[3.22] Trauma Support Flicker Strike Juggernaut

Unfortunately, since this build has a couple core uniques that are required, I'd say you'd need roughly 4 divines to start this build. 2 for The Red Trail (most important!), and 2 for Farrul's Fur (qol). Obviously these will go up and down in price as the league go on, so check out these two uniques before you consider running this build. The rest of the core setup should generally be cheap.

I wouldn't day 1 league start this build. But once you exit maps and can get at least The Red Trail, you're free to play around and incrementally power up this build. I would start with boneshatter and transition to this build once you have enough money.

The core of this build relies on using The Red Trail, along with The Golden Rule to inflict bleeding on yourself to generate a frenzy charge on hit. Keeping us at maximum frenzy charges in case we stop bleeding comes from Farrul's Fur and Aspect of the Cat, linked to a less duration support to refresh our frenzy charges to their max every 4-5 seconds.

In this build, we need to be careful not to inflict a heavy bleed on ourselves or else we'll die.

So, how do we do that? We have a couple of options. We could wait and stand there until we get hit enough times. With The Red Trail, we have a 50% chance to get a bleed whenever we get hit by an enemy, but that bleed damage scales off the enemy's damage, and that can be dangerous against a boss.

So instead, we're going to try and inflict the bleed ourselves. Vengeance procs whenever we take damage from a hit, which includes us taking damage from our own trauma stacks. Link that with a Chance to Bleed Support, and we get a 25-ish% chance to bleed if any enemy hit by vengeance bleeds. This 2-Link Vengeance doesn't benefit from trauma stacks, so you'll do a pathetic 2k damage hit and bleed to yourself for about 5-6 seconds.

But what if this bleed fails? If we're against Shaper, we only have 1 target to bleed with a 25% chance, and then we'd need to wait 1 second to try again. Enter the weapon swap:


Pick up the shittiest, fastest attacking bow you can find off the ground with a 5 or 6 link, scour it, and link puncture with any skill that decreases the dps and increases the effect duration, and fire that bad boy once.

This will look like a Short Bow weapon swap with

Puncture (Lvl 1/Qual 0)
Increased Duration Support (20/20)
Greater Multiple Projectiles (1/0)
Unbound Ailments (1/0)
Efficacy Support (1/0)
Lesser Multiple Projectiles (1/0)

in order of importance.


When I say I want to bleed, I want to bleed.

I want to emphasize how carefully you need to manage your own bleed and poison generation.

Read this gem carefully.
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Let me repeat:

Only Vengeance, Puncture, and The Red Trail are allowed to be your only sources of bleed.

Any other bleed (and poison) sources will likely allow your Flicker Strike to bleed. That bleed will kill you, and it will *not* be softly.


will all kill you instantly.

will reduce your bleed duration and make it harder to keep Red Trail uptime.

both increases your bleed damage to yourself and reduces your uptime. Same with physical damage over time.

Bleed is a mechanic you want to be able to check off on your list, not a mechanic you want to scale outside its duration.

Before we get to the POB, let's talk briefly about what POB settings you should use when looking at your own build.

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- Rage: Rage generation usually happens 1 per second on the gloves, or 1 per second on the axe tree. I'd usually pin my rage at about 10 or so. Rage (and berserk) is there to increase the speed at which you can ramp your trauma stacks back up after a boss phases.

- Berserk: Disable this in POB. It's unrealistic. Berserk is there as your ult to make sure something is *very* dead.

- Charges: Power + Frenzy at max if you have Farrul's, Frenzy + Endurance if you have Replica. Endurance on it's own can be checked if you have the appropriate generation on the tree (more on that later)

- Distance to Enemy: 0. Flicker puts you right in sniffing range of the opponent. This is important for Close Combat support

- Boss: Guardian/Pinnacle if you're in red maps, Boss otherwise.

- Seconds Standing Still: Put at least 1 second for this. Flicker always counts as having been moved, but you will always be considered standing still. Important for Arctic Armor if you choose to run it.

- Fortified:If you have fortify on the tree or Fortify support, add this in.

- Bleed:Both you and the enemy are bleeding. The enemies bleed doesn't matter much.

- Flasks: Eh. It's up to you if you want them enabled or not.

- Trauma Stacks: Take your attack speed and multiply by 4 or 5 if you want your base mapping DPS. Trauma lasts for 6.9 seconds, but I find the ramp to 6 seconds hard unless you're hitting *just* a boss.

- Vaal skills: Disable them and keep the base skills active if they're applicable. I'm looking at you, Vaal Ancestral Warchief

- Totems: I'm conflicted on this one. While the totems do last 12 seconds, I find they're hard to keep perfect uptime when you're busy flickering. And if you stop to drop your totems, your trauma stacks will go down. Turn this one on and off and see for yourself when you're playing what the difference is.

- Leeching: For the most part, yes, you're leeching. Thanks to trauma stacks hitting yourself, generally you're not hp capped.
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Now, with this in mind...

You can see the tree for the most part in the POB, so lets talk about the core pieces of the tree we want to pick up, and alternatives that you can use.


Prismatic Skin gives +2% all max res, and corrupted blood immunity for a couple skill points. Very cool for leveling (and if you're lazy to pick up a proper CB immunity jewel like me). Eventually you may want to drop away from this cluster, or at the very minimum drop the CB immune.


Slaughter is another good tree that gives attack speed, and access to 1 rage per second through the axe mastery. Pathing to this can happen from the cluster jewel as in the image, or through the bottom.


Inexorable is your endurance charge generation if you're too poor for a Replica Farrul's fur.


Pick up your frenzy charge here and near the ranger tree. Pick up iron reflexes to convert your Farrul's evasion to armour. Pick up your endurance charge here since it's just 1 point. Later on, you'll want to slot in a Thread of Hope here, and take Panopticon, Art of the Gladiator, Attack Speed Per Frenzy Charge, and whatever else tickles your fancy. I'd recommend you don't copy this part of the tree in my build, as I've been experimenting in this area a lot.


Culling strike is good. 10% chance to gain a frenzy when you hit a rare/unique as a mastery tends to smooth out the build early on, but becomes unnecessary later.


Ranger players will know this tech, grab an Intuitive Leap and go to town on all the nice nodes in the area. Note I didn't take Aspect of the Lynx because I'm out of skill points.


Yes. This is intentional. No, I'm not taking Cauterization. Each of those small nodes grants 25% increased bleeding duration. This turns Anomalous Vengeance's bleed from a ~5.x second bleed to about an 8-9 second bleed. Puncture changes from an 18 second bleed to 22+. Looking at this will hurt your soul, but it will help chain your bleed procs from vengeance.

For the Major Gods, Lunaris, Solaris, and Arakaali are all fine options. If you take Lunaris, all of the modifiers are good, although proj chaining tends to be less useful. For Solaris, reduced elemental damage if you haven't been hit is useless because you always hit yourself. No extra damage from crits if you've taken a crit has no special workings with Trauma, as Trauma can't crit. If you take Arakaali, do *not* take debuffs expire 20% faster, since that affects your bleed. Increased recovery rate if you've stopped taking DOT tends to be a bit wonky as generally you never want your bleed to end (but sometimes it just randomly does).

For the minor gods, you get two options. If you have a shield with the benchcraft "Moving While Bleeding Doesn't cause you to Take Extra Damage", I'd take Gruthkul, as it's another free 5% Phys Damage Reduction. Otherwise take Ralakesh.

Flicker Strike
Your 6L Flicker Strike is

Flicker Strike
Close Combat Support
Trauma Support

and 3 other support gems.

I'm intentionally being vague here on the last 3 gems because what they are depend on what state the build is currently in. If you're struggling to deal with high trauma stacks that holding flicker strike does, or if you can't sustain your frenzy charges, then multistrike will be the best support gem for the time being. Melee Physical Damage support gets an honorable mention here as it slows down your attack speed, while still compensating with appropriate damage.

Once you can break away from intentionally limiting your trauma stacks with more armor/phys damage reduction, look for Brutality, Ruthless, and Impale Support. Impale doesn't affect your bleed damage, so you don't need to worry about that.

If you're crazy, Increased Duration support increased the maximum amount of time Trauma lingers for, effectively increasing your sustained/max trauma stacks by 50-60%.

This means your 6l early game may look like


Flicker Strike
Close Combat Support
Trauma Support
Multistrike Support
Melee Physical Damage Support
Brutality Support

and later it will transition to

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Divergent Flicker Strike
Divergent Close Combat Support
Divergent Trauma Support
Impale Support
Ruthless Support
Awakened Brutality Support

Note that I don't mention fortify here.


Fortify as a gem is *good*. Taking 20% less damage from all sources, including ourselves, is welcome, but we can generally get fortify from other sources, including the fortify mastery, or through overlord (if you're using maces). In 3.22 I have opted to get fortify as an attribute tattoo, effectively making flicker a 7L.

Auras
The core auras are


Aspect of the Cat (remember the less duration support)
Pride
Determination
War Banner

Honorable mentions go to

Precision - Usually kept around level 1, its free crit chance for ~17 mana.
Arctic Armour - You're always standing still while attacking, so this has good synergy with Flicker. This has bonus synergy with physical damage taken as fire, which you'll likely want to have on your helmet. Note though, that AA works differently, reducing damage AFTER armour and other damage reduction has already applied. This limits its usefulness as you still need a lot of armour to tank a large hit, but is still good for mitigating that last bit of damage away.
Summon Skitterbots - More damage = :). This one's cheaper than pride, but is also less effective and doesn't synergize with watcher's eyes.

Totems
Nothing a melee player hasn't seen before.


Multiple Totems Support
(Vaal) Ancestral Warchief
Ancestral Protector

More damage and more attack speed, whats not to love?

Leap Slam


Blood Rage

You can put this support on left click to keep it always active.

Puncture (Weapon Swap)


As mentioned before, the goal of this weapon swap bow is to do the longest puncture bleed debuff with the lowest amount of damage possible. Therefore anything that reduces our damage while increasing duration and increasing projectile count is king here.

Mark on Hit

Poacher's Mark gives you life/mana on each hit, as well as increasing the physical damage you do to an enemy. Honorable mention goes to assassin's mark, which I've tried in the past (and may try again), but I found Poacher's mark to be better qol when you've reserved away all your mana.

The Bleed Engine (Vengeance)

Ideally Anomalous Bleed on Hit, and Anomalous Vengeance to increase the bleed chance and decrease the cooldown on the gems, respectively.

Berserk

For the aspiring POB warrior.

In order of importance, Unstoppable, Untiring, Undeniable, and then Unbreakable.

If you're crazy enough to try to run some piece of this during late acts, then make sure you have the first 3 ascendencies. Getting stunned during flickering is a death sentence, and you need the life regen from Untiring to sustain trauma stacks.

At this point, the core uniques have been talked about in length. Farrul's Fur + The Red Trail start and maintain your frenzy/bleed engine. The rest of the stuff are your generic rares.

Weapon
With Trauma support, you get an option of a 1 or 2 handed Axe or Mace. The advantage of a 1 handed is generally more speed, and the opportunity to use a shield, and a 2 handed weapon has more base damage. Axes hit slightly faster than maces, but maces can fortify with Overlord.

Aim for attack speed as a priority on your one handed weapon, as flicker strike itself scales well with attack speed, boasting a 120% multiplier. Attack speed = more trauma stacks. Flat phys damage is nice, but remember that you can make up for a shitty phys damage axe by having more attack speed. In effect, think of base attack damage on your axe like permanent trauma stacks. It's nice, but the raw flat damage comes mostly from trauma.

Shield
I opt for a shield for the sweet unconditional physical damage reduction. This reduces the amount of armour you need to have to get to 90% physical damage reduction against your trauma stacks. You can opt for a 6L 2 handed weapon if you want, but I'm cautioning more on the side of defensive layers for this build. Keep in mind 2 handed weapons are generally a hair slower than 1 handed weapons, but have more base damage.

Belt
While you may see a rare item in my equipment, you're best options are a unique.

You get 2 options (and a self-griefing third option)
Ryslatha's Coil, and The Magnate are your typical dps increasing options. Coil is better overall, but with the wild damage rolls, getting your hands on a good coil can be a bit pricey. On the other hand, you'll find it easy to get to 400 strength, so all of the Magnate's modifiers work in your favor. The last option you can use is Arn's Anguish. You lose out on the defensive layer of endurance charges, but you will do a lot of damage with the brutal charges.

Helmet
I don't like using an abyssus here. The crit multi looks *very* nice, but the extra damage from the abyssus won't help with your ability to instagib yourself with the 40% increased physical damage taken modifier. The added flat damage is equivalent to a whopping 3 trauma stacks. Instead, use a rare helmet. Benchcraft Physical damage taken as fire, and use eater currency to shift some more damage taken as fire if it helps the damage reduction at high stacks. Note that while we don't necessarily get to 90% fire resistance cap, arctic armor and the jugg ascendancy (8% of armor applies to ele damage) puts us well in range of 80%+ physical damage reduction. You'll need to use POB to determine how much fire conversion is too much.

Rings
If you're absolutely swimming in cash, a synth +1 frenzy charge implicit is your friend. Otherwise delve's Precursor's Emblem may interest you. Otherwise, your generic resists + stats rings will carry you far into endgame. Just make sure if you're using rare rings, add the - mana cost prefix benchcraft to reduce Flicker's otherwise absurd manacost.

Amulet
Anoint your third frenzy charge. Extra curse is useless here because Vulnerability gives a chance for any attack to bleed. This kills the jugg.

Flasks


This would be an average midgame flask setup. Note that the quicksilver flask is worthless here - you don't walk like a plebian, you leap slam and flicker everywhere. Leave walking to the minion builds.

Reach uniques in this department would be Progenesis and Bottled Faith to replace the quicksilver flask and the life flask.

When you enter a map or fight a boss, you can weapon swap, toss out puncture, then weapon swap back. Throw out your totems and go to town. You can keep blood rage on left click to keep it always active without thinking. Toss Berserk out when you hit 20+ rage to peak your trauma stacks and take advantage of Berserk's innate 20% less damage taken.

In a map, if you have Farrul's and you see a particularly large pack in front of your face (ie every map), feel free to leap slam into the center of the pack and just start flickering. The first vengeance proc is likely to hit 10+ enemies, instantly starting your bleed engine.

- Life recover modifiers on maps (cannot regenerate life/mana, reduced life recovery rate) mess with the life recovery from our Juggernaut ascendancy.
- Reflect Phys. You're going to instantly kill yourself on the first pack.
- [Expedition] Enemies block attacks. This one is a bit of a weird case. Hitting enemies while affected by the Red Trail and bleed does *not* provide a frenzy charge if the hit is blocked. It does provide a charge if all damage of this hit is avoided, though.
- [Expedition] Enemies overwhelm 100% physical damage reduction. Armour is your main mitigation strategy.
- [Heist/Eater Altars] Less Armour per x (ie Less Armour per alert level, less Armour/Defenses per Frenzy(?) Charge). The former is just annoying. It's still possible to run heist, but it'll be needlessly dangerous. The latter is outright fatal given you're at near max Frenzy/Endurance Charges all the time.
- [Eater Altars] Less Life Recover Rate per Endurance Charges. See Life Recovery above.

As a general statement, at the moment the build doesn't do explosive amounts of dps, so you may find blight bosses a little more annoying without stun towers to keep enemies in place. However, this build is amazing at clearing every other blight mob in the area, bouncing up and down the line like they're nothing.

Also, don't play with anyone that uses Vulnerability. Don't.