Hello, exiles! Today I’ll be bringing back this immortal build from last season, Blade Trap Trickster. It has over 16k Energy Shield, over 3k Regen, very high Damage Mitigation. Coupled with this season’s POE currency item Tattoos support, this build becomes even more powerful.
Skill Itself
Our skill of choice is Blade Trap. When it’s triggered, it makes your weapon spin like a Cyclone. That’s why it matters what weapon we use. We need to be 100% accurate.
How We Scale Damage?
We also have access to a very cheap weapon, Ephemeral Edge unique weapon. This weapon has some stats unique to that weapon only.
Foremost, attacking with this weapon increases maximum lightning damage by 20% of your maximum Energy Shield. Meanwhile, it also provides us with more Energy Shield.
In Trial of The Ancestors we got new Support Gems for this build, Volatility Support. This will give us more max attack damage.
Since this is a build based on lightning damage, we already have very high max hit damage. And this will further increase the damage range of this build, and the overall damage will be higher.
Because of the unique ring Anathema, we can use 4 curses in this build. Our curse limit is equal to our maximum energy drain. Each character can have 3 charges. Meanwhile, we can also consume Chaos Orbs for extra energy. This way we can add 4 curses to the build.
You can choose whether to go all out and use all damage curses or use 3 damage and 1 defense curse.
I took the defensive route because we had enough damage, even with three curses. So the offensive curses I use are as follows: Elemental Weakness, Assassin’s Mark and Conductivity. Our defensive curse is Enfeeble, which reduces the damage enemies deal to us. We can easily generate energy and Frenzy Charges if our enemies trigger the trap.
We also get an extra 2 max Frenzy Charges with Trickster. This allows us to have 5 Frenzy Charges, and we pair it with Charged Traps Support to make our trap throws as fast as possible.
Judging by our largest Energy Shield, this build is very large. So I tried to increase the quality of all armor parts to at least 29% to get more damage in the build.
You can also increase tattoos with Global Defenses, which give us 3% defense per node. But you can also replace all Int nodes for more Energy Shield.
Defense
Sadly, Trickster doesn’t build Regen. So we’ll need to borrow Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame’s Pyromaniac Ascendancy from Saboteur.
We got both gems for the price of 2 Divine Orbs. But supplies are very limited right now, so you might have a hard time getting them.
Because we chose Trickster, we have access to a very interesting node, One Step Ahead. This will slow down the enemy’s movement speed. If we paired it with Summon Skitterbots, the enemies would move like snails, giving us plenty of time to react.
We still use Aspect of The Crab. This will give us a Crab Barrier every half second and reduce the physical damage we take by 20%. But when we get attacked, we lose all stacks.
We can also use Grace Aura to increase the dodge level. This way, we hardly ever die from normal attacks or projectiles from monsters.
How To Deal With Chaos Damage?
Maybe you’re wondering, while we have so many Energy Shields, we don’t use Shavronne’s Wrappings or Solaris Lorica. So how do we deal with Chaos Damage?
In fact, taking Chaos Damage doesn’t bypass our Energy Shield when we’re not low on health. In short, as long as you reserve more than 50% of your health, you’re immune to Chaos Damage.
Items
Also, there are a few important things that are needed in this build. Before starting, you need to increase the quality of all POE items. You can do this with Perfect Fossil or Hillock.
Next, let’s start with our weapon:
- Ephemeral Edge Unique Weapon: This weapon has some important stats that are unique to this weapon only. Attacking with this weapon increases maximum lightning damage by 20% of your maximum Energy Shield. Meanwhile, it will also provide us with a large amount of Energy Shield.
- Esh’s Visage Unique Shield: Chaos Damage taken will not bypass our Energy Shield when health is not low. Because of this shield, we can have 600 health without dying from Chaos Damage.
- Ghostwrithe Unique Body Armor: This item converts our max health into Energy Shield, while also giving us a good amount of Chaos Resistance.
- Atziri’s Step Unique Boots: This gives us increased spell suppression and evasion ratings. It’s important because we can’t limit our spell suppression without it.
- Anathema Unique Ring: With this ring we can use 4 curses in the build. It also gives us intelligence and a little Energy Shield.
Passive Tree
We have access to 8 Passive Cluster Jewels, including Weak, Advance Guard and Veteran Defender.
If you can try increasing the crit chance or elemental damage of the node. Watcher’s Eye has a chance to suppress spell damage while affected by Grace, and regenerates Energy Shield while affected by Discipline.
If you can’t find this combination, you need to get inhibition first. It’s very important. We also used some tattoos. Here I use spell suppression, the rest is to increase Global Defenses.
We replaced all Dexterity nodes here. But be aware that if your gear doesn’t have enough Dexterity, then you can’t replace it until you get more Dexterity. In addition, if you are willing to buy POE Currency to get more Global Defenses Tattoos, you can also replace all Int nodes.
Ascendancy
- First Lab: We took Trickster as Ascendancy for this build and took One Step Ahead. This will increase our speed of action.
- Second Lab: We took Swift Killer, which just adds extra Frenzy Charges for us.
- Third Lab: We took Polymath, we just got more damage parts that others didn’t apply to us.
- Last Lab: we used Heartstopper, this is just as part of our defense.
Overall, this concludes this Blade Trap Trickster build guide. The new POE currency, Tattoos, makes this build even more powerful than the last league. Follow this guide and this build will help you tank everything in the game!
