[1.1.2.5] Elemental Beastcaller's Conjurer

Last patch updated: 1.1.2.2

With Forgotten Gods came a lot of balance adjustments for pets that brought many of the top pet builds back down from the stratosphere. The expansion also brought a lot of new goodies for pets which has greatly expanded the variety of competitive builds. Beastcaller’s Conjurer have emerged largely unscathed, and received a few minor enhancements along the way.

Update 1.1.2.0 brought a few additional enhancements that are applicable to this builds, including Ground Slam gaining pass-through and aether resistance on Oak Skin.

===GrimTools===

Gladiator 151-170 - 6:30
SR 75 Grava + Kuba + Theodin [from 1.1.0.0]
I’ve taken this build as far as SR 85 with buffs but SR difficulty in general extremely inconsistent so that is not very repeatable. SR 75-76 should be doable consistently.

Devotions

Meteor Shower + Whirlpool + Elemental Storm + Giant’s Blood + Shepherd’s Call + Howl of Mogdrogen

I absolutely love this devotion setup, and I now use it on almost every elemental pet build.

Meteor Shower is the best elemental offensive Celestial Power you can use. For Elemental pet builds, Howl of Mogdrogen is the best T3 pet devotion offensively to go for. In my testing I found that Blizzard and Whirlpool are pretty much equal at this point, so I prefer to use Whirlpool because the other nodes involved are better defensively. The recent buffs to Behemoth/Giant’s Blood make it very much worth taking, and that leaves almost no remaining wiggle room in this devotion setup. Beastcaller’s Talisman + Ground Slam + Ember Claws does a great job keeping agro on your pets for the most part.

If you are not comfortable with the defenses of these builds, you can choose a devotion setup using Ishtak and Tree of Life. The recent buffs to Tree of Life make it incredibly potent for keeping both player and pets alive. That devotion path is significantly slower, but is a great option for less experienced or more cautious/patient pilots.

Equipment Options

3p Trinkets vs Heart of the Mountain + Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth

Trinkets are a bit better defensively, due to the health and physical resistance on the completion bonus, the aether/chaos resistances on the rings, and the active heal through the granted skill Bysmiel’s Command.

Heart of the Mountain + Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth is a bit better offensively. The extra pet is decently strong, and the Glyphs max Primal Spirit and provide a lot of bonus lightning damage.

Mogdrogen’s Ardor vs Primal Instinct

In the Crucible, Mogdrogen’s Ardor often slightly outperforms due to the extra skills and pet resistances. Swarmlings aren’t as useful in the Crucible because clear speeds are largely impacted by how fast your pets reach their targets. Swarmlings are very slow, so they tend not be very useful on otherwise fast builds. They are also temporary pets, preventing them from gaining the extra bonus from Crucible buffs.

To make best use of Swarmlings in the Crucible, you need to pilot a little differently. Aside from taking down occasional high value targets (boss/nemesis), you generally need to avoid using Pet Attack so that the Swarmlings AI can just go for whatever is closest to them. If you are manually moving pets around, the Swarmlings will spend most of their time moving instead of attacking.

In SR, particularly on boss shards, the movement speed of swarmlings is much less of an issue as targets tend to live much longer. The lack of guaranteed buffs also makes swarmlings more powerful relative to your permanent pets, and the extra bodies can do a lot to improve survivability. Primal Instinct tends to perform slightly better in SR, in my experience.

Runebrand Legwraps vs Chausses Barbaros vs Wildshorn Legguards

With Aether resistance now available on Oak Skin, the Wildshorn Legguards are now the best pants option in my opinion. Chausses of Barbaros is a fine alternative but leaves you a bit more starved for skill points. If you’re using both 3p Trinkets and Primal Instinct, the Runebrand Legwraps can be a better options because you’ll need the elemental resistance, and in SR the CC resistance is also very useful.

Bysmiel’s Mindweaver vs Bysmiel’s Grasp vs Spark of Ultos

Bysmiel’s Mindweaver performs best all around, followed by Spark of Ultos, followed by Bysmiel’s Grasp. Not much else to say about this.

Augments

On Beastcaller’s builds, I usually use some combination of Mogdrogen’s Blessing and Mender’s Powder, depending on the setup and whether I am playing Crucible or SR. Using Mogdrogen’s Ardor in Crucible, I’ll use all Mogdrogen’s Blessing. Using Primal Instinct in SR, I’ll use two Mender’s Powders if I’m using Trinkets, and three if I’m using the Glyphs.

Alternatives

Here are some examples using the alternatives above:

Glyphs + Primal Instinct
Crucible 6:30-7:30, SR-76 with high reliability

Glyphs + Mogdrogen’s Ardor
Crucible 6:30-7:30, SR-76 with medium reliability

3p Trinkets + Mogdrogen’s Ardor
Crucible 7:00-7:45 SR-76 with good reliability

3p Trinkets + Primal Instinct
Crucible 7:00-7:45, SR-76 with high reliability

Glyphs + Primal Instinct + Ishtak
Crucible 7:00-8:00, SR-76 with high reliability

Glyphs + Primal Instinct + Ishtak + Tree
Crucible 7:45-9:00, SR-76 with high reliability

Bonus

Elemental Trinkets Conjurer
Crucible 6:30-7:15

This setup is a little weaker on defense compared to Beastcaller’s. The defenses are fine for Crucible but the difference is noticable in SR. Trinket’s Conjurers can farm SR-76 reliably with Ishtak/Tree of Life devotion setups, but end up being a bit slower as a result.

Leveling

Follow this guide until lvl 94, then switch over to Beastcaller’s gear. It’s a little out of date but it’s the best I can offer for now.

4 Likes

Ah yes, here we go.

Been looking at a lot of setup’s similar – I assume you’ve looked at the Manifestarius offhand a bit? As much as I like the defensive stats on Cataclysm’s Eye, Manifestarius has been something I’ve wanted to use in a pet build for a while now. It even has pet bleed res…

And yeah, the biggest thing I really like about elemental pets is that they have a large variety of procs to choose from. Kinda makes me wonder what would happen if pets had a couple things like fire to physical conversion or cold to physical conversion.

As much as I would like Birbs shooting physical lightning bolts, Elemental would still probably be better due to having more support from both items, skills and RR.

Clearly what we really need is pet retaliation damage added to attack.

Side note: This is what I was looking at for Elemental Beastcaller’s: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/1NXoGj3Z didn’t finish the devotions, but the gear is kinda the important part. Amulet choice I think is obvious, cause I’ve been on the 90+% uptime primal spirit kick for a while.

I doesn’t make a lot of sense when you already have tons of conversation. The skill bonuses end up being move valuable, IMO. I tried using it instead of Bysmiel’s Mindweaver a while back and found the mindweaver setup to be more effective. If there was any one-handed weapon with +1 shaman and Occultist, I think the results might be different.

It’d be inteserting for sure. It’s effectiveness would be linked to where that conversation came in. Both items and devotions for elemental are currently better, and most of the good elemental items also have elemental conversation.

Nice build, added to my thread. :wink:

Yes please. We need a Claw of Hagaraz for conjurer :slight_smile:

Nah but really, especially with the set transmutation (since cataclysm belt is craftable) getting the offhand isn’t even hard either while playing legit, assuming you get the blueprint for the belt that is.

Yes, pet retaliation with a lot of flat ret + %ret dmg in every pet gear :stuck_out_tongue:

Btw, since all of phy dmg gets converted with good rolls, some pints could be taken from CoF and added elsewhere like Raging Tempest for eg.

I did a lot more comparison than just those listed in the OP, so I’ll pass on some of those results that may be relevant here:

  • With only 1 Familiar, Hellhound is a better investment than Lightning Strike, even when using Trinket rings that each give +2 Lightning Strike. I wasn’t using 26/16 Familiar in that test, but I can’t imagine that would dramatically change the power of 13/12 Lightning Strike. In your case, using Beastcaller’s, investment in Briarthorns may make more sense.
  • I found that for Beastcaller’s, Heart of the Mountain > Bysmiel’s Iris > Sovereign Ruby ~= Will of Bysmiel. Again this was without 26/16 Familiar, but it held for 22/12 Primal Spirit which you do not have.

If you want to focus on Familiars + Primal Spirit, you’re probably better off using Trinkets + Necrolord’s Gaze instead.

considering according to the pet DB (and personal tests before this backed this up) familiar has literally 0 weapon damage, 26 shouldn’t change the power of lightning strike much other than the damage + crit and such.

interesting on the amulets. Haven’t had a chance to use Heart of the Mountain in a while. I can absolutely see why it’s still strong. Bysmiel’s Iris is a bit surprising to see even beating out Sovereign Ruby on a build that’s not focused on having the bysmiel set. (also, does mythical blightshard amulet fit in anywhere here or do the pets just die too easily?)

I’m assuming this also all applies to SR + crucible both. Primal Spirit is pretty weak in crucible compared to campaign as I’ve noticed.

I’m hoping to get back into the pet side of things soon, just haven’t been getting a lot of the items that I’ve wanted to get after restarting from nothing in FG. Managed to try bleed pets at least, I suppose.

Also one other question while watching the SR video, what’s the reason you sometimes click the icon to resummon pets instead of pressing the button? Kind of a super random question, but I’m curious because it seems like you don’t do it all the time.

Until very recently I had buffs before pets on the alt toolbar. I just moved them to the front so that I can safely hotkey them without worrying about accidentally toggling a buff and I’m not used to it yet.

I was surprised too. I suspect Iris is mostly the +1 skills doing some combination of increasing your power and freeing up other skill points.
I didn’t test Blightshard Amulet because I remember trying those pets once and finding them utterly useless. I suppose I could check again but I don’t expect a different result based on their stats.

In my experience with Blightshard Amulet while fresh starting, the pets were basically only good at proccing devotions on stuff that didn’t die instantly due to their high hit rate. For some reason, those pets draw an insane amount of threat though and very often died when I used them.

I couldn’t really judge the damage because ya know, fresh start, I had shit gear when I was using it. Just was curious if you had any experience with it that differs from mine.

I suppose Heart of the Sand King would be interesting to chuck in to a test since it has +1 occultist instead of +1 shaman like every other amulet.

Sigatrev, would you recommend transitioning to this build from your “Familiar Conjurer (Beginner’s Guide)”? I’m far from having all the gear for this build but could switch skills and devotions around.

I actually also tested a hybrid Elemental/Bleed build using Heart of the Sand King at the same time, and tested using the Eldritch Conduit with Familiar bonus. The Conduit’s performance was roughly the same as Bysmiel’s Iris, and the hybrid was somewhere between Bysmiel’s Iris and Sovereign Ruby but had some pretty severe resistance issues. I think that might have been before Familiar’s base damage was nerfed, because I just tried the Conduit again and got worse results. I then tried the Eldritch Conduit with the CoF bonus and got almost the same performance as Heart of the Mountain while having better player defeses. That might ultimately be the best way to go.

I think in your case, with the focus on Familiar, you should give the Conduit a try.

I would stick with the Familiar build’s skills until you have the full Beastcaller’s set. Without that, you don’t get either the uptime bonus to Primal Spirit or the second Briarthorn, so you’d probably end up weaker. Switching to this Devotion setup would probably be benefit though.

Thanks for the advice. I have two items with -4 sec skill recharge for Primal Spirit (one being the Mythical Will of Bysmiel), but no second Briarthorn yet. How about lowering the number of points assigned to lightning strike, and putting them in hellhound, as you suggested in the OP? My current gear already has a bunch of +hellhound and its related skills.

That is definitely a good thing to do. Max hellhound with 1 point in Ember Claws.

I think i know the answer but i was wondering is there any area in perticular to farm the mythical beastcallers? All i have is normal helm. I been doing steps of torment and grove so far but no luck yet

Once you get the blueprint for the mythical helmet you can transmute them using the new set conversion mechanics, but otherwise loot is entirely random.

Yeah thats what i thought but i wasn’t sure. Ah well i’ll keep at it thank you!

Ohi frogot to ask should i swap my rifthound salts for the mogdrogen’s blessing?Or swap them for menders powder? https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrj0xkZ is my layout atm