I always had the impression that if you have an item cast aura, such as double Dragon + HoJ, it would override Self cast Holy Fire, but I recently read that this was not the case. It only overrides the Elemental damage on your melee hits but the tick damage stays on top of it. Can anyone confirm this to be true?

This is not true. Whatever the highest aura is will always be the one that shows up. Also, conv makes your stuff smack suuuper hard.

Edit: I might be wrong, but my understanding is that you can only have 1 version of an aura at a time and that the highest level one will be the one that shows.

This post was edited by NeutralSmith on May 20 2026 11:31am

This guy in this thread says otherwise: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/t/ultimate-auradin-guide-dragondin-tesladin-frostdin-auradin-etc/156954

A bit further down he says that the tick from self cast counts as a seperate tick, so you get 4 ticks total. He seems to understand the mechanic pretty well.

Also, I did conviction but I use self cast Holy Shock since everything dies before the aura even activates.

Yeah man, you can either do triple holy fire items or double dream items and then you throw an extra dream or dragon on top of that but regardless you will still use conviction. The only difference is whether to put 20 in resist fire or 20 in resist lightning + you still need 20 in salvation. (Passive boosts to aura dmg) The rest in zeal, conviction, one point in holy shield and if you have any left dump it in sacrifice.
Offensive charms don’t help it’s best just to pile on masses of AR charms
Afaik the displays are a little buggy but the dream version does a bit more dmg, 10-12k range

Rogue or beast. You can def use some fanat going on, No real room for merc infinity so you can self cast some lower aura that wont work ect

If your still in doubt, do single player p 8 run. Time it. Then do these changes and time that as well

This post was edited by Osiris_Reborn on May 20 2026 12:02pm

I think you missunderstood my question. I am very well aware of how to build a Dragondin. I was asking if self cast HF tick damage works with Item cast tick damage. I have both a Dragon pala and Dream pala. Offensive charms do work with self cast though and Dream version does NOT do more tick damage than dragondin. This doesnt really matter though because I did not ask how to make a dragon pala but: Does self cast HF work as a forth tick in Dragondin ticks? I understand that it doesnt get the lvl 44 tick, but does it do a tick at all?

Probably not, everyone would alrdy be doing that. Go ahead and try and time it and do a big experiment. I don’t think I could find out anything about this game that 100 other people haven’t already thoroughly testied experimented with

Also, a good chance there is old info trying to creep in in older versions of the game you had different aura’s swapping between levels, that is fixed. Also, you used to be able to switch and still get the benefit of the old era for a second or two that is also fixed.

The player's aura skill aura does not stack with the item-based aura; it creates a separate, weaker pulse.

Separate Auras: The game treats the aura from your skill and the aura from items (like Dragon and Hand of Justice) as two distinct auras.
No Level Stacking: The levels do not add together (e.g., a level 44 item aura + level 20 skill aura ≠ level 64).
Separate Pulses: You would get three pulses from the items (level 44 each, due to the stacking bug) plus one additional, separate pulse from your skill (level 20). However, the skill pulse is much weaker.
Conviction is Better: Because the skill pulse adds minimal damage, players run Conviction instead. Conviction breaks monster immunities and massively boosts the damage of the powerful item-based Holy Fire pulses.

This post was edited by Osiris_Reborn on May 23 2026 09:56am

seperate pulse from each and every item and aura
its doing what you wanted, all on its own, altho using your own aura creates a seperate (weaker) pulse

chat gpt acted stupid about it untill i started cross examining holy fire vs holy shock
i.e. why do 2 items still beat 3 ect

This post was edited by Osiris_Reborn on May 23 2026 09:53am

so i was pretty dismissive and wrong but your theory is already wad no change in build required

the real limits here are how many hard points can u concievably apply to defensive skill tree
most people only boost one of them + salvation
dont have the spare tokens to really compare like 1 pt zeal all def points ect. or even a 3rd idea using a diff aura on yourself (freeze?) while still boosting shock and fire from items (i like that idea) and then bringing in infinity merc

This post was edited by Osiris_Reborn on May 23 2026 09:55am

hey ink! long time no see!