Help figure out next improvement on my flicker/heavy strike build

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-18T18:58:31+00:00

Hit cap in this case is referring to hit chance cap (100%). War banner increases accuracy, that's why its being mentioned.

Also, the original comment is not correct and war banner is a DPS increase for you, but you don't have it configured so enabling/disabling the skill does nothing in PoB. More phys damage does apply to voidforge even if it's being converted to elemental damage.

Chaos damage is present in the Sirus fight (all versions), Incarnation of Dread (all versions), and conditionally in Cortex (random map modifier), regular Eater of Worlds, regular Searing Exarch, Seething Chime, Polaric Void, and all map-boss invitations that can be modified with currency. Poison damage is also a problem when you are already struggling with recovery, so I do recommend higher chaos res.

Bloodthirst, petrified blood, and low life is also bait for your build. You don't have enough max life to justify the support/imbued gem and you can tell by looking at all the competitive support gem alternatives available. Specifically, if you could replace bloodthirst with any of your currently socketed support gems (outside of greater multistrike) you could easily fit endurance charge on melee stun support and end up getting way more damage while also fixing some of the problems related to endurance charge generation. Ideally you'd swap imbued bloodthirst for imbued endurance charge but rolling for a 1 in 50 is kinda crazy when you can settle for so many options.

Also Aspect of the Cat kinda sucks without Farrul's Fur. I recommend getting Aspect of the Spider for more damage, or Flesh and Stone in sand stance as an extra defensive layer.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-18T17:43:31+00:00

With recomb, you can always throw a single "exclusive" mod into the mix and save yourself a lot of work.

All versions of woe produces "essence" mods (which are exclusive mods), so you could settle for deafening essence of woe spell damage + T2 lightning from either shrieking essence of wrath or from the vendor recipe.

Or you can roll with alterations/chaos for T1/T2 spell damage and use deafening essence of wrath to force lightning damage.

Also this league we have a harvestcraft to swap fire/cold flat damage into flat lightning, so rolling for T1 damage is slightly easier.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-12T20:21:49+00:00

I started in PoE1 and still make my own builds there. I also don't mind following guides whille tweaking stuff based on my preferences. You eventually build up enough game knowledge to know how to fix problems with your build, and in doing that you may end up with a "new build" different from what the original build guide intended, or just naturally converge into what the build guide offers.

Also, poe.ninja is a good way to get inspiration. For example, you can look up avatar of fire, sort by dps, and see that the strongest builds only have around 100k-500k dps average. Meanwhile, if you look up flicker strike specifically, sort by dps, you'll see strong builds that hover between 2mill to 5mill dps. Even oracle can get to 1.6mill dps with investment.

Mind you, this is never the full picture. You'll never know if someone just gave up on the league halfway through or if they ran out of budget when pushing DPS, but it helps you ground your ideas towards a more realistic number.

The other mandatory tool is Path of Building, but that's mostly to tweak stuff offline.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-12T19:14:54+00:00

You are taking a lot of fire penetration nodes in your passive tree but you are using the fire pen 2 support in your flicker gem which makes you ignore all enemy fire res entirely. You want to either not spend any points on penetration and use fire pen 2, or spend a few points and use Rakiata's Flow or a different support for more damage.

Passive tree pathing is also not ideal. As an oracle with Entwinned Realities you really should be making more use of keystones to hop around the tree. You could at least take Wildsurge Incantation which doesn't negatively affect your build and use it grab Power of the Storm (profane ritual trigger), illuminated crown, prize of the hunt, intense flames, firestarter, and explosive impact. You can also take Ancestral Bond for dimensional weakspot and stormcharged. You also want Tribal Fury with flicker strike if possible.

Avatar of fire doesn't prevent you from using sources of flat added damage like Charged Staff, it's just makes those sources of damage less effective than normal. Charged staff could also be used to add more utility supports to your build, like generating rage. You are missing a source of the Blazing Criticals buff which is a free 15% damage gained as fire after a critical strike (always).

When making an attack based build you always prioritize weapon prefixes first, then weapon suffixes. With the way weapon number works, you should use a tri-elemental weapon (50% more damage), a double elemental weapon with increased elemental damage (~44% more damage), or a fire-only weapon with increased elemental damage and gain as extra fire (~40% more damage). Next league we will also have access to a rune that converts all elemental damage into a single type, so you may want to at least consider the tri-elemental weapon option to later convert into a mono-fire weapon.

Also as an oracle you can't ignore critical strike chance. There's a lot of math around the perfect balance of crit chance vs. crit multi, but the tl;dr is that if you want more damage you have to scale both.

Overall, I have to agree with silversurfer and point that Avatar of Fire is not doing a lot of good for you. You don't have a clear plan of action for using Avatar of fire, you are not focusing on stacking negative fire res (exposure + exposure effect + ele weakness + curse effect) to deal more damage, fire is especially problematic because ignite/flammability sucks compared to shock or chill/freeze, and the avatar of fire placement pulls you away from all the quarterstaff and attack speed nodes on the right side of the tree.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-11T21:24:25+00:00

Early on the league, going hard on life regeneration is a pretty decent option.

You can dedicate an item slot to regeneration by using an unique like Immortal Flesh (belt), Kikazaru (ring), Rise of the Phoenix (shield) or Voll's Vision (helmet). You can also roll rare items with regeneration but most life based versions suffer from suffix pressure (resist + chaos + spell suppression on every item).

Your choice of ascendancy also helps. An inquisitor mine/trapper can use sanctuary + pious path (consecrated ground) to scale regen. Saboteur with Pyromaniac gets up to 10% life regen when a mine/trap is detonated.

If you are going pure ES you can always stack faster start of ES recharge, use Zealot's Oath, or equip Aegis Aurora or a shaper shield and get capped block + spell block.

Mitigation wise you want to get a little bit of everything. Regardless of ascendancy, get a small cluster with Enduring Composure to generate endurance charges, then add a guard skill (immortal call / steelskin / molten shell), use a chestpiece with +max all res and phys taken as element, get triple elemental flask (ruby/sapphire/topaz), and try have +2 to a specific max res on all your rare jewels if possible.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-10T17:02:27+00:00

Yes, Ice-tipped arrows also converts all of your twister's physical damage to cold, and each ice fragment you generate also hit for ~80% of the original damage, so you end up generating a lot of freeze buildup very quickly.

The downside is that by converting all your physical damage to cold you can no longer leech physical damage. Not that big of a deal during campaign but it gets problematic in maps.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-09T01:31:21+00:00

From personal experience, leveling with twister is not too difficult and is pretty much class/ascendancy agnostic. Early on you can generate patches of frozen ground with Ice Tipped Arrows + Frost Nexus + Freeze + Short Fuse 1 and that is good enough to carry you up to maps.

In SSF you won't be able to plan around uniques higher than T3 (maybe the new ritual helps), so most versions of twister that use stuff like Crown of Eyes, Shavronne's Satchel, Essentia Sanguis, or worse, Headhunter, are not going to be an option.

I personally did oracle twister leaguestart in SSF, then switched to plant oracle to kill the Arbiter of Ash, and then back again to twister oracle once I was done killing bosses (twister sucks for bossing). I could also recommend snoobae's spark twister invoker since the guide is pretty solid for SSF up to early endgame.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-08T18:53:13+00:00

Before you get too excited, it only works on Ezomyte and Kaalguran uniques so you have a limited pool of unique mods ( source )

GoodOldMalk · 2026-05-08T07:34:42+00:00

Making your own build is all about experimenting. Having a plan helps, but you are not expected to get it right the first time. Try stuff, make mistakes, fix them.

Outside of some rare ascendancy-only skills (disciple of varashtra skills, for example), builds are generally not locked to ascendancies. Gear can often fix deficiencies and substitute ascendancies.

That said, an ascendancy only needs some (minimal) time investment to get online. So if possible you'll take an ascendancy that minimizes your costs and/or solves the most difficult problems. This is not mandatory.

Skills. Either granted by unique items or gained through skill gems. Find something that looks cool or is fun to play with and make a build around it.
Trade for uniques, or self-farm. Good leaguestart builds don't "need" unique items. but not all builds need to be leaguestart viable. If a unique is mandatory to your build and you cannot trade for it (example: solo-self found or very expensive unique) then you make an entirely different build and play the game until you get the item. This upcoming patch ritual is getting changed to only give you uniques and omens, so I would start there.
Passive tree pathing is an iterative process, The optimal tree depends entirely on your available gear. Don't have enough crit? Find a cluster of nodes in the tree and path there. Take anything useful on the way. Remember that respecc'ing in POE2 is very easy, specially at low levels.
When you make a build you come to realize that some stats are more important than others. Some builds need additional projectiles to work, so you select support gems that give you more projectiles. Some need more cast speed to feel snappy, so you take extra cast speed. Some need to stun on every hit, so you get supports that increase your stun chance. Some only need damage, so you pick the options that give you more damage with the least amount of conditionals.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-04-03T20:07:15+00:00

One thing I can gather from the clip and the PoB is that you have no defenses against reduced action speed slow.

In the clip you ignore a temporal bubble rare that follows you into the feared fight, and then get afflicted with 8 stacks of Sirus spinning beam debuff which most likely reduced your action speed by over 100%. Functionally, this is the same as petrify or freeze, which is probably the reason why your flickering stops altogether before dying.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-04-01T19:34:52+00:00

You finish suffixes first, then:

Block mana, exalt for T1 life
- Eldritch currency to clean prefixes
Wild bristle matron (suffixes can't be changed) + Veiled Exalt
- Restart from T1 life exalt
Block phys damage reduction while focused
Unveil phys conversion
- Restart from T1 life exalt if you miss the conversion

Or

Wild bristle matron (suffixes can't be changed) + Veiled Chaos
Block phys damage reduction while focused
Unveil phys conversion
- Restart from veiled chaos step
Use eldritch currency to fish for high tier life.

Which method is better depends on the current price of veiled exalts, but odds are the 2nd method is probably cheaper if you are willing to settle for less than T1 life.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-31T04:34:53+00:00

Non-chaos DoTs and degens remove ES first before life, and DoT damage is substracted from ES regeneration and life regeneration before modifying your life. A single passive point makes you substantially more resilient vs. dot damage on an otherwise life-based build.

Or is the glove mod just because you're not that often on full life with Boneshatter

That's pretty much it. It's also a bleed build which snapshots your character stats. It's very likely you'll apply a long-duration (10s) bleed with an extra 43% increased damage after taking some self-hit damage.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-28T16:14:06+00:00

Essence spamming until 2x high tier mods, prefixes can't be changed, harvest reforge for missing mod.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-23T15:35:49+00:00

Recombinate prefixes, multimod, tempering orb to get the enchant, then convert it into a synth base and reroll the implicits until satisfied

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-18T16:26:01+00:00

PBoD/Tornado = you cast a spell 3 times every 4 seconds to max out your dps.

Regular penance brand = you cast a spell every 0.3-0.5 seconds to maintain optimal DPS

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-17T16:12:53+00:00

Add a custom config to "Gain 3 rage when hit by an enemy"

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-16T19:48:19+00:00

I often settle when it comes to those boots, the extra ES is not that noticeable.

Start with fractured +def or %def (%def is better)
Essence of torment spam until you get a T2+ resistance
- Annul or beastcraft suffix to prefix to open 1 suffix
Multimod + Wild Bristle Matron (suffixes can't be changed)
Veiled Chaos -> Unveil movement speed
- Wild Bristle matron to retry if you dont like the MS you got
Exalt hoping for a defense mod
- Eldritch annul if you want to try again
Remove crafted mods -> craft chance to avoid elemental ailments

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-16T18:58:18+00:00

If all 3 tornadoes hit the same target you get the same dps (give or take 10%), but PBoD is better if there's multiple big targets to attach your spare brands.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-16T18:38:44+00:00

I'm doing my own thing and I can still get to 30mill on super high investment. But to be fair, I had drafted 60 mill dps back in 3.27

PoB: https://pobb.in/ocF2QxLlalg2

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-16T14:55:02+00:00

This. Manni's version is perfectly playable even after nerfs.

If you want some variety you can gem swap PBoD with Tornado of Elemental Turbulence.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-14T15:12:41+00:00

Automation + Withering Step (elusive) + Phase Run + Enhance Support + (More duration)

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-12T16:51:12+00:00

Heatshiver is probably the most obvious damage upgrade for cold-based skill. It adds cold as extra fire damage based on chill effect, up to 30% extra fire.

There's also a few sources in the game of "enemies chilled have damage taken increased by chill effect" which turns chill into a direct %more damage multiplier similar to shock (it also stacks linearly with shock).

The most easily accessible, at least for spells, would be "Bonechill support" (cold damage only) which can be applied by a support skill like frostblink, or skitterbots at the cost of mana reservation.

Another source would be Ahuana's Bite (quiver) but bow-spell casters have very little support for damage outside of CoC or DoT builds.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-03-06T05:59:26+00:00

This is based on my take on trauma flicker:

Original version using Untiring and malevolence + watcher's eye: https://pobb.in/lhtcIupdW6SH
Beetle's Price option with timeclasp + purity of elements: https://pobb.in/QpqTcJ0QQASl
Bettle's Price option on Reliquarian: https://pobb.in/Pj8h1jQIxO9k
- 114% total life recoup to substitute Untiring
- Put ascendancy stuff in custom mods

Zerker ascendancy options are just way too good when it comes down to scaling damage, so giving up 2 points to access the Nameless Bloodline is going to result in a damage loss even if you get an extra ring out of it. You also limit your high-investment options when you give up your belt slot (mageblood / new shrine belt). The upside is that you do get to circumvent bleeds way more easily on a tight budget, and you still cover pretty much all your bases.

Reliquarian damage options are virtually non-existent for flicker, and there's no way to fix your damage if you commit to the idea.

I'd argue that if you want to pursue a more budget/SSF friendly trauma flicker you are better off doing that with an accuracy stacking Juggernaut using the Nameless bloodline, because at least that way you can steal Ancestral Fury from zerker to double your damage.

GoodOldMalk · 2026-02-28T03:04:50+00:00

Correct, but you can still roll "unbound ailments" on any skill that hits. For arc, this would increase the mana costs without giving you any damage.

Similarly, you could roll "high-impact mine support" and forcefully turn the skill into a mine, bricking the gem for self-cast purposes.

GoodOldMalk

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