As much as we love our Apocalypse Warlock build for all the big explosions, if you want to hit the highest tiers of Torment difficulty with a Warlock, it’s hard to argue that an Abyss/Demonology build isn’t the way to go. At the highest levels, this build - the Shadowform Dread Claws Metamorphosis Warlock - is a fairly technical and involved affair, requiring optimized gear and a bit of skill by the player to function properly. On the plus side, it’s an incredibly fast, mobile build that can casually fill the screen with billions of damage, capable of rending through the hardest Torment difficulties in the game. We reached Torment 11 with only fairly optimized gear - the sky is the ceiling for this build!

Page Breakdown¶

Shadowform Dread Claws Metamorphosis Warlock Build¶

As the name of the build implies, the Shadowform Dread Claws Metamorphosis Warlock relies on numerous mechanics to feed its damage output. Dread Claws is the primary damage dealer, but on it’s own it’s not that impressive. It can, however, strike multiple times and over a wide area, its attack can be echoed by your Greater Demons, and there are various ways to boost its damage, including the standard boosts to Abyss Skill Damage, Demonology Skill Damage, Shadow Damage, Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage, along with Paragon Board boosts and the Harash’s Shadow charm set.

Dread Claws deals more damage when you’re Stealthed thanks to its Ambush upgrade and massively more damage if you’ve got stacks of Shadowform and have the Harash’s Shadow charm set. Shadowform and Stealth are related functions - you’re Stealthed when you move while you have Shadowform stacks, but moving (and hence remaining in Stealth) consumes Shadowform stacks. Likewise so will using Dread Claws thanks to its Enveloping Terror upgrade, so you’ll really need ways to generate Shadowform. Fortunately Sigil of Subversion, Command Laalish and Metamorphosis all accomplish this, and there’s no good reason you should ever be bereft of Shadowform in a fight.

Cast Sigil of Subversion at enemies, teleport over to the enemies/Sigil of Subversion with Nether Step, use Command Laalish to create a Terror Zone AoE and echo your Dread Claws, then start attacking. You want to move frequently with this build, ideally between every attack and on shadow trails generated by scoring kills in the Sigil of Subversion, as this will help maintain your Shadowform and Stealth, ensure you retain the damage buff from said Shadowform and Stealth, and make your character untargetable by enemies. Untargetable does not mean unkillable however - you still need to watch out for damage spikes and AoEs, which will likely be your main causes of death with this build, but being fast and flighty, mostly untargetable and most importantly, having an insane kill rate should keep you alive most of the time.

Oh, and flavor longer, chaotic fights with Profane Sentinel, as necessary to spread debuffs like Slow and Vulnerable and echo your Dread Claws if Command Laalish ends up out of position or on cooldown.

SCMW Build Pros and Cons¶

Skills¶

Your main damage dealer, you want the final upgrade that causes Dread Claws to be cast around you while consuming one stack of Shadowform to have the attack echoed by the last Greater Demon you summoned. Because what’s better than casting the spell once but casting it twice, sometimes from a safe distance? You also want the upgrades that reduces the cost of Dread Claws when you kill enemies and the upgrade that causes your first hit to deal 50% more damage - which applies to all hits when you attack from Stealth.

Gives you four stacks of Shadowform on use and increased movement speed. Already solid, but you also want Shadow Recall so that you’ll bring your summons with you when you use Nether Step, as it allows you to reposition your Greater Demons, one of which should be echoing your Dread Claws - a form of teleport ambush. Also get the Damage Reduction and Movement Speed upgrades which will give you 60% damage reduction along with the movement speed bonus and the one that increases the duration of the latter to improve its utility as a survival/mobility option. No reason not to spam this frequently in combat.

Deals damage via eye beams and renders enemies Vulnerable. Also counts as a Greater Demon, so it can echo your Demon Claws, but this should be a secondary option next to Command Laalish. Still, sometimes fights don’t play to script and you may need to use some of that Dominance to reposition your Dread Claws-echoing Greater Demon or spread debuffs around. You’ll want the Single Target Damage, Wide Beam and Focused Glare skills. Most of these aren’t terribly important, you just need to keep Profane Sentinel as a Recast skill, as it’ll play off the Blasphemous Fragment Soul Shard when you unlock it at Lv30, causing it to inflict Hex and boosting your damage to enemies with Abyss Demonology skills by 20%. Just remember to recast it to focus it on your current target to enjoy the damage buffs it provinces.

Hexes enemies and if you kill enough in the area, you’ll create a shadow trail that grants you Shadowform while running along said trail - a good way to preserve Stealth and build up stacks of Shadowform. Get the Infiltration Trails upgrade to boost the duration of the trails by 50% while preserving your stacks of Shadowform while moving, as well as the Movement Speed and Slow upgrades, which increase your movement speed while on the shadow trails and slow enemies, respectively.

Passively inflicts nearby enemies with Slow and Vulnerable and attacks random enemies while this skill is assigned to a slot and when actively used it’ll become a more potent source of AoE Slow and Vulnerable while dealing less damage over a wider area. Stand in its “Terror Realm” active use area of effect and you’ll also gain four Shadowform a second. A fairly low Cooldown means you should be able to use this often and it should be your go-to Greater Summon, causing the AoE it creates upon active use to debuff enemies, recover Shadowform and echo your Dread Claws. Hard to ask for a better Greater Summon for this build.

Primarily gives you Demonform on command, you want the Terror Demon upgrade to turn it into an Abyss skill, grants four Shadowform stacks per second and retains Stealth while using Abyss skills, accompanied by the Damage Scaling and Dominance upgrades, which increase your Demonology skill damage by 1% per 1,000 bonus Maximum Life and the one that reduces your Dominance costs by 20%. You’ll still do good damage without Metamorphosis, but this takes it over the edge, and the Harash’s Shadow charm set really, really needs you to have Shadowform stacks. The 350% damage you get from that set of charms takes this build from dealing hundreds of millions of damage to billions - it’s a big deal!

Soul Shards¶

Pretty obvious what Soul Shards you’re going to want, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t cover it. Since this is a pure Abyss/Demonology build, you’ll want to pick the Mastermind Shard, as it prevents your Recast skills from breaking Stealth at the expense of two stacks of Shadowform. This is a minor boon, however, compared to the other bonus this Soul Shard provides, as it also causes you to deal 30%[x] damage with Abyss skills while you have Shadowform and increases your Movement Speed by 5%[+] per stack of Shadowform. Functionally a permanent damage and movement speed boost for this build.

When you hit Lv30 you’ll want to select the Blasphemous Fragment, as it’ll cause your Recast spells to Hex enemies, and increase your Abyss Demonology skills damage by 20%[x] against enemies hit by your Recast skills. This means your Profane Sentinel becomes a skill you can use to tag an enemy with and enjoy a damage boost again.

Most importantly, however, this Soul Shard gives you the Command Laalish skill, which will passively inflict enemies with Vulnerable and Slow and when actively used it’ll create a “Terror Zone” AoE effect which gives you stacks of Shadowform and counts as a Greater Demon, echoing your Dread Claws.

Best Gear and Affixes¶

The main sources of damage for this build are Abyss, Demonology and Shadow, but thanks to Command Laalish you’ll also pretty much have every enemy afflicted with Vulnerable, too, so any of those bonuses on gear will also help push your damage forward. While those are nice and all, main thing we need to focus on for really boosting damage number is Critical Strike Chance and Critical Strike Damage - you need a healthy amount of both, as there’s no point in dealing critical hits if they don’t also deal tremendous damage, and no point in swinging with heavy criticals if they never occur. With painstaking rerolling you can get up to 100% Critical Strike Chance, but anything over 80% will get you to Torment 10+, as long as it’s paired with 2,000% Critical Strike damage.

This will take a long, long time to get to all these numbers, barring absurd luck, and will be something you work at from the start of Torment difficulty until you’re done with the build.

Cooldown Reduction bonuses are also nice, as Command Laalish, Sigil of Subversion, Nether Step and most importantly, Metamorphosis all have cooldowns and you’ll want them handy pretty much all the time. Granted, many of them also have durations whose length can eclipse their cooldown with a bit of gear, but this will always be a nice-to-have mod on gear.

Attack Speed is also somewhat useful given the Brutal Gorilla’s Aspect we’re going to want on a piece of gear, which converts attack speed into raw damage. Yes, you’ll swing slower, given how much the build benefits from staying mobile, we feel swinging harder and slower is better than standing in pace and spamming attacks quickly. Forces you to be honest and maintain Stealth, which improves survivability.

Otherwise you’re just going to want the staples on your armor: Potion Capacity on pants, Evade Charges on boots, Armor, Resistances and Life when you can get them. Many of our legendary Aspects are obvious damage boosters, but the Aspect of Deeper Shadows is really key for this build, as it increases your max Shadowform stacks - something this build can never have enough of.

List of Suggested Affixes and Stats¶

Wrath generation isn’t a tremendous issue, but it is an issue - one that becomes trivial as time goes on, but you do need Mother’s Embrace and the Ring of Starless Skies to all but ensure you never run out. The former will likely drop well before the latter. Like most builds that focus on critical damage, stockpiling sufficient Critical Strike Chance and Critical Strike Damage will be a slow, incremental and likely expensive process, albeit one that should keep you interested in rare and legendary gear for a long while.

The biggest and likely last major damage spike this build will see will come from gathering all five different Harash’s Shadow charms.

Gems and Runes¶

No build is complete without scraping a bit more damage and survivability out of gems and runes - it’s easy enough to add sockets to gear, no sense in not making use of them. Here’s what we placed in our socketed gear:

List of Suggested Gems and Runes¶

The Amethyst in weapons and focuses are no-brainers, as are the Diamonds in jewelry. Sapphires in the pant sockets were… well, the best of some rather uninspired choices, but more damage is more damage. We put Tam+Gar into a helmet to buff our Critical Strike Chance - it should proc every time we use Dread Claws, which is… well, all the time. Might become unnecessary if you get your base Critical Strike Chance high enough, but until then, it’s a fine boon. Bac+Eom in our chest armor helped shave a bit of time off our cooldowns, which by the end game were a large part of our damage, and we couldn’t get cooldown reduction to quite cover for the full cooldown of our skills. This is also a very mobile build with loads of movement speed, so at the very least it ensured our cooldowns were done by the time we reached the next group of mobs.

Charms and Talismans¶

• Talisman: Your goal here is simple and has been mentioned numerous times, but it may take a while to gather everything you need. First you’ll want a legendary Talisman that has 5-6 Charm slots and the Critical Strike Chance stat - bare minimum for this endgame build.

• Charms: As for Charms, you want all five pieces of the Harash’s Shadow set, as it’ll give you x350% damage with Abyss skills while you have Shadowform at the cost of one Shadowform stack. This is a massive damage bonus and you should have plenty of stacks of Shadowform by the endgame due to rotating various skills like Nether Step, Sigil of Subversion and Command Laalish.

In the meantime you’ll want to focus on lesser sets, like Practiced Technique and Slaughter and charms that give useful bonuses like Abyss Skills, Resistances, Life, Armor and Movement Speed.

Paragon Boards¶

The Abyss/Demonology Warlock is spoiled by the Paragon Boards, having plenty of potent boards with legendary nodes and Glyphs that provide excellent damage-buffing bonuses. In addition to the legendary nodes mentioned below, you’ll want to keep an eye out for nodes that boost Abyss damage, Demonology damage, Vulnerable damage, Cooldown, Critical Strike Chance and Critical Strike Damage. After that, flesh out your build with the standard Armor, Resistances and Life.

List of Suggested Paragon Boards and Rare Nodes¶

• Demonic Spicules: An obvious pick, as it causes all enemies hit with Demonology skills to take 40% additional damage, boosted by further hits up to 120% bonus damage.

• Dynamism: Will increase your Demonology skill damage by 3% per point of Dominance you have while in Demonform, so when you use Metamorphosis you should get a 90% damage bonus (less for every time you summon Profane Sentinel.

• Greater Hex: Causes you to deal more damage to Hexed, Vulnerable or Weakened enemies while taking less damage from them (Command Laalish and Sigil of Subversion will ensure most enemies are debuffed, making these more or less constant bonuses). This board also has several good rare nodes.

• Ritualism: You deal 45%[x] increased damage to Crowd Controlled enemies and 65%[x] increased damage to elite enemies. Sigil of Subversion and Command Laalish both debuff enemies with Slow, which should ensure you get these damage bonuses against just about every enemy, all the time.

Glyphs¶

• Mastermind: One of the better damage buffing Glyphs, Mastermind will boost your Abyss skill damage for every Willpower node in range. Its additional bonus will, when unlocked, boost your damage while in Shadowform, which should just be a flat, nigh permanent damage buff when this build is fully online. The legendary bonus further increases Abyss skill damage.

• Demonologist: Another solid damage-booster (the Abyss/Demonologist is spoiled!), your Demonology skills deal more damage for each Willpower node within range. Its additional bonus causes you to deal more damage when you have a Greater Demon summons, which includes your Profane Sentinel and Command Laalish skills… which you’ll have summoned any time you’re fighting anything stronger than fodder. The legendary bonus further increases Demonology damage.

• Eldritch Sight: Boosts the Vulnerable damage you deal to enemies for every Willpower node purchased in this Glyph’s area, with an additional bonus of increasing your overall damage every time you hit a Vulnerable target, up to a maximum boost of 18%. This Glyph’s legendary bonus is another bonus to Vulnerable targets. Since Command Laalish ensure that enemies will (eventually) be afflicted with Vulnerable, this is a pretty solid and reliable damage boost.

• Wrath: Gives you bonus Critical Strike Damage for every Willpower node you buy in the area. If you unlock the additional bonus, all critical hits will generate 1 Wrath, which should functionally be most attacks once your Critical Strike Chance is high enough, mitigating any Wrath concerns you may have. If you unlock the legendary bonus you’ll get another bonus to Critical Strike Damage.

• Destruction: Like the Wrath Glyph above, this one boosts your Critical Strike Damage, but its additional bonus causes enemies you Critically Strike to sustain more damage each critical hit. More damage overall, but that Wrath generation can be pretty useful.