Looking for a beginner friendly and safe Phoenix Mosaic build

One of my sons wants to play a Phoenix Mosaic Sin. He is currently levelling the char with traps but we soon will have to respec him to the final build. Now, there seem to be many variations for this build and I am a little overstrained about what to do (some max

Dragon Talon,

Tiger Strike and

Fists of Fire, some not, some max

Fade and

Blades of Ice, some use

Mind Blast, some not etc.). E. g. if I have understood this correctly you loose all leech when you have

Fists of Fire beyond 33. So how do you regain life and mana while playing with maxing this skill?

As I noted in the title, he is not a very experienced player and I have no experience with playing Sins either. He has played a Zealer and a

Frenzy Barb and is not very familiar with using many short cuts. Of course for this build he has to "advance" his skills in this respect and I told him in advance that this will be a very different play style . My question therefore is what you would recommend for a beginner friendly and rahter safe build.

He has the following gear available (of course other recommendations are welcome, too):

2x Mosaic, each with +2 to

Phoenix Strike
1x Enigma

Mage Plate
1x

Gore Rider or Natalyas
1x Griffons with Lightning Facet
1x

Arachnid Mesh
1x Draculs, Trangs or

Magefist
1x Mara 30
1x Stone of Jorden
1x

Raven Frost
1x Anni 18/20
1x Torch 16/20
6x bare Martial Arts Skiller
1x Lightning Sunder -71
1x Infinity for the Merc

EDIT: 1x CTA and 1x Spirit on swap

This is my all-in-one build that can do basically everything.

https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/wq8h203s#3

I'd aim for at least 65FCR (102 needs expensive amu\rings).

from the gear you listed, this seems like the best option:
https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/mzsh703w

Start the game with prebuffing

Battle Command,

Battle Orders and

Fade on CTA side (

Eth

Monarch saves you 10 points on str)

after switching back to

Claws, start building charges:

3

Cobra Strike
3

Blades of Ice
3

Claws of Thunder
2

Phoenix Strike

from there, just tele on everything and kick them:P

1pt mindblast can be useful to convert mobs so you can kick them later (like after you've finished with the seals in Chaos). Maybe it is too much for a beginner (and can be avoided with 102).

I'd skip

Fists of Fire and

Tiger Strike entirely (not needed). Instead, i'd max

Fade and

Weapon Block (well, i skipped 1pt from there, since the build above couldn't reach a higher percent of block with 1 more pt.)

basicnecromancy wrote: 4 hours ago

This is my all-in-one build that can do basically everything.

https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/wq8h203s#3

Thx!
Which charges do you usually build up when playing? E. g. do you use all which are available to you or only the ones you maxed out?

uuee wrote: 4 hours ago

I'd aim for at least 65FCR (102 needs expensive amu\rings).

from the gear you listed, this seems like the best option:
https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/mzsh703w

Start the game with prebuffing

Battle Command,

Battle Orders and

Fade on CTA side (

Eth

Monarch saves you 10 points on str)

after switching back to

Claws, start building charges:

3

Cobra Strike
3

Blades of Ice
3

Claws of Thunder
2

Phoenix Strike

from there, just tele on everything and kick them:P

1pt mindblast can be useful to convert mobs so you can kick them later (like after you've finished with the seals in Chaos). Maybe it is too much for a beginner (and can be avoided with 102).

I'd skip

Fists of Fire and

Tiger Strike entirely (not needed). Instead, i'd max

Fade and

Weapon Block (well, i skipped 1pt from there, since the build above couldn't reach a higher percent of block with 1 more pt.)

Thx! This looks interesting, too. I lean towards skipping mindblast, too because he would have to spend 3 pt to get there. I also tend to advice him to max.

Fade because this seems to help him to better stay alive

Tiger Strike 3

Fists of Fire 3

Cobra Strike 3

Blades of Ice 3

Claws of Thunder 3

Phoenix Strike 2-3

I try to load them up all when I play with her. Some find it tiresome, but this is my way after all.

I'm playing right now the 4th character, a Mosaic Sin, after a

Hydra Sorc,

Zeal Paladin and

Lightning Fury Amazon.
She's at level 97 now.

It was a rough start because of different play style and accommodation with so many shortcuts. At the previous builds I used 2-3 keys, and now I have to use 6 in the beginning (charging up). It took me some time to find a place for everyone but after that I storm through everything with Enigma.
My shortcuts looks like this (at all my builds F2 is

Teleport):

F1 -

Dragon Talon
F2 -

Teleport

F3 -

Phoenix Strike - max level
F4 -

Cobra Strike - max
F5 -

Tiger Strike - max
F6 -

Claws of Thunder - max
F7 -

Blades of Ice - max
F8 -

Fists of Fire (only one point to not exceed the infamous level 33)
F9 -

Burst of Speed
F10 -

Fade

W - Swap weapons

F -

Battle Command
G -

Battle Orders
J -

Mind Blast

My rotation is this:

Prebuff

Battle Command,

Battle Orders and

Fade.
Then start with F3 for two kicks (not three to stay with Lightning instead of Cold). If I get three I let it expire and recharge.
Then F4 for 3 kicks, then F5, F6, F7 and F8 with three kicks for everyone. You could

Charge-up everything in one session.
If the enemy is weaker and die quickly then I use F1 to finish the move and get another 15 seconds to

Charge-up the rest of the skills on another foe.

After I turn myself in a Christmas tree just F2 (

Teleport) in search of the next enemy and F1 to finish, then F2, F2, F2... F1, and so on.
From time to time I loose the charges when I pick items and IDing them and have to build the again. But strategy came on and I pick them, put in the cube, kill an enemy and then ID it.

With a good planning I can get to different zones without loosing my charges. I open a town portal, then kill the last enemy and immediately go to the city and choose another waypoint (not working on

Lut Gholein).
For

Chaos Sanctuary I use

Mind Blast to

Stun one of the last Storm Casters to kill him a few seconds later to not loose the charges before Diablo spawns.

For safety reasons you could max

Weapon Block to get as much blocking as possible. With

Fade active try to get 75% resist with the least points allocated (depending on the gear). Less points get to cast more often due to less time that it stays active at lower levels. My actual level is 12 and last for 252 seconds (4 minutes and 12 seconds).

There's a handful of 'weird' things to keep in mind for Mosaic sins:

First and foremost,

Fists of Fire - despite what the tooltip claims - doesn't just add fire damage but it actually converts your physical damage into fire. As a result, the more you push that to maximize your fire output, the lower your physical damage will be to the point of completely eliminating your physical damage in favor of fire. As a result, you are also lowering your leech further and further until you eventually lose all leech entirely as that is based on your physical damage.
Without

Fists of Fire, Mosaic sins are pretty much immortal once charged. Pushing

Fists of Fire however - due to removing your leech - does mean you can suddenly die again as you get worn down without ever recovering.
In addition to that, you really don't need even more dmg as a Mosaic sin which is why I for one always only had 1 pt in

Fists of Fire and never bothered even binding it or ever using it on my Mosaic sins (excluding the very first testing variations when mosaics first got added of course).

Building on the above-noted leech-to-immortality concept,

Cobra Strike is - in simplest terms - just insane. And it doesn't need more than 1 pt to be insane. You'll get a few more pts added via gear anyways but in terms of hard points, 1 is plenty. Coincidentally, that 1 pt is unavoidable anyways as you need it to unlock

Phoenix Strike so...even better.
The single most vulnerable stage (read: only vulnerable stage if done right) for a Mosaic sin is when you're just starting a new game and don't have charges built yet. That's when things don't yet die instantly, don't yet get perma-aoe-frozen and you don't yet leech from nada to full with every hit. Because of that,

Cobra Strike for me is the first part of the

Charge rotation to get to 3 because even if you do get hurt at that stage and have nothing else charged up yet, cobra stacks are all you need to survive.

Adding (massively) to said survival is 1 point in

Cloak of Shadows. Again, don't invest more than 1 point. It actually kinda gets worse the more pts you put into it because while the duration may increase, so does the re-cast timer so you lose flexibility in case of new mobs floating in. With that 1 point, when you start anew and need charges built, find your first pack, hit

Cloak of Shadows and you have all the time in the world to

Charge up in Peace on the 1-2 mobs right next to you, with none of the other mobs in the area bothering you yet as they can't see you.

Damage wise,

Phoenix Strike,

Claws of Thunder and

Blades of Ice are all you need (so max those skills!). Could add tiger to your rotation for the hell of it, despite only having 1 hard pt in it, and I for one usually do (only takes a sec to

Charge one more anyways) but it really isn't a necessity.
Once cobra is charged, I'd go with tiger (optional) -> Phoenix ->

Blades of Ice ->

Claws of Thunder in that order, getting 3 charges on all of them. That tends to be an order from lowest to highest damage impact which is intentional. You don't want to start plowing through until you're fully charged but want to do as little dmg as possible while charging so the mobs last longer and you don't need more of them to

Charge up.
The reason the finisher order is somewhat important for that is because charges refresh either on that same skill or on a finisher. But not from a different

Charge skill. So you may have to hit 1 finisher half-way through your

Charge-up cycle to ensure your first charges don't run out before you built the last ones, depending on how quick you are/how often you miss for some reason.

A lot of folks will tell you to only get Phoenix to 2 charges, not 3. That's because the lightning

Charge (2) offers you more dmg than the cold (3) one. And while that is a fair argument, I personally always went with 3 because I find the frozen shards far more satisfying to watch than the lightning (yup, entirely subjective) and because it gives you a more even spread overall between cold and light dmg. Your dmg will be stupidly high no matter which one you go with but if you balance cold/light closer together by keeping Phoenix at 3, you will more consistently pretty much not even notice light immunes as you have plenty of cold dmg to plow through them while still keeping enough light to also not notice cold immunes. As a result of keeping them balanced, I also never bothered with a sunder on a Mosaic sin (just wasn't needed) whereas most folks who do keep Phoenix at 2 will run a light sunder to make up for the imbalance.

As for core finishers, you're looking at 3 options.
-

Dragon Tail: A glorious finisher if you build your sin around it but that deviates from your classic Mosaic sin. For the thunder/Ice/Phoenix

Charge Mosaic sin, your damage stems from proccing those charges, not from what the finisher itself does. And since

Dragon Tail is the slowest hitting (7 frames/atk) core finisher, you want to avoid that here.
(Fun fact:

Dragon Tail sins actually have the single highest per hit dmg and dps in the game by a landslide but to do that right, they're not using mosaics)
-

Dragon Claw: Not a bad choice and some folks do swear by it. With 10 frames/2 attacks you're looking at the middle Ground in terms of speed with the advantage of only being locked out for 1 such cycle at a time.
-

Dragon Talon: The fastest of your core skills, by a clear mark if skilled, and my personal fav but it does have downsides. First and foremost, it locks you out for the entire kick rotation which gets longer and longer the higher your skill level because you're adding more and more kicks per skill use. That's why I for one wouldn't invest more than 1 hard point into it. You still get plenty of kicks added via gear skill pts to hit a solid middle Ground between "enough kicks to make use of the speed factor" and "few enough kicks to not be locked out for ages". Do keep in mind that

Dragon Talon is so fast that it can actually be too fast. And WILL be too fast depending on your Mosaic base. "Too fast" meaning all but your last kick hit at 3 frames which is actually faster than the next hit delay on

Claws of Thunder and such, meaning you're only hitting with that on every other kick, dropping the efficiency of that skill to what is then essentially 6 frames (i.e. worse than

Dragon Claw's 5/atk avg). I wouldn't worry too much about that since either one will still leave you with "overkill dmg" anyways and it only applies to the NHD-suffering part of your skills but it is worth knowing for the theory of it.

Regardless of which one you choose though (claw or talon), 1 hard pt is plenty. Primarily because you can ignore the attack rating on the skills entirely as that's a left-over from the pre-assassin-buff days where finishers actually needed AR. Now, they always hit so long as you have at least 1

Charge of something up, meaning Mosaic sins will not miss with a finisher due to lack of AR, ever.

Dragon Flight is a separate consideration and something that I would always get on any Mosaic sin. Again though, 1 pt is all you need. It isn't a core finisher, simply due to the cast delay on it making it not viable as a chained rotation but it will be your typical opener as you move from pack to pack as it simply teleports you there and immediately procs your charges. Not only will that mean you immediately leech to full on every new pack if by some miracle you weren't at 100% after the last one but you also immediately freeze/CC everything in your new pack and - let's be honest - quite regularly, your new pack will immediately fall over dead because Mosaic sins are just that silly.

Dragon Flight also effectively removes the need for Enigma for anyone who enjoys clearing zones, rather than just chain-teleporting to their target mob. The only times you'd "need" Enigma (but that's beyond the "beginner" stage) is when you hit that last seal in CS and are waiting for diablo or on

Baal. The reason being that those delays are long enough for your charges to fall off, subsequently screwing you over because you have to start from scratch at the most inopportune time. Though both of those can be handled by other means as well:
For CS/Dia, just

Mind Blast and convert a mob on the last seal before you pop it, it'll become hostile again a few seconds into diablo's spawn timer, allowing you to quickly hit it with a finisher to refresh your charges before they drop and now have plenty of time left for diablo to spawn without having to worry about it (with Enigma you'd quickly tele out of CS, hit something in river and tele back to dia).
For

Baal, you're basically doing the same as you would with Enigma: hit something outside his room to refresh. Except you'll inevitably be slower at it, making it more annoying and - if timed poorly - adding the risk of resetting the wave timers meaning you have to do it all over again until you stop messing up the timing (unless someone else is with you and stays in there to keep the timer going).

I'm sure there's plenty more but that's really the core points from my perspective.

But the core message for Mosaic sins is and remains two-fold:
- Pretty much no matter what you do, they end up being OP as hell so don't worry about messing up small bits of it.
- Also no matter what you do, they end up being the single most stressful character to play because they're the only thing that really makes you worry about expiration timers and every time you mess that up, you kind of want to smash your head into the nearest wall for having to start the

Charge-up rotation all over again.

@Florian_G and @Schnorki thx for the explanations and tipps! I really appreciate it

Now the boy just has to learn English so that he can read it all himself