For those not wanting to start Sorc to gear up your Warlock or aura farm a bound demon for conviction, here is a build that can help you farm up your ladder account so you can play D2R and d2jsp.

This is a straightforward magic damage build with some Defiler tech to make it smoother while you are gearing up your account.

We start at level ~75 so get there however you please and then:

Obtain the following gear (nothing higher than hel rune needed):

Spirit sword
Rhyme in a tower shield
Lore helm
Authority armor
The best gloves/belt/boots/rings/ammy you can find/gamble
Insight for your merc (a1 bow merc is the easiest to keep alive)

Place the following stats:

Str for gear
Dex for max block
Rest vit

Place the following skill points:

20 Miasma bolt
20 Miasma chain
20 Abyss
1 each: Levitation mastery, Echoing strike, Blade warp, Hex: bane, Hex: purge, Hex: siphon, Summon goatman, Summon Tainted, Blood oath, Consume
5 Demonic mastery (enough for 10 after +skills to get 2 demons)
8 Summon defiler (enough for 13 after +skills to get 5 max souls bound)
Rest in your choice of Enhanced entropy or Consume

Defiler tech:


The defiler tech is really the only reason this build deserves a forum post, as everything else is self-explanatory.

We consume one defiler for the buff and leave up the second defiler to give us 50% damage sharing across 5 targets. This simple tech significantly improves the clear ability of Abyss. Stray monsters that are out of the Abyss range can still take 50% of the damage if the defiler hits them with soul bond. Monsters within the abyss who are soul bonded also seem to take more damage/die faster.

Gameplay:

Summon 2 defilers and consume 1
Put on your siphon hex
Cast Abyss at packs
Cast Miasma bolt at something that has the green soul bond effect on it from your defiler
Switch to Miasma chains when you need to kite or can get better dps
Blade warp to keep your merc alive or just use siphon/potions

A+ Farming areas:

With this build you can farm all 3 keys, cows, chaos sanctuary, pindle, travincal, and random terror zones. Worldstone keep with souls and wave 2 on Baal is the only thing that is out of reach until you build up your ladder gear. As you add to + skills with an amulet, spirit monarch, hoto, anni, skillers, and torch you should be able to move up to p3 games but this build starts out as something you would use on p1.

Came here for this thanks

Ok but how fast can you run for keys with this

D key not bad (if you know the tricks).. the others would be a bit slow

depends on your boots, somewhere between 0% and 40% faster.

between blade warp and tele staff on swap it shouldnt be too bad. been doing this with a blood boil build to practice for reset.

Nothing will replace a Sorc with tele but on a budget (aka without enigma) this is the 2nd fastest HKey runner in the game due to Blade Warp and the FRW from consume.

A tele staff might work OK for Dkeys if you know the layouts well.

Tkeys will be about as fast as a running Hammerdin (which is to say a painfully slow 5 min per countess run).

You only play an off-meta-non-sorc build like this for fun, not for efficiency though.

If you only want to run Hkeys then you could also do a fire build and just kill ghosts along the way for runes/charms/jewelry.

This post was edited by Jrmunch on Feb 19 2026 09:03pm

My pleasure!

ty for detailed answer mate

Just tested this on hardcore through NM A4 to Hell A2 on a playthrough. Vouch on the Defiler tech.