There's a bug with resist fire aura from tainted vs flickering flame conflicting with each other, it appears to take taint's lower resist fire instead of level 8 from FF.
You'd have to unequip and put it back on your merc to fully take effect, it's the same aura bug interaction with infinity and monster's conviction.

Need to stick with eth cure for mercs

I feel like its a build that really doesn't have many mana issues before enigma. Its certainly an issue as you teleport around with enigma, but in my early ladder play with a teleport staff I've never been mana starved compared to other builds. I have a merc with ethCV insight / skin of the flayed one / cure, but he's more there for the 3x prayer healing and his dps. The mana feels redundant. if you're not spamming blood boil, you're not even using mana at all, and when you do spam blood boil you get it back from hex siphon.
But I guess using a tele staff over blade warp is a big part of that. I think its unplayable to use blade warp, I farm some travincal for gold or I just pick up staffmod / armor items and sell them nonstop, because no teleport = no diablo 2, in my books


I think this playthrough also convinced me taintlock works very well as an undergeared/budget char early on. No enigma, no infinity, no sunder, no cta, no torch, no anni (missed that walk), and I was using a leaf staff until yesterday. And yet I'm at 20k tainted with prebuff, max resists with my survivability setup, or just 200%+ mf with my mf setup, all while keeping that tainted. And I don't even have some basic stuff like rings/belt/boot slot figured out. Just;

• Ondals (leaf, before that) - tele staff on swap with 48 charges / 2100ish repair each
  
• Measured wrath with pdiamond - chromatic tome on swap with 29% all resists
  
• Authority - swap with wealth
  
• +3 demon skills plain circlet - swap with kiras (um) +80 all - swap with 3x ptopaz mask
  
• +3 demon skills plain ammy - swap with rising sun amulet
  
• magefist
  
• string of ears
  
• trash rings/boots
  
• 8x plain skillers (sub out 4 while mfing)
  
• rando mf scs
  
• eth cv insight / skin of the flayed one / cure on prayer merc

And yet that's enough I can do sub 30 second trav runs with mf gear on, or solo P8 tombs/flayer/wsk/etc in TZ games. I think I'd want to respec some strength and get a tgods to teleport baal runs, I let the sorcs die while doing that right now
There are some fire immune p8 tier 5 herald I have to skip though, the non-immune ones die easily but blood boil isn't enough to kill heralds especially if I can't keep amp on them because they can actually kill my venom lord with a tiny % of what his actual HP should be

also ex;

this seems like a good build to max demon mastery and bind demon with, bind a p8 amp conc/fana lister with, and then respec with +demon mastery and +bind demon skill items like bloodpact or baalos book, then max the tainted skills while keeping your buffed demon around.

I am rolling around with my fire lock with max bind and 3 demons worth of mastery, and my lister (p8 tz bind) basically tanks p8 heralds for me. I cast him in the center, use the rage sigil, and spam apoc and flame wave which clears out the minions letting him 1v1 the herald. Even without amp proccing he does sizeable chunks off the heralds life. I am stacking him (conc/amp/lvl 20 bind passives) with a might merc with infin. Merc does over 7.5k listed and Lister feels like he does even more.

I am betting you could run a similar demon setup here if you do the aforementioned bind prebuff technique.

This post was edited by Gilgameshed on May 25 2026 11:23am

Blizzard way ahead of you, all minions of all types are hardcoded to die instantly when you respec so you can't prebuff them like that.
You can't really afford to put more than 1 point bind demon here since normal skills max with 1 point at level 97, I only have 14 hard points blood oath at level 91

But yes bind demon damage is pretty absurd now, capable of 40-50k on a demon build, and even a taintlock with 1 point should manage 15k+ bind demon depending on setup as you join a new game. I've run a lancer for a bit and she's not as good at applying amp, especially to bosses, but deals stupid amounts of dps. With my current setup if I join a game with my +demon circlet/ammy/charms on, I get +1356 base damage / +590% ed, and that's just level 22 bind / 41 mastery (fully geared with 1 point bind you can join games with as much as 38 bind / 51 mastery). So even with my early ladder no torch no anni setup with only +1 from measured wrath, my bound demon is still doing over 10k per hit. And that's using holy freeze aura on the demon and prayer on merc, so it could be another +500% ed from those auras if you used them.

hmm, even with the hard point wand + baalos book? I didn't lose my LE amp fana lvl 20 bind lister from before the patch after it hit. I haven't actually tested this idea out myself though.

:edit:

another idea I heard but haven't tested, but it is said that if your demon is lightning enchanted and has curse, you can bloodboil it which causes the bolts to release which then can proc amp. Even without bloodboil my LE lister was amping like crazy from the bolts going off from just throwing him into an enemy pile.
still haven't tried the spearwoman vs lister but I really like his durability, dmg, and the smite swirls which go great with ring of fire.

This post was edited by Gilgameshed on May 25 2026 12:02pm

So basically I need a full inv of skillers and abuse prebuff gear swaps too
Not exactly what I had in mind :/
Lots of gold for tele staff :/
I might look to go full fire build plus 2 tainted and 1 consume tainted

This post was edited by ahyp on May 25 2026 12:03pm

you can run a firelock pretty cheap, but you will def want to hybrid demon build it and get yourself a strong demon to handle heralds. apoc + sunder + tainted consume + flickering flame smokes regular immunes. Infinity helps a lot but isn't exactly needed. Run hysteria or authority armor pre-enigma. With consume and hysteria and the occasional blade warp you can get wherever you need to go fast enough for a self found/welfare char anyway.

This post was edited by Gilgameshed on May 25 2026 12:07pm

What’s an example of a good demon for tanking and how much talent investment, what’s your hybrid buildout?
I like the tainted, they’re like a mini fireball sorc, but I don’t really like blood boiling, idk why. I didn’t realize that -fire res didn’t work on the tainted until yesterday. 😅😅 I told myself I was gonna play something other than sorc this ladder and I don’t wanna play echoing or abyss

This post was edited by ahyp on May 25 2026 12:11pm

Yeah and LE is probably the best affix after holy freeze + cursed now, if you're binding with a 15+ bind for uniques. But with 1 point bind you're restricted to 1 terror affix + extra fast / extra strong / spectral hit / aura enchanted. Hence cursed is the only real option, unless you want to do something like a stone skin siren (good before build has +19 bind gear for holy freeze). The 3 most useful affixes for uniques are lightning enchanted (release more bolts), multiple shot (for venom lords, sirens, flayers) and stone skin (make it phys immune). Stone skin isn't as important now that bound demons can get astronomical HP with maxed out gear from blood oath



well its not like I got to level 91 with a full set of skillers, but considering skillers cost less than 1 dkey each it wasn't hard to trade for them
ondals alone cost like 4-5 of those and was the same cost as an occy I found, and its only a very marginal upgrade over leaf staff anyway, basically just +1 skills +5% xp +45% fcr traded for 33% cold resist

I would stress that if you go a full tainted build, you cannot kill fire immunes, at all. Blood boil REALLY wants amplify damage to kill stuff. Best in slot gear reaches ~13-17k blood boil damage vs immunes after amp, sunder & -resists. That completely shreds immunes, even heralds. Yet right now I'm fine killing even in P8 games with a 3.3k phys blood boil + amp alone, which is 5-6.6k vs immunes, not even half damage- enough for almost everything but p8 fire immune heralds.