So essentially tainted would be like your golast skill in the 90s after everything else is maxed. Now that lethargy has been turned into trash tier it's not like there's a whole lot worth using the final points on. With enough bonus skills you should have a good tainted minion anyway. I'd rather not handicap the bloodboil or demon part of the build. An urdar with fanatacism/curse and might aura is going to slap bosses around. Plus you can continue casting bloodboil on bosses with an urdar due to the high regeneration rate. If you pick a low hp regen demon bosses become that much more difficult (due to lack of corpses). I'm still in the process of shopping for another urdar in river of flame they're so good on bloodboil builds it's hilarious. Now that I think about the amp nerf I wonder if lightning enchanted will allow it to proc enough to be another option aside from holyfreeze.

This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Apr 17 2026 06:00pm

Baseball accusations with zero evidents
Reddit swears by this guy i doubt he would do that

Well hard on skill points. 60 for boil engorge oath for max damage. 20 demonic mastery 15 bind demon to be able to have 3x demons and bind uniques. You could get away with 1 bind demon if you only used the TZ cursed method, you'll never get stone skin / lightning enchanted / multiple shots. But even a basic level 1 venom lord could hit max hp and have decent amp spread with holy freeze + inferno, his damage would be gimped anyway

But then you don't have the demon slots. 1 defiler is just worth more than 1 tainted, the impact is so huge. 2nd defiler is often redundant though. But then you have a bound demon and consume. So what do you trade? You could skip bind demon. 20 tainted, 2x tainted and 1 defiler.

So the upsides are 2x heavy dps tainted and you never lose a hard to replace demon and can tank with demons freely and even do bosses like baal / ubers without any risk because you just resummon. And more single target dps, and summon 3rd demon vs single bosses. What you lose is +20% fire, 15% pierce, 32% life, 43% frw, amplify damage, some super high physical hits on demon when it connects, and its reliable melee tanking

I think there might be merit to the max tainted build. Losing some serious fire damage on blood boil if you don't consume, but you COULD consume for mob clearing and summon 3x tainted for bosses. And skip bound demon entirely. No amp, it would hurt. I doubt a self wield infinity + dreadfang merc would outperform mang songs + infinity merc though.

Current blood boil build has 8.1k fire / 4.8k phys, -100 amp, -37 sigil, -55 pierce, -85 conviction.
Say enemy has 33dr/33fr, it does 25.8k per hit. Against 50 dr / fire immune its 15.2k.
PTR you lose sigil dr. So against 33dr/33fr it does 24.2k. Against 50 dr / fire immune its 13.4k

Now say you also lose the consume bonus. fire drops from 8100 to 7200, pierce by 15, so 33 fr becomes -92 instead of -100, immunes become 38% instead of 23%. And lose the amp AND sigil.
So no consume PTR against 33dr/33fr it does 17.0k per hit. Against 50 dr / fire immune it does just 6.9k


Point being- if you skip amp merc, you lose a big chunk of damage and huge gimp vs immunes. If you skip consume, you lose a big chunk of damage vs everything. You lose 1/3 your dps to non immunes, 1/2 to immunes. Big sacrifices and even if you consume 1 tainted, you still lose that amp which matters a lot vs immunes.

2x tainted, bind, good merc, bloodboil spam all together, let see

people are bitchin very hard on blizz forums https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/c/general-discussion/6

it's gonna be interesting to see what will bubble into live

I think there's a good argument for a tainted + defiler setup (using 20 mastery 20 tainted) being better than bound demon + consumed tainted + defiler setup (using 20 mastery 20 bind)
At least with current PTR, where you can't have physical dps and 'casts amp on bosses' on a bound demon and sigil lethargy doesn't do anything and defilers are now stupid high damage and you need hard points for mastery/bind.

You're losing a pretty significant amount of blood boil dps as I laid out, and need to focus more on telestomping uniques to have more focused DPS on the elites while the trash mobs get cleared by the large aoe.
But there is a huge QOL factor in that you never have to worry about your monster HP and engorge is more of a dps steroid you don't really need to manage, whereas bound demons with low HP in current PTR are extremely vulnerable to heralds in particular, can die to diablo lightning hose, etc and are a huge pain in the ass to replace. With a tainted setup you can just summon and go. You'll hit the same fire aoe with a consume+defiler active and only have 1 tainted chipping in, but can go to full 3x tainted for bosses. So the real loss is in the amp damage missing, and that's often the difference of ~4.8k damage per blood boil. If you would deal 25k with amp you'll deal 20k without it.


With all that considered, I'd actually recommend the no bound demon at all build now, and using infinity + holy freeze merc.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 17 2026 11:51pm

but isnt BB radius nerfed to 4 yards on PTR now?

I was told BB builds are dead from this

Blizzard's incompetence at balance is only outdone by their incompetence at coding. They only changed the tooltip radius to 4 yards. Actual radius is still 10+

How have we gone over it of the synergy is broken on live and tainted cap out at 6k? Not to mention bloodboil only procs once even with three demons. You can't hit the same target three times.

As early as the first few days of RotW we tested the mechanics and ran the BiS gear on SP to test all these skills, pointing out that tainted displayed 30-36k but only dealt an apparent 5-6k, and something had to be nerfing their damage. But we could easily tell how they'd perform if they actually dealt 6x as listed, because that would be extremely high damage but still limited by the tiny aoe and AI delay between attacks. Same as when we figured out how blood boil works, and defiler soulbind works, both using a nextdelay to prevent units from being hit by the simultaneous aoe damage more than once

Even back in the original thread I think we had a full list setup for how tainted would be broken in PvP way more than PvM but the list only hit ~15k per volley in reality when the listed tooltip was 108k per volley

The real truth is even scarier. The people enacting the ptr changes do not play the game at all and are merely playing it by ear. At least with devs in a small indie they thoroughly play the game and test most of the changes themselves. Modern blizz prob has someone who hates the game working on it and they asked chat gpt to come up with changes based on some skills people complained about. It's probably one of the only ways most changes make sense.

This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Apr 18 2026 09:46am