I’ve tried once your Dracarris build and it was the most fun build i’ve ever played so far.
Now it’s time to try this one! Great work!
After seeing both videos that showcase and incredible performance I went thru grimtools only to see some kind of disjointed pile of green items and a lot of non-pet constellation. WTF, how did u do it?
Resummoning-based build IS awesome, but it holds one problem - enemies often turn their attention to you when temporary pet dies. While my petxplosionist actually relies on expendable pets and their aoe damage by design, unpredictable enemy behaviour is quite annoying.
Do the skeletons/swarmlings nullify an aggro problem for you?
No wonder this shit is getting nerfed, jesus christ :rolleyes:
With all the new mysticals i expect dracarris to be even better than this, simply because with dracarris you dont have to manage things like crazy.
A million button presses Actions/sec build :eek:
In all fairness, even lazy pet builds are less lazy than most other builds in crucible.
Night King’s solution to skeleton fragility (best defense --> overwhelming offense) is almost inevitable and doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room without digging heavily into DPS, which has spiraling consequences for pet cabalist in my experience. (At least in crucible.)
The good news: We get a summoner that legitimately FEELS different than the rest.
Bad news: Crap player like me probably won’t ever look as good as DaShiv playing this. 
Ok crate now nerf dashiv’s build even before he finished posting them.lol
Oh dude with the skeleton nerf do this build still playable for crucible gladiator ??? 
undecided::furious:
Pretty sure they had a good bead on each other. :rolleyes:
Should still be imminently capable. DPS came down but the intrinsic mechanics are untouched. (Great DPS, low CD summons).
EDIT: Ouch… disregard the second response.
They even nerf Patron Pauldron shoulder by removing crit damage for pet ><
My skele and mortar build should still, be OP - 
I’m pretty sure the skeleton nerf was inspired by DaShiv, not because of his OP builds, but simply because he himself requested it in multiple places, including this very build. The fact that they nerfed skeletons in such a way that almost exactly parallels his own suggestion is the main reason I’m inclined to believe this.
That being said, I still think this build will be viable, but with more points in WotC, for example, for flat damage. I’m certainly looking forward to trying it, as his builds are definitely my favorites.
Hi folks - patch 1.0.3.0 will slightly delay my finishing up the guide, since I’ll need to go through and update/revise some of the unpublished guide content. In the meantime, I’ve added a mini-blog at the top of the thread for updates to make it easier to stay on top of all the latest guide changes.
Yes - unfortunately, Crate’s approach to bonuses for pet sets isn’t nearly as synergistic as for their non-pet sets. That said, the large increase in flat damage for the Diviner set is a step in the right direction.
Maybe I’ll actually use one of Crate’s pet sets in one of my builds, after a few more patches. Looking forward to new pet items in the beast roguelike!
Seriously?[/quote]Hmm, that doesn’t quite seem right - I was pretty sure that the “dumbass” Skelemancer build had a Gladiator variant. :rolleyes:
In all seriousness though, my assessment hinges on a few facts:[list=2]
[li]A number of Praetorians with no previous pet experience had easily completed Ultimate during testing using skeleton builds.[/li]
[li]Post-release, just about every post I’ve seen from those struggling with skeletons have been those completely new to the game itself, rather than from people with experience with pet builds.[/li]
[li]Youtube has tons of videos of various skeleton builds using all kinds of item and devotion setups, so clearly there’s not a single “right” way that’s required to beat even Ultimate.[/list][/li]With this in mind, it seems pretty clear that just about any reasonable skeleton build can easily clear Ultimate, as long as the player is sufficiently familiar with the game mechanics.
I described them as “unlimited damage sponges”. For more details, see the “Resummon is the New Heal” article in the Analysis section.
If you look at the linked damage calc in the Analysis section, it provides a detailed breakdown of every damage component. To summarize, the build’s DPS is a combination of lots of tricks: flat damage stacking, conversion, massive RR, huge OA/crit bonuses, and other pet bonuses (such as high pet count and pet speed).
The build is simply very well-optimized for damage, the same way that Dracarris Incarnate was able to squeeze huge amounts of DPS out of a handful of tiny bugs. Except for this time, I’m working with a much bigger army.
One aspect of pet builds in Grim Dawn is that aggro is never 100% on your pets or 100% on yourself - it’s fluid and changes all the time, so a good pet build needs to handle all aggro situations fluently. I actually much prefer having aggro on myself, and you can see in the Gladiator video that I’m extremely aggressive with CoF spam to try to grab as much of it away from my pets as possible, before my pets can even reach the enemies.
Of course sometimes enemies will still lose interest (especially if they’re having pathing problems) and start attacking pets instead, and here’s where blight fiends come in super handy. I’d much rather have a boss smack around a blight fiend for a few seconds instead of decimating skeletons/swarmlings one-by-one. Since blight fiends are being used as more of a decoy/safeguard than as an extended-period tank, the fact that they’re constantly expiring and resummoning doesn’t become an issue at all. And having multiple blight fiends is even better - thanks to them, just about all my skeleton and swarmling casualties come from enemy AOE instead of melee damage.
It’s a real pleasure to read such a guide.
You learn a lot and it’s really clear and easy to follow.
Such dedication in your pet builds and guides.
You are not the only one, but thank you for that !
You and few other players are a great support to the GrimDawn community
This is what I like also about this game.
Am I using the spreadsheet incorrectly?
Plugging in Mantle of Mogdrog shows to be more damage than Mythical Mantle of the Patron.
(Adjusting conversions from -2 Will of the Crypt included.)
The spreadsheet also (incorrectly?) included %lightning damage from Raven despite the constellation not being taken.
DaShiv, you might be the reason I have so many hours in GD. You made pet builds fun for me. THANK YOU!
Preach.
lol. I was just teasing but you know that.
EDIT: Doh. Disregard. Ninja edit.
You don’t do a lot of build… But when you do …You do it for years ^^
The initial analysis was made pre-1.0.3.0, so now is a good time to revisit the calculation.
Mantle of Patron provides:
Part 1 - Flat Damage:[ul]
[li]+9 elemental (Storm Spirit)[/li]
[li]+2 vitality (WotC)[/li]
[li]+4% skill-based (first-step) vitality conversion (WotC)[/ul][/li]Part 2 - Damage Multiplier:[ul]
[li]+40% all[/li]
[li]+154% lightning[/li]
[li]+22% elemental (Storm Spirit)[/li]
[li]+24% elemental (WotC)[/li]
[li]+20% vitality (WotC)[/ul][/li]Part 4 - Crit Multiplier:[ul]
[li]+8% OA[/li]
[li]+16% crit (pre-patch only)[/ul][/li]Mantle of Mogdrogen provides:
Part 1 - Flat Damage:[ul]
[li]+21 lightning[/ul][/li]Part 2 - Damage Multiplier:[ul]
[li]+70% all[/li]
[li]+112% lightning[/ul][/li]Plugging these into the calc results in RRDmg for Patron=18706 and Mogdrogen=19351. (Please feel free to double check my math in case I’ve made any mistakes.) Easy, right?
But our Max Pet Damage calculator doesn’t attempt to calculate actual DPS based on crit probabilities - it’s designed to simply calculate max crit damage to compare against in-game observations. To calculate the impact of OA and crit, you’ll need to use an external OA/DA calculator, such as the OA/DA calculator from this thread. Using the “Eff. OA” and “+% Crit” bonuses from our calc against an enemy DA of 2531 (Mad Queen on Ultimate) and using the resulting OA/DA multiplier from the external calc, our final calculation is:
What this tells us is that Patron was stronger than Mogdrogen pre-nerf (and in fact, the difference was much more pronounced before the other 1.0.3.0 nerfs, such as Spellblade, Raise Skeletons, Stormbringer, etc). However, after the removal of the crit damage bonus from Patron, we should definitely switch to Mantle of Mogdrogen instead.
I’ve been meaning to run this calculation myself as part of updating the build for 1.0.3.0, so thanks for bringing it up!
Good catch - fixed! Let me know if there are any other discrepancies or omissions.