- League Starter
- All-Rounder
Introduction & Expectations
I expected this skill to perform a lot better than it is in your guide. Why is this?
Because it is impossible to cater to everyone, I choose to not overcomplicate things. As a rule of thumb, this means you get to be confident you can obtain your two first Voidstones, an otherwise full Atlas completion & have a great mapping experience in T16 maps with moderates amounts of juice.
This implies you will most likely be looking for some help, or further investments to obtain your last two Voidstones. This is due to the fact that fighting these bosses on acceptable amounts of gear requires an enormous amount of game knowledge, fight practice & mechanical skill. Trying to compare your playing experience to those who’ve done nothing but play for years, tends to lead to disappointment.
Therefore, take your time & appreciate the fact that some content can be harder for you, and the characters powerlevels you’ve managed to acquire, than for others. There’s no shame in this. When invested upon correctly & piloted well, this build has no limits however.
Disclaimer
I am currently playing the new Challenge League and a lot of things have been added of which no mention can be found in this guide?
While I would very much like to give you all the ins and outs of the new powercreep in the new Challenge League, it saddens me to let you know that no Early access is given out and we thus have no more information than anyone else when updating our build guides before the new patches. We try our utmost to make sure everything is as close to perfect as we can, but cannot forecast which special mechanics / interactions might exist in new Leagues. If something of tremendous power is teased or announced beforehand, you can find specific League specific remarks in the section on the Gear Page
What to Expect
🔸 T16 Maps ✔️
🔸 T16 Maps w/ a few Atlas Mechanics or some scarabs ✔️
🔸 Pinnacle bosses when playing well ✔️
🔸 T17 Maps ✔️
🔸 Uber Content ❗
🔸 Uber Content when investing well beyond the guide ❗
Collaboration with our Resident Lightning Strike expert
This guide was made with the help & approval of Lolcohol who has made Lightning Strike his baby over the past years.
He has invested a tremendous amount of time into perfecting Lightning Strike characters and has chosen to opt into the Warden playstyle as its new, refreshing and incredibly strong. He has compiled a ton of information which is to be found on this google spreadsheet..
Lolcohol’s in depth video
Lightning Strike
Lightning Strike is a Melee Attack which has some interesting mechanics to it. When you attack, a bunch of Lightning Slams come out of your weapon, covering a wide distance and killing monsters along the way. The projectiles and attacks can double hit a target, which we explain further in detail a bit further into the guide.
Playstyle
This build plays something like a mix of both a ranged caster & a melee build. You are attacking but your coverage & clear makes it feel like you’re cheating a bit. Because of mechanics with projectile skills, you’ll be a cannon firing of a million projectiles everywhere creating satisfying moments of complete domination. Especially since it has a Vaal version in 
Vaal Lightning Strike, it really comes off the ground faster than most Melee Skills as this can bridge your damage from early gear to later game gear. Therefore, it lends itself incredibly well to League Starting for all of your melee enjoyers.
Build Assessment
Pro’s & Con’s
➕ Relatively Fast Playstyle
➕ Really enjoyable Melee Skill
➕ Very solid well-rounded Leaguestarter
➖ Positioning Matters
➖ Some specific gearing options require some crafting knowledge
➖ While for most, Lightning Strike feels rewarding, some people don’t enjoy its playstyle.
Viability in Numbers
🔸 Ease of Transitioning: ★★★★☆
🔸 New Player Friendliness: ★★★☆☆
🔸 Playstyle: ★★★★☆
🔸 Ease of Gearing: ★★★☆☆
🔸 Easily Executable: ★★★★☆
Map Modifiers to Avoid
While certain combinations of modifiers are generally just bad, such as for example a couple of damage modifiers combined with Critical Strike Multiplier, these are things you are supposed to get a feel for yourself and test out. Just make sure not to combine too much crazy things together. Modifiers the build cannot run are listed here.
❗No Leech
❗Elemental Damage Reflect
Damage & Defenses
Mechanics
There’s some very important things to mention here, such as positioning to actually do maximum damage to Single Targets. There’s a very good source of information made by Fuzzy Ducky in this video. You can double hit the boss this way, which is a lot of your damage.
Next up, there’s the mechanics around 
Trinity Support. It requires you to somewhat balance your at least two of your Elemental Damage rolls.
Because Lightning has a very low Minimum and a very high Maximum damage roll, meaning Lightning Damage will sometimes hit a low roll, causing Cold or Fire damage to outshine it and activating the Trinity Support.
Knowing that a Vaal Lightning Strike is by far your biggest upgrades throughout campaign & early maps, is vital to how your progression will feel. This will tremendously help dealing with annoying targets so whenever you can find/afford one, pick it up. Lastly, throughout campaign and even in maps before transitioning to the critical strike variant, make sure you always have enough accuracy to keep the Precise Technique keystone activated!
Tinctures Explained
Mana burn is a global debuff that can stack and is applied to us from Tinctures
Each stack of Mana Burn causes you to lose 1% of your Maximum Mana per stack, per second.
With the Warden Ascendancy Enduring Suffusion, we gain 0.5 seconds of “free Tincture uptime” for every stack of Manaburn we had when the Tincture was deactivated, up to a maximum of 6 seconds.
This implies that if we can reach 12 Mana Burn stacks, we will get 6 seconds of free Tincture uptime.
For this reason, we need to try to build up Mana Burn stacks as QUICKLY possible, NOT as slowly as possible, so we can reach those 12 stacks, because when we do, we get those seconds of free Tincture uptime.
With the Tincture Mastery “Your Tinctures deactivate when you have 12 or more Mana Burn”, our Tinctures will automatically turn off when we hit 12 stacks of Mana Burn
With the second Tincture Mastery “The First 6 Mana Burn applied to you have no effect”, we will only start burning mana on the 7th stack until the 11th stack, before the Tincture turns off at 12 stacks
This 7th stack of Mana Burn will only burn 1% Mana, not 7% (this has been confirmed by GGG)
So by accelerating how quickly we get Mana Burn stacks, we race through the Mana Burn phase of 7-11 stacks more quickly, meaning we spend LESS time burning mana.
This is why we want to INCREASE OUR MANA BURN RATE (the rate at which we gain additional stacks of Mana Burn), and not DECREASE IT, because when we reach 12 stacks we get 6 Free Seconds of Tincture
This is why adding a second Tincture is so good – it doubles the amount of Mana Burn stacks we acquire, helping us to reach 12 more quickly.
There is a great modifier on Tinctures “35% increased effect, 65% increased Mana Burn rate” – we want this on all of our Tinctures.
Scaling & Layers
This build layers a lot of unconditional mitigation to reduce incoming damage. These layers are combinations of following attempts to avoid taking relevant hits:
🔸High Chance to Evade Attacks
🔸High Amount of Armour
🔸Capped Spell Suppression
🔸High (Instant) Leech
🔸Elusive
🔸Oath of Winter
🔸Bark Skin
Build Resources
Path of Building, Passives, Skill Gems & Progression
Ascendancy choices, Bandits & Pantheons
Gearing choices
Leveling the Build
Leaguestarter or Transitioning
This build has the Leaguestarter tag. This means we will be holding your hand right from the get go until you reach the pinnacle of your power and finish the guide. In order to maximize your experience, please make sure to follow the Path of Building leveling sections accordingly. We will be providing multiple skill trees & gem sets to ease your progress to endgame maps.
*You can find the Path of Building link on the Path of Building page.
Leveling advice by Lolcohol (at 5:45min)
FAQ
p<{color:#D55E00}. Why is my Trinity Support not giving me Resonance?
When hitting with multiple elemental types (fire, cold, and/or lightning), whichever element hits for the highest amount will generate resonance for the other two elements. If we hit hardest with Lightning, Fire and Cold will gain resonance however hitting harder with Cold would give you Lighting and Fire resonance.
The goal with Trinity is to gain maximum resonance for all three Elements. This means occasionally we will have to be hitting the hardest with a different element than we did before. You will know you have reached maximum Resonance when the circle in the top left of the screen is shining white, orange, and blue. If only two out of three segments of the circle are lit up, you have a problem.
Fortunately, with the wide damage range of Lightning, this is fairly easy to do, so long as you have a decent amount of flat Cold Damage or Fire Damage on your weapons and gear. Just make sure that when you hover over your Lightning Strike tooltip, you see a low Minimum and high Maximum Damage on your Lightning Damage, and a range of damage on either Cold or Fire damage that slots in between this.
Solutions if you aren’t generating max resonance: Craft flat elemental damage on your jewellery or weapons, try using Added Cold or Lightning Damage Support to your gem setup temporarily while acquiring other gear.
p<{color:#D55E00}. I feel like I’m doing Low Damage early on. How could that be?
Are you sure you have enough accuracy for Precise Technique? This Keystone grants 40% more attack damage, so long as our Accuracy is higher than our life. The downside is that we cannot deal Crits with this, but this is a non-issue early on. Check your accuracy in your Character Sheet to make sure your accuracy on your main skill is higher than the amount of Life your character has.
More Questions? Show Support?
If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, or you have a specific question you request my private time for, you can buy me a coffee over at Patreon. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.
Even though we try to make our guides as complete as possible, obviously it’s possible you still have questions. We have an entire mod-team readily available to support you & your questions on Discord. You can find us on the ARPG Vault Discord. Make sure to open a Guide Help thread so things stay clear in the main channels.
