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Optimal Blood Oath for mixed Demon builds

FerociousTerrier · 2026-06-09T00:54:55-07:00

tl;dr: Blood Oath is hard to pinpoint what level is best to target with hard + soft points. Whilst we know more about the mechanics of Bind Demon and Demonic…

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FerociousTerrier

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FerociousTerrier `123`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 3 hours ago
I'm definitely hearing from others that the resists don't apply to bound demon.

I think levels if BO are probably still worthwhile, but maybe last. The reason is because the damage reduction and synergy to
Blood Boil are pretty nice.

I think it is very much worth it for a pure demon and/or

Blood Boil build as the synergies are good. Don't forget

Engorge, which gets a very nice synergy from

Blood Oath in defense and life replenish.

But for mixed builds, I am not certain, but somewhat confident that the 19 points are better placed elsewhere.

In my case, I am now running:
20

Bind Demon
20

Demonic Mastery
1 Lethargy
20

Abyss
20 Miasma Chains
1

Blood Oath
1

Consume (mostly for testing purposes)
Rest in prereqs and

Miasma Bolt (I think 16 or 17 for

Miasma Bolt)

This feels like a strong build so far, because the demon is very strong and doesn't seem to be affected by the lack of

Blood Oath, i.e., performing as OP as before. And now I also have very strong Chaos skills.

FerociousTerrier `123`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Note: I haven't tested this specifically yet, but I believe

Blood Oath is working as intended with summoned demons.

The goats and

Tainted I summoned for the Ubers needed to be resummoned more often than usual with just the 1 hard point and 29 soft points in

Blood Oath (previously,

Blood Oath was Lvl 48). So you may find some reduction in longevity of your summoned demons. That, or the ubers just mop them up more rapidly than P8 farming and heralds (which can still kill them)--entirely possible.

FerociousTerrier `123`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Schnorki wrote: 9 hours ago

FerociousTerrier wrote: 10 hours ago
So, @kerph and I did a bunch of tests with demons ranging from
Fallen, to
Blunderbore and finally
Corrupt Rogue. Target was
Uber Duriel. Here are our observations:

1.
Baal's Minions cannot be bound. Derr.
2.
Blunderbore bound in P2 are relatively tanky and seem to regen quickly. They were not the best candidates for testing
Blood Oath health bonuses.
3. Corrupt Rogues seemed to be the sweet spot. At zero points in
Blood Oath (~30 points in
Demonic Mastery and
Bind Demon), the P2 non-terrorized Dark Rogue from
Outer Cloister took approximately 5 hits from
Uber Duriel.

Here's the rub. Adding 1 point into
Blood Oath + 29 soft point for total 30 points into
Blood Oath, for a bonus of +1065% life to demon, resulted in a newly bound Dark Rogue that took.... 5 hits from
Duriel.

I then asked, is it possible that
Duriel is hitting with Crushing Blow? But no, apparently
Uber Duriel does not do Crushing Blow.

Ok, so maybe the
Blood Oath bonuses only work with hard points. I then maxed
Blood Oath, which led to a newly bound Dark Rogue at Lvl 48
Blood Oath, which took... ~5-10 hits from
Duriel. I don't know exactly how many hits landed, because I'm pretty sure I saw some hit blocked by the Dark Rogue. But, from 0 points in
Blood Oath to 30 points to 48 points, we observed nearly identical resilience. That sounds like
Blood Oath is not working as intended--or that
Blood Oath is not intended to work on bound demons.

After this, I cut short our (long) experiment, since it seems that there is something up with
Blood Oath and
Bind Demon.

I am going to tag a few individuals to see if there is any other knowledge or observations on how the skill works: @Schnorki @varangium @dionisy_cn @Rhaegar86 @DrunkAkuma Sorry for anyone else I left off.

Has anyone had any problems using
Blood Oath with their bound demon?
You rang?

Afraid I haven't done much specific focus-testing on
Blood Oath but my general feeling is that it simply doesn't do anything for a bound demon. Neither the resist nor the life seemed to ever noticeably change from 0 to skilled+geared. And even if it does work for the life boost, it might still get severely limited by possibly being unable to override the new health
Cap so...yeah.
Take with a massive grain of salt as that's solely based on random side-observations and no proper testing but yeah, my perception has always been that there's no real benefit to going past the 1 pt needed to unlock
Consume.

If anyone wants to do real testing on it though, I'd happily be proven wrong on that one.

Thanks! Great to get your views on this. In our attempt at testing this, albeit imprecise and limited by my online-only play with GeForceNow, our observation are in concordance with yours. We only ended up doing duplicate measures instead of triplicates and not all conditions, because it seemed rather obvious that nothing was changing, or that it was undetectable. Everything was planned so we would not have been anywhere near the healthcaps at the lower

Blood Oath levels but reaching healthcaps at hogh levels (IF the

Blood Oath health bonus were in effect).

FerociousTerrier `123`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Mizar wrote: 6 hours ago

FerociousTerrier wrote: 10 hours ago
So, @kerph and I did a bunch of tests with demons ranging from
Fallen, to
Blunderbore and finally
Corrupt Rogue. Target was
Uber Duriel. Here are our observations:

1.
Baal's Minions cannot be bound. Derr.
2.
Blunderbore bound in P2 are relatively tanky and seem to regen quickly. They were not the best candidates for testing
Blood Oath health bonuses.
3. Corrupt Rogues seemed to be the sweet spot. At zero points in
Blood Oath (~30 points in
Demonic Mastery and
Bind Demon), the P2 non-terrorized Dark Rogue from
Outer Cloister took approximately 5 hits from
Uber Duriel.

Here's the rub. Adding 1 point into
Blood Oath + 29 soft point for total 30 points into
Blood Oath, for a bonus of +1065% life to demon, resulted in a newly bound Dark Rogue that took.... 5 hits from
Duriel.

I then asked, is it possible that
Duriel is hitting with Crushing Blow? But no, apparently
Uber Duriel does not do Crushing Blow.

Ok, so maybe the
Blood Oath bonuses only work with hard points. I then maxed
Blood Oath, which led to a newly bound Dark Rogue at Lvl 48
Blood Oath, which took... ~5-10 hits from
Duriel. I don't know exactly how many hits landed, because I'm pretty sure I saw some hit blocked by the Dark Rogue. But, from 0 points in
Blood Oath to 30 points to 48 points, we observed nearly identical resilience. That sounds like
Blood Oath is not working as intended--or that
Blood Oath is not intended to work on bound demons.

After this, I cut short our (long) experiment, since it seems that there is something up with
Blood Oath and
Bind Demon.

I am going to tag a few individuals to see if there is any other knowledge or observations on how the skill works: @Schnorki @varangium @dionisy_cn @Rhaegar86 @DrunkAkuma Sorry for anyone else I left off.

Has anyone had any problems using
Blood Oath with their bound demon?
My experience is that
Blood Oath does work. At least I have noticed a difference in the tankyness of my bound demons. Or it's just that I leveled up more and my demon is leveling with me. Perhaps something is weird with
Duriel specifically, but I noticed my demons tanking heralds much better at least after pumping points into Oath. Another hypothesis could be that corrupt rogues just have a very low health
Cap as a bound demon, which is why I never use them (or lancers).

I can't make any certain conclusions about this experiment. It was very imprecise, and we had to make several modifications to the initial plan as we went along because the

Fallen binding approach just wasn't working. But the Black Rogue should have given us a wide enough health range, with 0 pts in BO giving a Black Rogue with 3008-6686 hp and the lvl 30 BO binds with a sure P2 healthcap at 13860. Given, that is only twice as high as the upper limit of Lvl0 BO, but we should still see some difference, as physical damage should have also been reduced by 11% (+resists, but that's a bit irrelevant with

Uber Duriel).

varangium `75`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Wait, are you saying that even if your bound demon is far below the health

Cap that

Blood Oath does literally nothing? Like it only applies to summons and not bound demons?

Or maybe it's just hard to detect, because if I recall from the health caps file, the

Cap was only 2-4x the base health range of most demons. And if you can't avoid having 1 point in bound demon, that's already +50% before + skills. Level 5 (from only +4 skills) is +190% at which point the health

Cap should be reached in most cases.

The resist all impact you could potentially test by having as little +skills as possible, binding a demon that has zero inherent fire resistance to start, and then putting him up against a Venom lord with

Inferno. That said, in most non-controlled situations, factoring for somewhat standard +skills gear, mixed resistance profiles, etc.., most people won't notice the difference between a level 13(+12 skills)

Blood Oath at 60% resist all, and a 71% or so that you might get with a level 32 from having maxed

Blood Oath with the same + skills.

FerociousTerrier wrote: 3 hours ago

Schnorki wrote: 9 hours ago

FerociousTerrier wrote: 10 hours ago
So, @kerph and I did a bunch of tests with demons ranging from
Fallen, to
Blunderbore and finally
Corrupt Rogue. Target was
Uber Duriel. Here are our observations:

1.
Baal's Minions cannot be bound. Derr.
2.
Blunderbore bound in P2 are relatively tanky and seem to regen quickly. They were not the best candidates for testing
Blood Oath health bonuses.
3. Corrupt Rogues seemed to be the sweet spot. At zero points in
Blood Oath (~30 points in
Demonic Mastery and
Bind Demon), the P2 non-terrorized Dark Rogue from
Outer Cloister took approximately 5 hits from
Uber Duriel.

Here's the rub. Adding 1 point into
Blood Oath + 29 soft point for total 30 points into
Blood Oath, for a bonus of +1065% life to demon, resulted in a newly bound Dark Rogue that took.... 5 hits from
Duriel.

I then asked, is it possible that
Duriel is hitting with Crushing Blow? But no, apparently
Uber Duriel does not do Crushing Blow.

Ok, so maybe the
Blood Oath bonuses only work with hard points. I then maxed
Blood Oath, which led to a newly bound Dark Rogue at Lvl 48
Blood Oath, which took... ~5-10 hits from
Duriel. I don't know exactly how many hits landed, because I'm pretty sure I saw some hit blocked by the Dark Rogue. But, from 0 points in
Blood Oath to 30 points to 48 points, we observed nearly identical resilience. That sounds like
Blood Oath is not working as intended--or that
Blood Oath is not intended to work on bound demons.

After this, I cut short our (long) experiment, since it seems that there is something up with
Blood Oath and
Bind Demon.

I am going to tag a few individuals to see if there is any other knowledge or observations on how the skill works: @Schnorki @varangium @dionisy_cn @Rhaegar86 @DrunkAkuma Sorry for anyone else I left off.

Has anyone had any problems using
Blood Oath with their bound demon?
You rang?

Afraid I haven't done much specific focus-testing on
Blood Oath but my general feeling is that it simply doesn't do anything for a bound demon. Neither the resist nor the life seemed to ever noticeably change from 0 to skilled+geared. And even if it does work for the life boost, it might still get severely limited by possibly being unable to override the new health
Cap so...yeah.
Take with a massive grain of salt as that's solely based on random side-observations and no proper testing but yeah, my perception has always been that there's no real benefit to going past the 1 pt needed to unlock
Consume.

If anyone wants to do real testing on it though, I'd happily be proven wrong on that one.
Thanks! Great to get your views on this. In our attempt at testing this, albeit imprecise and limited by my online-only play with GeForceNow, our observation are in concordance with yours. We only ended up doing duplicate measures instead of triplicates and not all conditions, because it seemed rather obvious that nothing was changing, or that it was undetectable. Everything was planned so we would not have been anywhere near the healthcaps at the lower
Blood Oath levels but reaching healthcaps at hogh levels (IF the
Blood Oath health bonus were in effect).

varangium `75`

3 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Oh I see, you were able to do 0 points in

Blood Oath (wasn't sure if it was a prerequisite). So yeah, you should have noticed that. And you couldn't? Meaning it's busted and doesn't apply to bound demons at all?

FerociousTerrier wrote: 3 hours ago

Mizar wrote: 6 hours ago

FerociousTerrier wrote: 10 hours ago
So, @kerph and I did a bunch of tests with demons ranging from
Fallen, to
Blunderbore and finally
Corrupt Rogue. Target was
Uber Duriel. Here are our observations:

1.
Baal's Minions cannot be bound. Derr.
2.
Blunderbore bound in P2 are relatively tanky and seem to regen quickly. They were not the best candidates for testing
Blood Oath health bonuses.
3. Corrupt Rogues seemed to be the sweet spot. At zero points in
Blood Oath (~30 points in
Demonic Mastery and
Bind Demon), the P2 non-terrorized Dark Rogue from
Outer Cloister took approximately 5 hits from
Uber Duriel.

Here's the rub. Adding 1 point into
Blood Oath + 29 soft point for total 30 points into
Blood Oath, for a bonus of +1065% life to demon, resulted in a newly bound Dark Rogue that took.... 5 hits from
Duriel.

I then asked, is it possible that
Duriel is hitting with Crushing Blow? But no, apparently
Uber Duriel does not do Crushing Blow.

Ok, so maybe the
Blood Oath bonuses only work with hard points. I then maxed
Blood Oath, which led to a newly bound Dark Rogue at Lvl 48
Blood Oath, which took... ~5-10 hits from
Duriel. I don't know exactly how many hits landed, because I'm pretty sure I saw some hit blocked by the Dark Rogue. But, from 0 points in
Blood Oath to 30 points to 48 points, we observed nearly identical resilience. That sounds like
Blood Oath is not working as intended--or that
Blood Oath is not intended to work on bound demons.

After this, I cut short our (long) experiment, since it seems that there is something up with
Blood Oath and
Bind Demon.

I am going to tag a few individuals to see if there is any other knowledge or observations on how the skill works: @Schnorki @varangium @dionisy_cn @Rhaegar86 @DrunkAkuma Sorry for anyone else I left off.

Has anyone had any problems using
Blood Oath with their bound demon?
My experience is that
Blood Oath does work. At least I have noticed a difference in the tankyness of my bound demons. Or it's just that I leveled up more and my demon is leveling with me. Perhaps something is weird with
Duriel specifically, but I noticed my demons tanking heralds much better at least after pumping points into Oath. Another hypothesis could be that corrupt rogues just have a very low health
Cap as a bound demon, which is why I never use them (or lancers).
I can't make any certain conclusions about this experiment. It was very imprecise, and we had to make several modifications to the initial plan as we went along because the
Fallen binding approach just wasn't working. But the Black Rogue should have given us a wide enough health range, with 0 pts in BO giving a Black Rogue with 3008-6686 hp and the lvl 30 BO binds with a sure P2 healthcap at 13860. Given, that is only twice as high as the upper limit of Lvl0 BO, but we should still see some difference, as physical damage should have also been reduced by 11% (+resists, but that's a bit irrelevant with
Uber Duriel).

departure `177`

2 hours ago (pre-Resurrected)

Here's the answer. This was posted today.

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of

Blood Oath does work with

Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

FerociousTerrier `123`

1 hour ago (pre-Resurrected)

Duplicate

FerociousTerrier `123`

1 hour ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 2 hours ago
Here's the answer. This was posted today.

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 11-44-30.png

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of
Blood Oath does work with
Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

Is that a Blizz person? Nice to have confirmation. Have the link to that thread by any chance? Thanks!

FerociousTerrier `123`

1 hour ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 2 hours ago
Here's the answer. This was posted today.

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 11-44-30.png

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of
Blood Oath does work with
Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

If that is the case, then

Blood Oath is very much a 1 pointer once you have some +skills, because there are severely diminishing returns to the physical resistance reduction.

All the more reason to go pokemon hunting for a Stone Skin Cursed Magic Resistant (or lightning enchanted) unique or a superunque! In P8!

departure `177`

1 hour ago (pre-Resurrected)

FerociousTerrier wrote: 1 hour ago
Is that a Blizz person? Nice to have confirmation. Have the link to that thread by any chance? Thanks!

Pavke is pretty well known as authoritative on D2R. Mr. Llama relies on him quite a bit. Sweet Phil did a whole video based on a Pavke reddit post about heralds and their spawn rates. I don't know if he actually works for blizzard but wouldn't be surprised.

Pavke also doesn't usually say much in the threads, but I got this from the d2-general discord channel in the Llamas of the Round group set up by Mr. Llama. You can find it in there if you join.

varangium `75`

1 hour ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 2 hours ago
Here's the answer. This was posted today.

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 11-44-30.png

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of
Blood Oath does work with
Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

Hahaahahahaha

This is why we love and hate the game. Retarded stuff like this, just randomly making a skill not work on something the description implies it should work on with no notice, then just acting like it's all normal in his response (assuming this is a Blizz employee).

It's the hunt for Diablo's misleading random and often poorly thought out mechanics that makes it interesting.

Schnorki `5364`Moderator

51 minutes ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 2 hours ago
Here's the answer. This was posted today.

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 11-44-30.png

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of
Blood Oath does work with
Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

Matches with my no-real-testing-but-random observations. And Pavke seems a smart cookie. So...good enough for me.

Bisu `547`

28 minutes ago (pre-Resurrected)

departure wrote: 2 hours ago
Here's the answer. This was posted today.

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 11-44-30.png

He went on to clarify that the damage reduction aspect of
Blood Oath does work with
Bind Demon, but not the life or res.

If this discussion becomes a public post, I'd very much like to read more about it.