Hmm well one thing is the extra damage from demons is fully independent but damage on apocalypse has the opportunity cost of missing a blood boil, so its pretty exclusive to such a boss scenario. It begs the question of why you feel the need to kill p8 baal in solo games rather than p1 baal or p8 teams. And even them, just doing a tp trip to malah and back might be faster. The -resists on sunder maths out worse for a mang song build that already has +45/-55 sure, and maybe if your setup has less -res from using obsession it makes sense to recoup it on sunder. Overall its a pretty marginal difference whether sunder is plus or minus

But that damage on the demon isnt minor enough to write off. It can be about 20000 physical every 23 frames on an urdar, plus 25% crushing blow. Its gimped a bit by bosses with 50% block but even after dr and block its around 20k dps disregarding cb. Does 20k dps kill a 2.2 million hp boss quickly? Nope. But how does the marginal damage stack up next to skipping blood boil for flame wave/apocalypse. Its 20k dps with no opportunity cost.

But again in the rare times I've felt like killing p8 baal or ubers I'd just kiss malah once or twice and its easy, and there's overkill damage for p8 diablo or p1 baal and plenty of corpses for heralds. The answer for killing those problematic millions of hp bosses is to ask yourself why you're fighting them in the first place.

And bear in mind, you can always pump up a demon with swap gear. If you're going to spend half an hour in a TZ game or do other lengthy runs, it can make sense to set it up in a prior game by swapping on a +3 circlet, +3 ammy, 2x bk ring, 2 extra skillers, a 4+ tome like a splendor in a +3 bind base. Thats what I use on ladder. Then that bound demon can get an extra 30% or more overall dps for just a few clicks.

Is there any footage at all with p8?
How does it compare with es with lvl 20 sigil death and 2x defiler link? This feels like good enough aoe tbh

you sir have too much time on your hands but gg

Second half of the video on page 1 is a p8 tz96 in frozen river

I definitely wouldn't choose Baal in a p8 game, that's true. But I think my point is that I wouldn't be doing blood boils there because of the damage to the demon, so having another skill capable of taking him down means not having to skip content. I use blood boil 90% of the time, but if I drop into a room that is legit full of mobs I will first drop the apoc, then boil. Often the apoc will get guys like the unravelers in tombs that I would have to individually travel to, while the blood boils clean up the 90% of mobs within the radius.

Right now I'm at +6/-30 from gear without the consume, +26/-45 with consume (not accounting for conviction). It feels a lot better than when the rolls on the gear/jewels I was using had less -res.

The only time I need the demon for damage is when fighting a boss such as Baal or a higher herald, or in a pack of high HP/defense mobs that have natural immunity to fire. I am legitimately curious if a pumped up demon/demonic mastery guy will actually make a difference there, because I was skeptical when planning my build out.

That being said, I'm inspired now to redo some things, and go for a gorebelly with fanat/extra fast/cursed, and try infinity on my merc. I'll report my findings!

Just saw that, thanks. Does look more consistent aoe than es variants, at least for non immunes. I'd like to see a p8 baal wave clear tho.

I saw your note about nextdelay for defiler link. How sure are you that the nextdelay is happening on the defiler link rather than blood boil? From subjective experience, it works quite well on es builds to extend the aoe, which would make no sense if nextdelay causes it to take dmg from only one shard per es volley.

I think ES rocks crap and there's no avoiding that. I think blood boil works faster on larger density of mobs however. I will figure out how to record my next p8 tombs and show my completely non optimized way of doing it to give people an idea. It's a lot more clicking/doing things than ES, which isn't my favorite, but I think for targeting elites/clearing density it's pretty awesome.

Doing a quick test on the hybrid builds I see with a similar setup I'd get around just 12k apocalypse / 4.4k flame wave after +% including tainted, when they're not fully synergized. I'm not sure what your skill setup is, but you have to lose synergies on one of the two and can't use skillers of both, and a 12k apocalypse or flame wave hitting 3 times still deals less damage per cast than blood boil does. By contrast, if I swap to a goatman consume and have 20 mirrored blades rest echoing strike, I get a char screen of 13-20k echoing strike

I got some PMs from someone discussing the build who swore by the echoing strike hybrid and it does kill bosses, at least p8 baal+, far more easily than pure blood boil does.
I've tested it and the DPS of spamming that not-fully-synergized echoing strikes seems about on par with blood boil without any major gear drops, which is what you'd expect since the full blood boil has much higher overkill dps.
So it won't instakill baal or ubers but it does let you simply sit there spamming away without losing demon HP. And its just worse against everything but p8 baal pretty much, and lets you do ubers about the same.
of course you could always swap in some items like laying of hands / pride merc / highlords / etc and pump up that damage, I haven't gone that far

Losing the free demon DPS just to gain the ability to do comfortable p8 baal / ubers / uber ancients doesn't seem like a tradeoff most players would care to take, but its definitely an option



Its a delay between each linked unit being able to take damage from soulbind, so yeah when damage occurs at staggered intervals like echoing strikes hitting multiple targets per cast a fraction of a second apart, it can trigger soulbind multiple times per cast
As a general rule, defilers can only multiply once the set of {cleave, mirrored blades, apocalypse, blood boil, demon melee hit, abyss} because they hit their whole AoE simultaneously, but can get multiple procs off {echoing strikes, flame wave, fire nova} because of their staggered hits.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 26 2026 07:32am

I guess my question is, do you visibly notice the killability being higher with the max bind demon/demon mastery, like on p8 heralds? I feel like boil wipes so much out that it's not necessary because it doesn't scale with gear or anything.