well there's a question of how much you need to do and how much you're willing to do
some things are just +1 skill for an extra few clicks, some are +5-6 for one click, and some items could be kept equipped because they are already pretty near BIS
for example I just keep arachs, sojs, magefist & enigma equipped, same with swap cta/spirit, and swap out the other items.

Its one shift click each to swap;
>mang songs <-> insight
>+3 circlet <-> your choice of helm (could be +3/20 and keep it on full time)
>+3 ammy <-> your choice of ammy
>+4-6 tome <-> ars baalos (can use 2 extra tomes, one for bind demon if wanted, and extra click)
>wraithsteps <-> resist boots
Now where you start getting into the excessive stuff is when you need to start moving charms around for room, opening inventory, swapping rings (can only shift click your left ring slot), using a skill shrine, etc
Its pretty fast depending on your setup to ctrl+click your cube/tome out of inventory and put charms in, then undo that after summoning tainted at the start of the next game
Its also an extra few seconds if you want to use a waypoint to cast BC before summoning tainted, whereas you could simply cast it without BC and have -1 skill and save that time

Those are all sort of tradeoffs for time. There's stuff I won't bother with, like hunting down a skill shrine, and it takes me about 10 extra seconds at the start of a game and end of a game, since I have my inventory arranged to just shift click everything in a row



I'm not even sure physical sunder would have this effect on minions at all, ie testing on a grizzly bear with amp from druid.

And worth reminding that damage is geometric here. Level 30/40/50 tainted is about 1:2:4 ratio of damage. I might have 16k with an unbuffed, low +skills setup and 36k with it, so its a huge difference
Its obviously not worth it for P1 runs in fast areas like trav

you know, my spearbae just fought a herald ghost and once amp procced, it died in about 3 hits, so maybe there is something here. I will have to fight another group of these ghosts as heralds without the sunder pre-equipped to compare. I usually just nuke them so I am not sure if this is faster than she would take it out normally.

I think we should have a few people test this just to verify.

I thought they nerfed amp DMG to 5 percent, how you proc it so much ?

Also why don't they make atmas like 20 percent chance to amp on hit?

Been using atmas scarab forever but the 5 percent and low level amp is still way worse than lock.

, so how are your resists? it survive souls, poison damage, fire damage just fine?

Its 5% per every damage instance from the demon, and casts in a big aoe around the target- its just casting that level amp damage curse, increasing aoe/duration. Holy freeze aura can hit 20 monsters every 2 seconds, so that's 20 independent damage instances, =1-(1-0.05) ^ 20 -> 64% chance to cast amp damage on at least one of them, which usually tags all of them. But against single targets like bosses, holy freeze might only be hitting one target at a time, less frequent than its melee attacks. And act bosses / ubers aren't hit by holy freeze at all.
some monster skills like inferno on megademons/flayer shamans can apply amp more rapidly because its hitting numerous times per second, tripled by multiple shot- but deal less DPS because they aren't attacking. And sirens just cast amp, but also cast a few other useless curses that can overwrite it and have a much weaker attack

holy freeze + cursed on a spearwoman tends to be all you need, since the case where it fails is against single target bosses like diablo/baal, but those bosses all melt to tainted + conviction damage so amp is unnecessary. And heralds have 14 minions, so they always get amped very easily from holy freeze



Well its a new ladder, I simply slapped um'd kiras + rising sun on after my prebuff and I've got some nice 38/37 fire/light resist boots, so I'm at 75% fire/light/poison and the sorb of rising sun and haven't died a single time even doing areas like chaos, WSK, swampy pit, pit of acheron, etc. You could probably get a setup with 125% fcr and higher %mf and still have max resists, though honestly I think rising sun absorb in PvM is too good to pass up right now, and its +2 blood boil so its a fine option at 75% fcr


This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 1 2026 09:07pm

si k thanks.

just to spitball an idea;

if you did
>obsession, enigma, coven, maras, baalos, magefist, 2x soj, arach
you'd wind up with 125% fcr and a bunch of +resists/life/etc but lack meditation aura, but because of the total +skills you'd wind up with level 15 teleport and only 10 mana per cast, instead of the level 8 / 17 mana per cast I'm spending.
and you simply can't cover that mana usage with potions alone, you'd need to be finding some huge % mana regeneration somewhere. On the setup I had it was about 40-45k mana used in 19 minutes, 5k base regen, 35k meditation regen, 1.25k from magefists, some potions and hex siphons incidentally. That above setup would cut it to 23-26k mana so a net 18-21k you still need beyond base regen. You could increase warlock's total mana or regen, both need to scale up otherwise that's like 40+ mana pots over that span and there aren't many free item slots to pump mana without losing much and I'm already using 2x sojs here. Unless you want to start cutting life for mana, or find a bunch of 20/17 charms

Maybe there's a way that build could work, but it seems like a whole ton of effort when insight staff go brrt

ah I had to go reread the wiki because I honestly thought +skill (class only) didn't apply to oskills, *but it does*
so using an obsession in a +3 teleport staff actually gives -3 mana cost to teleport, and so does insight in a +3 teleport staff
and now I need to go hunting down +3 teleport staff bases in cows
so yeah that's one more BiS item that requires a bit of nonsense either way. With that same setup above you'd get down to 7 mana cost using a +3 teleport / +4 all skills obsession, whereas an insight should take me down to 14 mana per cast if I put it in the right base

dunno how I forget these basics:

Okay so 5 percent per enemy hit that makes a lot of sense, similar to atmas throw barb with 100 percent pierce but probably even easier to apply. Do you think buffing atmas scarab to be level 5-10 and a 20 percent chance on hit would be fair ?

This post was edited by chudman123 on Jun 1 2026 10:01pm