Bare in mind that unless blizzard decides to actually gut blood boil, this means it is probably one of the strongest builds in the game.
It takes a serious nerf from bind demon not being as reliable with curse, and especially losing curse against bosses- its still pretty high % ctc against packs but not nearly as frequent.
And as swirl mentioned sigil lethargy got inexplicable nerfed in ways that weren't even listed, I think we need to test if they somehow removed the slow and kept the amp, or removed both and it does literally nothing, because it clearly doesn't slow
But sigil was barely worth using anyway
Still a lot of nerfs to bind demon and we should see what the actual health on the demon is now too, since before demons were simply immortal even against p8 tz96 t5 heralds. Now you might need a stone skin physical immune demon

-Phys resist was indeed removed, breaks Immunities on live and does not on PTR. Just double checked.

I did some quick and dirty on minion health here but again, I'm running on some nasty insomnia for the week so don't trust me:
https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=109095311&f=148&p=688448341

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=109095311&f=148&p=688450452

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=109095311&f=148&p=688450806

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=109095311&f=148&p=688452147

We're just uh going to not mention my Blood Boil comments. Didn't happen. Nope.

This post was edited by Swirl on Apr 15 2026 01:50pm

If the range is the same as live version then would the build be better off ditching Bind Demon all together for 3x Tainted or 2x +1x consumed Tainted? It would realistically solve both the P8 boss kill and squishy Bound Demon issue simultaneously.

New build would be:
20 Demonic Mastery
20 Blood Oath
20 Blood Boil
20 Engorge
20 Summon Tainted
1 Hex: Siphon

Edit: This is because BB synergy now works for Tainted dmg

This post was edited by cam_sally on Apr 15 2026 01:51pm

well I think even at 5% ctc the power for mobs of holy freeze + cursed is too powerful to pass up on a bound demon. I played a bit of PTR on the old build and it works nearly as good as it did before, maybe a bit nerfed on amp casts
Its definitely a significant loss of boss killing power since they won't get amp or sigil, so just fire DPS. And using max tainted would indeed deal way more single target dps now, but at the cost of being pretty awful in aoe

this of course assumes that they actually buffed tainted at all, I'd like to see that tested because for all we know it was another fake patchnote

Decent Tainteds are hitting for 34k~ on tooltip and its real in game. Their shot tracking is lousy though, probably reduced to boss killers and Defilers are the go to for AoE still.


I wouldn't be surprised to see Holy Frost+Amp settling in as the standard.

This post was edited by Swirl on Apr 15 2026 02:23pm

Also as long as I was testing I compared it to nova using the same method
Unless I'm mistaken, blood boil (at 20 radius listed) was hitting from just 1 tile further than nova. I should try again with 20.6 boil to double check it since that could be 2 tiles. But it appeared to either be identical range to nova, or 1 extra tile I believe from the slight offset when I overlaid the two images (urdar on one, sorc on the other, making it hard to tell). This is consistent with my assumption about how blood boil was programmed. Nova just creates a bunch of projectiles that travel ~8 yards and perform a collision test. Nova spawns size 1 missiles with 24 velocity and 13 range and -1000 acceleration. I'm not sure how that deceleration works out but basin wiki says the overall range is ~8 yards rather than the 12.5 yards they'd get with no deceleration. So they only occupy 1 tile, but they can collide with the 5 collision tiles of a size 2 enemy, and thus extend their effective range by ~1 tile. Even on a flat axis, these missiles shouldn't hit on the concave side of the X because the missiles are fired in all directions and the ones just above/below the horizontal axis will hit the extruding collision tiles. Meanwhile I believe blood boil is just iterating over actors and running a distance function, because that's how a programmer not using 1999 caveman tools would do it. Which means its got no extra distance from collision tiles.


also another good test case would be to try out level 99 blood boil to see if it hits the whole screen or not

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 15 2026 02:26pm

It may be too early to tell. Balrogs actually apply amp pretty well too since their flame attack applies damage for several ticks, each one having a chance to cast.

Edit: I guess why not both, Balrog with cursed/holy freeze.

This post was edited by khoaker on Apr 15 2026 02:35pm

True, I'm curious how it actually plays.

DM into a pack and maybe multishot flame since afaik they always use it for their first strike would be more reliable than waiting on tick procs from Holy Frost. Don't know how much the occasional flame attack would hurt their damage since it doesn't get boosted iirc.

Right, why not both. I need sleep.


Just popped a Multishot Cursed Ventar, Amp proc seems very reliable on his flame attack even without Holy Frost on top of it. 4/5 maybe?

This post was edited by Swirl on Apr 15 2026 02:49pm

Yeah a balrog with cursed + lightning enchanted + multiple shots could be ideal now
I am testing one out and you're definitely getting way faster amp procs, nearly the instant amp of before, but its going to forfeit a lot of physical DPS
Its still not going to amp bosses as fast, but in my testing it was fairly reliable vs bosses after a few seconds, whereas holy frost not hitting at all + 5% on attacks that get blocked half the time is absurdly bad
lower regen than an urdar but at least all venom lords are poison immune after blood oath, so it doesn't get regen disabled in pvm

That means that if you optimize blood boil for the new patch, you're mostly regaining all your lost power from amp damage but you mostly lose the physical DPS on a bound demon, yet you're still forced into maxing mastery+bind to accomplish it

/e also I put him up against some tier 1-2 herald bone archer packs with concentration and they did some reasonable damage to the venom lord with 66% dr. He was losing HP and maybe would tank 10-20 seconds of full dps from the whole pack if I let him afk, he would definitely die if I didn't teleport around / spam engorge. Previous demons would barely register it

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 15 2026 02:47pm

That's a good point on the stone skin phys immune demons. They'll be a premium mods to have. Maybe stone skin and magic resistance combined to have higher elemental res on top of the physical res. Magic res currently is +40% Resistance to Fire, Cold, and Lightning. So that plus the resistance from blood oath should be good. Spectral hit grants half that resistance bonus of magic res and is automatically applied with a certain amount of bind demon points.

Binding demons in lower player count games is going to be a huge pain now though and much higher chance of current demon killing it before bind works.

This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Apr 15 2026 02:57pm