[1.0.6.1] Beastcaller's Build Medley - 12 Gladiator viable pet builds based on the Beastcaller's set

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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The Mythical Beastcaller’s set provides a great platform Gladiator viable pet builds. I wanted to showcase just how versatile the set is by making builds around it using all possible Shaman subclasses, but threw in a few extra Conjurer/Ritualist builds because those classes provide pets of their own. Not many of these builds are particularly fast, but most are pretty safe and reliable.

None of these builds use any MIs other than Salazar’s Soverign Blade. The one I used was Wraithbound of Thunder, because I have found a bunch of Wraithbound Salazar’s Blades, but the affixes are not very important.

Disclaimer:
Many of these are not necessarily unique build concepts. Some of these are very very similar to each other, and some similar concepts have been tried before by others including thepowerofmediocrity, superfluff, and more. Most of these are not optimized to maximum their potential. The purpose of this thread is mainly to showcase the set’s flexibility in terms of build design.

Winter King Beastcaller’s Trickster
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:10
This build was super tanky thanks to high DA, Physical Resist, lots of healing, and Blade Barrier. It could face tank like a pro which was good because it really needed the RR from Veil of Shadows. This build doesn’t have a whole lot of damage output though. It didn’t need Ishtak, so I tried Mogdrogen + Leviathan and it worked out okay. Credit to SirSpanksalot for the idea to use Savagrey.

Winter King Beastcaller’s Conjurer
Gladiator 151-170 in 11:06
Conjurer variant of the above. It unsurprisingly played much better.

Fire/Chaos Beastcaller’s Conjurer
Gladiator 151-170 in 9:00
I wanted to see how good Meteor Shower was on a pet build, and because of the need for Elditch and Chaos it made some sense to try Fire/Chaos damage types. I considered trying this setup on either Pyromancer or Elementalist but I’m not sure it would manage.

Elemental Beastcaller’s Druid
Gladiator 151-170 in 12:40
I tried a Druid variant of the Winter King build but it didn’t work out, so I did it with Spark of Ultos general elemental instead. I’m sure there are better druid summoner builds, but honestly I’m not a huge fan of the class combination.

Elemental Beastcaller’s Elementalist
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:40
I tried to do the “obvious” thing and use Thermite Mines for the RR, but they are hard to use and have the same limitations as Wind Devil - they don’t spawn Swarmlings and can’t proc Celestial Powers like Shepher’d Call. I couldn’t pilot it very well and it flopped, so I decided to try the same setup I used for the Druid, since the pet relevant bonuses of Demolitionist are very similar to the ones from Arcanist. It was a bit slow but relatively safe. I even stuck with Blizzard because I find it to be pretty powerful and effective, and requires few extra devotion points to get. There are probably more effective ways to play an Elementalist summoner, but this did clear Gladiator so I can’t complain too much.

Physical/Pierce Beastcaller’s Vindicator
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:30
Given the bonus to Inquisitor’s Seal on Mythical Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth it would seem pretty natural to play a Lightning Pet build here, but having just done that on Druid and Elementalist builds I wanted to try something different. This build was super tanky, but had somewhat mediocre damage output. You could almost certainly improve damage output with a different devotion, particularly one with Time Dilation to improve uptime of Salazar and Primal Spirit, but you’d have to be careful not to sacrifice too much defense or lose the benefits of face-tanking. The devotion setup used by the Warder build below would probably be very effective here as well.

Physical Beastcaller’s Warder
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:20
This actually played a lot better than I was expecting. This build leveraged the combination of Wendigo Totem and Overguard for massive defense. As Soldier has very little to offer offensively, I opted to take the Time Dilation + Hungering Void + Nature’s Guardian devotion combo pack, leaving me with no Celestial powers for my pets to proc, but giving me much needed uptime for Salazar’s Harbinger and Primal Spirit. The build was very tanky, but didn’t have much play room on resistances. On the build as listed, without the aura from Salazar’s Harbinger the Elemental resistance is only 77. I was willing to deal with a lower poison resist because with the crucible blessings provide some, there are no dangerous enemies that deal acid/poison on 150+ waves, and not a lot of poison RR.

Skeleton + Beastcaller’s Death’s Gate Ritualist
Gladiator 151-170 in 17:00
Was curious if a Vitality Beastcaller’s build would work, but it didn’t really. I noticed that it was within range of being able to max skeletons so I gave it a shot. Not great, but interesting.

Skeleton + Beastcaller’s Witching Hour Ritualist
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:30
Same as the above, but with Witching Hour instead of Guardian of Death’s Gate, and Mogdrogen’s Ardor instead of Dirge of Akrovia. More effective, but still not really my style.

Zookeeper Beastcaller’s Ritualist
Gladiator 151-170 in 13:04
I had been doing some testing with Mythical Black Grimoire of Og’Napesh on a more typical Conjurer and decided I wanted to try getting a larger mass of “tough” pets so I tried it out on a Ritualist with Blight Fiends and Wraiths, and threw in Salazar’s as well. This wasn’t the most effective build, but it was actually really fun to play. Having only one active skill helped keep my threat low which was nice because killing things took so long. The huge spreads of damage types didn’t help.

Physical Beastcaller’s Conjurer
Gladiator 151-170 in 12:30
This was posted before, but I thought it’d include it here for completeness. This was my first Gladiator viable pet build.

Beastcaller’s Witching Hour Conjurer
Gladiator 151-170 in 8:09
This has also been posted before. Unsurprisingly, the Witching Hour build is the most powerful of all of them.

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Dat phys res doe.

EDIT: You should put 1 point into maelstrom. veretragna pointed out to me that the AoE from it is excellent for spreading RR.

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Looks like a Compendium!
Excellent builds @sigatrev. I didn’t try to play pet builds last patches, but it is not needed - your builds are well rounded, I don’t see the way to make a better pet build.
Minor improvements are possible, but they don’t make global difference.

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^Exactly that.

I simultaneously both dread and look forward to adding these builds into the compendium. :rolleyes:

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For full completeness, I wanted to point out that some of these build concepts had been attempted in the past, but I wanted to thank sigatrev for painstaking going through the effort to test each and every one of these. Some of these builds I tried taking through Crucible but couldn’t get nearly the results that the OP did, I guess Beastcaller’s is just that much above the competition (similar to how Justicar makes attempting any other fire melee build obsolete).

Winter King Trickster was something I looked into and posted here - TPOM’s Hybrid Winter King Trickster I wanted to be original and not rely on Beastcaller’s, but my Crucible results were disastrous compared to sigatrev’s - Beastcaller’s too good, I guess.

Elemental Beastcaller’s Druid was first Superfluff’s creation - he decided not to post the build in favor of working on his Ritualist.

Physical / Pierce Vindicator is almost a carbon copy (but a better performing version) of my own Vindicator which is already submitted to the Compendium: TPOM’s Pet Vindicator

I do not know whether this means sir spanksalot will replace my Vindicator with his since he clears 170 Crucible and I could not. It would feel awkward to have two builds that perform basically the exact same function.

Zookeeper Ritualist looks very similar (but again, better polished) to arm quimson’s Zookeeper Ritualist

This is not to undermine sigatrev’s accomplishments by any means - he deserves all the credit for piloting these builds. I just wanted to point out how other people attempted these builds in the past and make sure they didn’t get left behind in this celebration.

I must say, absolute props for building a Warder that can complete Gladiator. I was not expecting that, to say the least.

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Nice builds/compendium, sigatrev. I haven’t thought that one can play that many builds with the Beastcaller set.

However, it seems that some links are incorrect. The last link the same builds.

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I do not know whether this means sir spanksalot will replace my Vindicator with his since he clears 170 Crucible and I could not. It would feel awkward to have two builds that perform basically the exact same function.

There are no rules stating that there can’t be duplicates in the compendium, nor do I intend on starting it.

I doubt the builds are built 100% the same way - right down to skill point distribution, and devotion pathing.

I think it’d be helpful for both of them to be there so that new players can compare the 2 to understand the pros and cons of each.

That being said - if anyone would like me to remove a submission from the compendium, just lmk.

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Thanks, I fixed the link.

I added a disclaimer to the original post to clarify that.