[1.0.6.1] Familiar Medley - 9 Gladiator Viable builds based on Summon Familiar

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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The Mythical Will of Bysmiel allows you to summon 2 Ravens at once. There are enough items that have bonuses to Summon Familiar that it is pretty easy to get the skill to 26/16 where they get 5 shots each for a lot of damage. They are sufficiently strong that all you need to do to clear Gladiator is stay alive while they kill things. Once you’ve figured out how to do that, the sky is the limit. After clearing Gladiator with every Shaman subclass using the Beastcaller’s pet builds, I wanted to try do the same for Occultists and Familiars.

While there are a lot of items that boost Summon Familiar, some of the slots they occupy have very few useful alternative options so in terms of equipment there ends up being not too much variety in terms of gear used by these builds. There is also nothing that converts pet damage away from Lightning, so there is little damage type variety either.

Almost all of these builds use Primal Instinct because extra pet bodies are needed in general, plus the swarmlings are really good to begin with. The most unique builds here are the Cabalist builds which have enough pets to not need Primal Instinct (mostly), and split their focus to other pets in addition to Familiar.

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. On the Witch Hunter the second one I was used Wraithbound of Decay.

Most of these builds would be better off using Mythical Mark of Forgotten Spirits, but I don’t have one so I use Mythical Rotdrinker Crest instead.

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. Most of these are not optimized to maximum their potential.

Devotion Notes:
When using Dying God and Aeon’s Hourglass, I often choose not to use Shepherd’s Crook. This allows me to build using only 2 active skills on the summoner, which really helps keep threat down, and it allows me to take additional Celestial Powers to bind to my pets. Because of how the constellation requirements line up, I often end up using Manticore for Elemental builds. I usually bind Time Dilation to Curse of Frailty because on builds with Salazar or Primal Spirit I pretty much want it to proc as often as it possibly can, timing is not particularly critical. On most of these builds I do not use Arcane Bomb. It can’t bind to pets meaning I need an additional offensive skill of my own to trigger it, and it draws additional agro to me. For builds using Shepherd’s Crook and Ishtak it is fine, but less so for builds using Dying God and Aeon’s Hourglass.

Familiar Salazar Witch Hunter
Gladiator 151-170 - 12:15
2 x Salazar’s blade on a Witch Hunter works out pretty well, especially combined with Time Dilation. You get 2 Harbinger’s pretty much permanantly, frequent heals from Pneumatic Burst, and Blade Barrier for emergencies. With all that healing, you can afford a more offensive devotion setup, using both Dying God and Time Dilation.

Familiar Witchblade
Gladiator 151-170 - 12:30
This was settup was virtually the same as the Witch Hunter, but using Salazar + Stronghold Defender instead of 2 x Salazar. This worked out about as well as I could have hoped for. Not the most offensively powerful Familiar build, but I wouldn’t expect a Witchblade to be. I forgot to active Field Command for the Crucible run, so realistically this build would be a little faster.

Familiar Pyromancer
Gladiator 151-170 - 13:10
I really love devotion setups that uses Dying God, Ishtak, and Hourglass together, so since Demolitionist has a convenient to use skill that provides the kind of RR that doesn’t overlap with Manticore, I decided to go for it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t leaves very few Celestial Power attack skills possible for Familiar to use, so I went with Tsunami. Overall this build wasn’t as effective as I had hoped, but it did okay. I suspect a devotion setup not using Ishtak’s would have been more effective. I wanted to use the Muthical Black Grimoire of Og’Napesh to have an extra summon to hold agro, and forgot I was using the Shadowfiend’s Coil instead of the Voidmancer’s Coil so I replaced one of the rings instead of the belt. This would probably perform better with Voidmancer’s Coil + a second Glyph. As I noted in my Beastcaller’s Elementalist, I deliberately chose not to use Thermite Mines because they are difficult to use properly, cause me to draw extra agro, and can’t be used with most Celestial Powers.

Familair Warlock
Gladiator 151-170 - 11:50
Same equipment setup as the Pyromancer with the devotion setup from the Witchblade and Witch hunter. Played similar to the Pyromancer but a lot more robust.

Familiar/Reap Spirit Cabalist
Gladiator 151-170 - 9:50
I wanted to make use of the Wraithcaller’s Mantle, plus use the Stormbringer of Malmouth to convert the Wraith’s Vitality damage to Lightning. I tried something similar a while ago but using Beastcaller’s Helm and Mogdrogen’s Ardor. This worked out a lot better, the swarmlings really help with agro. This build manages to be effective despite having medicore defenses because of how little agro it.

NOTE: The following 4 have been posted before, I’m including them here for completeness.
Familiar Deceiver
Gladiator 151-170 - 9:20
This was my first Familiar build. I wanted to play to the synergy between Aura of Censure, Primal Instict, and Familiars. It worked out pretty well.

Familiar Conjurer
Gladiator 151-170 - 9:00
Similar to the above but with a Conjurer instead. Unsurprisingly more effective, with all of the Shaman abilities that are amazing for pet builds.

Familiar/Blight Fiend Cabalist
Gladiator 151-170 - 8:00
My first try at a Cabalist build using Familiars. A lot of equipment boosts both Familiar and Blight Fiend so I wanted to try them together. There was no damage type synergy but Acid/Poison does compliment Lightning well in that nothing has high resistance to both.

SkeleFamiliar Cabalist
Gladiator 151-170 - 6:20
The infamous Skeleton Familiar cabalist build. Absurdly powerful.

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It’s amazing how pet builds evolved from gimmicky niche builds to the most powerful build that clear all content in record times without the help of impossible green items.

Good job on bringing all those concepts into the spotlight, man!

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Hey sig - how long have you played GD for? Is your forum-join-date any sort of indicator?

I ask because I’m actually really curious as to whether a ‘new player’ revamped the pet-meta.

EDIT: Not that it matters. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve posted in a previous thread that 1.0.0.7 brought a huge hammer down on a pet build that swallowed up gladiator and killed mogdrogen in record time. Late 2016 before you and others were around, it seems.

Not only was curse of frailty nerfed, but three items (spark of ultos, sovereign ruby of domination, and glyph of kelphat’zoth) plus the primal instinct relic had to be nerfed for this OP build.

But your general point remains that pet builds rarely becomes the most powerful build.

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I played some vanilla GD back in 2016, and started playing AoM off and on sometime in February, shortly before the 1.0.5.0 patch. I didn’t make an account until I had something to post, just lurked anonymously until then.

I read up on all the conventional wisdom regarding pet builds but it didn’t ever really work right for me, maybe because of changes between patches, or because the builds required unrealistic rare items and crazy micro management to play, so I tried instead to focus on builds where it was much easier to survive and then permuted from there.

Of course I also doubt almost any of these builds would have worked back in 1.0.5.0, the current patch was huge for pet builds, shaman in particular.

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Definitely using a couple of old characters for these builds, they were boring and outdated. Now I can perhaps work on my dislike for pet builds, at least I won’t have to level them :slight_smile:

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Really love what you are doing here man.
Previously I have kind of give up on the pet build because it is so hard to design and require sick piloting skills. Then you brought up a new philosophy and have test it in all sort of mastery combination. it really get my hopes up. But still, the itemization is almost the same across all build (beside beastcaller set) shows that there still much work to be done from crate’s side to better give pet more support.

Sent from my Redmi Note 3 using Tapatalk

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Good pet builds was amongst te highest dps builds at least since i play GD (around 2 years).

A pet conjurer (pre AoM) held (probably still holding) the record for the fastest Mogdrogen kill (3 and a half minutes or so), Primal Instinct received some of the hardest nerfs i saw in GD since then.

Familiar on the other hand was really weak indeed, but AoM doubled its damage potential with a single item, so no wonder :).

Also, back then Familiar didn’t received flat damage bonuses at all as it’s basic attacks were considered spells, so it had no “weapon damage” wich is needed to benefit flom flat damage buffs, and that’s probably not the case anymore since Lightning Strike received (alongside other pet skills) a %WD part which could mean the base attacks got also revorked like that, dunno.

So IMHO pet builds were good before, but Familiar only became an actual damage dealing part of them somewhat recently.

PS: Great builds btw.

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Duel-Wield Salazar Harbringer Gladiator Clearer

Zantai can finally relax in peace

I’m more surprised that your Pyromancer can willingly give up 65% Lightning RR between Thermite Mines and Arcane Bomb and still can possibly beat 2 150-170 runs in one set of blessings if you did the equipment changes you were referring to. That definitely throws the conventional wisdom on pet builds right out of the water and demonstrates just how powerful these birds can get. It helps that the equipment’s all there to get Familiar to 26/16 in the first place.

Just a quick nitpick - for the Pyromancer build, Stag + 1 node in Tree of Life is an inefficient way to use those devotion points. Solemn Watcher (provides the same Pierce Resistance + all that DA) or Ulo (resistances for you and your pets + Nullifcation ability) are much better alternatives in comparison. Other than that, the devotions across all the builds look like they’re perfectly optimized and the gear is very limited by whichever pet we’re getting to 26/16. No need to look into pet builds, everyone can go home now. :stuck_out_tongue:

Kidding. Can’t wait until the new items / devotions from the expansion come.

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Keep in mind that I’m not using any +5 BoMs or ridiculously rare MIs. If you used a +5 Familiar BoM, and/or a Familiar bonus Heretic’s Salazar’s blade, you’d have tons of equipment playroom.

I suspect that you could actually do a lot of interesting and cool with DW Rare Salazar’s. I still want to mess around with Necro-based summon builds, and really want to clear Gladiator with a Hellhound build because they are so bad, but after that I may take to the MIs and try some really different concepts.

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Here is my conjurer:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/D2pKAeBN

Gladiator - 151-170 - from 6:45 to 7:45 with banners and potions. Time depends on mobs.

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