I’ve never focused on any specific %damage values. Generally speaking, you want (and can get without too much trouble) at least 2000%, but for pet builds speed is often at least as important. 130% pet attack speed is good, 180% is great, much more than that is overkill.
Different damage types also have access to wildly different amounts of both % bonuses and RR.
[ul][li]Physical gets some of the most RR, but can only get up to around 2000%. [/li]
[li]Chaos has some of the least RR but can get to 3000%. [/li]
[li]Lighting can get around 2800% with a lot of RR, but conversion isn’t full meaning it’s mostly Familiars. [/li]
[li]Vitality has trouble getting much above 2200% but has tons of flat damage and RR.[/li]
[li]Poison can get to around 3000% but RR is limited, and only Blight Fiends really supply any damage.[/li]
[/ul]
Also the character sheet doesn’t tell the full story. Most pets have ~150% all damage on the skill itself and the character sheet only shows all damage. There are tons of items/skills that boost specific damage types. Non-pet specific aura boosts don’t show up in GrimTools (e.g. Battlecry proc from Barbaros)
Also pet builds tend to deal a veritable soup of different damage types.
Probably, depends on what you mean by top tier and how much hybrid. I’m afraid I don’t understand non-pet builds well enough to have much hope of pulling off a serious hybrid.
I did manage a 7:08 clear with a Storm Totem/Familiar Conjurer using a stupid MI weapon, but Storm Totem is basically a pet and I think the Familiars were doing most of the work anyway based on the number of Bound Spirits spawned. I thought it’d be cool to use Lightning pets while having Stormbringer of Malmouth convert Bound Spirit vitality to lighting so they’d be all elemental.
I think your best bets would be Diviner Ritualist/Cabalist, Lightning Conjurer/Vindicator, Elemental Deceiver/Vindicator, Witching Hour Deceiver/Conjurer/???.
You’d definitely want to focus on Familiar, Primal Spirit, or Reap Spirit for your pets. Those are the easiest to itemize for and also give the most power for the least points, while being the easiest to keep alive. Familiars are basically immortal, and the other two are temporary by design. Diviner’s set is pretty much a must if you want to use Reap Spirit for the pets, but I’ve been messing around with a lot of Diviner builds lately and have had some pretty good success. I’ll post about them eventually.
Viper applies to player attacks only, not pet attacks. Storm Orb’s %weapon damage is the pet’s flat damage (from any flat damage bonuses, such as from Storm Spirit). In my experience, the RR on Viper is not useful to pet builds.