Choosing Duelist's Gladiator In PoE Flashback League

PoE Flashback League, the Ascendancy is of course the Duelist's Gladiator. This Ascendancy is one of the best choices for Block based builds, as we get incredible bonuses to it.

Painforged grants additional block chance if we take damage and increased damage if we block a hit. It also makes us stun immune if we block, and the counter attack double damage helps ensure that our Reckoning setup stuns enemies!

Versatile Combatant applies all of our Attack Block chance to our Spell Block chance as well. This means for every point of Attack Block we get, we also get a point of Spell Block! Violent Retaliation's rework in patch 3.2 was amazing.

It now grants +4% to maximum block chance, raising our block chance cap to 79%! It also grants 8% damage and 1% block chance per hit blocked in the past 10 seconds. Whilst mapping, we are able to stack this quite high, generally keeping more than 20 stacks which is over 160% increased damage and 20% block chance!

Finally Blood in the Eyes lets us apply Bleeds as well as Maim & Blind on bleeding enemies! Maim slows enemies movement speed by 30% and Blind reduce their chance to hit by 50%. Both of these provide a lot of defense, along with bleeding enemies taking 10% increased physical damage (an effective 10% more multiplier to our physical damage).

For Ascendancy Progression, I would follow this order: Painforged Versatile Combatant Violent Retaliation Blood in the Eyes

It can be argued that it is better to take the Outmatch and Outlast over Blood in the Eyes, but we are already able to generate both charge types and wont benefit from this node on Bosses, where we globally benefit from Blood in the Eyes regardless of charges!

Gratuitous Violence is also a great option for the Bleed Explosions, but I found the loss of Violent Retaliation defense and damage wasn't worth it to me, and would rather look to get Haemophilia gloves when you can. For more guide, you can visit https://www.u4gm.com/path-of-exile.