this right here is the golden boy alt build. I can feel it in my bones. even better with a LE + cursed + conc/fana spearbae. Just ridiculous numbers that when paired with the bone break trick should melt any herald in a quick chop suey stir fry

where you guys finding a le+ cursed spearwoman? any specific spot or just luck try until get an unique that have both?

after testing the damage on ubers im more inclining to believe that is better the holy freeze becouse the fana is not needed to kill, conc you get from pride unless if it has LE makes no need for HF

wsk 1, ancient's way, frigid, and frozen river. gotta find an elite and yea its a bit of work to find the right affixes. I am just running HF + cursed elite rn, but before I died like a dumbass she was fana + le + cursed and the amp coverage was more or less equal to the hf coverage. real question is whether the hf slowdown is worth the damage loss, and vice versa.

I feel like either can work and in the case of being unable to find said legendary spearbae, a hf cursed one works fine really. The best of all was conc with the LE and curse though, I could just tele at 125 fcr with might merc and conc lister and he would 1 shot basically every single enemy he took a bite out of, even heavy chonksters in p8 96tzs in wsk and throne even. Cast death mark on a herald pack, use a blood boil to release bolts and proc amp immediately, lots of fun here.

This post was edited by Gilgameshed on Jun 3 2026 04:27pm

hmm for hc the hf may be a better deal since the fana damage may be not needed i usually just get normal spearwoman i dont hunt elite, is it better stats wise? or just more afix?

This post was edited by m4rin1 on Jun 3 2026 04:28pm

goom says a normal one is fine, I felt the normal one I had as a temp was too fragile personally, even with max bind and +10 demon mastery (but only 1 blood oath). hf is def safer. conc is a lot more damage than fana for demons it seems. Over 2x as much vs fana, which I guess has a 50% penalty when applied to mons.

elite is better stats and more affixes, but elite spearbae aren't very common and are difficult to bind without killing them/getting smoked yourself.

This post was edited by Gilgameshed on Jun 3 2026 04:30pm

yea conc way better but i get conc from second hand pride soo thats covered

ubers died with max bind demon without conc only fana and infinity from merc soo for sure conc from pride and hf will be enought

never cheked stats from elite vs normal if have more life or dmg..

But again this seems incredibly niche for most players. Ubering is easy enough with a dirt cheap smiter with life tap, and its something you can't even do unless you're setting up a farm, buying keys/statues and turning them into torches/jewels.
For normal pvm uses, it wouldn't really matter how they fare against ubers.

We still have other testing to do, making sure mechanics actually work the way they're listed. Like making sure blood oath applies its % life according to soft points not base points. I do see that with 3 blood oath its clearly fire immune vs trav hydras, lancers have 25% resist, and its immune with no tainted summoned so its the full amount
And I tested out parking a demon in the middle of chaos P8 surrounded by doom knights, with 1 point blood oath vs 20 and same +skills, it was a fairly proportionate survival, you can see the HP dropping a bit on the tankier one, and dropping even faster on the other, lost about half her HP in 10 seconds of pound town. Which doesn't feel quite as immortal. Not that your demon should be tanking that much dps in normal play, but against heralds it can matter

is blood oath still working with no demon?

yea but we shuld consider that in normal pvm you have engorge for those situation, and probably p8t5 herdalds do more damage then ubers

We could test it again but it seems like a pretty irrelevant test since warlock always has demons up, probably the reason blizzard never bothered to consider that case in the first place lmao
I only noticed it when I was testing how blood oath % redirection works in patch 3.1 months ago and had trouble with the baseline control case because monsters kept hitting me for too little damage and showed no difference with demon summoned, until I realized blood oath was just nullifying that damage with no demon



a lot of p8t5 heralds even from decent packs still deal less dps than the amp damage fanat doom knight p8 tz lord de seis gang bang I was testing against here, and 20 seconds of tanking de seis isn't immortality but its a pretty huge grace time for you to pop engorge when your demon is tanking what's likely 10,000+ DPS
I do think both uber ancients and heralds with conc+might+cursed on melee mobs have the potential to kill a bound demon if you're inattentive, but it clearly tanks long enough for you to move it out of the way and kite packs safely.
Its very noticeable with packs with stun attacks like wendigos, urdars, lister, etc that they can stun and disable your tainted/demon, and you don't just want to prevent damage but actually increase your DPS dramatically by constantly teleporting your demon back and in again with teleport+deathmark so its hitting and retreating.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 3 2026 05:17pm