That was from patch 3.1, where indeed blood oath did not work with bind demon (the resists did, the % hp didn't)
it was changed in patch 3.2 on the PTR and left out of the patch notes



Assuming 60% EIAS from engorge+mastery, lister has 22 fpa normal attack, 23 fpa smite, while urdars have 24 fpa normal attack and smite, though their two animations have slightly different action frames (lister is 12/7 and 13/7, urdar is 15/8 and 15/6)
its a pretty negligible difference

doesn't seem so when teleporting at 125 fcr. Lister was able to hit and 1 shot enemies when I held tele down, Urdars were not fast enough to do so.

well you got me interested enough to test it, but results are a bit mixed
Ya know I might be thinking back to our threads about summon grizzly attack speed to make me figure out what's going on here, and maybe there's some potential to exploit

In my testing, lister and an urdar had very similar DPS and killed a barricaded tower in almost exact same time, but the lister was attacking significantly faster, but sometimes paused for an entire attack cycle, while the urdar did nothing but attack nonstop
It was clearly much faster attacking for lister, he did about 20 attacks in the span an urdar did 18, but that includes 4 times he paused and sat afk for a cycle. Which would be about 24 attacks if he had done them all, about 33% faster
Its pretty obvious when you fight minions in throne that their AI does just randomly sit still without attacking you at random, and lister inherits that, so yeah his unreliability hampers his usefulness. But he clearly attacked faster than should be possible with a 15 frame AI delay- 24 attacks+pauses in ~17 seconds.

Now what I remember from the shaman threads is- the 15 frame AI delay only actually applied after a unit used an ability. The grizzly would appear to have a series of fast attacks, then knockback the enemy and pause for a moment. And the number of fast attacks were random. This was because it had a 50% chance to use bearsmite, and the 15 frame ai delay only applied after bearsmite. But even from that, its unclear why lister is pausing so long compared to the urdar attack speed. The urdar matches the expected aspd, about 18 attacks in ~17 seconds at 24 fpa. But if lister was getting away with attacks without AI delay and some with it, he'd just be attacking faster overall, rather it appears his random pauses are baked into his AI, probably some kind of RNG roll for resting for a cycle. That, or his AI is giving him a super long extra AI delay more than 15 frames every time he randomly uses smite, which is also a possibility to explain it, and would make sense if smite was only ~25% chance on him.
Afaik nobody has ever deconstructed the AI routines in Diablo II and actually explained how they work. We can figure it has a list of actions with probabilities, sums them and rolls a random number, because someone bothered to explain merc AI and that's how it works- but each function, we don't know
That said, lister DID regenerate once I brought him to a new game, so yeah it must be pulling from his base stats and not the superunique disabling it, though that's still half the regen of an urdar

Now what might make this more interesting, is if we test demons to see if any can just use nothing but normal attacks with no AI delay between them, because that could attack much faster than either and probably faster than a spearwoman, who presumably needs that 15 frame delay after each usage of jab or power strike, but not normal attack

I've heard that a unique lancer is less D. P. S than a trash mob lancer because it will go through its unique affix stuff between attacks, slowing it down something like that.

or perhaps it was the opposite way around, the 15 frame ai delay doesn't kick in except on normal attacks not abilities, and for some reason urdar smite isn't counted as an ability, but lister is? I don't know
Tested a flayer- its AI is very combat avoidant and runs away even after deathmark, but when it does attack the same target twice, it clearly has a delay between attacks (12 fpd / 256 speed, so super fast attack animation, would have been one of the fastest possible)
similar for the more aggressive ai of vile mothers, their vile children and a3 birds, they clearly have that same pause between attacks with no attack abilities


The real problem we have here is I don't think anyone actually knows how the AI for enemies works in d2

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 22 2026 01:34pm

I was going to say something stiff, like it doesn't matter. The lancer is best DPS, bar, none

That would be a disrespect to theory crafters, of which I am one.

But it is true, the lancer is the highest DPS

But now I'm wondering if a unique is as much DPS as a regular white one?

If it's more and that's something to do is go find one. Because I'm beyond bored.

Well reading around the wiki's old stuff like the raise skeletal mage thread, it says the 15 frame AI delay applies to attacks including attack skills, differentiating them from casting skills. So jab, monsmite, coldstrike, etc should all have the 15 frame delay, and so do skeletal mage bolts even though they look like spells, because they're missiles being fired as a ranged attack rather than cast as a spell;
>15 frame AI delay in all difficulty levels lengthens the interval between consecutive attacks (missiles are fired rather than cast).

Still, lister can attack faster than his frame data should allow with a 15 frame delay between normal attacks, while the other monsters all apparently work as predicted. So its probably something funky with the minion AI itself, which also carries that random pausing that breaks him back down to the level of an urdar in practice



I'm still interested to see if there's something we haven't considered yet
Like if its a property of superuniques to have a lower AI timer

So the next thing I need to test is the witch doctor endugu, binding the flayer that he becomes after his first death.
/e nope same ai delay on his attacks, so its the minion AI
/e2 well he transforms back into totem pole shaman version when you join a new game. At least offline. I noticed some differences in online vs offline play testing him before

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 22 2026 01:49pm

The "Skill Cooldown" Hidden AI PenaltyIn Diablo II: Resurrected (especially within the Reign of the Warlock modded setups), all Lancers share a standard 15-frame delay between deciding actions. However:Normal Lancers cycle through their kit cleanly, executing Jab (which hits 3 times in a row) a massive percentage of the time. This applies flat Bind Demon scaling on every single poke.Unique Lancers are weighed down by extra Boss AI logic. They dynamically prioritize their special unique modifiers, regular attacks, or Power Strike over Jab. Power Strike only hits once and carries a high animation frame count, leaving them locked into a slower attack loop.

If uniques for some reason use different AI then yeah it could make a huge difference. It isn't something easy to test, you'd need to record like a full minute of each of them attacking a physical immune target and count how many jabs they use
also tested a few other monsters with same results of ai delay on every strike, like battlemaid serena (also gets locked into block animations apparently)
Once upon a time blizzard posted this about their changes to ladder:
>Ladder Games offer a more challenging type of gameplay than players will find in Normal Games. Monster AI speeds have been increased. Reaction times increased for Ladder Nightmare and Hell games. Basically every monster acts like a super unique
I haven't seen anyone in the 20 years since explain what that means, or how AI changes between normal mobs, uniques & super uniques.
It can't be the AI delay being different on super uniques or I wouldn't see identical results across 'every super but lister'. Yet lister did indeed attack faster than should be possible with max attack speed, if you discount the times he randomly paused.

Lancer is still clearly faster overall and higher DPS, so yes unless we can identify something to exploit here, this is all pretty pointless because:

• Even trash mob 1 point blood oath lancer is already so tanky you can level all the way to 99 without it dying a single time even while fighting P8 TZ96 heralds nonstop
  
• Lancer is still the highest DPS mob as far as we know
  
• DPS of lancer outweighs the extra abilities/amp of other mobs like venom lords, sirens, etc with much lower dps

The one good takeaway we might have is if you're right about unique lancers having worse AI. In which case they wouldn't be just vastly harder to find than a regular TZ cursed lancer, but worse as well
The only real benefits the unique has is 2x the base HP (irrelevant if it can't die) and potential for extra affixes- stone skin (same issue, redundant, but hey at least you could leave it afk tanking in terrorized cows as a fun joke) or lightning enchanted (actually useful for spreading some amp on boil, but does nothing during passive play, and is pretty marginal even when you use it)

i saw this and was wondering, does lister have huge regen when he pauses?

"Lister does not appear to have normal built-in monster regeneration according to the monster data tables, but there are known situations/bugs where he can regenerate life very aggressively, leading many players to think he naturally regens."

cause if he does, i got some ideas

This post was edited by Evilweanie on Jun 22 2026 02:07pm