Optimal Blood Oath for mixed Demon builds

departure wrote: 4 hours ago

FerociousTerrier wrote: 6 hours ago

I am working on an experimental design, generously funded by @kerph as my patron of

Token of Absolution for respeccing in and out of

Blood Oath. The objectives are as follows:
1. Determine when

Blood Oath is applied to a bound demon: at binding, at game start, or dynamically during play
2. Determine if all benefits of

Blood Oath (including warlock benefit of damage transfer) are applied at the same time
3. Use these determinations to identify optimal allocation of skill points and soft points for

Blood Oath use in mixed demon builds

Ancillary objectives:
Explore the interaction of the HealthCap and

Blood Oath.

Aim 1. Determine when

Blood Oath is applied to a bound demon.
- I will again be using bound

Fallen to test the hypothesis that

Blood Oath is applied and snapshot at time of binding, or alternatively, at time of spawning at the start of a game. The null hypothesis is that it does neither of these and adjusts Life, Resists, Physical Resists and Warlock Damage Transfer at any point in time depending on present skill level.

Methods:
1. Reset skills. Put one point in

Demonic Mastery and one point in

Bind Demon (and pre-reqs).
2. Bind a

Fallen in P1.
3. Take

Fallen to Jails and find a closed cell with archers or, alternatively,

Teleport into a closed cell with archers on the outside. Estimate number of missiles required to kill the

Fallen (or damage the

Fallen to X% if unkillable).
4. Repeat steps 2-3 for each

Blood Oath condition detailed below.

image.png

For the exploratory aim of understanding how/when the health

Cap takes effect, I will only test in Players 8 (this ought to be fun in online SCNL...) doing essentially the same thing but selecting skill levels that theoretically minimize or max out the health caps:

image.png

In principal, Level 11

Blood Oath in P8 should perform exactly the same as Level 30

Blood Oath in P8. However, if we find that Lvl 30 is much more durable than Lvl 11, it may mean that

Blood Oath ignores the health caps, and it is only the base demon health that gets capped. Note: the difference between Lvl 11 and Lvl 30 damage reduction to demon is 3% (8% and 11%, respectively). I don't think that will account for a 2.5 fold difference in health, so it should be noticable if they have equivalent hp.

Happy to take any critiques, comments or suggestions before starting! Cheers!

Can I recommend that you do this offline? Build yourself a good character on maxroll and export it to offline so you have all the gear you need. Enable respec so that you can respec at will, and you can set player count at will. If you wanted to get really crazy, you could even lock your map seed.