It was well known that End-Game Pet builds are capable of killing anything with little to no time (save for maybe the Sentinel) while being completely safe from any damage to the summoner
I expected kill times to be 15-20s to be honest, not 6 seconds though.
Not how nerfs work i think
Movement skills aren’t everything, why would a pet build even need one is beyond me
The build has survivability and excels in Crucible and Vanilla kill times are impressive as well. In the past builds that were good at only one of the two (not both) got nerfed. So you can use your imagination on this one
Great job making this build. I made something very similar a while ago, but using the Hellhound and Swarmlings combined with Raise the Dead - it was powerful at delivering lots of Fire Damage and Crits via the pets, but your build takes the cake!
Swarmlings are far from being a magic bullet. They have far, far less health than other pets, and they’re likely to die to a single AOE attack. All nemeses (including Fabius and Iron Maiden) have AOE or shotgun attacks that can easily wipe out all your swarmlings, and so do most endgame bosses like Mogdrogen and Aldritch. This is why I mentioned to Chthon earlier that I’d probably need to take a build with sturdier pets against Mogdrogen, rather than a swarmling-based build.
Bysmiel relic is actually pretty good for a hybrid - especially a melee hybrid - due to the huge physical resistance. The main drawback IMO is that it has terrible uptime for a proc that requires being hit, which is already a weakness for pet builds. It would be nice to spawn some temporary pets when hit as well, which would already be far less frequent than the swarmling spawn rate.
Nice variation on the concept (less flat damage and damage sources, much more RR), but at this point I’d say it’s more of a pet build, but a quite active one and that activity gives results!
Good god man, you basically just put everything hybrid summoner players have been saying into numbers and figures.
And yes, this build works beautifully because you don’t go the normal “max mastery pet and stick a devotion in there”-route, but in the complete opposite direction by distributing those skill points into party-wide buffs/debuffs.
The irony here is that you STILL end up with what is essentially a pure summoner anyway, heh.
You can conceivably tweak those numbers around though so you end up with a true hybrid build (like more points into Thermite Mines and such) but I suppose that’s better off left as a possibility in the expansion. Unless you go melee, and then you’ll probably end up doing some kind of Dying God-Tree of Life combo to make up for the survivability issues, and that’s probably a different kind of build altogether.
Likely to improve group clearing speed. You can see as much from his skill setup.
With Shepherd’s Crook, I see enough pet mods here for his pets to be good enough in Ultimate (barring getting wiped by AoEs - and with that setup mobs will usually be going after him instead of his pets anyway) so it makes sense.
With enough pets out single target damage could skyrocket easily.
Pros:
Great build! Much better than my Dracarris build from a year ago
Cons:
Ugliest character I have ever seen
“Hybrid” in the title. How is this hybrid build when you allow you do is buff/debuff with your pets =p
Is it really hybrid though? He does nothing, but buff his pets and debuff shit for them Witching Hour is much better than people think though a lot of the power of the build is coming from everything else ofc. I managed to get 9.5s mad queen with WH build and I’m just some idiot who doesn’t play pet builds
It’s definitely on the road to being a hybrid, just need a few more points in Thermite Mines or so.
It doesn’t really matter if all you do is debuff for your summons, many debuffs also have a damage component.
But as you can see from the vids, if you define a hybrid as simply a build that does OK by itself even without its pets up against most mobs then it definitely qualifies.
I’d definitely agree with both of you that an “ideal” hybrid would have 50/50 player/pet damage split. That said, my litmus test for pet hybrids is Necromancer’s Deathgrips. We’ve had endless threads begging for a proc change so they can be used by pure summoners, and the response has been always been, to quote the 1.0.0.8 patch notes, that this is “itemization for more hybrid pet summoning builds”.
Bound spirits don’t lie: Necromancer’s Deathgrips are only useful if you can get kills as a hybrid. With a 30% proc chance and 20s duration, sustaining 1 spirit in combat represents a minimum of 1 kill made every 6 seconds; 3 spirits represents a minimum of 1 kill made every 2 seconds. (Obviously a lot of kills will also be lost due to the 4s proc cooldown.) The Valbury and Gladiator videos show spirits running around all the time, so the player kills are definitely happening.
I think it’s a lot like BWC builds: you never really see any big damage numbers pop up, but the rate at which enemies melt make it clear that all the stacked procs/DoTs are having a significant effect. This is why rather than talk about raw damage output, I discussed the AOE traits that really mattered to the build: fire-based, fire-shred, auto-spread, and continuous uptime. The Valbury video especially makes clear how effectively enemies crowds are being roasted, and the bound spirits prove the results of the player damage.
I do agree that the Devastation from my previous build, or even the Obliteration I was using during development, would make the build more “active” and closer to an “ideal” hybrid since the AOE damage would become more obvious. Then again, this build is all-around stronger than my aether build, so I’m pretty comfortable with the tradeoff for leaning more toward pets than player damage.
Witching Hour is much better than people think though a lot of the power of the build is coming from everything else ofc. I managed to get 9.5s mad queen with WH build and I’m just some idiot who doesn’t play pet builds