its not bad enough to discard it.

Whats more important – it autotargets enemies. You don’t need to aim – it will go to the nearest enemy and then bounce to next one. With ashes of the starts and 20% quality it gives about 5-6 seconds uptime on damage hits. And that is insanely good.

This thing can easily clean legions, blights and breaches without you needing to move.

Ive been playing a while with it and I cant get over how good it feels.
Mind that its still a terrible idea to try going range playstyle on this version of the build (read in comment above why). But it requires a simple gem swap that doesn’t require a color change from your setup.

It also lets you keep using Scepter, unlike Splitting Steel that requires a sword.

So just by swapping 2 gems you can gain the ability to stay at range with all the downsides of being at range with the physical build

Several examples where its super good:
T17 – obviously. All those 420 projectiles shotgun monsters and DD effects? Just snipe them from range. Problem solved. Even T17 bosses could be done with it (although its kinda bad) – letting you dodge most of the mechanics.

Blight maps/events/ravaged – this is just self explanatory – you can just hold the button down and heat seeking fissures will trigger nova on delivery from safe distance. I kinda wanna try doing full afk blight map – will do that in the future.

Gigajuced expedition big boom – same idea. Flickering into the tanky monster packs is dangerous? Just use fissures and be on other side of the screen.
Doing challenges – did Sirus kill across the screen while standing in his piss puddle.

This was a low cost way to get even more clear without going for Profane Bloom jewels. I think its safe to say that difficulty in the game got so high this no longer works.

Monsters are so tanky that this damage does nothing and its sad.
I’ll still try experimenting with that, but in a different direction – by using Profane Bloom and get ignites from it.

So… Instant Leech works as intended. That means several things:

If you have it – you can do 100% less life recovery maps, including no regen maps (although you would have to solve mana problem with mana recoup/mana on hit). Less recovery doesn’t stop instant heals, so you will get Aegis restoring you ES and Leech healing you.

That being said – you get about the same functionality from Forbidden taste/Instant heal flask.

It feels very good against degens – Im pretty sure you could outheal shaper beam with it.

It’s a bro-science but it should be giving you about 300 hp per hit per relic on maxed out build.

The downside is of course – 7 passive points cost for just that. It’s a lot. I lost about 600 life to have that. But it still might be worth it, especially early game. Will have to test it with low investment gear.

Back in time time again – to adjust the build for early game. This time – extra challenging. Maximum map mods on atlas tree. Expedition big boom. No Grand Necromancer allowed – since its impossible to get him in first few days. See if I can handle that.

Hidden blade – still need to test that one. I’ll do it I swear! Eventually!

Wanna experiment a bit with 100% uptime Ancestral Cry.

Tweaks to AG gear – to support ranged playstyle more, alternative to kingmaker, alternative gloves with Mask giving infinite life.