I’ve been having a lot of fun with Cold Flay Lich and wanted to share my build in case anyone else was interested trying the same. So far I’ve been able to down the T4 dungeon bosses, all of the Harbingers, Abberoth, and now sit in the 300ish corruption range.
What to do Before Flay?
Harvest + Bone Curse was very effective until I got Flay around mid campaign. If you get decent crit rolls early you can abuse Harvests 8% flat crit rate. If you don’t want to manage your gear at all just stack flat damage on a 2-hander ( got a +70 combined damage club that just mowed everything down). Damage type won’t even matter. Harvest has built in double damage and enough throughput to just kill outright.
Gameplay
The overall gameplay of the centers around being a highly mobile hybrid melee attacker who abuses low life synergies. You utilize Flay to proc Marrow Shards and Blood Eruption (all converted to cold). All of these hits then proc bone curse and Tundra nova for even more damage.
Offensive scaling is mainly focused around Dex for flat Flay damage, Int for resistance shred + increased damage, and crit multiplier. This build easily obtains 100% crit chance for both melee and spells so you get full value from crit damage sources.
Defensively you use Foot of the Mountain to maintain 60% damage reduction for HP while standing still, 40% or so DOT damage reduction, 18% damage reduction from frailty, perma leech, ward per second from missing health, and ward per second per necrotic resist. You are also super mobile making manual dodging very easy.
A starter build for Monos with items you should target early on + skill and passive timings built in up to level 100:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oYjv8vgA
My current build with better gear and updated skill tree for more damage:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oYjv84lA
Skills
Flay - For Flay you want access to your curses first to help with proccing the warlock mana regen passive. Then you move on to maxing out crit chance, speed, and lastly reaper form cooldown. The reaper nodes cut your cooldown in half, but are mostly quality of life.
Your leech and mobility allow you to have almost permanent reaper form while mapping ( I was able to extend it several maps on campaign 10+ minutes) and during bosses it never falls off.
I would suggest investing in the -mana nodes until you get a Foot of the Mountain and some more base mana ( naturally around level 80).
Marrow Shards - This is your second big hitting attack. The final version of this tree is pure damage, but I would suggest taking out the 100% more damage nodes from bleed and putting them into Rip Marrow nodes for mana recovery starting out. The mana nodes + the -mana from flay makes early Flay trivial to keep using before you get gear.
Bone Curse - This applies around 30 armor shred with Aura of Decay. Not quite the 60% more modifier at 144 stacks but it still gives a decent boost. It also applies bleed so your marrow shards does 100% more damage and has a good execute. Outside of that the actual hit is around 20% of what I do with Flay, but when you factor everything else in it is an irreplaceable damage boost.
Reaper Form - 280% more damage, 1% necro resist per intelligence ( nets about 30 ward per second), and 4 armor per intelligence ( 320 to 400 flat armor depending on gear). You don’t need to bother with the attack speed cluster. Average gear rolls have the build hitting 2.5 a second. A 24% boost only gets it to 2.7 times a second not worth having less armor or ward per second.
Aura of Decay - Built for pure utility. Can easily be turned into a 100% more damage aura that also shreds armor. Makes cold damage taken trivial as well.
Death Seal - Couldn’t spec this even though you could get death waves to hit really hard in this build. Used as a vanilla skill to counter 1 shot skills or to increase uptime when you want to DPS through something. A real life saver for some of the Harbinger attacks so you can just soak and keep wailing on them. You don’t need Marrow Shards on bar to proc it so this skill takes that slot.
Gear
At the start you just want to use defensive base types that shore up your health and resist weaknesses. Big gaps for Acolyte are void, fire, lightning, and physical. Solve those, get some hp, and Reaper Form + Flay’s ridiculous early curse nodes will push you to empowered monos.
It’s an int/dex helm that also scales your extra necrotic resist into ward per second. At 4k hp it will net you around the equivalent of 5% of your missing hp as ward with decent gear. Offensively it will be better than any helm you get you hands on before sealing a T5 affix AND rolling a T7 helm with full T5 affixes. That’s before considering how easy it is to get LP for it.
Gives a large chunk of spell flat damage while also giving a moderate amount of melee flat. The freeze rate on it also was enough to have me freezing everything (including bosses) until around 150 corruption. An Exalted obsidian scepter may be better if it is really juiced. Hard to say since Frozen ire also procs Tundra Nova.
Wield in the off hand to give yourself a major crit boost. Also gives a ton of skill points to Flay. I wanted to wield 2 but the 63 spell flat loss from scepter just couldn’t be justified. Low crit rolls can be itemized around, but +4 skills has felt mandatory.
Let’s you get full hp endurance without any other investment. Blink step doesn’t remove the buff so you get far more mileage out of the -mana cost ability too which lets you forsake mana cost nodes in the skill tree. For such a mobile build it seems counter intuitive, but it does exactly what the build needs. When you are mobbing you enjoy 45% to 50% dodge chance evading large portions of the pack’s damage. When you need to stop and grind down something large you have 60% damage reduction. It just works.
The idol buff is insane. It allows for so much defensive and offensive itemization. Just get it as soon as possible and reap the rewards.
40% more cold damage and armor. Great for bossing. Worth enough on its own to not be outclassed by 2 buffed idols when you have your defenses balanced out.
As for the rest of the gear its just crit bases, armor, and DOT reduction. You want crit in every slot to make sure your spells crit. Double health is preferred in each slot outside of rings which should be 1 health and 1 crit avoidance. You can slip in some dodge rating if you want but you hit like 40% with just dex, int, and vitality investment. With just that Foot of the mountain will cap your endurance threshold.
I opted into a little more, but will probably be trimming my dodge down the line as better gear will still net me around 50% dodge from stats alone.
Passives
The basic gist is get your 20 points into defense in the Acolyte tree. Get 5 points into warlock for mana on hit passive. Dump everything else into Lich until your last 10 points or so. Then you have to decide if you want more quality of life with the move speed passives, more damage, or a mix of both with more damage and mana from the Warlock tree.
Conclusion
That pretty much wraps it up. I’m probably going to grind this one out another few days or so to see if I can hit about corruption 500 and call it. I want to make a Rogue with Atropos Scissors too maybe a month or two down the line.