[1.1.5.2] [HC] The Immortal Army - Pet Dervish - Beginner Friendly Pet build! Super fast MC farmer!

That is a REALLY nice feature of Nvidia. Unfortunately I have a Radeon card. It may have a similar feature as both companies normally strive to be on a par with each other. I have not come across it, but worth a Google.

it’s build right into the driver

I think my card and driver are too old for that. My driver has nothing like that.

I have a HD 5800. Radeon has something called Radeon ReLive, but from reading the requirements. It does not look my card is supported.

I have found a YouTube clip that shows how to use “OBS Studio” for recording - I will give that a go.

Yeah that’s the problem with having 10 year old hardware, support for it starts getting dropped. Since that’s the case you will have to use a third party software like obs or fraps if you want to record gameplay

That OBS Studio captures the game nicely and is easy to install and use.
I am not sure the best way to post the video here as this is the first time I have tried this.
I am using a shared link, forgive me if this is the incorrect way of doing it.

The video is of lvl 92 in Ultimate with the lvl 80+ gear still, running from Direni to Darius Cronley.
I am using PB and Living Shadows in this alternative.

EDIT …

Ok, I am now able to equip my lvl 94 equipment and it really does make a vast difference :star:

Still looking for some decent leggings and some other fine tuned upgrades, but getting there, and the build is now ROCKING.

You can immediately see the difference here if you compare the SAME run to the above previous 80+ gear.

Nuff Said!, it smashes things to pieces with very little effort from the player, I just either charge in dealing damage, or charge out dealing damage.

As a player you have the option to stand back and let the army do what they do, or stride in and utilize the 2 “Fight or Flight” skills that actually deal damage anyway whether you are rushing in, or getting the hell out of there. They are your “Get out of Dodge” or “Here I am, Rock me like a Hurricane” options.

The build as it stands is able to charge into the battle with Ram and Vires and stick around in the melee for a while dealing damage before jetting out of danger, leaving the army to continue their damage and is quite resilient in resistances, DA and armor absorption.

@Contragor Fire build I think will probably have tons more damage to the pets that lets you stand back and watch, and as he says “You are welcome to climb in and have a few swings yourself”. This build immerses the player a little more with the fight and flight damage mechanics that requires more player interaction to add to the damage pool and encourages more " climb in and assist" gratification.

As is the norm with Grim Dawn, there is NO ultimate build with any class combo or BIS as there are in many other games I am not going to mention.

Once I am happy with the final lvl 100 build and found all the other shit I am missing, I will post Grim Tools.

2 Likes

that looks nice…looking forward to a grimtools link with full setup (skill points/devotions/attributes/gear) for the final end game version when u have the time

New post (or rather EDIT), not sure if Discord triggers on edits or new posts, but see above.

I only read far enough in the posts to see that you’d considered but discarded a vitality build for this idea, but not far enough to see if anything had come from that, so my apologies if this has been addressed already. My vitality/acid build for this idea is only around level 80 for real testing, but theorycrafting says it should be plenty strong in the long run.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/qNYXAbJZ

You’re right enough that you lose a blade spirit, but better damage conversion should about even things out in the long run, since I don’t think multiple sources of damage conversion stack additively the way you’ve implied it does. Unless that’s changed in the past couple of updates since I actually looked it up. Shrugs. The Deathstalker will be a bit weaker, since I didn’t go out of my way to convert its physical damage. The build still uses MIs, which doesn’t make me happy, but I managed to meet my minimum resistance requirements without any prefixes or suffixes at all, if only barely, so pretty much anything will be a net gain.

The armor and DA is a bit weak for my tastes, but considering combat is nearly 100% kiting it’s not a huge issue, and a vitality build means easy access to ADCtH, so its a decent trade to me. There’s also not a lot of give in the equipment, not with a vitality/acid split and trying to avoid MIs if I can. Also, since I’m lazy, I favor items with on attack effects that get procced by Night’s Chill. I can’t say it looks better than your versions (not that I didn’t try), but it shouldn’t fall behind, at least. Unless I’m missing something. Since I don’t have a completed test build yet, who knows?

1 Like

Looks pretty good to me. This needs testing, but on paper it should be very strong indeed. Nice setup! Would it be stronger than the fire pet dervish? Not sure. EoR easily adds about 100k dps to this spec if you are willing to drop a few points here and there. But even without the extra skill and its good synergy with the overall fire spec, the devotions look a bit stronger on the fire side. Plenty of mobs have high fire and vit res though, so not sure. But it should definitely be on par if not better than the acid version I posted earlier. I hope you get it to 100 and test thoroughly.

As an official member of the Lazy Summoner’s Guild (since Diablo 2, bless its little black necromancer heart), I was quite pleased when I saw this topic. I looked at the Dervish when FG came out, but dismissed it without looking too deeply when I saw that the Guardians and Spirits shared no common damage types. Ended up with a pure fire Paladin specced Guardian/Aura of Censure/EoR not too dissimilar to your fire build. Hence not following in your footsteps for this character.

As a vitality build, the only real option for a non-summon nuke is PB, if you aren’t confident in your conversions. And it is very skill point hungry if you want it to perform properly for DPS, in a very skill point starved build. I would max out Blade Trap and never look back if the blessed damned thing actually worked on bosses. Likewise, I’d take Blade Burst if Lethal Assault worked with summons, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I’d like to figure out a way to better leverage the vitality build’s superior CDR, but most vitality devotions are more focused on sustain than DPS, and the build doesn’t really use any other skills. More points into Clarity of Purpose for more OA and a higher crit rate? I’d love to, but skill points again…

1 Like

Not seeing many other options to improve DPS, I sacrificed a bit of acid damage and some less useful RR to the Hungering Void for more OA, more crit damage, and maxed PB.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrWoqON

Initial testing on of the new devotion spread is favorable, especially against larger crowds where the RR I gave up was useless, but it’s possible I’ve lost some potential single target damage. Even if I did, I’d consider it worth it.

Died a few times, but that has more to do with my playing one-handed in Intermediate Ashes of Malmouth with gear I haven’t updated since level 40 than the build itself. If anything, the fact that I’ve only died a few times is promising.

I’ve run a similar build to this in the past, it’s worth considering stacking all your damage to Poison & Acid (since it’s less resisted than Vitality, for example 33% less on many bosses) and relegating Blade Spirit to just a devotion proc’er.

Mythical Pack of Deadly Means has a 50% vitality to poison conversion and there are Magi rings that convert 25% - that way you can get more mileage out of your Guardians and not worry about the lack of Vitality RR on the Nightblade side. Also pure Poison & Acid damage have some of the best devotion paths all clustered together - relatively naturely.

I’d never even considered that, since you can’t double convert elements. Does the Guardian adjustment not actually count as a conversion? Anyway, not going to sacrifice my Blade Spirits, simply because if you give up on them then you’re better off not using Nightblade to begin with.

The Guardian transmuter from your Oathkeeper mastery happens first before your item conversions kick in, so in fact you can convert everything to Poison.

Well I’d say Nightblade is still useful even if you relegate Blade Spirits because they are one of the few classes that has Poison RR, Poison passives, and Poison damage on skills naturally and they have good defensive options.

Plus having Blade Spirits, even if you dont focus on them, in essence lets you be more lazy and attach a powerful devotion to it - so it’s still contributing ‘lazy’ damage that way.

1 Like

It occurred to me after I hit 94 and was rummaging through my stash for the move to final tier equipment. If I’m less concerned about the Guardian/Spirit thing than I am about simply amassing a horde of invincible vitality minions, the Blood Knight set is right there. If I drop the acid secondary element and focus entirely on vitality, Blood Knight does pretty much everything that I want. And PB is really, really good at proccing on attack skills.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jxabxZ

While this build will shrink my standing army, if you just embrace the fact that you’re a stationary turret for most fights, you’ll be swimming in a horde of skeletons, blood servants, and horrible eldritch abominations from beyond reality in just a few seconds. As such, there’s a small ramp-up time before you can start DPSing in earnest. Not all of them are invincible, but the cooldown is so short and the resummoning so fast that I don’t see it being a problem. And if they have HP, they can block bullets, which is nice for a stationary turret. Plus I’ve got better armor and lifesteal than my previous idea. Focusing on a single element rather than the split I was using before gave a wider variety of options for equipment, which translates to more element conversions, which in turn means I was also able to be a little more aggressive with the devotion choices. Too bad without an off-hand the energy regen sucks to high heaven. Sadly, I don’t have any of the new dungeon legendaries yet, so I’m going to have to go grind that approximately forever before I can fully test this new idea. I am digging the effect of the BK set, though.

Aren’t you mixing player scaled pets with regular pets? Afaik you need different gear for regular pets, without this gear they would be practically useless in ultimate, isn’t it so?

Well, I don’t actually have the ring and mace of Morgoneth yet, so I can’t be completely certain. In general with Grimtools though, unless it specifically says on whatever skill that it scales with pet bonuses, it scales with player instead. The fact that the ring, mace, and full armor set of Morgoneth all have summons attached to them, but have no pet bonuses, is pretty suspicious in its own right. Everything on there that I’ve actually tested is player scaled. If I end up being wrong, I’ll just revise and repost the build.

TL;DR. I don’t know. But it’s probably fine.

Edit: After double checking everything:

Definitely player scaled-
Guardians of Empyrion (Oathkeeper)
Blade Spirits (Nightblade)
Raise the Dead (Devotion)
both Blood Knight minions (Armor set)
Nemesis (Relic)

Grimtools says player scaled-
Tentacle of Yugol (Ring)

Grimtools doesn’t say-
Nightbinger (Weapon)
Nightbringer (Armor of the Eternal Night, not used in build)

Even if the weapon ends up being pet scaled, it’s still worth it for the conversions, skill boost, and physical resistance over the other things I looked at.

Ah, there we go. Problem solved. Thanks.

I’m not usually super interested in pet builds, or build guides for that matter… however, due to the nature in which you’ve laid all this out, and the uniqueness of a Dervish pet build, I find myself looking forward to getting home from work and starting one.

1 Like