Hello there,

I did a theory craft on Power Charge Flicker Strike with the new Crucible Node that allows us to spend Power Charges instead of Frenzy Charges to reset Flicker Strikes cooldown.

My inital plan was to go with Assassin and go with Lightning Damage since it works so well with Power Charges, but then I realized that Flicker Strike actually scales with Frenzy Charges aswell and Power Charges are really only needed for our uptime. Power Charge on Critical Strike solves this issue for us as one mandatory support gem and we are good.

A few notes before I give you the Pob:

• The PoB is very barebones. We have open Body Armour, Gloves, Belt, Amulet/Annoint and theoretically 5 open Flasks and 2 open Rings (Rings and Flask in PoB are only there to make it a nice 100% Crit).
• No required uniques. I added Darkray Vectors and Replica Abyssus simply because everyone uses them and they are easy to aquire and they should be BIS for 99.9% of players.
• We have 2M ShaperDPS, 100% Crit, 555% Mult, are 100% Elemental Ailment Immune, Immune to Corrupted Blood and have 2.8k HP with pretty much empty gear (that is a lot for a Flicker Build; they usually run between 3-4k HP with gear).
• Herald of Ice for satisfying explosions.
• No bs aura effect / reservation scaling that is hard to achieve. Only 3 auras and you can run those without needing anything.
• No bs scaling with berserk or other temporary stuff. The only thing is Vaal Ancestral Warchief that is temporary.
• Configuration Notes: Mana-cost crafts are recommended, so I added them here. The new Mastery that has a 25% chance to invert enemy resistances is very powerful. PoB doesn't currently support calculation for it, but it should be at least 20% more damage, even with the Exposure from Avatar of the Veil.
• Don't forget to set Melee distance to enemy to 0 in config (for Close Combat to work).
• If you intend to go full glass-cannon and go for the Onslaught Ascendency instead (theoretically more damage and you'll also free the other avoidance nodes), the Inversion Mastery becomes even better, giving you definitely more than 20% more damage.
• The weapon is a tweaked preset 2H-Sword from PoB. I removed some mods and added a bench craft for it to be more realistic. You can definitely find way better weapons.
• DO NOT LEAGUE START THIS. You require the Crucible Node in order for this build to work. You do not have any other way of keeping Flicker Strike going. I assume getting the node will be similarly difficult to obtaining a Lab Enchantment on a helmet you like. I recommend you to wait, farm currency and buy an Exquisite Blade with this node from trade (with good iLvl) if available and then craft it yourself. Any uniques (such as Paradoxica) or well-crafted items with this node will probably be incredibly expensive.

So, this build has a lot to offer (imo) and seems incredibly strong on a budget with a lot of room for way higher dps. The only thing I'm not 100% satisfied with is that we currently only cap Crit with Assassins Mark (87.5% without). May or may not be a problem, but we have a ton of room to fix that (+Crit on Body Armour for example).

Anyway, roast it:

https://pobb.in/BL_DDaRWtpGa