3.2 destroyed Bind Demon

Baal almost killed Hephasto. 20 points in Bind Demon, Blood Oath and Demonic Mastery. I think I can go ahead and delete my HC character—just to be safe. In season 13 he was able to kill Lilith, and now he almost fails at Baal. What a humiliation!

That doesn't sound right.
Are you sure you bound a hell Hephasto (ideally a TZ96 one)?

Mine has no problem whatsoever facetanking Baal, T5 heralds or whatever else he's come up against.

Schnorki wrote: 3 months ago

Are you sure you bound a hell Hephasto (ideally a TZ96 one)?

No was crap gear and only level 82, but still.

Llama published some videos showing something similar. Bind Demon is at P1 as strong as the others at P8. It really is always entertaining to watch people screw things up.

ceving wrote: 3 months ago

Baal almost killed Hephasto. 20 points in Bind Demon, Blood Oath and Demonic Mastery. I think I can go ahead and delete my HC character—just to be safe. In season 13 he was able to kill Lilith, and now he almost fails at Baal. What a humiliation!

Maybe your char can help your Demon and your merc a tiny little bit? Did you Engorge him?

Had a slight variation to my build to test anyways so I went ahead and respecced and intentionally got a non-TZ P1 Hephasto to compare.

What's interesting and what I didn't even notice before (no reason to pay attention if the life bar never moves ^^) is that bound demons (or this Heph at least) have 0 inherent health regen it seems so once they take dmg, they won't heal until you Engorge.

That said, I let him solo an entire Baal run (waves + Baal) without a single Engorge to see just how much dmg he takes and long story short, he demolished it and didn't even remotely come close to ever being in danger. Ended up still in the green.

Then proceeded to take him into a TZ96 game (P5, couldn't find a P8 atm) and 4 face-tanked T5 heralds later, including a couple conc'd ones, one of which ended up with fana/conc/cursed, he is still sitting pretty at ~80% life with 0 heals in between. And that's with intentionally slower killing and no sigil to make sure he actually can take at least some damage.

Simply put, I don't get the complaint. Heph is still an insanely good tank. Even the "worst case" non-TZ/P1 type.

I do prefer Holy Freeze for my build so that adds some extra defense of course but that alone doesn't generally take you from "gets stomped by Baal" to "basically takes no dmg from anything".
Beyond that, no defensive affix on him.
That's with lvl 34 bind, 26 mastery and 15 Oath.

Schnorki wrote: 3 months ago

That's with lvl 34 bind, 26 mastery and 15 Oath.

These are not early hell stats.

This is how it looks at the beginning of hell. And this was already a better run.

ceving wrote: 3 months ago

Baal almost killed Hephasto. 20 points in Bind Demon, Blood Oath and Demonic Mastery. I think I can go ahead and delete my HC character—just to be safe. In season 13 he was able to kill Lilith, and now he almost fails at Baal. What a humiliation!

Is this your original Heph from before the patch, or did you catch a new one?
Just to be safe in case there are bugs for "transfered" old catched demons (we never know).

Greys_Prey wrote: 3 months ago

Is this your original Heph from before the patch, or did you catch a new one?

This is a new one. Old one was on HC. New one is offline test with crafted gear from Maxroll.