Ward Break Flicker Strike ft Tainted Pact

PoB: https://pobb.in/BG3QWsKQK23C

So I started this league with the classic flicker slayer. It was good, but I was at the point where the next major upgrade was going to be a mirror ring, and at the time no perfect ring was made. Ward Break had started to pop off and I saw some people doing it with attack builds and a few people even doing it with flicker. I was inspired.

For everyone not familiar with this setup I'll break it down a little bit.

The new Timeless jewel from expedition Heroic Tragedy can roll with three keystones. One of which is Celestial Mathematics.

>While you have Unbroken Ward, your next non-channeling Attack you Use yourself breaks your Ward to gain Added Cold Damage equal to 25% of Ward

So if we get a bunch of ward we can get a bunch of flat damage.

Ward once broken takes 2 seconds by default to come back. So we can't attack more than every 2 seconds? Well some people have used static strike to get around this. Others have taken advantage of one of the notables that can roll on the new timeless jewel. Regenerative Runes.

>Iron Flasks gain 2 charges when your Ward Breaks. 10% increased Flask Effect Duration

Iron Flasks take 40 charges per use. So we just need to figure out how to scale charge gain to get 40 charges every time our ward breaks. The great thing about this is that this notable stacks. So if you have 2 of them, you get back 4 charges, etc. There are setups that work with 3, 4 or 5 copies of this notable. Finding a seed that works where you can put a jewel and path to all of the nodes is the hard part. I found one that has 6! (not 720) of this notable, and some others I'll talk about later. I only run 5 of them. That means I get 10 base charges every time my ward breaks. There is also a mod that can roll on flasks that gives reduced effect and increased charge recovery. This charge recovery is multiplicative with the charge recovery from the tree. I also get a little bit of reduced charges used on the tree. This means I need 36 charges, I get 10, so I need a bonus 26 or 260% charge recovery. The maximum roll on the flask is 66% so if I have around 157% increased on the tree combined with the flask I can recover and use an iron flask every time my ward breaks. Used when charges are full is the perfect enchant here.

Flicker strike requires some frenzy charge generation. The new timeless jewel also provides a solution to this. Frenzying Sigil. Gain 1 Frenzy charge when ward breaks. I'm breaking ward every time I attack, so this means if I spend 1 charge on flicker I'm guaranteed to get it back. With the quality on flicker I gain charges over time. With multistrike or greater multistrike I'm easily net positive on frenzy charges. I also gain one every time I leap slam around.

As a bonus, there are endurance and power charge nodes as well. I run the endurance charge node for two reasons. One I'm a slayer so I get bonus max endurance charges equal to frenzy, two I want the defensive layer Endurance charges offer.

Nothing really new in the build up to this point. There are some problems that I wanted to solve.

Damage is crazy with this setup, so that's not an issue. A sub 2k life pool means its very easy to fall over. We don't like to fall over, despite what people say about flicker strike. See my trickster that could tank maven brain bomb in Settlers to show how tanky I like to build flicker.

Restoring ward instantly every time it breaks and having 20k+ ward (30k+ at the top end) solves hit damage. Dots are the real issue. Historically in ward loop builds you would solve this with recoup. You would trigger summon skeletons or more recently raise zombie of falling and summon raging spirits with a bunch of reduced duration. This means they would die really fast. Then you equip a heartbound loop to take 350 (420 with catalyst) damage every time a minion dies. This would not get past your ward, either with the new tech, or using the old unique flask tech. You would still get full recoup value from the damage even tho none of it hit your life pool. Looping this 10 times per second with forbidden rite also building up recoup let you recoup thousands of life per second.

I ran into two problems trying to do this with the new ward setup. The biggest problem comes from how Cast on Ward Break triggers Forbidden Rite. It triggers the same time ward is down, so the damage is going all to life. This means you need more than 100% recoup to benefit from Forbidden Rite. You can solve this by moving FR into a cast when damage taken link instead of cast on ward break. The second problem, is also why I couldn't put FR in a CWDT link.

I had too much armour! When using Ynda's stand you get ward from armour on your body armour, evasion too, this means we want a body armour with high armour. The best evasion armours are going to give only ~75% the total of hybrid armour evasion, so I didn't want to go that route.

Why is too much armour bad? Well that 450 phys damage taken from the heartbound loop gets reduced by armour. Converting 60% of the armour on my chest, left me with 40%, my shield also gave a little armour. This means I would end up with ~4k armour even without trying to gain armour. Armour is very good against smaller hits, at 450 and 8 endurance charges I'm taking less than 100 damage from the ring. This means I'm only recouping from that 100 damage, It takes a few procs to trigger one level 1 cwdt. It scarified a ring slot. I would need to solve mana issues casting 10 times per second. If we assume 10 casts per second, I would also need to sacrifice a bunch of jewel slots to get the zombie duration down. It also used a 4 link.

Slayer leech is very strong, but with again under 2k life, it was not enough recovery for many dots in the game. What else is strong about slayer leech? Well the overleech means even if its not a lot of leech, it lasts for a while. Up to 10 seconds. Enter Tainted Pact. I get to solve chaos dots, and regen in one amulet slot? Sound good to me! I get a little chance to poison from a glove implicit, I convert a little of my cold damage to chaos with the green nightmare, I slot in a golden rule to reflect those poisons to myself and I turn a few hundred leech per second into thousands to millions of recovery per second of self inflicted poison damage. The only real issue here is I don't get that recovery 2 seconds after combat ends because I don't have much extra duration on the build. In combat tho I can tank shaper beams while standing in degen puddles and my health never dips.

Boon of the Mountain for 50% less damage over time taken while full ward (all the time) gets combined with 10% reduced damage taken from Damage over time with the Soul of Arakaali patheon. Throw in 8 endurance charges for another 32% reduced damage taken from phys and elemental damage. Dots are basically covered. Bosses with immunity phases that leave ground degens or map mods that leave ground degens are now annoying but not unplayable.

This massive regen helps with the other major problem the build can face. Of Drought rare monsters. They prevent my flasks from restoring ward every tick, but I still need to get 1 shot through 8 endurance charges to die. I'll be honest, during regular mapping I almost never die now.

I don't think this build will survive into 3.29 so I'll be trying to min max it to the moon. You can definitely get it going on a smaller budget. You don't need my specific timeless jewel, any 4-5 flask with the keystone can work. You can also put it over on the right side of the tree and path differently. You just don't get as much endurance charge gen. You don't need a mirror weapon, damage is already insane. I just had it before the switch. Paradoxica and a rare shield, or a lower investment weapon both work well. The watcher's is pure damage, so any good mods can work. If you don't mind pressing flasks every few seconds you could go with the Lavianga's and Runegraft of Quaffing tech over tainted pact.

I think the biggest weakness of the build is how many map mods I can't run. The hard bricks are reduced flask charges gained, monster's can't be leeched from. I also filter out monster's steal charges for QoL, as well as exarch runes and monsters have a chance to avoid poison. You can mitigate reflect but I don't currently.