I can do Cleave/Mirror Blade MeleeWarLock! With 2 Frenzy Goatmen and 1x Fanat Bound monster with Pride / Might Act 2 Merc wearing Bramble Thorn aura, Will Be 5 of us vs D2R RotW could be Fun!

Throwing sigils lethargy for crowd control

This post was edited by JayBomber on May 24 2026 04:59am

Im at a point now where I have a dreadfang in my stash but using insight a2 merc, should I switch up to use dreadfang and run 3 taintes or still go with 2 tainted/1 venom lord?

I have spirit/spirit authority and lore helmet and +3 demon amulet, working towards a +3 circ and fire sunder

If you're teleporting with enigma you definitely would rather have the insight aura. If you're using a telestaff there's a lot less mana pressure and I've barely been keeping my insight/cure merc alive
If you're not using fcr for enigma then breakpoints don't matter as much here, I'd go with a leaf staff or +4 ondals and measured wrath, or any tome that can beat spirit monarch. Particularly since without enigma its costing a huge amount of max life
I personally like the 2x taints + demon because my merc dies so often but even 1 point demon has basically never died on me once and I don't have max blood oath yet either. And without the +19 skills you need for aura enchanted you'll want to grab a siren who can cast amp damage directly, I imagine your setup won't have the swap gear to get a cursed+holy freeze venom lord yet. That can be helped along by some swap gear like bloodpact blade (though again redundant if you have ondals)

In the current patch, each point in Bind Demon adds 64 raw damage, which boosts the bound demon's damage tremendously. With 7 points added, your bound demon gets a Grief equivalent. This could potentially outshine the dps boost from Demonic Mastery.

Since physical dps is more desired to supplement the already high Fire output, it could be a good idea to maintain Demonic Mastery at 10 points (to get 3 summons), and then invest more points into Bind Demon. With a buffed bound demon, a decently geared merc, and 2x Tainted, plus your own Blood Boil, it feels like a nice balanced setup.

I've tried this, albeit without bind demon and with 3 tainted, but it wasnt good enough against fire immuns, and there are plenty. And this is just another fire build and we already have one.

Normal fire build is better imo. I have two warlocks in single, one was fire and one was ES. Now es is completely trash tier i wanted to try something else but its not this. I might give a shot to magic variant, otherwise just gonna keep my fire build.

But as the whole point of the build: you can be hitting an immune for up to ~17000 HP per cast of blood boil after amp damage & +/-% fire on sunder
And that does kill immunes fast enough. That's why you need the bound demon to provide amp, whether its a venom lord or siren or even flayer shaman
The damage vs non-immunes is so overkill you can do ubers or p8 baal with it, the damage vs immunes is so weak you NEED that 2nd element to speed it up, and its right there for minimal investment: 1 point bind demon and +19 skills can get a holy freeze + cursed demon that is mostly immortal

That person you replied to is a euro
He can only play previous iteration of warlock or mosaic sin
No need to entertain those soft diaper shitting cry babies

I think conceptually it has to be reiterated:

Blood boil warlock was already an S tier build in patch 3.1, and arguably faster than even ES warlocks. The bigger and unaimed AOE was simply better at clearing dense areas than needing to aim ES, but ES was way better at killing bosses and particularly the highest HP heralds/ubers/baal p8 were not killable by boil. Now a taintlock is still a 100% full power blood boil build with identical gear and mostly untouched by nerfs, only the 5% cursed change, while getting buffed bound demon damage & slightly larger aoe. But also having 2x tainted who deal 36k per cast, obliterating everything non-immune AND making bosses very fast
Its not like you're some one trick pony that can only teleport around and deal fire damage on a slow attack speed. You have a skill that is basically 3x the DPS of nova in an even bigger aoe. You teleport around spamming blood boil and everything dies. Your tainted DPS is on top of that, and the build was about balancing the tradeoffs of tainted vs blood boil dps. Consume is too small of a % overall difference. Defilers aren't a reliable bonus to every shot and too often are doing nothing. But the bonus of amp on a bound demon is huge, and you can even have a high DPS version now with just 1 point, albeit needing to trade off bound demon dps vs amp procs. (lancer > venom > siren > shaman for dealing dps, but shaman > siren > venom > lancer for procing amp, at least from my testing I think shaman procs more consistently while siren too often overwrites amp with defense curse)

good for lvling with too?

I'm not sure how the ring of fire nerf affected leveling. It used to be ideal to stat ring of fire -> flamewave -> respec into your other build. But I steamrolled with tainted on day 1 and you're already past level 15 in the first hour thanks to trist runs, 1 point goatmen were unimpressive and I spent a lot of time throwing strangling gas potions but eh, level 12 was so fast it didn't matter. And tainted really shot up like a rocket from nothing but hard points alone and made it the dominant char in every game up to hell with immunes

Absolutely needs to shop a tele staff in a4 norm (a3 ormus at level 19+ can do it, but npc placement), blade warp is terrible

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 24 2026 02:25pm