In the Conflux private league for Ancestor, I leaguestarted with trauma flicker slayer. It's been going surprisingly well!

The vibes: tankiest Flicker build I've played by a country mile, and the most damage I've seen from Flicker on a 2-3 div budget.

The operating principle:

1. Handle your Trauma using Divine Shield and massive plain phys reduction, via endurance charges and 100% uptime Enduring Cry.

2. Get good max endurance charges via Masterful Form, making it equal to your max frenzy charges.

3. Get good max frenzy via Badge of the Brotherhood, making it equal to your max power charges.

4. Cheese your max power charges using Malachai's Loop + Graven's Secret, then stack more from tree, helmet, etc.

5. Use Replica Restless Ward to power the classic Kaom's Spirit + Berserk.

(Some more details linked here.)

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I'm currently up to:

• Level 93 ½

• 215 deaths

• 119/132 Atlas passive points

• 2 voidstones

• 59 hours played, ~4-8ish of which was AFK, and some further chunk spent staring blankly at stuff in hideout

• 10 maximum Endurance, Frenzy, and Absorption charges

My current status: PoB on pobb.in

Bear in mind the above has ancestral protector active, but not vaal warchief.

We're at > 3m DPS but I still need a 6-link Replica Restless Ward, and an Overlord cluster jewel to replace Fortify Support.

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We get our frenzy charge generation from The Red Trail + The Golden Rule, our base attack speed from Brightbeak, and our Berserk (lots of damage) from Replica Restless Ward powering Kaom's Spirit.

You may be asking, "How do you leaguestart this build, again?"

Good question! The answer: ~~you don't~~ you shouldn't? A quick guide:

1. Start as a Slayer roughly a week late.

2. Level up mostly with Trauma + Frenzy. It scales pretty much the same way that Flicker Strike does.

3. Trade your silver coins (~35 dropped during acts) for a Badge of the Brotherhood and Malachai's Loop.

4. Get a Replica Restless Ward for free from a heister who would otherwise have no use for it.

5. Drop a natural divine orb in act 10. Trade to acquire The Red Trail (I had to get an Uul'Netol's Blessing and The Infinite Pursuit, since nobody was running flawless breachstones yet).

6. Get a The Golden Rule from... I can't remember? I think it was more silver coins. People like silver coins.

The Deep Breaths passive loop works till you can get warcry cdr tattoos. A Siege Axe with good attack speed works till you can get Brightbeak. Being sad works until you can get Kaom's Spirit.

Lessons Learned

Your ability to handle trauma stacks generally far outstrips your ability to stack attack speed.

The one exception, of course, being bad map mods. Despite being intended as a mapper, the build's defensive tech means there's an annoying number of mods to skip:

• Monsters steal charges? Bricked.

• Less recovery rate? Bricked.

• Can't regenerate? Bricked. (Divine Shield counts as regen.)

• Cannot leech? Bricked. (Still sketchy even if you take off Kaom's Spirit.)

• Less cooldown recovery rate or buffs expire faster? Not technically bricked, but your Enduring Cry turns into windows of 'able to do damage' and 'explode messily if you right click too long'.

On a similar note, Vulnerability was also dangerous till I got enough max charges, and killing The Infinite Hunger (halfway boss to Eater of Worlds) was total ass. Did you know his goop swamp phases give you a permanent debuff to % phys damage reduction which gets worse (not better) if you die? I definitely do now.

(In comparison, Eater of Worlds itself was one-portal easy breezy, though Searing Exarch was a torturous 9-portal mess.)

Also, running into 'removes charges' monsters in the wild feels a bit like when packs and rares could roll outright reflect mods. If you lose your charges, you have about a third of a second to react before exploding to trauma damage - thankfully you can still kill them by darting in for a few attacks at a time, but for me that's generally after I've already died once.

We need to inflict bleed (reflected by The Golden Rule) to get our frenzy charges off The Red Trail - without Multistrike, we need perfect charge economy. The Slayer ascendancy node Endless Hunger makes us unaffected by bleeding while leeching. However, if our Flicker Strike inflicts bleed, we occasionally get into a situation where we hit a small monster hard enough to get a dangerous bleed, but not hard enough for the leech proc to last the full 5 seconds of the bleed.

Having a build that occasionally spontaneously kills you, I am told, is Not Great.

The solution? Zero base bleed chance, and then having Vengeance as a utility skill with Chance to Bleed Support and some ailment duration. Since it doesn't use our trauma, and by keeping it low-level, the bleed damage is trivial but the uptime is pretty good.

Conveniently, Bloodlust Support gives us a chonky 39% more damage against bleeding targets while stopping our CWDT Vulnerability from causing bleed problems on our main attack.

For emergencies like charge removal and running out of bleed, I've got Frenzy socketed at the moment, but I'm hoping there'll be a way to go without - weapon swap for Puncture (on e.g. a Quill Rain) would work but would take a lot of getting used to.

(I'm currently using my weapon swap for veiled trigger craft + Vortex + Portal, which is a portalling method I can't believe I didn't figure out earlier. Press X, double click on your feet, bam.)

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With credit to:

u/Keyenn, who more than quadrupled the numbers on my original build idea

u/Nivius, who is very correct about massive self bleeds being sketchy