XD

Stripping my warlock nekkid, 20 hard points blood oath, letting a hell zombie attack me in P8
Have to do this test offline because I don't want to forfeit my urdar... yet

Displayed: 29% damage redirected
Previous patch: 43% damage redirected
Zombie deals A1 64-152 (108) and A2 76-164 (120) with 5% chance to crit (denoted *), and any attacks outside the supposed bounds of 64-164 with a (!). Should be avg ~114 for non-crits.



No demon summoned:
1790 -> 1711 -> 1575* -> 1466 -> 1392 -> 1303 -> 1202 -> 1120 -> 1020 -> 916 -> 832
=
79/136*/109/74/89/101/82/100/104/84
= 91.3 avg across 9 hits disregarding crit
Now with demon summoned (defiler, so it doesn't kill it):
1790 -> 1674 -> 1582 -> 1521 -> 1426 -> 1315 -> 1125* -> 1054 -> 970 -> 894 -> 827
=
116/92/61!/95/111/190*/71/84/76/67
= 85.9 avg across 9 hits disregarding crit again

And now for null case, also testing after respecing with token and having 0 points all skills and all points vita
1892 -> 1761 -> 1607 -> 1516 -> 1390 -> 1241 -> 1175 -> 1096 -> 937 -> 857 -> 771
=
131/154/91/126/149/66/79/159/80/86
= 112.1 avg across 10 hits


This is a pretty small sample size and on a monster with a huge variance in hit damage, d2 doesn't have many with tightly grouped damage to test anyway
but given at least one hit out of the normal range and pretty similar stats in the first two tests, I believe the patch notes are accurate. The 3rd test with no blood oath is within the margin of error of being ~75% of the other 3rd test.

tldr takeaway: It appears blood oath indeed was nerfed from 43% to 25%

also very easy to confirm with sigil lethargy
As some may have noticed, on PTR sigil lethargy was not working whatsoever and did nothing but change the color of monsters, didn't slow them or give any -% dr. Maybe it dropped their defense but who knows or cares, it basically did nothing at all

On current patch 3.2:
Sigil lethargy indeed lost all its -% dr, so nothing scales on the skill except aoe at soft level 10/20 and -% defense
Sigil lethargy actually slows enemies again
So it can be a 1 point bad frost nova for warlocks. Simple test of putting sigil lethargy on ghosts in arcane, they are still physical immune unlike patch 3.1, but are slowed.

does the damage from tainted seem to be accurate now to you? The tooltip seems quite low for me with all synergies. Not running optimal gear but was expecting more

It appears to be accurate from my testing just now. At least in the order of magnitude. I am not 100% convinced that the damage is scaling with demonic mastery as it displays, I need to test that, but its clearly scaling with blood boil now or else it wouldn't be killing stuff in 1 hit
With prebuff (no shrine) I get it to 58 tainted / 51 mastery for 32116-35471 listed damage, which is way down from the ~47k on PTR, but lines up with the expected 5/7 damage from synergy change
Things I don't know, is whether they actually scale with demonic mastery, whether it locks in their level when cast or demonic mastery is applied at time of attack, and whether battle command is giving them +1 slvl fireball so its actually like +1 level above what's listed, which I expect is the case since minions act like that
At any rate, they very clearly 1 hit kill most stuff in P8 difficulty that isn't very high fire resist or immune. Volleys instantly deleted minion packs in crystalline passage without seeing their hp bars go down, just OHKOs every time

/e and I can have a flickering flame merc without them dying, they fixed that bug

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 19 2026 02:14pm

i cant seem to bind anything even with lvl 20

What do you think is a practical build for tainted with decent MF (like 250-300mf)? Something like +40-45 tainted?

dunno I think the 125 lock build kind of hits a non-prebuff ~19 + skillers, so if you're only leaving open cube you should be at 46. With cube and a 2x4 open inventory you'd be at 44
that's not using a specialized +tainted shield, just +2 from baalos, no 3/20 circlet or wraithstep
Gear below that is just going to be mostly suboptimal leveling stuff, like subbing ondals for mang song, but the core enigma/hellwardens/magefist/arachs/baalos/craft ammy/torch/anni puts a pretty minimum threshold at the price point of a warlock to function. Blade warping around on a poverty build is not very good no matter how astronomical your dps, we saw that last season

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 19 2026 02:25pm

You have to do damage to the demon before binding it the lower it is the higher chance you have of binding it and then you have to hold down Bind Demon it takes a couple of seconds to charge.

ive literally tried to bind a heph with 20 hard points all the way down to him being killed by my emilio... still cant bind him