So this build seems to shine doing full clears and taking out elites fast, but suffers a bit vs immune heralds, yea?

I was thinking, would it destroy kill speed if one of the BB synergies was left at 1-5 hard points, and bind demon was maxed instead? I feel like this would improve kill speed vs heralds quite a bit as well as giving your demon more survivability, but am unsure if this would reduce clear speed of standard zones too much.

My experience with self found gear (leaf, stealth, lore, meas wrath, rising sun, etc) so far is that you can walk around in normal and nightmare and everything dies, maybe you want to use death mark sometimes. Easy to be lazy though.

But in Hell you have to become a blood boiler. And there's not a great way to get 19 skills to bind a good demon with only 1 point in the skill if you are self found at the start of a ladder. You can do all the quests and P1 isn't bad, but in P8 with fire immues blood boil takes forever without a bound cursed demon. I'm sure with end game gear and +19 to skills though you are basically a blood boiler where anything not fire immune is basically dead before you even know you teleported over it.

I'm wondering if like a witch from crystalline passage with only like lvl 4 bind demon would work as a curser.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on May 26 2026 10:02pm

Ye.. might try it. Would have to be blood oath imo

Create a game until you get cursed atrribute then you have 2 options.

Siren from frozen river act5 if they spawn. They do more cursing than the second option but run away and dont tank.

Venom lord for act4 with holy freeze or giga speed vigor. Multishot if your lucky.

Recommend getting +3 circ / +3 army/ authority/ +3 ondals or hoto / fill in rest with plain skillers and a anni, put a few spare points into dlenslace demon until you are 20 then update and respect as you upgrade major items such as mang song and torch etc.

When you get tele the witch can curse more but so can the venom lord seems curse gets out faster when telestomp.

This post was edited by SyML1nK on May 27 2026 07:02pm

Siren is basically the only option for a build at less than 20 soft points bind demon, before gearing up
After that, I'd say the big options are

Max dps min curse with spearwoman
Min dps max curse with siren
Min dps good curse and potential for extra bodies with flayer shaman
Avg dps avg curse with venom lord

They are still vulnerable to dying to when you're undergeared and taking them from P1 games as temps
If you get a P8 and have high/max blood oath and +skills and CTA, they're all basically immortal even against amp+conc herald 5 in p8 tz96

is fire sunder a must for this build ? the sunder and +fire dmg dont work for tainted and only for blood boil fire damage?

finished 99ing this build on ladder last night, can confirm the taintlock is strong though best warlock build is definitely the

nope, fire sunder is pretty small impact until you get some -% fire gear and maxed blood boil synergies so when you're level 97 and have defender's fire in mang songs + facets in helm, its a pretty big impact
leveling up with mediocre gear you can do without sunder entirely, just using phys from blood boil + bind dps + bind amp to kill immunes and its quite fast

A half finished char might hit ~3200 phys on blood boil and deal 4800-6400 per cast against immunes after amp and have a bound demon that hits for 10-15k on its own (before amp). A finished char might hit as high as ~6000 fire / ~4800 phys with 40% pierce and deal 9900-12300 per cast against immunes after amp and have a bound demon dealing 20-25k before amp. So maybe the damage on blood boil gets doubled overall against immunes when you bring in sunder and fire pierce
when you don't have fire pierce and have a lower level synergy/boil you're getting a 5% fire damage from boil and 5% from tainted and doing nothing. Although lesser monsters might still die to 5% damage on tainted, you can see it happen with weaker immunes

is this farming p8 tz fast?

Looks fun to play