From my play experience, this build with non GG gear is considerably faster than ES hex purge in general clearing, but much slower vs tanky fire immune mobs. You need fire sunder.
Talking about P8.

Pre-enigma budget works and you can just keep recharging a tele staff and do well, but you're a tiny fraction of the speed of an enigma build, and clearly worse than a budget sorceress. And that's true for all chars really.
Worked well enough for day 1 of ladder but would have been plainly better off with a sorc. IE leaf staff, authority, lore, measured wrath, etc in gear and the tainted easily had the DPS to comfortably do non-immunes rapidly, and cursed + holy freeze lancer and phys blood boil are pretty easy to achieve with budget gear for a good dps vs immunes. Better in both cases than the hex ES build.

My recommended curve would be something like;

Leaf staff -> Ondals (prebuff) + insight (caster) -> Mang song (prebuff ) + obsession (caster)
Authority -> Enigma
Rando tome -> Measured wrath -> +5-6 tome (prebuff) + ars baalos (caster)
Lore -> Flickering flame or Um'd Kiras -> +3 circlet (prebuff) + cham'd shako (caster)
Rising sun -> +3 (prebuff) + 2/20 crafted ammy (caster)
Any gloves -> Magefist
Any belt -> Arachs
Any rings -> dwarfs or ravens or whatever -> 2x SoJs
Any boots -> Aldurs or Nats -> Wraithstep (prebuff) + resist boots (caster)
Teleport staff with 48+ charges on swap -> CTA + Spirit

So you can start with some real trash on day 1 of a new ladder and still be a top tier non-sorc build, but come enigma it blasts past everything else

Idk about u guys but a cursed + holy freeze lancer has been a major PITA for me to bind.
You need to keep recreating games until you get cursed, which can take up to 20.
That game need to have lancers, which seems like less than half the time. Else, you reroll step 1.
At P1, your merc may kill them too quickly (even without weapon), then once you successfully bind, it may not be the aura that you want. Then it subsequently quickly kill the nearby lancers too before you can bind more to reroll. You have to kill your lancer quickly before she does.
And P1 lancer is very very squishy.
Finding or making p8 cursed TZ game is even more of a hassle unless you have loaders. And now, your merc don't accidentally kill them, but they have a good chance to kill you. You have to kite and bind them repeatedly until you get HF.
Ughh.

This post was edited by xtraseal on Jun 11 2026 08:09pm

taintlock's biggest weaknesses are me being dumb and consuming my amp demon

I don't even keybind consume demon on a taintlock. Why would u need consume lol

Don't you need to consume to get the bonus from consuming a tainted

I don't even have a point in consume. Though yeah you get it from Ars Baalos



For the TZ cursed variant, you need to pop in/out of baal/chaos games or follow a set of runs until you find a cursed game and then immediately pop a5 shard and go pre-teleport all the 4 areas with lancers. Its about 22% chance to spawn lancers per area, so 63% chance you'll get lancers in that game. Then teleport the whole area where lancers spawned, to lock them in at p8 hp. Then you can take your time converting them one by one, and always make sure to teleport away immediately after you bind one. Its best to use goatmen to tank and deal some small dps, since they can also stun the lancers and it won't immediately turn around and kill another lancer

For a cursed superunique, you need to just follow any baal/chaos games, preferably if someone is already popping their own shards. Because you need to scout for lancers, and can find them in any game in the 4 areas. But if you want them to be level 99 instead of 83-86 you need to pop shards every game you find them, before you scout too far. And the odds are the first pack of lancers you meet ARE uniques because of the heavy weighting to spawn them on first few tiles. So you can burn through shards extremely fast with this method.

In both cases you need to ensure games were being made tz96 first

Is there any world were an apocalypse / tainted hybrid could work?

Apocalypse is a 60 point build , just max tainted, blood boil 10 demon mastery , one consume.
Consume one tainted , run two active.

Since tainted can be summoned with pre buff gear, you can get huge damage out of them while running full fire warlock gear

Will the tainted benefit from the - fire res from apocalypse?

how does this thing do vs heralds??

I feel like this thing maybe faster then my Abyss lock.

very solid vs heralds, a high level tainted is a very tanky summon, if the herald is fire immune, it'll take some time, but you'll get it done. This is a great build, perhaps one of the best builds for this season.

This post was edited by FoldersUnite on Jun 12 2026 04:39am