i ended up with:
20 bind demon
20 tainted demon
20 demon mastery
20 blood oath
1 levitation mastery ( help alot to use high damage insight)
1 hex bane ( for ubers and t5 heralds / baal if needed to reduce their defense/AR
1 ES ( to proc hex bane into bosses/ubers)
1 sigil lethargy ( bosses)
1 sigil death ( help aoe IF needed)
that build is done exacly at 99
gear is precast then i would hold a high damage insigh to do some damage with es on bosses if needed and kill ads, and put alot of mf sc's/ gear even considering sling ring for the cast, mf and dont need hold tp is big for me haha ( for hardcore i can use some resist scs/gear as well)
can reach 500+ mf easy
opinions?
This is the alternative build I was looking at, and mocked up in SP to test, and I was also exploring the potential for maxing engorge but leaving blood oath at level 1 and seeing how that scales. Though I would never bother with sigil death, es or hex bane, they all feel redundant
Essentially the tradeoff here is most of your blood boil damage (to the point its not worth using), for the increase in bind demon damage. You might unlock a slightly stronger spearwoman but really the only relevant affix a unique can have is lightning enchanted, to help trigger curse faster, which only matters for its own attacks here since you're skipping blood boil physical anyway. So its really just about that +damage / %ed on bind demon.
I find myself using blood boil quite a bit, basically any unique mob of fire immunes or heralds, but also in some dense areas of enemies who might not even be immune but are just so numerous the big AOE can wipe them out faster than smaller fireball aoe, namely flayer jungle. Its unnecessary for most non-immunes and against bosses its barely any extra dps. A build that skips the physical damage on blood is relying heavily on lancer for immunes. In P8 chaos TZ96 for example, venom lords are 154k super + 116k minions with 50% dr + fire immune. 2x 36k tainted only deal 16k to them per volley, about 8-10 volleys to kill just the ones in front. And even a 50k lancer could take 6-7 attacks without curse, but with curse its just ~2-3, even one jab sequence could kill the unique.
But there you run into a big problem with prebuffed tainted: You can't just switch to summoned defilers as easily. I mean, for chaos and travincal and other areas, sometimes I
do just summon 2x defiler and let my spearwoman + blood boil carry. Then you have to go to town and resummon tainted with prebuff gear afterwards, which does work but its an annoyance. Blood boil is strong enough that you can just ram through these big heavy mobs even without defilers though. At ~10k per blood boil after amp with a lesser dps build (not mang songs), but hitting
all the venom lords at the same time, you can kill the whole pack in about 4-5 seconds just from blood boil damage, and your spearwoman/tainted make that 2-3 seconds. For some of the tankiest biggest baddest mobs in the game. If you had to let you spearwoman and tainted do the killing all on their own, you're maybe going 20+ seconds because of how many attacks it takes between them
Areas like flayer jungle can be a bit annoying as it feels like tainted are carving out a scoop of a flayer pack at a time instead of killing them all like blood boil does, but when you're in WSK and the flayers are fire immune, there's such a world of a difference between "cast blood boil once with amp and they all die" and "spearwoman chasing and attacking one monster at a time, tainted taking multiple attacks for one flayer"
I think the most important thing is to just run the numbers on the marginal utility you get from the skill points
1->20 engorge raises blood boil physical damage from ~1152 to ~4800, the more than 4x scaling of the synergy (well 1.2 -> 5.0x because 1 point synergy as a bind demon prerequisite). It also gives +19 LAEK/MAEK to blood boil from hex siphon, and some minor benefits to engorge like % hp restore mostly.
1->20 bind demon results in {+2188 base /755% ed} -> {+3404/850% ed} in my max prebuff setup with bone break included, using mang songs & +5 book (not +6s because they aren't as realistic, and I actually have both +5 slots on ladder)
Which tracks with the +64 damage / 5% ed per point. Now for a spearwoman with ~155 base damage and just +240% ed from might aura on merc, +99% extra strong and 18% jab and 5% crit, that's 29.8k -> 48.8k damage per jab hit, about 1.64x overall DPS
There's no denying this makes a significantly stronger bound demon, but its still a 1.64x on top of the already strong spearwoman you have with 1 point. Blood boil vs immunes would drop from ~10k to ~5k
Then there's the third option I discussed- leaving blood oath at 1 point but maxing engorge. You get the full physical, but lose demon hp and blood boil fire. You don't lose much % redirection, we're talking 29->27% by only being 1 point. And the max HP benefit is questionable- ~1135% vs ~1800%, only about +50% overall. The demon honestly should be functionally immortal with 1 point. So is that fire damage synergy to blood boil worth it? It helps much less against immunes.