Yet another moderately important tidbit has been sent in by a reader

It seems that lightning enchanted will trigger off blood boil, contrary to initial testing, but only under some conditions. Its not clear what makes it work / not work. If you take a lightning enchanted demon into blood moor and boil away, nothing will happen. But let your demon get hit a few times by some melee mobs and then try it, and it kicks in and every cast of blood boil will release charged bolts. Or maybe it won't. And I had an urdar sitting afk at a waypoint after not being able to release bolts, waited 10 seconds while it sat immobile, and then cast it again and it released bolts

This is a major point in favor of using a lightning enchanted unique if you could find it. That's a really rare combo, you'd want cursed + aura enchanted (right aura) + lightning enchanted, all at the same time, and can't use TZ affixes with it
Of course, these bolts deal negligible damage (~65-99 best case scenario) but they DO apply the curse aoe on each hit, so even a lightning enchanted + conviction + cursed unique could proc amp damage even more than a holy fire + cursed does, since its shooting the bolts immediately and not on a 2 second cycle.


I'd still like to test other affixes in depth, see if there's any benefit at all to teleportation, multiple shot on anything but succubi/archers, poison enchanted on achmel. Stone skin is obviously a fairly useful mod since it means a physical immune demon is going to survive the few scenarios where other demons could actually die. I'd also like to test if the %dr from engorge+blood oath can put a monster to become immune

and more testing results

melee mobs either don't teleport or do so very infrequently. ranged mobs teleport, pretty rarely, to basically no effect just random repositioning, even at less than 30% hp I couldn't get a melee mob to teleport once
all dark rangers appear to get glitched and perform an attack animation with no shots fired, regardless of multiple shots or affixes, all the combos I tried would get glitched at points
poison enchanted REALLY appears to be using an identical attack to rabies: invisible missiles fired in random directly at very short range nonstop, passively. Using an urdar trapped and unable to move off me while teleporting, it would only poison enemies a short distance away. They carried amp, and had a lengthy poison duration but negligible dps
all the elemental enchanted carry their added minor elemental damage as advertised (cold enchanted slows targets, very minor upside)
the fix to multiple shots + lightning enchanted does apply and nerfs bound demons same as it has enemies, no triple shot applies
a 40% base DR flesh hunter with stone skin to be 90% dr, and supposedly gets 11% dr from blood oath / 5% engorge, did not display as immune to physical when selected. However, I had her tank physical damage from about 30 p8 enemies while poisoned and she never lost a single pixel on the HP bar, making me quite sure she's actually immune to physical
succubi showed no benefit from %ed stacking on might/pride merc, so they are indeed just getting the flat +damage added to their projectiles with no scaling
possessed champions retain their immunity to curses, for what its worth. I sure think its also getting that massive HP bonus since mine is standing in the middle of 10 frenzytaurs + 10 doom knights as I write this and still at 95% hp


I should still test some stuff like normal vs minions vs unique HP after binding, using that scenario with normal urdars

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 19 2026 02:43pm

I noticed this too, lightning enchants are GG, but it is so hit or miss, you are on to something here...

Did you find that the added movement speed on the goatmen had them amping the screen more quickly compared to the extra attacks the dark lancers have?

well its a bit of a difference but lancers are already so fast its hard to notice a difference, they both might as well be teleporting
goatmen variants have different speeds, the fastest is frozen tundra with walk 12 / run 12 which might be the fastest unit in the whole game, but others scale up 5-11 speed (act 5 is 10-11, late act 1 is 8, stony field is just 5)
dark lancers in act 5 all have the same walk 8 / run 12, and I think they only run around in their AI so they use the full speed

but the d2 efrw formula should mean that goats are getting 50% more bonus from %frw effects. I'm not sure if extra fast or the champion bonus speeds modify the base speed or use the %efrw formula
also I believe the code for how extra fast works means you actually get less % frw depending on monster speed, it gives 10-100% using the formula max(min(2048/monstats.speed-128,10),100) so it becomes just +42% for goatmen, but +100% for dark lancers
so unless they've changed that code since 2007, there's actually a bit of tradeoff where the goatmen get 50% more bonus from %frw, but get less %frw from extra fast (but should be the same from the demonic mastery / etc)
with +38% on mastery and +42% or +100% on extra fast it should be goatmen with {12+12*(0.38+0.42)} = 21.6 velocity, and dark lancers with {12+8*(0.38+1)} = 23.04 velocity

maybe you could try them side by side but I think the lancers will actually move faster, and you could add vigor aura (+36%) and fanatic champions which use the same formula as extra fast (+42% for goatmen again, +100% for dark lancer)
stack them all and its 30.96 for goat, 33.92 for lancer

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 20 2026 07:12am

I'm loving the switch from Hephaesto to the lancer, it feels like she's always engaged with whatever's on screen. The amp spread feels quite a bit faster (i'm not sure how much removing pride from the merc is contributing to this, though).

I’ve tried using the spear woman from ancients way and the damage is awesome but even a unique tz one is dying in p1 hell when it gets surrounded by dangerous mobs and I’m not playing close attention to it’s hp. If you have a spear woman do you just have to constantly manage its hp with engorge? With Hephasto and lister I never have to worry about it and I’ve never seen their health go below full ever. My demon skills are around lvl 36 btw

Mine also died very quickly with a pack of spike-throwing hedgehogs with fanaticism in Eldritch... So I'm starting to think that unless it's from Matron Den or a p8 game, it's not worth it if you usually play alone...

My previous urdar was very tanky.

This post was edited by Thoroku92 on Mar 21 2026 07:33am

Did you bind her in a P8 high TZ game?
I can see spearwoman HP being pretty dubious if you're skimping any of the factors like max blood oath, high +skills, p8 bind, tz game.
The A5 guest lancers have only 97.5% hp / 33% dr / 1.44% regen/s. A2-4 urdars have 200% hp / 55% dr / 2.88% regen/s, while A5 guest urdars have 230% hp / 75% dr / 1.83% regen/s

Getting a stone skin unique lancer the hard way would probably really help her survivability but make it very hard to get the aura/curse combo you want.

I got it in p1 tz, it's very difficult to role a p8 game with cursed to bind a normal spearwoman...

This post was edited by Thoroku92 on Mar 21 2026 07:56am