Updated guide with a LOT more information. I had time to work on this and make it look better.
I had the realization that Moosilauke is this build’s worst enemy thanks to the crystals chain freezing pets and being bleed immune (they have 1000% bleed duration reduction, meaning they literally don’t take bleed damage). Even with the CC res pylon he’s really tough. If I get him in the log arena it’s super sketchy – usually ends the run right there, but that’s because log arena more than anything. He actually seems to take the longest of all the nemesis I’ve gotten.
I’ve spent the night getting into the gritty details of optimization, and have found a LOT of possible optimizations for that extra boost. Just when I thought I was close to done, I realized I have more options, mostly in terms of weapon/offhand components and jewelry/armor augments.
I realized I was quite overcapped on chaos resistance (33 on GT). If I’m willing to drop some, suddenly tons of stuff opens up.
So lets go through some examples. For reference, the stats on the build I was using were 2878 DA, 16 overcap aether, 33 overcap on chaos. Also worth noting is I was only 15 over on poison. Pet attack speed was 113 with nothing, 173 with everything. Pet crit dmg was 79 with nothing, 117 with everything. Pet aether res was 19 over with oak skin, pet chaos res was 3 over. My HP was 16026.
Sandclaw scale setup: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/D2pxowy2 – pets gain 8% crit damage and 16% hp in exchange for 10% attack speed loss. I lose 60 DA + some chaos overcap in exchange as well, but gain about 600 HP. Still have 19 aether overcap, 18 chaos overcap, so a lot of augments could be changed around. I suspect the crit damage should be better than the attack speed overall.
Purified Salt + Imbued Silver weapon components: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/p25rPbyV – The main thing about this setup is that phys res is sacrificed, imo (51->43 for me). I don’t think the pet phys res should be that significant. Pets are 36 overcap on aether, 20 overcap chaos with 83 max on both with this setup and have a bonus 10% crit damage. I lose about 15% chaos res, 60 DA for this. Max aether/chaos res goes up.
This just looks straight out better than what I was doing provided the phys res loss doesn’t hurt too much, as I can replace the mogdrogen’s blessing with a 70 DA augment for even higher DA than before, or use a Sandclaw Scale and replace the 12 aether res augment on the helmet for 30 DA. It can also replace the mender’s powder in the same regard to result in the same amount of pet resistance. Still have a decent chunk of aether/chaos overcap myself with this. I don’t think losing pierce res overcap on pets should be that big of a deal other than on Callagadra.
I know sigatrev is a fan of mender’s powders and seems to like overcapping pet aether resistance, so I’m really curious if keeping the mender’s powder for extra overcap is worth it. Obviously if not, that’s more damage/defensives options, but I can certainly see it being worth, especially because sometimes the pets end up out of mogdrogen range.