[3.25] Holy Flicker Strike Necro [League start > All content] All content is done. PoB updated
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Aright time for an update
First things first – getting up all who wants to try this out up to current events: Dragonfang amulet – over the top price, just skip it. Went up because there is a poison holy relic version of the build being forced (more about that later). Just ignore it – go straight for Ashes. Ashes, even with lowest roll will do you a solid – just make sure you are using spread sheet in FaQ to set your triggers properly. In fact – if you have one of those from before – might be a good time to sell actually Diallas – same thing. Go for skin (and maybe buy some extra with different colors – if you wish to try poison version) Holy relic skill gem – got nothing for you here. Hopefully you can buy corruption mishaps from other players for cheap. If not – well lab awaits you! Good luck! Aright that out of the way – I have some testing results, some cool new and old forgotten specters and a rant about state of the game/endgame Lets go with specters first SPECTERS
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Grand Necromancer is an auto include. Frees up ALL the desecrate slots letting you include an automated Guard skill, third offering, or w/e you wish for yourself. Maybe golem with feeding frenzy. Maybe shield charge so you can 4 link static with AOE and duration for QoL. Get it in global 6666 or from someone in discord.
Warcaller and Specteral leader both options to consider to buff your own attack and move speed. I don’t use them (yet) but something to keep in mind. Guilded arach – increases damage enemy take from chaos by 20% amazing for poison version of the build Syndicate Silencer – 20% shock trap with 30% reduction to action speed – amazing for poison build, bad for flicker version. Moontouched miscreation – stops all the healing – great for dealing with expedition healing, maven healing, conq ground healing – people forget about this one – its amazing when you don’t yet have huge DPS and enemies just heal up. EXPERIMENTS WITH RANGED VERSIONS, POSION VERSION. RANGED-POISON PLAYSTYLE Alright, so to not get into too much detail and ranting (that is for later in the post) – giving you straight up facts. There are several key things to understand.
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Range/poison version is better than melee at avoiding damage. Obviously, duh. And while in the most content this is not a problem, this is absolutely a problem in T17 and possibly sanctum (haven’t tested). And whats more important is not just avoiding damage as a player, but also avoiding damage done to your minions (more about that in rant).
Range/poison version is better than melee at keeping DPS uptime. Enemies cant avoid damage when its from stacked poison and because you are sniping them from range. While with melee version – they can just move out of your static strike range and you stop doing damage to them. Poison DPS is mechanicaly better than phys DPS because it can not be reduced twice. Its… convoluted concept on how damage reduction work and how armor works, to keep things simple – when enemies have some form of damage reduction, suppress, less damage taken, immortal calls – poison would still do damage to them where Phys would be greatly reduced almost to nothing. Poison DPS feels on par with Phys DPS on high end. That is a bit weird (and is noticed by other players) – it feels like it deals too much damage for some reason. Still from my feeling, if you don’t take uptime into account, Phys does more damage, although not by a huge amount Poison damage is also delayed. That rare monster that you would one tap with phys will take 3-5 hits before poison stacks and kicks in. Ranged playstyle feels a bit… clunky compared to static and flicker. While its pretty cozy to hit enemies from range, you need to stop entirely to perform a ranged attack. With static/flicker you are constantly moving. Surprisingly enough, even on open layouts, I felt much more faster and fluid with shield charge/vaal flicker moving from pack to pack, then with ranged skills that could kill packs before I saw them. This could be a personal feeling though. Poison also require less auras, but instead require more jewel sockets. This is a buff. As in sockets are easier to come by then reservation. TL;DR – if you have time – try both builds and decide what you like more. They feel completely different. My opinion – ranged skills feel a bit clunky to use. T17 specifically – 100% better with ranged skills tho, and by a huge amount. RANGED SKILLS TESTED
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Lancing Steel of Spraying – the standart that everyone uses. Causes lots of hits, but has fair bit of a spread so not all projectiles hit the target. Makes you stop entirely to use it, but has a little bit of lingering duration after. Requires sword or axe – so you don’t get cool mods. Requires a fair bit of attack speed to not lock you in place for long.
Rain of Arrows of Saturation/Vaal Rain of Arrows – feels much better then Lancing Steel. Causes more hits, the damage zone stay for much longer. Vaal hinders enemies, even bosses locking them in place. Rearguard provides block values similar to using a shield. Having a bow grants you another 6 link and greater minion damage rolls on 2h weapons. Downsides are immense though. Being bow is still rather squishy compared to shield. You don’t get aegis recovery. But the worst part about it – no shield charge. And no real movement skill. If someone finds a way to make this version move around fast – this would be amazing. I could not. Rage Vortex – also feels very good. Big damage zone, lots of hits, sticks to the enemy. Two problems – axe and sword required – no good mods. And rage generation. Could not find a way to generate rage to activate the vortex. Low key pondering to try out Ascendant with Necro-Berserk, but it’s a terrible idea. Kaom gloves also do not work since relics no longer provide hp regen. If there was a way to generate rage this would be amazing. So keep an eye out for that. Honorable mentions Rage vortex of berserking – not really ranged but it’s a better static strike. Namely because of bigger AOE. Bladestorm – creates a damage zone up to maximum of 3. Pretty bad – very slow hitting even if 3 zones are stacked. Duration is same as Static, but can be placed under enemy and left there. Not great for now, but can be used to brainstorm something with it for sure. Storm Rain – works, but trigger rate is kinda low. Range is low too. Didn’t play a whole lot with it since RoA is soooo much better. WHY POISON, WHY NOT RANGED WITH PHYS CRIT
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The answer is simple – Pride and Brittle Ground. You need to be literally under the enemy to apply Pride aura and brittle ground to boost crit with your boots. You can not do that from range, losing like 2x of your damage if not more.
Playing melee(static) poison is also weird because – why would you play melee and put yourself at danger when you can… not do that. But I tried it out and it works – with the downside that it takes several hits to get poison going so it feels slower than just pure crit hits in most content. CONTENT DONE AND CURRENT BUILD I played with poison for a while, but eventually decided to switch back to crit phys. Pretty much finished all content. Simu 30 is done, Uber Eater is demolished. T17 after the nerf feels doable, even though not great still. Current PoB - https://pobb.in/4cVuAPcnYuv3 RANT TIME Aright, Im about to talk about negative experiences. So 1) Feel free to skip. 2) Take it with a grain of salt – its just my opinion (even though Im always right)
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There are several things that are bad and they influence each other. So I’ll start from afar.
REGULAR CONTENT – IS BAD Scarabs and content changes – are terrible. How is that related to the build? Im getting to it. But for me the base game content feels worse than ever. You can not alc and go. At all. You will just not sustain maps and further more – you will get nothing in returns for doing that. I don’t think it was ever the case in all the time I’ve played. If you are not putting all your atlas points into league mechanic that generates raw currency – you just never gonna get anywhere. To make things worse – if you are not putting all your points into 200% map mod effect – you will run out of maps faster then people who roll for nameless seer. And here lies the biggest problem. By doing so… you ramp the difficulty up by a lot. 80% Phys damage reduction, 100% suppress, 100% reduced recovery – you name it. On top of that – forced league mechanic – it doesn’t add much difficulty, honestly but it still adds up. All this adds up to the point where this build no longer feel comfortable to play. Even with recent buffs, even with 3x relics and all the extra damage we got. Even with QoL new specters – its just not enough to take on the difficulty GGG is slowly pushing since Archnemesis. Honestly few days ago I was seriously thinking to archive the build because of that. The platoe between league start and end game grows ever more, and items that make this build feel good become more and more rare. Ashes being moved to Uber drops. Skin being so rare its impossible to get for WEEKS. Dragonfang – 15 divs. And without those items – this doesn’t even feel like a real build. Not even Asenath pops can carry it with how hard game got. And if that was not enough – Guard skill removal. You like dying all the time to bleed or just to big hits? Oh you wanna lower the difficulty and farm white maps to get some currency for the items that are not even on the market yet? Don’t worry – all the white map farming strats are nerfed too! Can’t wait till they delete tujen as well. Wanna lower the difficulty by not taking 200% map mods? Sure! Just use scarabs to get that loot power back! You only need to trade for them for 3hours! Ah surely you can farm those yourself. Oh boy you can! You farmed over 100 scarabs! Good job – lets see how many of those related to mechanic you wanna run – its 3. END GAME CONTENT – IS BAD T17 is cancer for this build. You can do them, sure. Its not even too hard, given you avoid certain mods. But at its core its still cancer. First of all – its not balanced around minions. Enemies damage and HP (and that’s is the bigger problem) are so overturned that they just straight up kill AG who can afk sleep in Sim30. It very much remind me ToTA league mechanic. Remember that HP? Well almost every enemy in T17 have corpse explosion. It can be just ability the enemy pack uses, it can be on death effect, it can be Archnemesis mod on rare monster. Thing is – it onetaps 60k HP AG with max res. Just straight up – deletes him from existence. Your relics too. And your specters. And yourself. For the same reason – T17 are not balanced around melee. We are melee. And minions. You see where this is going. You charge into a pack only to explode to on-death effect of 50 projectiles shotgun. The gear you need to have to even remotely able to do those is way more than you need to do ubers. For this build statement that ubers are a joke compared to T17 – is fully true. Even T17 bosses themselves are harder than ubers – flooding arena with degen zones or one shot mechanics that are almost unavoidable from melee range. UBERS ARE BAD Mostly because of T17. You’ll have to run those for a while to get a full set of fragments. But also – because of the loot tables shift from regular bosses. Moving build enabling items to content that you stop playing the game after is like evolving but backwards. To sum things up…
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The build is fine actually. Still does all content including new one. Its terrible at it, but it does it. I have no doubts its gonna be nerfed eventually.
It feels terrible to play at certain point of the midgame progression because of how much difficulty of the game ramps up and how exceptionally rare powerful items are. I would not be surprised if someone would try the build, get to the wall of first multi divine item and just drop it. And I won’t judge them. Its not a good build if you need that much to do so little. I know from experience how to push it to the limit and what to upgrade first – most people prolly wont. So even with all the buffs this received – and even with it able to do all content, I am not happy with the build. I can still recommend trying it – and I can still say at least SOME people had and/or having fun with it this league. This warms my heart. So there we are. Rant over. Hope you all had a great time this league regardless of what you playing. And feel free to hang around discord – we share specters, make fun of your PoBs and give general tips. |
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Aight league is done time for a bit of an update. I’m gonna keep most thing shorts, because there will be one more big post after this one.
 League summary and challenges More content done:
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T17 is still cancer – the hardest challenge to beat. Its doable, but its not comfortable. Remind me a lot of sanctum.
Essenced bosses were really hard. To the point of almost killing my AG (pre ugrades) hard. Simulacrum seems alright with buffs to relics but still would not recommend. 5 rewards on average. Sanctum – still suffering from the same problem as T17 – not balanced for melee + delayed damage = bad. Phys relics do have a bit of a time to warm up the pride effect and brittle ground and harpy to apply the debuff and punishment to kick in at half HP. Recent findings and updates Mask of the stitched demon
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Something I missed is insanely strong item for AG now – because of how new Bone Barrier works. Bone barrier gives minions huge energy shield, and Mask convers that energy shield to something like 60% of life regen per second. I don’t think I ever saw AG taking damage ever since I put it on.
That being said – it only provides survivability and no other benefits, while other options – Leer cast/Rare helm (full DPS), Ylfeban's Trickery (Balance of DPS and survivability via curses) provide a lot LESS survivability but have other beneficial effects. Ylfeban's Trickery specifically was enough for me to play in T17 maps, although I saw AG getting damaged a lot still – and that’s not a good sign. Mask is interesting also because it means you could drop corrupted blood immunity from gloves and do something fun with that. Gonna mess around with that later. TL;RD - use it AG never ded, but its boring. Volcanic Fissure of Snaking
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This one is… questionable, but it’s an easy Band-Aid fix that lets you use ranged attack to trigger Holy Relics. Im gonna be real with you – I have no idea why it even works, but it seems to hit a lot of times in sequence BUT only if there are multiple enemies.
Its very bad against single target. But its not bad enough to discard it. Whats more important – it autotargets enemies. You don’t need to aim – it will go to the nearest enemy and then bounce to next one. With ashes of the starts and 20% quality it gives about 5-6 seconds uptime on damage hits. And that is insanely good. This thing can easily clean legions, blights and breaches without you needing to move. Ive been playing a while with it and I cant get over how good it feels. Mind that its still a terrible idea to try going range playstyle on this version of the build (read in comment above why). But it requires a simple gem swap that doesn’t require a color change from your setup. It also lets you keep using Scepter, unlike Splitting Steel that requires a sword. So just by swapping 2 gems you can gain the ability to stay at range with all the downsides of being at range with the physical build Several examples where its super good: T17 – obviously. All those 420 projectiles shotgun monsters and DD effects? Just snipe them from range. Problem solved. Even T17 bosses could be done with it (although its kinda bad) – letting you dodge most of the mechanics. Blight maps/events/ravaged – this is just self explanatory – you can just hold the button down and heat seeking fissures will trigger nova on delivery from safe distance. I kinda wanna try doing full afk blight map – will do that in the future. Gigajuced expedition big boom – same idea. Flickering into the tanky monster packs is dangerous? Just use fissures and be on other side of the screen. Doing challenges – did Sirus kill across the screen while standing in his piss puddle. TL;DR – Volcanic fissure of Snaking 1+/20. Try it. Its funny. And functional. Links are Faster attcks-multistrike-Volcanic-Shieldcharge Shaper of flames + Fan the Flames + Asenath Explosion + Spiritual Aid
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This was a low cost way to get even more clear without going for Profane Bloom jewels. I think its safe to say that difficulty in the game got so high this no longer works.
Monsters are so tanky that this damage does nothing and its sad. I’ll still try experimenting with that, but in a different direction – by using Profane Bloom and get ignites from it. TL;DR - do not use it. Light Eater Notable and Instant Leech Mastery
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So… Instant Leech works as intended. That means several things:
If you have it – you can do 100% less life recovery maps, including no regen maps (although you would have to solve mana problem with mana recoup/mana on hit). Less recovery doesn’t stop instant heals, so you will get Aegis restoring you ES and Leech healing you. That being said – you get about the same functionality from Forbidden taste/Instant heal flask. It feels very good against degens – Im pretty sure you could outheal shaper beam with it. It’s a bro-science but it should be giving you about 300 hp per hit per relic on maxed out build. The downside is of course – 7 passive points cost for just that. It’s a lot. I lost about 600 life to have that. But it still might be worth it, especially early game. Will have to test it with low investment gear. TL;DR - 7 passive points for 300*3 HP on hit. Maybe worth it. Maybe not. Oneshots is the problem, not recovery, but its still nice for no regen. Overall thought about league, current build and build future Well I already went into detail about my feeling of the game in the rant comment above. But to sum things up. " Future plans
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Back in time time again – to adjust the build for early game. This time – extra challenging. Maximum map mods on atlas tree. Expedition big boom. No Grand Necromancer allowed – since its impossible to get him in first few days. See if I can handle that.
Hidden blade – still need to test that one. I’ll do it I swear! Eventually! Wanna experiment a bit with 100% uptime Ancestral Cry. Tweaks to AG gear – to support ranged playstyle more, alternative to kingmaker, alternative gloves with Mask giving infinite life. So there is that. If you just now found this build and want to try it – you sure can, but I’d wait for Back in Time post – there will be some significant changes to early game progression as well as some tweaks to end game. The base build will still work tho. Current build - https://pobb.in/6OWAKXrvbDzC
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Vdeo showcase: 70 quant invitations 70 quant feared |
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Its back in time time. This time, a very short one, but read below some info about T17 build tweaks too!
 First of all CONDITIONS This time I decided to have a balance pass over every progression step of the PoB guide using Back to Basics keystone on White Yellow and Red maps with maximum map mod effect points taken to simulate a lot of difficulty. The main focus of tests was to see if I can do maps + 1 explosion Expedition. No AG and no Grand Necromancer at early stages of the build. RESULTS For once I am happy how build performed. Made several minor tweaks in PoB, cleaning up confusing stuff about mana clusters and cleaning up Gems, setting up proper levels, etc. There were few key moments that needs to be pointed out though " UPDATED POB https://pobb.in/W86_T1PwQQ25 New T17 and AG setup So you might have noticed that PoB now has a new setup for T17 and Volcanic fissure of snaking. These are adjustments I’ve made so you can safely farm T17 from range, because using flicker there is suicidal behavior. Volcanic fissure of Snaking in my opinion is superior to Lancing steel but only for clearing. Single target DPS is trash with it.
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Why better: it does 4 bounces, auto targets enemies, every bounce leaving several fire geysers on the ground that rapidly hit enemies with attack hits. After using it with 4 bounces it has ~4-5 seconds of lifespawn. Requires scepter – meaning you get get +1 all skills weapon. Tracks enemies so you can just hold it down or fire and forget (can afk blights with it), curves around the corners and travels several screen away (check 00:47 of showcase and look at loot on the minimap). Can function on 1 link. Why worse: can not properly bounce when there is just one enemy. To help that – for bosses Static strike is used. Use Shield charge to move around Charred beasts to be removed with allflame to avoid DD. Use new set of items for T17 AG in the PoB. This will maximize his HP to not die to oneshot, give him big huge ES recovery from shotgun damage and, while it will lack Kingmaker, you still get cull from a weapon and 6% damage reduction from shield. VIDEO SHOWCASE OF T17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa9YGzwsCYc |
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Ahoy Mateys! Its that time again! New league! New patch notes! New picture!
 Gonna keep it short this time. Build didn't not change significantly. Still... There are things in patch notes that needs to be pointed out And lets start with the NERFS
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"Might not seem like a big deal, but this was a go-to way to use an early claw. Will be missed. "Careful with Skin of the Lords! "Pretty big hit to tankiness. While we were not using it too often, it was REALLY nice to have. "Pretty sad with that one. Early mana issues are real, but perhaps 15% will be enough. "20 less life. Not a big deal, still a nerf. "We lose 10k armor from this resulting about 10% phys mitigation loss. Its not a huge deal, but since build is mostly uniques, you can't fully recover from such a hit. "It may actually be dificult to res cap even as necromancer now. "Makes one of the core items of the build entirely usless. Back to 2x armor flasks. " BUFFS!
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There are two HUGE buffs to the build. "This is insanely broken. It works on hits , so relics fully take advantage of it and it will make early game so very smooth. No longer 60-90% phys reduction monsters from expedition, ultimatum or just from map rolls will ever be a problem! "So this is basically: +1 gem slot from freeing desecrate, +1 specter from freeing Grand Necromancer, +15% attack and cast speed from adding third offering. All that at the cost of anoint. Sure sucks to lose +1 curse, but its only like 10% dps for all that massive utility. "So this is interesting because there is a specter that uses Enduring Cry. If they coded it to work, you will have free endurance charge generation with constant life regen AND your minions will get endurance charges that are now much more powerful than before. " OTHER CHANGES
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"Hopefully this means you can't be stuned out of vaal flicker. "Could be interesting to get crit to 100%, but I doubt it. "War banner could be used early game for a slight damage boost, but not anymore. "While 20% more damage and 20 less damage taken seems great, but its clearly a bait. Wording 'up to' means you need to be standing directly on enemy for it to work. Very much not worth. " "These two means easy block cap. However, we already had easy time capping block. This can be rather interesting for dual scepter option that I might experiment in a future. "Counter attacks were sometimes used as a way to auto trigger relics on block/hit. I removed them from the main build but it still was nice utility in certain cases. RIP TL;DR No big changes, build with perform more or less the same as last league. Expecting smooth sale with league start and a decent end game! It may feel a bit squishier with determination nerf, removal of some core masteries and very little source of resists. However, there is a lot of block you can get early on and life leech will now properly work unlike last leagu. The damage gonna feel A LOT better at early stages because of new minion mastery. Attacking with slow weapons will feel better too. Mechanis to take advantage of in league content.
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Recombinator. Duh. Finally a chance to make a good weapon since removal of Veiled Chaos orbs. Simply smash +1 gems with minion damage and trigger skills together and boom - uber boss killer ready. Runes. Some interesting enchants there. +1 curse, minion damage, maybe something else fun. Afterword I think its gonna be a great league for the build. Even if less tanky, the damage should make up for it. You not gonna need a lot to keep it going to the red maps and from there... well... You can always decide to swap to something else. Poison relics perhaps? Maybe Elementalist? Or maybe you stick around with this one to the very end. Regardless what you decides - Discord is always open for everyone and Im happy to give tips and look over your build. I plan to update the PoB as soon as we get a tree and skill gems update. And, of course, I plan to start the build day 1 and push it to the limit. Some of the progress will be tracked, but most talks will be in discord. Hope to see you all on league start. And wish you all smooth sailing. |
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Fire_Archer, thank you for information, I'm planning to start a new league with phys melee version Holy relics.
If use Mask of the stitched demon on AG will he survive on T17 maps? No oneshots? Also thinking about optimal spectres. |
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" Well they are nerfing t17, but previusly mask didn't help. Even made it worse cuz you lose like 20k ES. I made unkillable (to this day) AG that can survive oneshots and high DPS like 10essence map boss. Its in a PoB/post above. Specters didn't change. 2xHarpy, Gran Necro, Tul. If you get new anoint - Hairy Bonecruncher (if it works) or Frenzy/Power monket if it doesnt. Maybe they bring back Oak specter - that would be nice too. But you won't get that before anoint and that comes from ravaged maps, so gonna take a while. |
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" Nerf t17 encouraging. I saw that setup, but we lost Kingmaker buffs, if there is no other choice it is certainly better than nothing. " Thats good! " Yes, this for endgame, new oil will be expensive, I think. |
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" You didn't actually. Relentless gives back culling, and sap on block gives back well... not 10 forti, but 6% damage reduction I mean yeah, its worse, but not THAT much worse and comes with AG not dying, so... " Then we just farm it ourseves. With volcanic fissure tech you can literally hold a button down and go afk in the blight map, cuz unlike splitting steel it tracks enemies. |
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" AG not dying the most important thing anyway. I hate to go on trade for AG items every time he dies) Who plays TotA on 2000 knows what I mean... " Blight map yes, but that oil drops only from blight-ravaged maps, this requires much more damage and investment to build. Anyway, it can be farmed later at some point. |
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As melee and phys damage build I'm very interested in what retaliation skill and banner can fit well. It looks like this can give good buffs.
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