several undead dolls exploding on you at once is more or less the only thing that can insta kill you, so I pretty much just dont go where they can spawn (with the exception of throne)

Personally, when doing abaddon, icy cellar or throne I will never teleport ahead blindly. Usually I'd throw a deathmark first, see if monsters aggro to it, then teleport to my deathmark spot, repeat. Only becomes safe to teleport if you've seen 3 types of non-doll monsters so you know they aren't chosen. Although I guess 2 melee non-doll packs being chosen also excludes dolls since there's always 1 ranged pack, but I CBA to figure that out during a run.
If you feel like clearing swampy pit / flayer dungeon, its pretty safe to do so by just defusing every room with deathmark. You have so many walls to protect you while you deathmark your pack ahead of you and the room clears instantly
I did both those dungeons all the time and as long as you're playing cautiously its no problem

But there's no reason to set foot in durance, since its totally unrewarding. Its not whatsoever worth teleporting to meph

What modifications would you make for hardcore ?

i played this on hardcore and all variations, just slam a coa in the helm, and use obsession that was enought i even used a coa with facet + colossal jewel

Rest of your gear?

Helm Coa
ammy maras
rings sojs
gloves magefist
belt arach
armor enimga
weapon obssession
book : wrath
boots: i like the horizon set for magic resist but you can use rare with res, or any other

if you go full tainted dont use facet on coa/book, use um/ber

remember to precaast


in the end this build for level up is amazing, for mf you can precast the tainted/ bind demon and swap for mf gear

i personally ended up doing a bow build for hc mf running with a 800 mf build for chronicle, p8tz

if you run long games with tainted+ bind demon, you probably wont need gcs after summoning, you can use some mf scs as well

This post was edited by N1ck0 on Jul 20 2026 06:36am

Its pretty dang hard to die with 4000+ hp, blood oath and max resists, but you could max out your %dr and even drop the bone break from inventory. You'd have a weaker blood boil, less mf/mana/etc, but as nicko says you can hit 49% dr with 2x ber coa / enigma / baalos. I mean I didn't die a single time in softcore with 18% dr and I think putting on any sorb would be true overkill but you can easily become an absurd tank if you're willing to drop blood boil / 125 fcr. You could even build around wizspike+storm shield and need to chug mana potions, but its pretty hard to get a tome that lets you go max block with obsession since you can't wear shields now. Maybe if you had some rare 2 socket prismatic / blocking rare tome and didn't care about +skills because you drop blood boil usage entirely, stick 2x ber in it to create a mock stormshield tome and then get the dex for max block.

Its important to remember that tainted/bound demon DPS is entirely locked in by prebuff + merc, so everything you wear can just serve your QoL, survivability, or blood boil for immunes. I would never wear the tankiest setup because its a silly amount of overkill, but if you were worried about accidentally disconnecting when a t5 herald spawns near you, I guess a max block max dr setup might even survive because heralds still need a bit of time to chew through minions

ty

pretty much this,

i never came even close to die, even if you dced probably your max bind demon and tainted will kill tank for you. i would strongly advice to run this build for long tz games, where you just precast and swap gear 1 time and run all acts tz, as charms, i would only sugest yoou dont use bone break to summon your bind demon, im not sure but i felt like he get way weaker becouse the physical resist, and since you not maxing blood oath/mastery ( unless you do instead of engorge, witch i would) he can die in some extreme condition.. ( never happened to me..)


Goom, have you ever tried a max mf version? i just got curious how would this work, i mean speed maybe wont be the same but you probably can reach 800+ mf as well and since most damage come from prebuff summ,on, the only speed loss would be in teleport.

lmk if you do i might try something like that later on

This post was edited by N1ck0 on Jul 20 2026 07:39am

''The question is can it go full hammy in full immune area's given the amount of fire immunes in lvl 85 // TC87 areas or is this type of lock = locked into certain area's?

In fast games can it load and go w/o prebuffing?
I get that in long games it's worth while to pre-buff but can it also be insane w/o pre-buffing?''

What do you think about this? Interested in others opinions as well. I feel like the tainted do so well we can maybe drop some skills to put more into blood boil synergies maybe. If we use a fire sunder, doesnt it still sunder immunities and allow the tainteds to damage immunes?