warlock mysteries

[tofucsek]

I've been playing the game for over 50 hours now and managed to figure out most of the classes but the warlock. Had a futile attempt to build him as a bleed stacker but he doesn't feel too significant compared to other heroes. Tried to use crimson ritual to gain 3 fury charges, then use circle of agony to stack bleed on enemy, then finish with crimson pack to execute them. It's a bit costly, 3+2+2=7 ap on a turn and does decent damage but nothing to write home about.

I've made a mistake to play a bard once and after soloing the whole game, everything feels a bit underwhelming. That being said, I'm still determined to get the hang of the the warlock class so any and every advice would be much appreciated. (Little side note: I play campaign mode most of the time).

[Blastom]

I generally built him with red cards from blood magic.
With some passive cards to gain fury for free and the rage card mastery, he could very easilly gain more than 200% bonus damage, which is perfect for his 3 ap heavy hit (forgot the name of the card). So a little setup on bleeding tick on turn 1, you could shoot the enemies with 600+ 3 ap blood magic every turn, or floor all of them with 200+ 2 ap aoe.

Circle of Agony could easily generate lots of stacks of bleeding on all enemies. With other source to pull/push, like Force Wave. To make things simpler, if he has 4 ap, Circle of Agony + Some 2 ap AoE blood magic (forgot the name, which deal damage from all stack of bleeding to all) would explode all enemies in one go

He requires a build plan and takes sometime to build up. But even at the start of the game, Blood Mage is pretty decent for one shot minions with fury.

The other 3 classes for him weren't appealing to me. Warlock cards were mixed and lack of heavy hitter. Tornate had too many green cards and the hard hitting ones were all red. Blood pool required even more setups and lack of concentrated heavy hit, which benefits a lot from fury and might.

[Zeel Ara]

My best general tip is to pretend that bleed doesn't do damage. It exclusively serves as a way to trigger other effects. The bleed mechanic is a trap because the damage numbers on it makes you think that's what it's for. It's unclear to me whether or not this is intended, but that is the current state of the mechanic.

You can use bleed in your builds to trigger other cards (although you're almost 100% better off using different effects that also counts as bleed ticks), but your damage *has* to come from a non-bleed source. Once you've realized that, you can start looking for the cards Warlock has that actually do something. And he has a lot of them. You just have to move past that initial misdirection.

[jdavh]

im currently on a run using him with a mostly dex build its..... ok. the big issue for me right now is that his tier 3 cards are ....... lacking so far.

the blood mage tier three has blood lance which i used when i did a blood mage run with him and is an awesome card, problem with tier three blood mage cards is that the rest of the cards kinda feel like they should be in malediction instead but got tossed in blood mage since they use fury stacks. the blood mage tree also has a silly number of retain/passiv/trigger cards that work together in interesting ways but unless you intrinsic cards your not going to be doing much

the malediction tier three............ it has bone armor that is a great card. the other cards are cool (like voodoo curse and the excution ritual) but..... yeah they dont work to that theme of tossing around all the various status aliments and watching your oponents slowly wither away unable to do anything................. actualy the whole tree kinda feels like that what the "wanted" to do but they instead turned it into a blood magic support tree.

reaper.............. more blood magic this time with pools, i havent really even given this tree much of a shot yet since its..... ugh i dont even know how to go this route in any type of efficient manner in the early realms. i like the totems in tier three its pretty safe to always pick up one at some point since they have intrinsic no matter what your building just....... their in tier three, have no upgrades, and die pretty quick.

but hey his ENTIRE kit is about bleed it would be real real real great if they tooled up the malediction tree to have more debuffs. some blind, vunerable, weakness etc etc etc just make that tree the debuff master. shift all the blood mage support to the reaper tree so that there are two trees that focus on abusing bleeds and let malediction be about applying and taking advantage of debuffs (not just bleed) while gaining difficult to deal with defenses.

[Overeagerdragon]

I just quit an endless run (because it got boring) with a Druid (primal), Warlock (Blood), Bard (Tempo) party. The combination of a circle of agony (the card that inflicts bleed on the entire enemy) combined with blood pulse (inflict damage with bonus damage equal to all bleed ticks on everyone) and Dark fire pretty much made my Warlock my tank, healer and DPS combined. Druid to setup some inital blood ticks and or debuffs (Primal Roar) or shuffles to provoke blood ticks, using Apex Predator to finish off weak enemies that would be a waste to kill with the warlock and the bard to keep nasty effects off the druid and/or augment some more armor for heavy hitters; maybe inflict some vulnerability on the enemy for good measure.

I got my first AP+ items AFTER I maxed out on levels but you don't need much AP when a single Crimson Pulse does 200 Damage (or more) on the entire enemy field.

If anything a Warlock/Bard combi.....or even a Warlock with some crimson armors to give yourself some extra armor (and healing) in addition to the earlier mentioned Bone Armor and I would almost say the warlock is horribly OP.

[Blastom]

I've played a lot around Kudo recently under red build.

Under red build, I only take the Fury Totam as T3, because his T2 with fury + bleeding tick were not weaker than a T3 from other characters.
As he's too easy access fury stacks and the blood magic skills mostly have rage trait. The damage from them is far above from basic stats.

The build is simple, choose Blood Mage, upgrade Blood Shot, Circle of Agony and Blood Pulse, remove all but guard cards. Get only Fury Totam as Tier 3 (take any T3 card and reset).

The only drawback was that, he needed someone to do the pushing and pulling, or the fury generation would be problematic as himself wasn't a good pusher. So someone needs to do the push/pull works for him.

I'm thinking about blue Kudo, as the blood pool seems the best healing skill in game. With 100% int scaling, it could heal 15+ hp every turn Though haven't tried it yet. Fury stack from blood pool is also nice to have :)

[Zeel Ara]

Originally posted by Blastom:

I've played a lot around Kudo recently under red build.

Under red build, I only take the Fury Totam as T3, because his T2 with fury + bleeding tick were not weaker than a T3 from other characters.
As he's too easy access fury stacks and the blood magic skills mostly have rage trait. The damage from them is far above from basic stats.

The build is simple, choose Blood Mage, upgrade Blood Shot, Circle of Agony and Blood Pulse, remove all but guard cards. Get only Fury Totam as Tier 3 (take any T3 card and reset).

The only drawback was that, he needed someone to do the pushing and pulling, or the fury generation would be problematic as himself wasn't a good pusher. So someone needs to do the push/pull works for him.

I'm thinking about blue Kudo, as the blood pool seems the best healing skill in game. With 100% int scaling, it could heal 15+ hp every turn Though haven't tried it yet. Fury stack from blood pool is also nice to have :)

For an int build you can look at the one I posted in this topic, if you want some inspiration.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/981430/discussions/0/3114770279397602491/

[Blastom]

Already tried the blue build. He would be a better healer than I though with 20 healing per turn from blood pool.
But I've found the blue talents were not as good as red ones for him - most of them worked around channel charges.

The reaper magic skills seemed to have a lower baseline damage than blood magic but gain bonus hit from repeating on target in blood pool. This didn't synergy well with fury as bonus hit didn't benefit from might and fury. Also they couldn't get Rage trait.

He cound easily generate rage from blood pool and fury totam, but not as good as using them. He deal like only half or less damage on alpha strike.
I've tried to the t3 freeze magic from blood magic deck. Not strong as well.

[AterDeus]

Sooo imba in late...
on second turn oneshoted 6 enemies with 160 dmg each. With 2 pools of blood, blood rain, crimson tides, fury totem and sanguine shutter. had about 28 str and 6 ap points

[Blastom]

Originally posted by AterDeus:

Sooo imba in late...
on second turn oneshoted 6 enemies with 160 dmg each. With 2 pools of blood, blood rain, crimson tides, fury totem and sanguine shutter. had about 28 str and 6 ap points

There're lots of super heroes builds, like:
Pierre Gravity Surge + Triple Cast + Might would throw 4 enemies with 380+ damage with only 1 ap cost (2 ap and refund 1).
Lucious red build with finisher could haul 400+ damage at turn 1 on 2 - 3 targets with 5 ap.
Kudo blue build with Blood Pool + Crimson Guard could throw 50+ guard on everyone with 2 ap.

[jdavh]

so im now going through with a blue kudo (with a goor bit of red sooooo purple kudo???)....... uhhhh yeah wow its pretty gross, its taken a bunch of tooling around through the run to get working well but now its a bit of a well tuned machine. hits max fury turn one no problem, then eliminates a line or row each turn while maintaining great guard and healing............ yeah its gross.

right now its at realm 14 and going strong with the build being
1x blood lance (max but not mastered trying to path to a mastery node though)
1x bloodletting (intrinsic mastery but no points in it beyond mastery yet)
1x dark flare (potent mastery one point short of max)
1x crimson tides (intrinsic mastery no points beyond mastery)
2x bone barrier (intrinsic full max)
2x pool of blood (intrinsic full max)
1x frost beam (potent full max)
1x fury totem

item cards
1x restore
1x stand your ground (might rune)
1x shift (fury rune)
1x force armour (intrinsic and judgement runes)
1x throwing dagger (agility and fury runes)

its a smaller deck than i normally build but seriously relies on generating fury to toss out the extra damage on frost beam or dark flare for normal fights to delete a line or row each turn. agaists bosses its all about building fury to drop as much of either burning or frozen as possible while keeping up solid guard and healing the whole while, oh and ignoring debuffs because of bloodletting.

i have him at 6 ap so turn one goes:

drop the totem, use pool of blood (on cast grants a fury), use bloodletting on self, throw dagger (one fury, two agility), move twice (free because of agility) then shift (fury from rune and totem. this gives four fury stacks and a blood lance charge, next use either frost beam or dark flare to do a heck of a lot of damage (upwards of 750) to the line or row you feel like (and over 100 of the applicable status), follow that up with bone barrier on self for a good bit of guard. later turns its pretty much the same thing except you are starting your turn with fury charges from the blood pools triggering the totem so you can build more guard or potentially drop both the damage spells depending on the situation.

there were a heck of a lot of wasted points getting to this point of the build on this run (had a few cards that i removed after having dropped upgrades or masteries into them)

im thinking of working on building some more strength into the build so i can add might abuse into the build but well max level is a pain to build up since ya gotta seach for those camps and tomes for skill points not to mention the fact that if i can get another point into bloodletting it will give a lance and fury off each agility move freeing up some room to build more guard or go with the early armour.

this one seems weird compared to everything else ive tried with warlock since the only bleed stacks i care about are a few on myself to boost bone barrier and to trigger all them effects), the blood pools doing damage counts as a bleed tick though (and some nice damage) for triggering crimson tides (so the whole field is covered in blood pools), making lances and generating fury from the totem.

beyond the bloodletting upgrade being needed i dont yet know what blood lance mastery to go with (since i dont know how the extra attack works, but i have enough respec points to play around with it a bit) and i may add the lightning spell thats on the same line as frost beam and dark flare though id have to add the dex boost talent to make that work (half int mod to added to dex mod)