I really doubt this from the gameplay though. Theres some -50% resist on gear on that setup already, flickering flame would only make that -55%. Sunder, 3 facets, 1 defenders fire and mang songs. Tainted very clearly deal extremely reduced damage to fire immunes, which is consistent with them dealing their 36000ish damage vs 78% resist after sunder / conviction. If they were hitting vs 28% resist, they should be killing stuff like venom lords in just a few hits of their own, almost 3.5x the relative damage
Remember that skills.txt is often desynced with the actual mechanics, wouldn't be the first

You can see they definitely inherit sunder only when you have it equipped while summoning them, not retroactive. That may be the parameter they pull. If you summon them without sunder equipped they wont even damage venom lords at all

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 22 2026 09:55am

Sick! That looks pretty relaxing too haha

Is there an MF style build? What I am mocking up has tainted listed at around 20k fire damage, and only using a defender's fire (no other facets) and obession. 300% MF though without a full inventory of charms to boost that. Still viable for most player counts?

https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/c53mx0u8

This post was edited by Striker_99 on May 22 2026 10:06am

Now I am tempted to build this instead of a nova sorc.

Taintlock is what happens after visiting too many gay bars in a week. Don't ask me how I know.

Care to elaborate

I'm lazy so i'm concern about mana poting. Why do 600000000 dmg if you need to click and grab mana pot along the way.

There had to have been a better name for this one

For that?

In anatomy or crude slang, the "taint" refers to the small strip of skin between the an*s and the gen*t*l*. (Source Google)

This post was edited by Xshoot on May 22 2026 10:51am

Nope, it was a tossup between the Taintlock and Taintboiler
While I personally had been using the Taintboiler, I have to acknowledge that Taintlock already had traction on bnet so even if blood boil is one of your primary two damage sources, it doesn't even get into the name



I think the sacrifices to get meditation aura here would be too high. As I pointed out in the first page, it is possible to self-wield infinity, have an insight merc and go down to 75% fcr and lose ~3 skills and +15/-20 fire. Or to go 125 fcr you have to lose even more, like giving up ars baalos
That's a pretty hefty price, so I don't recommend it, and you sacrifice enough +skills and your blood boil's physical damage won't kill immunes efficiently

With the setup as is, you get about ~40 mana after each kill from hex siphon+opalveins, and when you DO kill a pack of monsters with blood boil, it instantly refills your whole mana orb. A non-tainted blood boil build from 3.1 had a pretty easy time just picking off a few stray monsters while teleporting to avoid the need for potions, or even just using conviction+cursed bound demon and insight merc. Now neither of those are real options, your tainted will kill stray monsters faster than you can actually cast, and you can't get conviction on the demon. If you sacrifice the infinity, your tainted lose almost all their damage to immunes and even with blood boil as your main source, that's a big slowdown.