Warlock - pure summoner X blood boil

Hi

I'm still leveling my Warlock.
I started using a pure summoner, as at first I was pretending to use it as my end game build.
https://maxroll.gg/d2/guides/summoner-warlock-guide

But, It is taking some time to clear the areas, unless I keep casting

Blood Boil to help (even with only a single point on it - as a pre-requisite to

Bind Demon - it is making a big difference)...

The point is, I'm having the same felling I had with the necro summoner: against multiples enemies, minions are just meat shield and your

Corpse Explosion (or in this case

Blood Boil) is that really kills the mobs...

It is just an impression, because I'm still leveling, or it is the real deal with this build... if it is the case (for general farming - not Boss killing), would probably be better another build (maybe

Blood Boil - so I still keep 3 demons... - https://maxroll.gg/d2/guides/blood-boil-warlock-guide )

The summoner gets much stronger the moment you bind a good monster. But I don't think we can expect

Corpse Explosion-like madness.

I have a cursed demon now, so I work with 1 Goatman, 1 Defiler and the merc. For hard single targets, I swap to 2 Goatmen. Always have your guys engorged for the IAS.

On the long run I will swap the A2 merc for something with AoE damage (A1 or A3), but for now, he is of use as a might spender and personal bodyguard.

My actual skillset is:

Sigil Lethargy - maxed

Demonic Mastery - maxed

Summon Goatman - maxed

Death Mark - maxed

Bind Demon - 9pts, maxing now

I screwed up a few points since this is my original walkthrough build, I didn't respec once, but I have a good companion now. So I am waiting to be killed, haha.

OK, I will give the summoner, another chance

Idk if u ask me all those points in the summon tree are kind of unnecessary, because you can still have tanky summons with enough points left over to invest heavily into Fire Warlock or Eldritch.

i have pure summon lvl 91 now. i work like a

Nova sorc or poison necro, i tp through the map, nuke everything with bloodboil and take less then 10 sec for terrorized act bosses. it is absolutely playable and very enjoyable at that

But did you invest points in

Blood Boil + Synergies?
(In this case it is more of a

Blood Boil build than a "pure summoner" )

NewGuyPlus wrote: 1 day ago

i have pure summon lvl 91 now. i work like a

Nova sorc or poison necro, i tp through the map, nuke everything with bloodboil and take less then 10 sec for terrorized act bosses. it is absolutely playable and very enjoyable at that

fredkid wrote: 1 day ago

But did you invest points in

Blood Boil + Synergies?
(In this case it is more of a

Blood Boil build than a "pure summoner" )

NewGuyPlus wrote: 1 day ago

i have pure summon lvl 91 now. i work like a

Nova sorc or poison necro, i tp through the map, nuke everything with bloodboil and take less then 10 sec for terrorized act bosses. it is absolutely playable and very enjoyable at that

It is in the "summoning" tree, its just called "demon" for wl also it does revolve highly around your summons as the dmg only happens through them, i d say it very much is a pure summoners build, without summons i also cant

Blood Boil

also yes i did,

Demonic Mastery,

Blood Oath,

Death Mark,

Blood Boil and

Engorge get maxed out, after i prob throw the rest into

Bind Demon. but with Enigma its like a

Nova sorc with benefits, you

Teleport and spam

Blood Boil but with the nice perk that when you get into a pickle, you can reposition the wall of flesh that is also the center of your "

Nova" ^^ so far i found bound demons with either cursed and/or

Conviction aura to be the strongest with this build, but it is true that it mostly evolves around

Blood Boil. you are limited to 3 summons anyway though so "minion master" at a scale as with necro or druid isnt possible ^^

I'm curious, genuine question if anyone has tested, how does the kill speed of these summoner warlocks compare to Eldritch who has maxed out

Mirrored Blades and High CB?

My currently warlock build has 10 points into most of the important summon skills and is using upgraded

Shael'd

Ribcracker, Spirit

Monarch, Coven

Helm, Enigma,

Gore Rider, deaths guard + hand upgraded combo, maxed out

Mirrored Blades, and few other things of note I cant recall ATM. In terms of boss killing speed, I haven't taken a stopwatch or anything like that but he appears to be possibly as fast or maybe faster than a smiter, and on top of that

Echoing Strike more or less obliterates everything in sight with the help an Extra Strong + Extra Fast +

Fanaticism enchanted + cursed

Hephasto the Armorer tear-assing all over the friggin place cursing everything on the screen.

If i were a fire warlock id be using

Conviction aura Hephasto and maxed out

Apocalypse + all synergies, which leaves more than enough for 10+ points in various demon skills.

Just wondering if a full Summoner is really worth it by comparison.

Would a full summoner actually work? I mean, you can have only 3 demons at best. Is going to be very slow to kill things unless you do most of the heavy lifting with your other spells?

Semirotta wrote: 1 hour ago

Would a full summoner actually work? I mean, you can have only 3 demons at best. Is going to be very slow to kill things unless you do most of the heavy lifting with your other spells?

I haven't played it yet, so I'm theorizing from what I already know about the Demons skills.

To help your demons, you can use

Sigil Death for clearing mobs, not very fast but should be ok. Killing bosses would take time, but since some bound demons are basically unkillable (some can solo

Uber Tristram), your enemies will always lose after some time as long as you can stay alive. But with lots of points into

Blood Oath, that should work. You can help with

Sigil Lethargy and

Engorge if there are some corpses available.

Blood Boil (life loss mitigated by

Engorge) obviously also works at higher levels, as someone has claimed here.
It's definitely a build that should work. I will try it out some time.

mikelessar wrote: 1 hour ago

Semirotta wrote: 1 hour ago

Would a full summoner actually work? I mean, you can have only 3 demons at best. Is going to be very slow to kill things unless you do most of the heavy lifting with your other spells?

I haven't played it yet, so I'm theorizing from what I already know about the Demons skills.

To help your demons, you can use

Sigil Death for clearing mobs, not very fast but should be ok. Killing bosses would take time, but since some bound demons are basically unkillable (some can solo

Uber Tristram), your enemies will always lose after some time as long as you can stay alive. But with lots of points into

Blood Oath, that should work. You can help with

Sigil Lethargy and

Engorge if there are some corpses available.

Blood Boil (life loss mitigated by

Engorge) obviously also works at higher levels, as someone has claimed here.
It's definitely a build that should work. I will try it out some time.

I love summoner classes as is, every game if its possible to use summoner im always going for it. Necromancer with summon build is my favourite build (or was before they made summons to unsummon if they are too far from the player so you must have

Teleport to keep them properly alive or end up re-summoning something constantly)

Kind of expected a bit more summons for demonology, but just 3 maximum, two if you want to have a buff which you most likely do.

I dont know which demons are unkillable as ive only used the hephasto.

If you can get 20 points into demon bind so that your

Bind Demon can automatically get aura enchanted, spectral hit, extra strong, and extra fast, you just need to find a good bind and it can work pretty well. I actually think investing in demon mastery + demon bind + some points into defiler until you can get 5 targets bound for each hit, this is better than investing points into

Blood Boil. I initially thought that it'd be like Summon necro where you just need the first kill and

Blood Boil would do the actual killing - however,

Blood Boil requires a lot of points to be worthwhile, I feel. I think only if you max out

Blood Boil and both synergies, it's decent. I was struggling to level up this build in ladder, so switched to put more points into the demon bind early on instead, and it has worked out better for me, at least at level 83 or so with very little to no gear. Hephasto is very good, but I found a reddit post recommending a terrorized lancer unique that sometimes comes out in ancients way and tried her out.. (the name is Gloom pus the

Wraith) and she absolutely slaps. She is already so fast, and as long as you find a cursed one, with 20 points in demon bind, she can get

Fanaticism too. I ended up doing a few runs while ancient ways was terrorized yesterday, and was able to bind one and got cursed and

Fanaticism. She zaps through the entire map super fast, and jabs too, which ends up doing way faster and more damage than hephasto maybe. And with two defilers also summoned, you pretty much clear 10 at a time pretty fast.

Obviously not as fast or strong as the

Echoing Strike build, but I have actually enjoyed this build way more than fire or

Abyss warlock.

So I am out of re-specs for this ladder character as I was experimenting all kinds of builds, but I am starting to think that

Blood Boil is almost unnecessary. Before I even do much damage with

Blood Boil, I just

Death Mark her into mobs and they just melt. Even terrorized diablo got melted pretty quickly (altho it was only p1). If you have enough +skills with good gear, I think you can almost just put a few points into defiler to get 5 bound targets, enough to get 20 soft points to demon bind, same with demon mastery, and be set. You may have enough points left over to almost max out

Echoing Strike and its synergies.. so you'd be a Beast with a bound demon with all extra stuff for sure while spitting out nasty

Echoing Strike damage yourself. May have to try this later on once I have enough gear on ladder

edit: here's the lancer unique that I think may be the best

Bind Demon target