Pathfinder Flicker Strike 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!

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 perfect here. This ability 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!

Lingering Illusion works wonders, but does require a specific amount of movement speed! 60-70% movement speed lets you spam evade to generate Power Charges, right after your second evade! Outranging the illusion counts as it been killed, which is how we’re able to generate Power Charges immediately upon entering a map. It’s very possible this is a bug, and the guide will be updated if it’s ever patched out.

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Strengths and Weaknesses

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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 Lingering Illusion to get first charges easily, either by outrunning/outranging it (as it counts as its being killed) or just simply using it as it was meant to and letting monsters kill it to generate charges, optional way would be Siphoning Strike, Killing Palm or Ailith’s Chimes with Culmination II.

If your crit is too low, you can add stuff like unique charms that grant charges. Self cast Profane Ritual if needed, or just use weapon set II to get pure movement speed and bind weapon swap alone to spam evade for Lingering Illusion to get you some power charges.

Defensives

We will be very squishy with the base version of the build. The cost is fairly cheap, maxing around 5 Divines for Body Armour (Coming Calamity) with 3 sockets and 35%+ all elemental resistance roll. Once the build begins to ramp damage, a life leech roll anywhere on the gear will have thingsfeeling much better. Getting hit will trigger Wind Dancer that will completely obliterate the whole screen and leech your life right back up. We are also using runes on Calamity “from mana before life”, preferably four of them, if you can get them. We just socket Second Wind with both Life Leech III and Mana Leech with the latter also being socketed both in Herald of Ice and Herald of Thunder.

Coming Calamity is great budget option as an offensive addition to the build. This completely removes elemental resistances from consideration, but also all Heralds provided by this armour are free, so no spirit needed. On top of that, Herald of Thunder from the item is scaled much higher than the regular one from skill gem, with around 200% more attack damage scaling. Making this build really easy to try-out before fulling investing, as you will only need to get semi-decent Quarterstaff and this cheap body armour

We enhance the cheapest version of the build with Charms providing us Guard. With Pathfinder, we don’t really need Thawing Charm. We can take advantage of either Fire/Cold/Lightning resistance charm x2 or one of them + Boar Charm to get tons of defense! Every time we get stunned (Stone Charm) we get 500 guard. Boar charm is an amazing source of damage reduction which also contributes to our damage dealt a bit. Bear/Ox are alternatives. Bear is the most expensive, but it’s also the best option, so keep that in mind if you have extra currency.

If you find yourself feeling too squishy and want to invest in some higher defensive options, for Pathfinder it’s quite easy. Pick up a body armour with 2.5k+ evasion, a helmet that offers bonuses when being surrounded, and boots with a lot of evasion. We just pick nodes for double evasion from body armour and that should put us comfortably on 65% evasion. This equates to around 72% damage reduction from elemental damage hits. Additionally, you should try to get both body armour and boots with at least 21% “gain deflection equal to evasion” for extra defense.

If you happen to find very good stats on Aegis Quarterstaff its also a good addition to the build with its Block Chance implicit. This gains insane value if you can sanctify it and get positive outcome on the block %. Megalomaniacs can help you greatly with either achieving max block chance or adding “Lay Siege” passive for damage gain out of the block.

Further investment is helmet with 3 sockets on pure Energy Shield; this option is costly, but with the addition of Subterfuge mask we get tons of ES+Evasion! But with this investment you can use Soul Tether belt to convert excess life leech to energy shield leech constantly charging your ES. This belt is only really good on maps thou, bosses like Arbiter will not give you easy time with this since it constantly drains your ES. It would also require swap out of surrounded helmet and all the nodes associated with it.

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 100% shock debuff.

Why Pathfinder?

I realized myself that damage in this build is the last thing to worry about, and that’s why I decided to keep Pathfinder as my main ascendancy for this build. Being unaffected by any slows on top of immune to freeze is just impossible for me to replace, and once you try it yourself you will understand this. Chilled ground? No effect on you. Temporal Chains? They don’t matter either. Monsters can’t maim, hinder, chill nor freeze you; no charms included!

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Skill Rotation

Map Clearing

• Self-cast Profane Ritual on minions in Weapon Set II or use any ability to land some crits/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 your in full party and wanna carry people, for example on Trials of Sekhemas:

• Before going in the room of the boss make sure you use evade and Lingering Illusion tech to get power charges.
• Buff yourself with Charged Staff to min max damage!
• Get another set of power charges (up to your current maximum power charges).
• 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)

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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/hinder + 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.

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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.

• Lingering Illusion is the only skill that we will be limiting to weapon set II in case you lack Spirit.
• Cast on Critical is the only skill that we will be limiting to weapon set I to save Spirit on weapon set II.
• Flicker Strike should be fully linked as a priority as its your mapping skill and its also great on bosses if you are solo.
• Falling Thunder is meant to be a “one and done” type of ability, so we are using Garukhan’s Resolve instead of Culmination II as we don’t need to stack it like unarmed builds. We just walk up to the boss with even a single Power Charge, press this and boss should be dead. If its not enough damage for you, just get more power charges.
• I 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, can save you time and if you would be really unlucky also currency.
• Rakiata’s Flow is mandatory if you are not using Coming Calamity, as we don’t use any other source of removing resistances. Use it either on Flicker Strike or Falling Thunder.
• If you can afford Dialla’s Desire it provides great flexibility, either if you need spirit you can socket it into one of your spirit skill gems to lower its cost on spirit meanwhile increasing its quality. Many uses of a great support gem. Most beneficial is using it with Uhtred’s Augury and Blind II on our Charged Staff.

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Ascendancy

Pathfinder is an ascendency that doesn’t provide much damage; its more focused on great amount of quality of life.

That lets you assign your first points of ascendency based on what you like more.

• 1. Traveller’s Wisdom – Extra 6 passive points. This is the only thing you can consider beneficial to our damage from the ascendency.
• 2. Practical Remedies & Thawing Campfire – The best pick here is without a doubt “Immune to Freeze” especially once we pair it with the next point on the list.
• 3. Relentless Pursuit – Paired with Thawing Campfire makes us completly immune to any kind of slow, chilled ground, temporal chains curse and other debuffs affect our speed.
• 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 part from leveling part, as we don’t get even remotely close to same value by picking anything else on the tree.

I highly recommend swapping Traveller’s Wisdom to Running Assault if you using skills like Storm Wave as they are not forced movement like Tempest Flurry and greatly benefit from that point.

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Skill Tree

We have advantage of 6 extra passive points and we are using Jack of all trade so we always try to adjust our passive points with 5 attributes to be relatively equal. We want some attribute gain on our gear, 160+ on all is the requirement as we use different skill gems that all require 157 of either int, str, or dex.

Walker of the Wilds node is one of most potent new nodes in the game, therefore we want a single mana leech from attacks on gear, even 4-5% will be enough. It greatly helps with mana management and survival.

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

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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.

Anywhere you want you can replace DAMAGE/DEFENSE for rarity.

Remember to have leech life and leech mana anywhere on gear atleaast once for each.

Slot	Base	Prefix	Suffix
Main Hand	Sinister/Bolting/Lunar/Aegis/Razor Quarterstaff	1. Adds x to x Lightning Damage 2. Adds x to x Physical Damage + increased % Physical Damage or Adds x to x Fire&Cold damage or Adds x to x Fire/Cold 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 Hardwood Target	50%+ Skill Effect duration is all that matters
Helm	Constricting Command Viper Cap	To maximum power charge corruption + socket preferably
Body	The Coming Calamity Heroic Armour	40% all elemental resistance + 4 sockets. Level 20 heralds if possible, all up to the budget!
Gloves	Any base, we just need 3 sockets if possible.	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	Evasion	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	Ingenuity Belt/Plate Belt/Darkness Enthroned Belt	1. This item gains bonuses from Socketed Items as though it was a Gloves (Attack Speed), Boots (Movement Speed), Body Armour (quality) 2. Ingenuity belt with corrupted resistance and no increase on charges used for charms! 3. Plate belt with max hp + mana + armour	1. More value with 25% resistance corruption than overvalued gain from socket 2. Same thing, resistance 25% corrupt better than anything else 3. If you want to risk plate belt, hope for the resistance again, if you got insane amount of resistance from other pieces then evasion is next best thing.
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	15 Spirit preferably but any will do! INSTILL: The Power Within/Lust for Power	1. Global Defences 2. Spirit 3. Evasion	1. 3 melee skills 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Critical Damage

Gearing Tips

Make sure you are capped at 75% for all Elemental Resistances, with as much Chaos Resistance as possible, while still meeting the attribute requirements for your gear and skill gems.

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

• Constricting Command Viper Cap – Absurdly broken helmet making you “surrounded” at all times, enables taking advantage of crazy nodes that require to you to be surrounded, and also enabling Defy II support to be active at all times giving us insane amount of quality of life with it. This also greatly increasing our damage output via having 100% lucky hit on everything that it supports.
• Arvil’s Wheel Hardwood Targe – Excellent weapon swap shield that increases skill duration by 50% (or more if corrupted) making our Lingering Illusion tech much easier to perform.

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 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
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
Belt	Unique belt with sockets is pretty simple – “as though it was boots” + movement speed is obviously best thing you can go for, but if you like you can get gloves and attack speed/flat dmg or body armour + fox for quality of skills (this greatly benefits Falling Thunder)

Corruption And Sanctification Effects

Weapon I personally prefer sanctified for extra skill 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 – 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 either Time-Lost jewel with 25% effect to notable passives in radius, and a radius of at least medium. Other option is much more expensive, but much better as well, and that would be Against the Darkness Time-Lost Diamond. The goal here is Notables grant 4% as extra Lightning + Notables grant 4% as extra Cold/Fire. As long as there is lightning or double elemental price will by sky high, but using as extra Chaos + Fire is completely fine and often happens to be three times cheaper than any version with Lightning. You will put it in socket near Struck Through cluster.

We will be supporting that particular socket with a From Nothing Diamond which lets us allocate everything around Walker of the Wilds. I’m gonna assume we have Against Darkness socketed there, and with that we pick passives as follows: Heartstopping, Dizzying Hits, Stupefy, Material Soldification, The Fabled Stag, Enhanced Reflex and if we high enough on level we will also allocate The Howling Primate.

Controlled Metamorphosis Diamond – This was barely used after first league’s nerf to amount of sockets in passive tree, but is making a come back in this build, as it has a perfect slot for it. We need one that has the least penalty of resistances with a Large radius. It’s gonna be socketed near resonance and we gonna pick Harmonic Generator, Kite Runner (weapon set II), Chakra of Thought 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/crit damage preferably, 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 build. Instead we focus on getting +3 for Charged Staff (gets most benefits on Gemling) or Falling Thunder.

Megalomaniac Diamond – This is first and probably gonna be the only MANDATORY jewel. Luckily for us, all we need on it is either The Power Within or Lust for Power. If you get both its even better! But it’s mandatory to have either of these paired with anything that can be useful for the build, but if you can’t afford anything like this it’s fine, just make sure to get one of these and anoint the other to your amulet.

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Changelog

• 15.10.2025: Flicker Strike Pathfinder Guide created for Patch 0.3.1