Yes please!
We already have Energy Shield and Experience Shrine

Fortitude and Obsessions >

Am I the only one who felt kind of baited by the video? He talks about how the Fortitude build is the unoptimized version like it is some sort of gotcha, but then doesn't provide any of the data for the optimized Fortitude build. I feel like he left us hanging.

none of them are optiomized, and all he did in his "testing" is kill 4 monsters

Arioc's needle is gg in the sense that you get a proper mercenary who doesn't die like a fly all the time. You give him a gg insight instead of that stick called pride. +4 skills allows you to easily get level 20 demonic mastery with maxed blood oath. You can have 2 x defilers + bondage demon. Defilers are the real game changers for the clear speed. Obsession or ondal's offer more fcr but they don't solve the deadly strike problem. With arioc's, you can completely drop highlords.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Mar 24 2026 04:40pm

There are some logical fallicies in what you just said:
1) you said if you wear ariocs, you can wear insight on ur merc. This isn't really that you "get" to wear it, it's you sacrifice lvl 20 conc because you have to make him wear it. yes, he will do more damage and may be able to live longer, but when u self weild insight, you can still wear an insight (or like eth reapers, or anything else u want that does a ton of damage). just because you wear an insight doesn't mean ur merc HAS to wear pride. he just gets to wear pride-- you could even wear a eth tomb reaver with 3 AMN runes if u want to leech the shit it of it for 35% LL from the weapon alone. So yeah, wearing pride isn't a constraint of self weild insight.
2)only hard points in blood oath matters, so the +4 isn't that helpful for that. it would allow u to get lvl 20 demonic mastery easier, but all that garbage is pretty unnecessary
3) with insight and 1 pt wonder in the passive, u get about 75% crit without any other crit item, meaning u get to also drop highlords

Talking about logical fallacies, you contructed arguments and understood them wrongly by yourself. I assume, there is no ill meaning:
1. Wearing insight on yourself doesn't give you any + skills. Each +skill is around 300-400 more average damage on an ES warlock. Eth arioc's or even the non eth one does a lot more damage than insight from those +4 and 50% deadly strike alone. Insight + not pride loses out big time.
2. I said maxed blood oath. Why do you assume everyone is a noob like yourself? So you max blood oath with hard points. Where you get those points? From es synergy, demon mastery and hex. With arioc and +2 amu, you can max blood oath and still have lvl 20 demonic mastery for 2x defilers + bondage demon. Defilers are the real deal for clear speed.
3. You get the same with arioc and levitation mastery. The damage on insight without +skills is low, so you need highlords to achieve 91% CS with one defiler instead of 2.

The advatnages insight has got, it is cheap and 125fcr is easily achievable. You do that at the cost of a very weak mercenary.

P.S.: both Ondal and Obsession + insight merc beat the insight + pride merc in real clear speed and quality of life as well.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Mar 24 2026 05:20pm

I’m going to assume this is less “bad faith” and more “bad math" based on your tenuous grasp of it, so let me walk you through it in terms that don’t require guesswork.

1) No, each level of +ES does not add 300-400 avg damage--the total +4 going from level 35-39 for example adds a total of 600 avg. And for that 600, no, that does not mean you’re adding 600 raw avg weapon damage. That added damage does not get multiplied by the ~425% ED from the skill. So when you tack +4 skills onto an already 3191–4842 range, the increase is marginal—not remotely comparable to turning a 171–587 base into 771–1187 (as you clearly think it does).

If that distinction isn’t obvious, here’s the simplified version: divide that ~600 avg by ~5 (your ED multiplier). Congratulations, you’re looking at roughly +120 avg weapon dmg. That’s it. Not “an entire extra weapon,” not anything close to what you’re implying—just a modest bump, instead of the grief and a half of dmg you think +4 simply does. This is easily verifiable in d2planner, assuming you’re willing to check your assumptions instead of repeating more jsp fallicies.

2) If you think Defilers are “necessary” for clear speed, it probably means your weapon sucks

3) You’re also mixing up Critical Strike and Deadly Strike, which is where things really go off the rails. These are separate, non-additive (“either-or”) probabilities.
Insight’s 46% CS stacks additively with mastery: 46% + 30% = 76% CS.
Arioc’s 50% DS does not stack the same way with CS. The actual combined chance is:
50% + (0.5 × 30%) = 65%.

So instead of your assumed “stack everything and win” model, you actually get diminishing returns. The presence of one reduces the marginal benefit of the other—something you’d notice if you ran the numbers instead of hand-waving them.

Overall, I get what you were trying to argue—it just doesn’t survive even a basic pass through the math.

This post was edited by LeetThrust on Mar 24 2026 05:39pm

I had one like this... I wonder where it went. I may have sold it :/
Time to get one back! xD.

defiliers are not necessary but they are a key ingredient to all your min/maxing + qol arguments that you keep leaving out for some reason
and you can get 2x of them for practically free on poverty tier gear
they turn your 120k single target dps into 80k aoe dps while also minion stacking so you dont need to run any res gear to deal with souls or dolls

i use 2x defiler to avoid accidentallay consuming my precious demon , which happens alot when your demon is extra fast and they sometimes just zoom into your mouse pointer rofl

This post was edited by Onyxdian on Mar 24 2026 08:48pm