Is bleed the most reliable debuff vs bosses?

[Panfilo]

So far I've found that all the bosses are fairly vulnerable to bleed. If you can stack it, via two or three classes that have bleed abilities, you can spend most of the battle focusing on keeping your heroes alive. While bleed varies in damage/turn I noted that it stacks the same as Blight, but far more classes have bleed abilities than blight.

Bleeding bosses out has saved my bacon more times than I can count. It takes pressure off you to use other abilities for a round or two (like heals or other buffs) while still consistently damaging the boss. Against bosses that can heal themselves (Hag, Flesh) it is particularly useful.

[Cassilda]

Bleed is good because it tend to come free as a bonus of allready pretty decent skills. Also as you mentioned several characters have such abilities allowing you to stack bleed easily.

On the other hand plague is near exclusive to the Plague Doc, does pretty similar damages to bleed but is tied to lower damage skills. You can't stack it like bleed and resistance hurt you more because of the lower raw impact of plague skills.

[Peek]

I stack 2 hellions, a jester and healer - or often even 2 hellions and 2 jesters and stack speed/crit ballad with bleed! It gets wild! Definitely a top choice for most bosses (besides necromancer and brigand)

[No One]

If you can take pressure off by using bleeds, you can take pressure off without using them. The only advantage is bleeds have high damage:action ratios if they're allowed to complete, which means the fight ends slightly sooner.

[CptMurdock]

So far I am trying to stack DMG/Accuracy/Crit as much as possible. If there were trinkets that would boost my bleed damage I may be more willing to use bleed skills. Crits are the most important thing for me since they reduce stress and deal massive damage. This may change when I hit vet difficulty but so far I have been doing great.

[Cassilda]

Veteran levels and further only make things worse for DoTs in general. Monster resistances go trough the roof. 45% is a "low" resistance on vet quests, so if you want to maximise the use of your DoTs you have to gear up with +bleed/+blight trinkets and its just not worth it compared to raw damages, accuracy and crit%.

[Sovereign246]

Not very easy to do on the prophet as i cant think of any class that has a row 4 bleed and at higher levels attacking the pews is pretty much suicide.

[nuther]

Originally posted by predator246:

Not very easy to do on the prophet as i cant think of any class that has a row 4 bleed and at higher levels attacking the pews is pretty much suicide.

I think the BH has one. A think a BH should go on every boss kill mission. Bleed is a dot not a debuff.