Warlock behaves like necro, you need 156 strength for a monarch and lots of dexterity for max block. You're left with little amount of life afterwards vs elemental attacks. Elemental attacks can kill you no problem, they ignore DR, block and defense. Blocking also means block lock possibility. You might not be able to take an action or teleport because of being in a block lock. As far as I remember, necro isn't the fastest at block recovery. There is also no way to increase your defense unless you are using a defiance merc then max block becomes a game of chance. 75% max block means in average 3 out 4 four hits are blocked. If you're unlucky, you can get hit 3-4 times in succession. The possibility isn't low unless your defense is high. Warlock doesn't have any skill to increase defense though. I think the skill that gives you 43% dr if maxed + 86% fhr recovery with spirit are enough to get out of trouble most of the time.

Homie never lost a lvl 98 on hardcore to a bad teleport and it shows

I would go with 20 blood oath + dr + some max res. I would say even going 75% block would be a bad choice, and those points would be better expent in life.

7 frame blockrate with a stormshield, 155 points into dex to max block. I'm at level 19 battle orders.
**edit - sitting at 2920 HP currently with block maxed**

I'm at 1970 defense, and yeah we're locked into might aura on the merc.

Is the blockrate really so low that we're not getting enough out of it on a warlock? Dumping a shael into the stormshield would take us to the 6 frame blockrate if that makes any difference.

This post was edited by filmd2 on Mar 18 2026 12:17pm

I mean there's this buggered tradeoff where a self-insight build has to tradeoff the damage of conc aura on a pride merc against the QoL issue of the merc blinding targets and not dealing damage / leeching enough- while an obsession build has to tradeoff the damage of a pride merc against the QoL of meditation aura on an insight merc.
You can easily get away with using insight on merc with obsession and still have the damage to one-shot everything anyway, so it just seems way better overall. When it can make up damage on laying of hands / gore riders / highlords and still not be down resists or fcr vs trangs gloves / rare boots / craft ammy
The insight build tends to hit around 70% ds/cs since it needs to keep rare boots on, 75% if it used gores, while obsession can hit around 65% with gores and have ~5 higher skills which also pumps all the demon effects / sigil / etc

If you're doing some survivability build for a level 98 softcore char or a hardcore char then yes obsession wins and its not even close, otherwise it just seems like an all-rounder that outperforms the insight build even if you might not stack as much direct damage, because you're doing everything else better

3k hp isn't much btw. A herald can one shot you. How do I know? My Blizzard sorc has got 2k life and 2k mana with 16p in telekinesis. Herald 5 left me with 400hp