Mosaic kicksin - sharing own experiences as someone who hates bright screen - its playable

Hello everyone,

I have to say I always hated those

Phoenix Strike assassins because of full screen turns to VERY bright White (most of the time I left that game when they joined). So I have decided to make it to see how it is.

My gear is totally crap, atm I dont have anything really good on me (Lore, skullders, some MF gloves, verdungo, amu with +1assa skills and resists, rings for resist) and two Mosaic and gore riders (not even upgraded yet).

What makes my eyes sore is if u combine fire and cold charges. Thats very bright White around you everytime you attack. And with kicks you get 6,58attacks per second!

If I get charges for lighting

Nova, but high amount of kicks makes it kinda ok-ish bright and to be honest to watch on 6lighting novas per second for several hours for me is not possible to sustain.

2 charges on

Phoenix Strike for chain lighting is even more annoying because they fly all around your screen, but 3charges of

Phoenix Strike which makes them cold are very OK for me.

My build is:
20 points into:

Tiger Strike (physical dmg),

Dragon Talon (5kicks finishing move),

Phoenix Strike,

Claws of Thunder (lighting)
1point into

Dragon Flight (teleporting finishing move),

Claw Mastery,

Burst of Speed,

Fade and

Weapon Block (I dont think u need this skill)
remaining points I will put to

Blades of Ice (because it is synergy for cold

Phoenix Strike)

How I play:
I get 3charges for

Tiger Strike(physical dmg), 3 charges for

Cobra Strike (leeching), and one

Charge for every element (because one

Charge will just add element dmg to ur kicks - no extra animation) - so far thats insane single target dmg (you get 2300+% dmg from

Tiger Strike and finishing move + all elemental dmg compare to kicksins which only gets 200% from finishing move)
to get AOE which wont hurt my eyes much is either 3charges of

Phoenix Strike (thats more like crowd control with my gear its 900-1000dmg) or two charges of claw of thunder to get lighting

Nova (kinda OK-ish eyes hurting aoe) or you can just go 1charge of

Phoenix Strike for meteors but it would be nice if u put more points into fist of fire (synergy)

When I face immunes or bosses I can simply add charges and after that I will swap weapons make one kick so I drop all charges and start over. Or you can actually keep kicking because you have high elemental damage.

If you hate bright flashes on the screen you can play it like kicksin on steroids.

With 1

Charge from every element you wont get problem to kill any immunes, because from maxed lighting I get 1-4500light dmg, and even from

Blades of Ice lvl17 (9hard points) you get 550-620cold dmg.

Enigma is really must have here, but for those who are on budget, if u get Cats eye's amulet, Hustle armor,

Peasant Crown (+1skills, 15frw) and maavina tenet (

Belt with 20frw) you will run really fast - 16,4.

And if u need resists just click on

Fade, you will be kicking a bit slowly, but it will be still OK (depends on your gear - if u have that FRW gear you wont need

Burst of Speed for dmg, just for running and because we dont

Teleport, so when u are about to attack and you will need resists just switch to

Fade and when u run switch to

Burst of Speed).

After few hours with Mosaic I switched to my fully maxed kicksin on NL to see the difference and Mosaic kicksin is infinite amount times stronger than normal kicksin - even without those eye hurting skills.

Also I would like to add, when I made Mosaic and respec, I put 1 point into each of dmg skills and it was even OK to clear p1 cows (it took me like 10mins - all charges maxed, but it was faster than using traps with same gear).

If you are like me and you see assassin with red spheres around her, leave the game, because she will paint whole screen White

This build is VERY cheap. All you need is 2gul, 2mal and rest you can get by selling pgems or if lucky you will find it on your own.

What are your thoughts about Mosaic assassin?

(I know that Mosaic RW is two years in the game, I just made it today and my friends which helped me this ladder told me that they never played it, so I assume most of you guys didnt.)

I am playing it for the first time this ladder and so far I really enjoy it.

I use the 2nd level

Phoenix Strike, 3

Blades of Ice, 3 cobra and 3

Claws of Thunder and don't find the flashing too bad. If I come across a cold and light immune I will add some

Tiger Strike charges to speed it up.

I have maxed

Fade, Phoenix, thunder and Ice, 1 point to each of the finishers and 1 to

Mind Blast. All the rest I am dumping into claw block, have found this combined with

Fade were huge to survivability.

Gear wise I am on 2x greater talon mosaics, Bulwark, resist ammy and rings, resist

Belt, Hustle armour, 3/10 gloves and gore riders. Did a deathless

Uber Tristram with this setup (swapping in a Cure and Hearth or Ground

Helm when they suited best).

Act 1 merc with Harmony is gas.

If you want an alternative Mosaic build that isn't as "flashy", you can replace

Dragon Talon with

Dragon Tail and use that in conjunction with

Tiger Strike (other charges are optional, whatever you like - only TS is mandatory).

Dragon Tail only kicks once per use but it creates an explosion that is 100% fire damage. The fire damage is based on how much physical damage you do to the kick target - and the % you see on the skill works multiplicatively with your kick damage including

Tiger Strike's bonus. So essentially

Dragon Tail's % is multiplied with

Tiger Strike's %. With an optimized build you can reach theoretical DPS values of 500k+ (IIRC, @Schnorki once did a theorycraft/experiement where he was close to a million DPS, but I don't know the specifics). To reach those levels you need to use

Amplify Damage or

Decrepify, because the explosion damage is based on the physical damage done to the kick target, as well as a lot of -X% to enemy fire resistance, such as via Flickering Flame and an Infinity on your merc. You would also probably ideally have dual sunders (

Bone Break and

Flame Rift) during normal play. Either way, even without being perfectly optimized you are still likely to one-shot every mob in the game except bosses.

The

Dragon Tail explosion AoE is smaller than the elemental

Charge effects of PS/BoI/CoT, so you're not going to delete entire screens with just one action, but it is an alternative that few even think of.

ShadowHeart wrote: 4 months ago

[..] IIRC, @Schnorki once did a theorycraft/experiement where he was close to a million DPS, but I don't know the specifics [..]

I believe it was something like 3.4 million actually. Been a while though..
Definitely well beyond a measly million. ^^

(Though it'd take like 500 years of farming to actually get the gear required to truly optimize that)

Ah right it was a million per kick, wasn't it?

ShadowHeart wrote: 4 months ago

Ah right it was a million per kick, wasn't it?

Something like that.

Can't remember the exact build off the top of my head but a quick rough reconstruction got me back to this:
So...close enough.
It was crazy boring to play though. That part I vividly remember.

Dragon Tail build is MUCH easier on the eyes. I've played it a lot and it's very strong and simple. Only requires

Tiger Strike and

Cobra Strike.

Its not quite as strong as

Phoenix Strike for sure. No full screen effects, but won't give you a headache.

When I okay

Phoenix Strike Mosaic I tend to just go 2 charges to get

Chain Lightning and nothing else.

The

Chain Lightning doesnt bother me or lag my Playstation.

Isn't

Cobra Strike useless with

Dragon Tail?
(as it converts all Physical damage to fire )

Spectie wrote: 4 months ago

Dragon Tail build is MUCH easier on the eyes. I've played it a lot and it's very strong and simple. Only requires

Tiger Strike and

Cobra Strike.

Its not quite as strong as

Phoenix Strike for sure. No full screen effects, but won't give you a headache.

When I okay

Phoenix Strike Mosaic I tend to just go 2 charges to get

Chain Lightning and nothing else.

The

Chain Lightning doesnt bother me or lag my Playstation.

Spectie wrote: 4 months ago

Dragon Tail build is MUCH easier on the eyes. I've played it a lot and it's very strong and simple. Only requires

Tiger Strike and

Cobra Strike.

Its not quite as strong as

Phoenix Strike for sure. No full screen effects, but won't give you a headache.

When I okay

Phoenix Strike Mosaic I tend to just go 2 charges to get

Chain Lightning and nothing else.

The

Chain Lightning doesnt bother me or lag my Playstation.

My DTail assa doesn't have and doesn't need or use

Cobra Strike at all.
Instead i'm giving her some nice lightning traps to make sure she can deal with anything and have more options.

No it does a physical kick that you buff with

Tiger Strike and leech with cobra. Then it does a fire explosion based on the damage of the physical kick.

That's why physical immunes are rough with

Dragon Tail

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

Isn't

Cobra Strike useless with

Dragon Tail?
(as it converts all Physical damage to fire )

Correction, it ADDS fire damage BASED on the ACTUAL physical damage done.
No

Conversion.

this is new to me

FULCRUM75 wrote: 4 months ago

Correction, it ADDS fire damage BASED on the ACTUAL physical damage done.
No

Conversion.

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

Isn't

Cobra Strike useless with

Dragon Tail?
(as it converts all Physical damage to fire )

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

this is new to me

It's why you can ramp it up so much, if say you add

Fanaticism and Might for example, and then have a way to constantly trigger Amp damage, you can reach insane levels, while if monsters are phys immune and you have nothing to break that, you do zero physical and zero fire damage, and if they're fire immune, you still do the full normal kick damage, but no fire damage.

Just to clarify, I already knew that

Dragon Tail damage was based the full Physical damage you are dealing
What I misunderstood was that I thought that

Dragon Tail also converts all Physical damage to fire, so your attack would deal no Physical damage in the end (probably I imaginated that because of the way

Fists of Fire works and not because I explicitly read that in some place.... )
But

Dragon Tail do not change your kick "original damage" it just add a bunch of fire damage based on the physical part of the "original damage"

FULCRUM75 wrote: 4 months ago

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

this is new to me

It's why you can ramp it up so much, if say you add

Fanaticism and Might for example, and then have a way to constantly trigger Amp damage, you can reach insane levels, while if monsters are phys immune and you have nothing to break that, you do zero physical and zero fire damage, and if they're fire immune, you still do the full normal kick damage, but no fire damage.

Id love to try Mosaic assa, but as long as the engine has the limits to particles and objects; Mosaic causes my game to close. I dont know why the engine has these limits. It happens in every setting I use, let it be lowest of the lowest or highest of the highest. Nothing fixes it and ive blamed myself for having this issue only to find out now later on that this is infact an issue with the game engine and nothing I can do to fix it.

Killing shenk in act5; I go kill it and leave the area, wait for the bombardment to stop and then go back. If I go during the bombardment; game closes itself. This was old news as its been a thing always, but finding out that Mosaic assas cause this to happen aswell is kind of a game breaking imo. Cant be in games with Mosaic assassins at all if they attack.... Idiotic.
They really need to rewrite this game again on a better engine :'D

There are some reports of

Poison Creeper crashing the game too

fredkid wrote: 4 months ago

There are some reports of

Poison Creeper crashing the game too

Really?? this is something ive not seen. Ive even played druid. Seriously this engine wasnt the best option for this game. Its just nuts they went for it knowing there are limitations. They just figured, if people have issues; boo hoo...

Semirotta wrote: 4 months ago

Killing shenk in act5; I go kill it and leave the area, wait for the bombardment to stop and then go back.

On my PC, game lags at 60 fps during bombardment...

Tornado_OLO wrote: 4 months ago

Semirotta wrote: 4 months ago

Killing shenk in act5; I go kill it and leave the area, wait for the bombardment to stop and then go back.

On my PC, game lags at 60 fps during bombardment...

I cant run the game most of the times as it launches unless I press ctrl + alt + del and open task manager, go to the Details tab and change priority from normal to REAL TIME. If I do not do this most of the times; the fps keep dropping from stable 75 (I use vsync to 75 as my screen is 75hrz) down to 50-60 and it stutter lags. Its weird. Turning it "real time" and no problems what so ever.
This game is so darn poorly coded, or perhaps its the engine, most likely a little bit of both.

Have you tried turning the game into real time priority instead of normal if that helps for you? at least you CAN remain in the area, I have to leave so the bombardment isnt in my screen.

I'm not using Windows, so I don't have to bother about these process priorities.

My PC is old, that may be related to this event if it's running D2R in ultra.