Insight OR infinity + cure

Chains of honor
>fairly high defense
>+246% damage to demons / 146% to undead / 46% to animals
>+20% damage added to player/minions
>8% lifesteal
>8% DR
>25% mf
>75/75/75/75 resists

vs

Greyform ethereal dusk shroud socketed with protector's stone
>very low defense
>1% Chance to cast level 15 Fade when struck
>+10-30 base damage
>-5-10% enemy DR
>5% lifesteal
>15-35% mf
>25-50% gf
>75/75/60/75 resists

Which one would actually wind up better for practical purposes? Sure, CoH has some buffer for merc resists vs conviction aura.
How much proccing does the 1% fade do, compared to the already eh fade on treachery's 5%. With longer games of people grinding sunders in P8 all acts it seems like it could actually trigger.

With no lifesteal on insight/infinity/cure/flickering flame, there are only 4 armors that provide life leech. Greyform is just 5% but it neatly caps your mercs fire/cold defense, while cure caps its poison. Skin of the flayed one is a higher 7% but would leave you at 60/60/60/75 resists. Boneflesh is just worse.
There's also the option of a crafted blood armor, but that only hits 3% lifesteal at best and needs to roll each +resist independently since there's no prismatic on armor AND its got virtually no benefit unless its also 2 sockets. And yeah you could have a 3% lifesteal / 2 socket / max fire / max light armor but nobody has ever crafted such a thing, and there are almost zero relevant affixes other than +life it could gain, so it would still be worse than the 5% greyform.

1% ctc aint much
Your merc is gonna be squishy until it procs and letting him stand in fire each new game is… better play without merc at this point

Mf/gf on merc is pretty much useless, so is -dr%

So you end up with a merc that is just giving you less of everything.
More fragile, less dmg (or I guess it depends on the target type and dr%), 2 less skill for whatever aura he gives you.

If you want to use this jewel on merc, better be for something like a trav zerker barb where you could put it in an arioc needle and let him use CoH. Or in a eth reaper if you’re a ww barb.

coh because you can share it between your merc and coh eschuta jmod sorc

Well how much mitigation are you really getting from CoH by comparison.
That damage/pierce on stone might be enough to break even with CoH on damage output, though it would still be 5% leech vs 8%, so I doubt you'd exceed it
For warlocks with amp damage its less pronounced, but on other builds piercing the 33-50% dr on monsters means a big chunk of extra dps, even stacking up next to 246% on demons.

but for incoming damage all coh has is some extra defense, 8% dr and (60-62)->75 light resist. And that defense isn't even much (~1380 coh vs ~720 max on perfect roll greyform). And of course, defense doesn't work against so many sources in PvM. If that fade does activate, that merc caps his resists and gets 15% dr and double curse reduction. Its more like the question is 3% life leech / 8% dr vs 1% chance to cast fade, the other affixes are all kind of gravy.

I don't think this can be theorized, needs to be tested.

CoH is more universal because you can do short and long mf runs.

But I honestly don't like spending Ber on a merc if I can avoid it



Also this

and just to run some numbers I figure
95 merc has 240% might / 54% jab / 208 strength, and in the -10 bases infinity is ~508 base +5 ed, and the merc has 69-77 base damage
so with no armor his jab deals 3498 avg at 6.5 fpa and no leech
with COH that becomes 4927/4346/3765 vs demons/undead/animals with 8% leech
with stone greyform (assuming %ed glitch for no effect) its 3618 with 5% leech and -10% dr

in the bad case scenario with a target that has 50% dr that's COH with 2463 damage to demons (197 leech) / 2173 (174) / 1883 (151), versus greyform with 2171 (109)
so in that case greyform is pretty competitive for dps but clearly leeching less- considerably less.
though it does mean the crushing blows also hit a bit harder on infinity for greyform, but the critical strike is higher level on insight for coh.
as monsters have less %DR like 0-33, or especially with amp applied, it favors the COH even more.

if it was damage/leech alone the COH would win. The question is, are those numbers close enough for 1% chance to cast fade to be worth more?

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 6 2026 04:04pm

Coh is best in slut for many builts
I do appreciate you're effort to minimax tho

Eth fort

>0% leech

Upped eth skin of the flayed one wins against both. The defense on this one is better than DR, combined with the defiance aura, he'll rarely get hit. Biggest flaw of CoH is low defense.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Mar 6 2026 04:28pm