Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 22 2026 03:01pm)

If uniques for some reason use different AI then yeah it could make a huge difference. It isn't something easy to test, you'd need to record like a full minute of each of them attacking a physical immune target and count how many jabs they use
also tested a few other monsters with same results of ai delay on every strike, like battlemaid serena (also gets locked into block animations apparently)
Once upon a time blizzard posted this about their changes to ladder:
>Ladder Games offer a more challenging type of gameplay than players will find in Normal Games. Monster AI speeds have been increased. Reaction times increased for Ladder Nightmare and Hell games. Basically every monster acts like a super unique
I haven't seen anyone in the 20 years since explain what that means, or how AI changes between normal mobs, uniques & super uniques.
It can't be the AI delay being different on super uniques or I wouldn't see identical results across 'every super but lister'. Yet lister did indeed attack faster than should be possible with max attack speed, if you discount the times he randomly paused.

Lancer is still clearly faster overall and higher DPS, so yes unless we can identify something to exploit here, this is all pretty pointless because:

• Even trash mob 1 point blood oath lancer is already so tanky you can level all the way to 99 without it dying a single time even while fighting P8 TZ96 heralds nonstop
  
• Lancer is still the highest DPS mob as far as we know
  
• DPS of lancer outweighs the extra abilities/amp of other mobs like venom lords, sirens, etc with much lower dps

The one good takeaway we might have is if you're right about unique lancers having worse AI. In which case they wouldn't be just vastly harder to find than a regular TZ cursed lancer, but worse as well
The only real benefits the unique has is 2x the base HP (irrelevant if it can't die) and potential for extra affixes- stone skin (same issue, redundant, but hey at least you could leave it afk tanking in terrorized cows as a fun joke) or lightning enchanted (actually useful for spreading some amp on boil, but does nothing during passive play, and is pretty marginal even when you use it)

Quote

Even trash mob 1 point blood oath lancer is already so tanky you can level all the way to 99 without it dying a single time even while fighting P8 TZ96 heralds nonstop

Quote (Evilweanie @ Jun 22 2026 03:04pm)

i saw this and was wondering, does lister have huge regen when he pauses?
"Lister does not appear to have normal built-in monster regeneration according to the monster data tables, but there are known situations/bugs where he can regenerate life very aggressively, leading many players to think he naturally regens."
cause if he does, i got some ideas

Quote (Ph0en1X @ Jun 22 2026 03:21pm)

I mean this is not true, a 1 point trash lancer (or any 1 point trash demon) can very easily die to a t5 herald pack (conc/fana/AD - even just 2 out of those 3)
even on p1, much less p8
sure you can babysit it and constantly save it with teleport/engorge etc.
but who needs that headache
on regular hell mobs - I agree it will likely never die, even on p8tz96
but t5 heralds can hurt very bad

Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 22 2026 02:20pm)

well you got me interested enough to test it, but results are a bit mixed
Ya know I might be thinking back to our threads about summon grizzly attack speed to make me figure out what's going on here, and maybe there's some potential to exploit

In my testing, lister and an urdar had very similar DPS and killed a barricaded tower in almost exact same time, but the lister was attacking significantly faster, but sometimes paused for an entire attack cycle, while the urdar did nothing but attack nonstop
It was clearly much faster attacking for lister, he did about 20 attacks in the span an urdar did 18, but that includes 4 times he paused and sat afk for a cycle. Which would be about 24 attacks if he had done them all, about 33% faster
Its pretty obvious when you fight minions in throne that their AI does just randomly sit still without attacking you at random, and lister inherits that, so yeah his unreliability hampers his usefulness. But he clearly attacked faster than should be possible with a 15 frame AI delay- 24 attacks+pauses in ~17 seconds.

Now what I remember from the shaman threads is- the 15 frame AI delay only actually applied after a unit used an ability. The grizzly would appear to have a series of fast attacks, then knockback the enemy and pause for a moment. And the number of fast attacks were random. This was because it had a 50% chance to use bearsmite, and the 15 frame ai delay only applied after bearsmite. But even from that, its unclear why lister is pausing so long compared to the urdar attack speed. The urdar matches the expected aspd, about 18 attacks in ~17 seconds at 24 fpa. But if lister was getting away with attacks without AI delay and some with it, he'd just be attacking faster overall, rather it appears his random pauses are baked into his AI, probably some kind of RNG roll for resting for a cycle. That, or his AI is giving him a super long extra AI delay more than 15 frames every time he randomly uses smite, which is also a possibility to explain it, and would make sense if smite was only ~25% chance on him.
Afaik nobody has ever deconstructed the AI routines in Diablo II and actually explained how they work. We can figure it has a list of actions with probabilities, sums them and rolls a random number, because someone bothered to explain merc AI and that's how it works- but each function, we don't know
That said, lister DID regenerate once I brought him to a new game, so yeah it must be pulling from his base stats and not the superunique disabling it, though that's still half the regen of an urdar

Now what might make this more interesting, is if we test demons to see if any can just use nothing but normal attacks with no AI delay between them, because that could attack much faster than either and probably faster than a spearwoman, who presumably needs that 15 frame delay after each usage of jab or power strike, but not normal attack

Quote (Gilgameshed @ Jun 22 2026 04:11pm)

lister pauses after one of his attacks iirc, I think the smite one that adds swirls (which are actually quite useful against heralds and such)

Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 22 2026 04:49pm)

It wouldn't explain why he's attacking faster than should be possible, or why the other monsters pause after normal attacks.
I counted 20 lister attacks + 4 pauses in ~17 seconds, which would be like 24 attacks so ~17 fpa. His animation should be 22-23 fpa, and there's no way he's doing it in 2 fpa because you can see the attacks. And even if its some weird thing with action frames, they're pretty similar to the animation values on urdars too (7/7 vs 6/8)

Urdar maths out because its 24 fpa, counted 18 attacks in 17 seconds which matches.
Lister isn't easy because of the delay. If you look at the exact start of the 12 second mark up to video ending ~17.5, that's a ~5 second span where he attacks 8 times, about 15-17 fpa, which should just be impossible

https://i.imgur.com/SizDyy4.mp4

If it wasn't for lister randomly pausing about 1/4 of the time he'd clearly be better, but attacking 33% faster and pausing 25% of the time makes you deal about equal dps, just erratically and unreliably :S

Quote (Gilgameshed @ Jun 22 2026 04:53pm)

yea I wouldn't know the why, all I know is the actual meat of it and yes I noticed similarly. As soon as I got my first Urdar to try and replace my lost Lister and saw how slow he was in comparison, I had no choice but to make him commit sudoku with unsummon in shame. I never had an issue with the delay myself, because he had always just finished a smite from what I remember seeing. Meaning the enemy he paused after hitting was also paused itself. I wonder if teleporting or casting death mark cancels this pause? I didn't notice it as problematic at all during normal gameplay. (But I was also using the fire spells in between death marking and telestomping with my boy by my side)

Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 22 2026 04:54pm)

Perhaps his ai just has an unlisted ability?
makes him self-regenerate, but stand still for a moment



if you went afk with your demon tanking them it would die, maybe. You'd have to be extremely inattentive or incautious, not bothering to teleport or sigil or engorge at all, or be spamming blood boil to suicide it
Its way more likely you'll die to stray arrows from the kinds of mobs that could actually kill your demon, than having your demon get nuked
You could have a herald and 10+ pack all attacking simultaneously with concentration and cursed and its still 10+ seconds for you to react and not let your demon die. Even if you disconnected you'd probably time out before it died

not that I'm going to bother farming all the way up to t5 herald on single player to illustrate that point, but its not like your demon just poof vanishes instantly, you'd have to purposefully let it die;
https://i.imgur.com/bzgDhQ0.mp4

Quote (FoldersUnite @ Jun 22 2026 05:37pm)

Not that I particularly disagree, but why would you illustrate the point using act2 beetles? There are t5 heralds p8 tz that can and will kill a lancer, like nasty cursed conc moonlords or the doom knights or urdars. But it doesn't happen instaneously, albeit fast. Colossal ancients on their second phase can wipe out a lancer before you can react though.