Flicker Strike Acolyte of Chayula Endgame Build

Build Introduction

If you’re bored of your current build, or just looking for something new without being limited to your current class, you’re in perfect place! Flicker Strike and Falling Thunder are both Quarterstaff skills that play perfectly together. One skill zooms you with lightning speed trough the map, while the other takes care of any boss in the game, solo or full party!

If you’re looking for a way to league start on this build, click on the link below.

---

Strengths and Weaknesses

---

Build Mechanics

Power Charges

The build will take advantage of Power, Frenzy, and Endurance Charges through Charge Profusion II. We will also utilize Charge Infusion for added crit strike chance, skill speed, and global defences! Cast on Critical combo with Profane Ritual and Profusion II generates all type of charges for us, supported with the Sacrifice to get first charges easily

If your Critical Chance is too low, you can add stuff like unique charms that grant charges, self cast Profane Ritual if needed, or just use a Rattling Sceptre and Sacrifice the Skeletal Warrior Minions it generates.

Power Charge Generation

Power Charges are at the core of this setup, and we are using Cast on Critical socketed with Profane Ritual to automatically generate our Power Charges after every use of Flicker Strike as we cannot gain any during it. Profane Ritual is used on a corpse and lasts a short amount of time on the ground before it ends and provides a Power Charge. That gives us amazing combo of teleporting with Flicker and while landing mostly critical hits that auto-cast Ritual to supercharge us right after using Flicker Strike!

After the rework on Lingering Illusion, we change our boss Power Charge generator to Sacrifice with a Rattling Sceptre in Weapon Set 2 and self-casted Profane Ritual. Sacrificed Skeletal Warriors convert to Power Charges which allow maximum Charges for Charged Staff. Swap to set 1 and back to set 2 to prepare the charges for Falling Thunder.

Defensives

Defensives are based on Chayulas synergy with leech and a Corrupted Soul Tether that removes the Energy Shield drain per second, preferably also with double Corrupt for extra Energy Shield. We will use every single slot possible with pure Energy Shield, including your Amulet. Sources of extra Chaos Damage, Purple Flames of Chayula, baseline physical damage or even some “as extra physical damage” will fuel the Energy Shield constantly. Life Leech III support will keep any leech over max for about 1 second for extra overtime regen as another layer of defense.

This build will focus on a pseudo-Mind Over Matter setup to stay alive. Mana before Life can be gained through a Rune on body armour, the passive Heavy Buffer (which will need either a Megalomaniac or Anoint on Amulet), and other passive tree passives closer to the Monk starting point.

If you find yourself feeling too squishy, you can safely drop damage passives in the tree for Energy Shield. The build is overkill on damage, so you can remove a bit safely for better defenses.

Remember that you can always enhance your gear via extra sockets or some corruptions once you get enough currency. Top-tier gear can make you sit at comfortable 10-15k ES. And that is all meanwhile any of your hits will instantly 0-100% that amount via leech.

Single-Target Damage

Bosses are not much of an issue. With decent gear all you have to do is get Power Charges with Lingering Illusion evade tech and just press Falling Thunder on the boss. With lower-end gear you can use Tempest Flurry for the final strike of the ability to apply enhanced shock to increase the damage of our Falling Thunder up to a 100% with Shock. Tempest Flurry has a whooping 100% magnitude of shock for its final hit, giving you an easy way to reach very high values on shock debuff.

Why Chayula?

Leech is very inconsistent unless you have a ton of it, but with both Physical and Chaos damage contributing to it it feels much better. Every use of an ability will refresh both your Life and Energy Shield (given we have Soul Tether) removing that inconsistency. Into the Breach provides us with consistent extra Chaos Damage from Purple Flames of Chayula, adding more to this leech.

Amazon has a similar function, as it makes Elemental Damage contribute to life leech, but Chayula does it better as this version provides the bonus to both Life and Mana Leech.

Chayula also comes with an ascendency node that doubles all your Chaos Resistance gains and increases the maximum Chaos Resistance you can have by 10%, giving the build very easy way to deal with Chaos and sit on comfortable 85% resistance.

---

Skill Rotation

Map Clearing

• Self-cast Profane Ritual on minions in Weapon Set II or use any ability to land critical hits, or evade with Lingering Illusion to get Power Charges.
• Use Charged Staff to buff yourself with insane amounts of flat lightning damage and every ability cast will additionally send a shockwave, greatly helping with clear!
• Use Flicker Strike to enable the Cast on Critical automation to gain Charges. This enables a continuous loop of Flicker Strike.
• Recast Charged Staff if needed.
• Try to retain a Power Charge or two to quickly deliver a killing blow to the map boss with Falling Thunder.

Following the passive tree guide you should have alot of movement speed in weapon set II so you can spam evade towards boss and generate Power Charges if you don’t have any readily available.

If you have decent amount of Fire damage in your build you can add Ancestral Cry to your loadout as we are automatically getting Endurance Charges. This can be a lengthy buff that lets us AoE everything as every skill of ours is gonna be Ancestrally Boosted. For example, Tempest Flurry is 10 meters and becomes a 360 degree ability with this. It also gains a 30% damage buff, making it great for Ritual farms!

Bossing

Bossing is probably the best part about this build

• Swap to your weapon set II and spam evade to generate your power charge.
• With decent gear no matter what difficulty, solo requires just 1-2 power charges and then we walk up to the boss and press Falling Thunder and that’s all she wrote!

Whenever you’re in full party and plan on carrying people, for example on Trials of Sekhemas:

• Before going in the room of the boss cast Profane Ritual on your Skeletal Warriors to gain Power Charges.
• Buff yourself with Charged Staff to maximize damage!
• Get another set of Power Charges, up to your current maximum.
• Use Tempest Flurry as soon as you can hit the boss to debuff him with its final strike for a huge shock debuff.
• Then you can use the optional Infernal Cry and Mantra of Destruction to greatly buff your next attack with Fire & Chaos damage.
• Once you set all that up Falling Thunder gonna deal with every boss.

So as long as you are able to put all full damage on the boss and land the Falling Thunder there won’t be a boss in the game, even in full party to survive your single hit! (Unless its specific map boss thats stacked to be tanky and he happens to get crit resistant affix)

---

Gameplay Tips

• Wind Dancer is a key of survival! Paired with new version of Life Leech III support gem it lets you destroy whole screen when hit as long as enemies are within range. If you have enough physical damage on your gear, play Amazon or Chayula. You’ll be able to leech your entire health bar back, and on top of providing a ton of life regeneration for 1 second!
• You can build this with Energy Shield and take advantage of the tip above while throwing into the mix Soul Tether belt that lets you use overflowing life leech as energy shield leech
• Charged Staff buff is a great damage buff as well as a great tool for clearing. The shockwaves it generates can proc Heralds or proc buffs such as Innervate and Ice Bite.
• Charged Staff gains a lot of value from +level to Al Attack Skills, greatly benefitting the damage on shockwave and even greater benefit to flat damage added to your weapon. At Level 40 it provides a whooping 8-153 Lightning damage per Power Charge, up to your maximum Power Charge count; 8 is most comfortable maximum, but we can get 9. This is 64-1224 flat damage added on top of the shockwave damage, making this one of most potent buffs in the game. This ability alone makes Gemling and Prism of Belief with +3 ranks to Charged Staff shine.
• Adding Armour Break III on Heralds, and for Herald of Thunder the new lineage support Uul-Netol’s Embrace + Uruk’s Smelting, can be another source of guaranteed Endurance charges for Charge Infusion or Ancestral Cry.
• Before getting decent gear buffs like Infernal Cry or Mantra of Destruction are great addition to build helping you to fill holes in damage.
• Remember to constantly keep you attributes equal! Jack of all Trades gives alot of damage per 5 of your lowest attribute, and our combo of skills put us on 157 requirement for each of the attributes!
• MOST IMPORTANT TIP! Nothing beats corrupted jewels for immune to Maim and Hinder alongside Crystallized Immunities node on passive tree if we are not playing Pathfinder. Slows and freezes are the most common culprits for deaths in any other class.

---

Video Guide

The mapping section in the video is from an older version of the build. This written guide has the latest setup, and a new video will be added here when it’s ready!

Gem Info

Below you will find a planner with a full breakdown of your skill setup for the Flicker Strike build.

• Sacrifice is giving you two ways of build. Either stack Spirit so you don’t have to deactivate Cast on Critical or get enough to have both active at all times.
• Profane Ritual for easy bossing. We need this on Cast on Critical and on skill bar, casted manually on Skeletal Warrior Minion from a Rattling Sceptre.
• Flicker Strike needs attack speed from supports for its animation; this aids teleportation speed and increases the wind-up on the skill. You don’t want to get light stunned while preparing to cast first hit as it will cancel it and make Hit and Run require you to move before you can cast again.
• Falling Thunder is meant to be a “one and done” type of ability, so after changes to Garukhan’s Resolve we don’t use it anymore. Culmination II also got a huge nerf, limiting its potential from limitless to a mere 20 combo points. That give us few options, Dialla’s Desire being the expensive one and Close Combat II being the cheap one. We prepare with Profane Ritual to first get our Charged Staff and then 8 Power Charges. Tempest Flurry is there to apply shock with its final strike followed up with Falling Thunder, doing the most insane amount of damage. Once your gear gets to god-tier level you will just need 1 or 2 Power Charges.
• We highly recommend just buying skills that are maxed, quality 20% and full linked with +1 corruption as this late in the league its pretty cheap. This can save you time and, if you’re really unlucky, also currency.
• Optionally, you can put Elemental Weakness in Cast on Critical for extra resistance debuff, if your crit is high enough.

---

Ascendancy

Our choice of Ascendancy with Acolyte of Chayula will focus entirely around gaining extra Chaos Damage, allowing that Chaos Damage to Leech both Life and Mana, and then gaining huge defensive modifiers to help us stay alive.

1. Sap of Nightmares – Leech recovers based on Chaos Damage as well as Physical Damage. This is why Soul Tether is a godly item for the build! This makes leech extremely potent for Chayula and since we get a lot of extra Chaos Damage, we will be leeching with all of our attacks.
2. Waking Dream and Choice of Power – These two are our sources of extra Chaos. With its recent buff, we just have to walk and enjoy constant infusion of power with chaos damage.
3. Chayula’s Gift – Very nice way of dealing with Chaos Damage, giving us +10% maximum Chaos Resistance and double the Chaos Resistance we have, making it very easy to reach 85% damage reduction for chaos damage.
4. Sustainable Practices – Works similiar to Armour applies to Elemental damage reduction, even showing it in the same tab on your character sheet. This means stacking Evasion and Energy Shield grants us also an insane amount of elemental damage reduction. Numbers like 70%+ reduction are quite easily achievable for anyone.

Not much changes for us in the endgame, as we don’t get even remotely close to same value by picking anything else on the tree.

---

Skill Tree

We need many different unique jewels to fit all the best passives, but it’s worth the pain of getting them.

Conduit keystone is one of our cheap options for From Nothing Diamond which provides us with simple Critical and Physical Damage nodes. However, this also gives us further range of Remnants we pick up as well as giving us 10% chance to create another one so we are always stacked up to 10 on Purple Flames of Chayula to maximize our Chaos Damage!

It’s really up to what gear you choose, but we recommend the budget version first so you can try build out first, and that is the version of skill tree you will find below.

---

Gearing

Gear Affixes

The following table lists the optimal gear, affixes, and uniques for the build, including both mapping and bossing as we don’t have to change a thing, build is performing excellent at everything in the game without needing to swap a single thing in it.

Replace any affix at your discretion with rarity if able to do so.

Remember to have at least one affix dedicated to both leech life and leech mana anywhere on gear.

Slot	Base	Prefix	Suffix
Main Hand	Sinister/Bolting/Lunar/Aegis/Razor Quarterstaff	1. Adds x to x Lightning Damage – mandatory 2. Adds x to x Physical Damage + increased % Physical Damage physical roll only if both present or Adds x to x Fire&Cold damage or Adds x to x Fire damage + Elemental damage with attacks.	1. Level of All Attack skills 2. Onslaught/Attack speed/Life or mana leech 3. To Critical Hit chance 1 & 3 – Mandatory
Main Hand Swap	Any martial one-handed weapon Preferably spear	–	–
Off Hand	–	–	–
Off Hand Swap	Arvil’s Wheel	50%+ Skill Effect duration is all that matters
Helm		Maximum Power Charge corruption! 1. maximum Energy Shield 2. Increased Maximum Energy Shield 3. Energy Shield/Maximum life	1. Critical Hit Chance 2. Resist 3. Resist 4. Rarity/Attribute option
Body	Energy Shield	1. To maximum ES 2. Increased max ES 3. 60 Spirit	1. Fire/Chaos/Cold/Lightning Resistance 2. Fire/Chaos/Cold/Lightning Resistance 3. Fire/Chaos/Cold/Lightning Resistance 4. Int if capped on resi
Gloves	Energy Shield	1. Adds x to x Lightning Damage to attacks 2. Adds x to x Fire/Cold/Physical damage to attacks	1. Effect of socketed items 2. +2 to melee skills 3. Versatile, crit dmg/leech/rarity whatever you need/can get.
Boots	Energy Shield	1. % Increased Energy Shield 2.+X Energy Shield 3.% Increased Movement Speed	1. Deflection equal to evasion 2. Resistance 3. Effect of socketed items
Belt	Soul Tether	We just need to get rid of the constant energy shield drain roll via the new corruptions from Fate of the Vaal!
Ring 1	Breach/Unset/Any ring	1. Adds x to x Lightning 2. Adds x to x Fire/cold/phys 3. Adds x to x Fire/cold/phys	1. Resistances 2. Leech life/mana 3. Leech life/mana
Ring 2	Breach/Unset/Any ring	1. Adds x to x Lightning 2. Adds x to x Fire/cold/phys 3. Adds x to x Fire/cold/phys	1. Resistances 2. Leech life/mana 3. Leech life/mana
Amulet	Solar/Any other with 50 Spirit	1. Global Defences 2. Spirit 3. Energy shield (flat pref)	1. 3 melee skills 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Critical Damage 4. Optionally all res

Gearing Tips

Make sure you are capped at 75% for all Elemental Resistances, with as much Chaos Resistance as possible.

Flat fire is much better than flat cold damage due to the fact we need corpses to fuel Profane Ritual Power Charge generation! Cold will make you shatter enemies and destroy their corpses in the process; we don’t want that!

At high investment and gear levels you can get 3-4 socket items with 100% socket bonus making meeting resistances much easier. Remember resistance > damage bonus. Not being dead is the biggest DPS increase.

Unique Items

• Soul Tether is all we need!

Socketables

Socketables are insanely flexible here, not really needed that much. You use anything you need at the time for most part, I will specify best options just for these wondering

Slot	Socketable
Main Hand	Best damage gain: Saqawal’s Rune of the Sky but as extra chaos is gonna fuel the leech! Feel free to use anything, Azcapa for spirit or even Leech mana/life runes if needed!
Helm	Resistance/Rage/Anything you need at the time
Body Armour	Iron/Fox/Resistances/From mana before life x1
Gloves	Anything you want! Attack Speed = Faster flicker, smoother damage, flat physical damage more healing/mana leeching. Resistances anything that you need at the time
Boots	Movement Speed is the best pick by far if budget allows. If not then use anything u need at the time

Corruption And Sanctification Effects

Your weapon will want a Sanctification to All Attack Skills since it greatly benefits the whole build. Heralds and Charged Staff are the main play here.

Your amulet is going to be difficult. Preferably you want corrupt for +1 to All Skills since it exists, but sanctify with around 50% to crit chance and damage is also quite nice.

+1 to Maximum Power Charges is the best possible gain on a helmet for the build.

Slot	Corruption/Sanctification Effect
Main Hand	1. +1 to Attack skills 1. +1 Socket
Off Hand
Helm	1. +1 to Maximum Power Charges
Body Armour	+ 1 Socket
Gloves	1. +1 socket
Boots	+1 Socket
Belt	25% light/fire/cold resistance 25% Evasion
Rings	1. % to Chaos Resistance enchant 2.% to all Elemental Resistances enchant 3. % Increased Damage enchant 4. % Increased Skill Speed enchant
Amulet	1. +1 to Level of all Skills 2. +1 to Level of Melee Skills via sanctification

Jewels

You will need a Time-Lost jewel with 25% effect to notable passives in radius, for the cluster with Struck Through.

From Nothing Diamond has many options. Conduit for range of remnants pick up, Resolute Technique for AoE size, max life, and some extra crit nodes, Chaos Inoculation for extra Chaos Damage, Mind over Matter for crit chance, magnitude of shock and elemental damage, or Vaal Pact for movement speed.

Controlled Metamorphosis Diamond: This is gonna be socketed near resonance so we can cherry pick the best nodes there. You’ll want a large ring radius. We pick Harmonic Generator, Chakra of Thought, Event Horizon, and Spaghettification.

Heart of the Well Diamond – Gain as extra % damage rolls twice. If you can’t afford Lightning then just get any. Additionally, we want crit chance and crit damage, but anything useful for build will do just fine.

Prism of Belief – We don’t need +3 to Flicker Strike as this build is completely stacked with absurd amounts of damage, and its the most expensive version of the jewel that could benefit the build. Instead, we focus on getting +3 for Charged Staff as a cheaper and more versatile option or Falling Thunder as more expensive option.

Megalomaniac Diamond – This is first and probably gonna be the only mandatory jewel. Lust for Power was moved away from its previous spot, so we can’t easily access it. We also want to get Heavy Buffer, so we need either both of these on the jewel, or to anoint one on our amulet. Second allocate on our megalomaniac will be something like Pure Chaos/Overwhelming Strike. If you happen to get both of them on the Megalomaniac, then I suggest anointing something like Overwhelming Strike/Barbaric Strength or Material Solidification on your amulet. Material Solidification seems to be best option as its gonna be in range of our Time-Lost for extra 25% boost on it!

Charms

Prioritize the following Charms:

• Charms
  1. Thawing Charm: Grant Guard
  2. Stone Charm: Grant Guard
  3. A Rite of Passage with Boar/Owl/Cat/Ox or any other related defense

---

Changelog

• December 24th, 2025: Guide added