I was burning through too many shards, I think waiting until the act 5 areas are terrorized naturally and going to every p8 game would be the only sane way but you only get a 40% chance to spawn lancers per game and maybe 1-2 lancer packs when they do, so its still unlikely to succeed in 30 minutes
I actually did give up and I'm back to a basic lancer and I'm a bit dubious on how she'll work with 1 point blood oath, she's losing about 1/3 of her max hp compared to my older setup

I am going to max out eldritch and chaos, this is slow and boring AF!

I'm probably going for a 20 BO, 20 Bind, 1 Engorge, Fire Sunder build

Probably getting TZ Lister, he is a good mix of damage and tankiness.
Might also be a Fana Lister, I dont like Cursed + HFreeze as much after the 5% AD nerf (I know it still procs, but much less consistently). And Fana IAS helps Tainteds too
Although HFeeze might help merc stay alive more, hmm...

I finally put together the obsession 125 fcr setup, albeit with coven + maras not shako + 2/20 ammy so far, and even using just 1 point blood oath AND a tz cursed spearwoman mob with 1/2 the hp, I haven't had get low on hp a single time so far, let alone come close to dying. I mean, its the difference of 1.3 million vs 2 million vs 2.6 million, its still all in the millions.

I cannot stress how critical it is to use HF+amp to proc amp consistently both for the blood boil you should get with the max engorge build, but even just for the demon DPS. The difference any of the auras makes to your demon/merc/tainted is very small. Maybe 1.1x dps on a demon, 1.05x on tainted. The difference amp damage makes can be 2-3x. Against phys immunes with bone break it can be 40x more damage.
There are still plenty of fire immune mobs where even if your spearwoman will kill them on her own, she does it slower than if you spam blood boil because of the massive aoe. Packs of fire immunes who are outside of the one-shot range of 22% of tainted damage. And that blood boil is reliant on amp damage, and amp damage is reliant on holy freeze. 5% proc on melee attacks might as well not exist, but against clumped enemies there's barely any difference from pre-nerf and post-nerf demon, in 4-6 seconds you could have 95%+ chance to proc amp.

Lister is generally mediocre as a choice, he's more or less the same as an urdar except with no regen/cb. Urdars can easily hit the same HP cap, maybe not quite as much %AR but probably have close to 95% CTH anyway with conviction. But urdars are worse than spearwomen because the HP really isn't a bottleneck here

p8 tier5 herald packs with Conc + Fana (and sometimes curse) absolutely can kill the lancer demon, post patch
I've lost one pretty quick once and another time they even killed a Stoneskin lancer.
She is tanky, but far from immortal. Even a p8 TZ lancer

Listers smite also stuns/knockbacks and he is a lot better at taking/holding aggro too
But yeah its not required to use him

I'll probably settle on Curse + HFreeze after all, due to HFreeze also slowing mobs down, so its both offensive and defensive.
although

this is a lot slower than pre-nerf
Pre patch would have curse + HFreeze/shock/fire proc within ~0.5-1 second 99% of time. It was basically guaranteed to proc right away

but its true that Fana isnt all that appealing on this build:

AR% - dont need it, due to Conviction -def (even without Conv probably dont need it much)
IAS - all demons already get plenty of IAS, probably only a minor buff
physical damage% only boosts the bound demon and merc, and is halved for merc. Tainted fire dmg isnt boosted.

for a ES build fana can be ~competitive
But for summonlock seems meh
Curse + HFreeze it is then.

Only players and mercenaries get the double %ed on fanat, its halved for monsters even when they are the origin of the aura. Which matters for enemies in PvM not just your bound demons. The % ias should be the difference between 21 and 20 fpa, since it should be a 6 vs 5 frame animation + 15 delay frames. It has 10 framesperdirection at 256 speed, so the breakpoints are at 43% and 67% eias for 6/5 frames and you already get 60% eias on them.

If there are 20 monsters in a group, there's a ~70% chance to proc amp every 2 seconds between the 2 second pulses and demon attacks inbetween. And that means going from 70% -> 91% -> 97% -> 99% with each set of ticks. Even if it isn't as reliable as patch 3.1, its still very reliable and impactful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPGX741HnE0

this youtuber tested that - res gear doesn't work on tainted ?

Unless blizzard added specific exemptions to a skill like hydras and traps, +% skill damage and -% resists don't apply to minions. Sunder is different and applies to all minions when summoned with it.
It was just those two specific types of minions where blizzard arbitrarily decided to buff them and make it work.


Hydras always had this or else the +% of fire mastery wouldn't work with them. Traps just got it in a fairly 'recent' patch

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 11 2026 07:18pm

This is a long thread and I haven't been following...but how does this build do with budget gear and no Sunder? Also, how does it stack up with hex ES?