Dark and Darker: Best Warlock Build Guide & How To Play

Warlock is one of the most unique classes in Dark and Darker, which also makes it somewhat hard to build and learn how to play properly. Essentially, they are a hybrid that’s capable of casting spells and fighting with melee weapons. Additionally, they have the unique trait of using their Health for casting. This allows them to cast more than other spellcasters, at least in optimal conditions! In this guide, we’ll give you a recommended build and tell you how to play the tricky Warlock class.

Best Warlock Build Guide & How To Play

Perk Selection

Warlocks, unlike other casters in Dark and Darker, use their Health to cast spells. This can make them tough to learn how to play, especially if you don’t pick the right perks for your build. As such, here are our recommendations for the best perks based on ease of use:

• Dark Reflection – Reflects 10 Dark Magic Damage to enemies whenever you get hit by melee attacks. It has a 15 second cooldown between hits, but it’s good for fighting back against melee enemies.
• Malice – Increases your Will by 10%, which is the stat that governs your magical power.
• Torture Mastery – Applying curses to enemies will heal you for 2 Health for each instance of damage dealt. However, it also doubles the Health cost for all of your spells. Nonetheless, it’s great for survivability.
• Vampirism – Increases your Magical Healing by 20%. You primarily want this perk to boost the effects of Torture Mastery.

The main takeaways from this perk selection are Torture Mastery and Vampirism. These two will work in tandem to help you recover Health by cursing foes. This greatly improves your survivability and also offsets the Health costs from spellcasting!

Speaking of spellcasting, let’s now take a look at the Warlock’s skillset.

Skills and Spells

The Warlock in Dark and Darker is best suited for more experienced players, as it has a lot of build versatility. They get access to physical skills as well as spells, after all. To simplify things, here are the skills and spells we recommend that you pick:

• Blow of Corruption – Buffs your next melee attack within 8 seconds with a base of 10 Evil Magical Damage. Additionally, it will lower the enemy’s incoming healing by 80% for 12 seconds.
• Spell Memory – Gives you access to the Warlock’s powerful spell book. You’ll be able to select up to 5 spells depending on cost. Unlike other casters, the Warlock uses up Health when casting. This allows for lots of casts, as long as you manage your Health!

These are our recommended spells:

• Curse of Pain – Deals 10 Curse/Evil Magical Damage to your target. Also applies a curse that deals 10 damage over time, distributed across 8 seconds. This is great for healing yourself, as it triggers Torture Mastery.
• Flame Walker – Leave a trail of fire where you walk for 6 seconds. Any enemy that walks into the flames will burn and take 25 Fire Damage per second. Great for protecting yourself if you need to run away from a foe!
• Hellfire – Summon a blast of hellfire that covers an area. The fire does 60 damage per second to anyone within it.
• Power of Sacrifice – Curses your target, making them take 3 Magical Curse damage per second. This triggers Torture Mastery, so you heal from the damage over time. However, it also buffs the target’s Strength and Vigor by 15 for a duration of 12 seconds.
• Summon Hydra – Summon an allied Hydra that hurls fireballs at any enemies for 10 seconds. The Hydra has 150 Health and deals 10 Fire Damage with each fireball.

Gear and Stats to Look Out For

Generally speaking, you have a lot of versatility with what specific gear you use as a Warlock. All you really have to do is look for a balance of weight and speed that you’re comfortable with. It’s very open-ended! That said, the gear available to Warlocks is generally light on Physical Defense.

For your weapons, the general recommendation for every Warlock is to use a Falchion with a Crystal Ball. This gives you access to melee and spellcasting at the same time, which is ideal since this class is good at both. Luckily, this is also the starting loadout for the Warlock! How convenient, right?

Now, we should go over stats. While you have a lot of versatility with what type of gear you use, you want to primarily focus on certain stat boosts from gear. These are the ones that we recommend as the best for pretty much every Warlock build:

• Magical Healing – Probably the most important stat for every Warlock build that uses spells. This will increase the effectiveness of Torture Mastery.
• Additional Magic Damage – The vast majority of your damage output as a Warlock comes from Magic Damage. As such, this is a must-have to bolster your damage.
• All Attributes – The all-rounder stat boost that is always good for every class and build. Increases all your Attributes, making you better overall.
• Will – As we mentioned before, Will is the primary stat that boosts your overall Magical Power. As such, increasing your Will also increases the overall effectiveness of all your magic. Can’t go wrong with that!

Now that we’ve gone over all key parts of a Warlock build, let’s break down how to actually play this class to the best of its potential in Dark and Darker!

The Blood Magic Specialist | How to Play Warlock in Dark and Darker

The Warlock’s biggest strength and weakness are, ultimately, the same: their spells cost Health. On one hand, this allows them to basically cast unlimited spells, unlike other casters. On the other hand, this makes them risky and requires a lot of Health management on your part.

This is why we primarily focus on Torture Mastery and Vampirism for our perk selection. These perks will allow you to greatly recover your Health anytime you hit an enemy with Curse of Pain and Sacrifice of Power. Each DoT tick will heal you back!

Most notably, this basically lets you abuse trash mobs for healing. Sometimes you can just fully recover your Health by cursing weak mobs safely. The downside is that the healing stops as soon as the curse effect ends or the mob is killed.

If you’re playing with teammates, tell them not to finish off cursed enemies so that you can continue recovering your Health.

Good and Bad Match-Ups for Warlocks

As a Warlock, you have the upper hand when dealing with melee-oriented enemies. Your Dark Reflection perk will make them damage for daring to hit you. What’s more, your Blow of Corruption skill lets you do huge burst damage to enemies and impair their healing. Besides, you’re a spellcaster! You can also just keep them at range with your powerful spells.

That said, there are classes better suited for melee combat if that’s all you’re interested in. Check out our best Barbarian axe build guide as an example.

Things aren’t quite so peachy for Warlocks if they face off against enemies with ranged abilities, though. Dark Reflection is useless against them, and it’s easier for them to avoid your spells. Rangers are a particularly dangerous class to fight against, so be careful when dealing with them!

Your spells are also overall weaker than what other spellcasters have, to balance out your potentially unlimited casting. If you face a Wizard in a spell battle, for example, you might end up losing the battle due to their higher firepower. Try to get up close in such cases, as you have an advantage in close quarters.

Ultimately, the Warlock class is somewhat of an oddball in Dark and Darker. They have the potential to shut down certain enemies entirely, and they can live on forever when played carefully. However, they do have a lot of trouble against certain enemies and situations. Nonetheless, we told you how to best play Warlock to overcome these disfavorable situations!

If you want some more help with Dark and Darker, make sure to check out our top 10 tips for beginners as well.