Ah I forgot about baalos just granting the ability. I still don't have it on my bb lock.

I have an extra you can have if you're looking for one

I tried to do exact tile testing and it sure looks like blood boil with a 20-tooltip radius in current patch resulted in a ~10 radius in PTR
I tested current BB, PTR BB and Nova all against a lightning spire in arcane so I could compare screen shots to line up the exact tile I stood on for a horizontal distance
Its a little tricky to compare because on the isometric view, I might have been off vertically by +1/-1 tile. But I found both versions of BB had the exact same radius, and it was just ~1 tile further distance than Nova

Nova has 8 yards radius, but the thing is nova shoots missiles that travel ~8 years and can collide with the extended collision tiles of size 2/3 units since its checking for overlap. Whereas blood boil is just comparing distance between actors directly, so there's no extended collision radius.
Games like warcraft III made a point of adding a collision radius parameter to such comparators, diablo II did not, so skills like blood boil and static field have a smaller aoe with the same 'radius' than skills with missiles that check collision

but either way blood boil still appears to be slightly larger than nova

I saw your work, it's excellent and leaves me feeling like not much needs to be adjusted if at all to remain viable. I think the defiler still helps with extending the aoe, and the biggest change is that I might prioritize lightning enchanted for my mauler to get amp out faster, and just accept that some mobs will take longer to kill.

I dunno I feel the upside of the max tainted build is too good to ignore. Slightly less blood boil dps in exchange for massive fire dps focused on elites and bosses, the QoL of not worrying about a demon's hp. Bound demon has to choose now between failing to amp bosses / small packs, or having a demon that doesnt attack (much). You can get that amp from venom lords or sirens, but an urdar or spearwoman has just 5% ctc on a blockable hit and 5% on fire/shock or 0% on holy freeze vs bosses.

Unless they wake up and nerf tainted on ptr which they might do

I had heard about this, but I take all about tainted was always that their attack is slow slow, and so is it going to clear density in the same way?

With engorge active its 22 fpa tainted shots, but they can have 30-36k damage without prebuff and 46k with full prebuff. In a small aoe, might be fireball or smaller sized, ~2 yards. But their real shortcoming is only sunder (must be equipped when summoned, not full skillers) and conviction will help them pierce. So even 0% res mobs still are at -85, and immunes are at 78% resist. So as astronomical as their numbers, they get gimped hard vs immunes.

They can kill non immune champ packs in 1 shot and kill p8 diablo in 2 volleys. And your dps is still fine for taking on p8 fire immunes since they are still that stupid high, but against fire immune p8 t5 heralds? You might have a problem. That amp + blood boil helps a lot on a bound demon build, tainted that shoot for 46k wind up dealing only 10k after sunder+conviction and if the heralds kill your infinity merc they deal only 2.3k per hit. Against 2 million hp heralds

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 19 2026 11:41am

Having convection helps a lot with the chance to hit, but I agree that that's going to make cursed very challenging to apply. I'm of the mind to try a couple of things. One might be to lean into the physical aspects and run a act 5 mercenary with a dreadfang, and then have the demon run fanat. The loss of conviction is big, but the heavy physical will help offset that. Another is to lean the opposite and just have the amp happen if it does, and not worry too much about it. Outside of A5, it seems that most jobs with physical immunity have very low hp, which neuters some of the need for constant amp.


This post was edited by jimmycongo on Apr 19 2026 11:48am

well its 50%ish block on bosses with nothing around to trigger amp off aura. You can also self-wield infinity, but then we're comparing -85 on infinity to +30/-30 on a facet sword to +5 skills / +5 / -20 on mang songs, and all those -resists on facets/song aren't nerfed vs immunes like infinity
Another option would be to pack a hel'd non-upgraded gavel of pain and use it exclusively against fire immune heralds.

Keep in mind its just the difference of 4.8k per blood boil in any of these cases. If you have 8100 / -55 fire and 4800 phys on blood boil, then against fire immune / 50% dr monsters you'll deal 8.6k without amp, 13.4k with amp (down from ~15.2k with amp+sigil before sigil became a non-functional skill). The amp is always just going to add that 100% of the base phys value. If heralds are 50% dr fire immune mobs an amp from whatever source will be 1.56x overall dps, while if they were 0% dr fire immune its 11k without amp, 15.8k with, so 1.44x.
Tainted build can even go further, because if you summon all 3 tainted and lose the +20/-15 on blood boil and on top of not having amp (sans gavel), so you could be doing 6.8k to the 50dr/fi or 9.2k to the 0dr/fi, but the tainted themselves can deal 23-30k hp after -resists per 22 fpa volley
of course the 2x tainted + defiler does more dps if there are multiple targets, like heralds have, because then you're multiplying both blood boil and tainted shots, and same thing for blood boil, but more relevantly it matters for the bound demon physical dps. And against immunes when a max bound demon build can have ~25k damage entering with swap gear and get that 56% splash onto 4 targets, THAT winds up being a huge dps source with as much as 50k per swing before defiler, compared to tainted struggling to damage immunes for their 10k per fireball

But its still a tricky thing to assemble. Your urdar needs stone skin to survive heralds now, preferably an act 5 urdar so its unbreakable 125% dr phys immune vs amp damage, which is worth the lost regen/speed. It won't be poison immune unlike other options like venom lord who can be immune to everything (well except magic, or amp/curse/conviction). And spearwomen can't be phys immune even with stone skin, they cap out at 99% dr funnily enough, granted a stone skin spearwoman should still be mostly unkillable even by heralds. But now that she doesn't apply amp reliable to bosses, eh, you're reduced to that "do I gavel?" I think however that would ONLY apply to bosses, because she'll still amp herald packs with her aura.


farming cursed + stone skin uniques and having only a tiny % to roll the right aura is tough enough especially if it still takes some playercount to reach the max HP (I don't know), and the build can't even get super uniques until level 99, though that mostly matters for trying to farm infector of souls for a venom lord setup
and the fact that for anything but the urdar, you're at serious risk of some cursed mob just deleting your demon instantly, after all that setup, even when its phys immune? eh

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 19 2026 12:13pm

So after clearing a cursed TZ game in P7 and killing 59 heralds (meaning 55 were T5), I can report the following...

Build still slaps, no plans to change anything point or gear wise at this moment, but I will continue to mess around to see if there are any ways to advance it. Damage feels very similar even if amp is not proccing as much. Using sigil: death more than before. T5 herald minions seem to have more HP. Lancers are a bit squishy, but I never died, nor did my demon (though a pack of succubi in the Halls of Anguish almost got her).