Hmm. This is a good point. Perhaps the set with 2x briar, helm BiS buff, and open weapon slots is the issue. And also the greens are pretty high.
Yeah, wouldn’t mind seeing the greens being made incompatible with the set like what Blightfiends got regarding unstable anomaly.
What the Hell(hound) is going here?
3.59 on pet build is crazy fast! Actually being pet master gives you a chance to shift your focus on pure damage and still survive, nicely done to figure everything on this build
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Maybe the Pet should be buffed and then made the Set bonus of Desecrator Covenant ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
3 Likes
If not that dagger into this set - It would be cool to play with double Salazars, even if they were nerfed 
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In response, I’ll leave here what I wrote last year:
I’m surprised that Fire beat out Lightning, but I suppose with the green belt giving a bunch of Shaman points and Fire RR being easier to apply than Lightning RR, I guess I’m not too surprised.
Excellent seeing what a great player can do with an optimized build. Nice job.
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Wow, impressive results.
You can bind something to Amatok Breath and save to points from DEE. I’d max Storm Spirit or Manipulation here.
Also, did you experiment with Infernal Breath? It got all dmg redux. Since we now know it also reduces offensive debuffs, might be worth it. Plus better proccing from the Hound.
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There are few reason that raw fire damage can be made way higher than raw lightning.
If we check on pure itemization (typical items for fire vs lightning variant) in terms of DPS:
- Korvaak’s Blade vs Spark of Ultos - % damage can be pretty close but korvaak can have additional skill points from affixes and stats like attack speed/OA. 100% phys->fire is pernament too, you do not need to relly on proc from rings which has not 100% uptime/
- Khonsar rings vs Khelpat’zoth - fire flat is more “consistent”, it has more stable value than nature of lightning. Next thing is conversions, with khonsar you can get 100% chaos and lightning -> fire so you convert massive amount of flat into fire from skills like Hellfire and Stormfire + devotions (flat from Raven/ Fiend + Rhowan proc). Look at relic too - Bysmiel got a lot of chaos flat, Primal Instinct can be fully converted with Khonsar too.
- Arcane Bomb for Lightning is really frustrating to proc, almost impossible to aim it at crucible with build like that. Solael is pretty easy, just binded to pets.
- I heard from other builders that overall lightning damage is in bad state, enemies are going to take much longer to kill and it is spreaded too much so RNG based.
- Components in weapon if you want to min-max - lightning has 0 for pets. Fire got 16 flat/ 150% fire/burn/ 15% chance for burn flat.
Many overpowered things in history often came from conversions, that’s a case there.
Thanks! I considered binding Amataok Breath but I am just too used to some gameplay, I did not charge through enemies a lot of and it’s hard to “teach an old dog new tricks” 
I have checked infernal breath but did not see difference, things die to fast and I think all these pure stats from Hellhound could be better there.
Yeah that’s right. Like you can’t teach Hellhound to do “any real damage”, just to mess up with enemies 
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This is an interesting lab experiment, very helpful for optimizing builds but I think it would be sad if zaria pendant needs to be nerfed over it. In my experience physical briarthorn is actually very weak damage and +65% feels justified in normal gameplay that isn’t going to see conversion or a 2nd briarthorn in a long time.
I think the weird part is a tier 3 bleed devotion somehow being the best choice for a fire build. I think the huge speed bonus on all the flat bonuses is the issue. If the speed on the proc was nerfed hard and a large %physical dmg bonus was added on top of it to compensate, converted builds would be scared away from this devotion towards more balanced options and physical/bleed builds can be more competitive with them.
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If you want to go pure physical then it can be problematic but beastcaller provide bleeding damage always (and you can’t really skip it) so if you stack bleed you are still doing physical damage too and it’s pretty balanced actually. If you have bleed damage support then Zaria is not the best amulet anymore, Sand King is better in most cases.
Same thing goes in every bleeding support case, although skipping physical dmg with some conversions (like acid/vitality/chaos/elemental) make dps faster due to skipping armor mechanic in the same time.
This build work this way due to insane ammount of flat damage converted into fire. I don’t have really idea how to tone it down without hurt to other more balanced setups. Maybe rings, basic weapon pet bonuses, also hellfire from hellhound gives too much damage. I am not good at GD mechanics and I don’t have any balancing knowledge however.
Salazar’s Sovereign Blade is however unbalanced, it’s barely worse for this build than Korvaak (and I am destroying my conversion with Salazar) and it can be bis everywhere else.
Excellent result.
Callagadra fight is kind of glitchy, the beast refuses to attack the player, it’s not normal
Greens + rings are doing the most work and it’s a very clever idea.
Conversion on rings will be nerfed ( and on dagger also), that the spirit behind the enormous amount of flat fire to pets.
NO need to touch %damage modifier on Zaria’s pendant and and Bloodsworn Codex, in my opinion.
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Why would anyone want a Tier 3 devotion to be nerfed just because a single damage archetype (physical pets) is underperforming?
What you instead want is more armor penetration options for pets since that is the only thing which hurts their damage compared to other pet builds.
We have 100% damage conversion to lightning, to cold, to elemental, to vitality, to chaos…
Why shouldn’t Fire get the same as well?
Or do you only mean the chaos > fire part?
Saying that the conversion is an issue while also saying that having enough bonus Total Damage to do the DPS of 3 Briarthorns in total is perfectly fine… doesn’t make much sense.
It is not something that is only seen here. It has always been an issue with Pet builds in general due to how it gets multiplied by the number of Pets.
If you want to fix that without breaking anything, I would say nerfing flat damage bonuses across the board and then compensating with additional base stats to pets if/as needed would be better.
3 Likes
Your build has a lot of skill cooldown reductions, by my calculations on average 27%, but you could have more from random rolls and possibly have no cooldown on the mogdrogen proc, so you end up with (almost) permanent +46% total speed on all pets from this devotion. Have you tried other devotion setups? I think an eye of korvaak or empyrion setup would lead to a significant drop in performance and those seem to be more thematically correct from perspective of people who designed the devotion system.
You also seem to have 65% OA + 15% OA more from mogdrogen (almost) permanently
I tested many setups in past and thoughts about it:
- If you want tank for HC or something go for Ishtak.
- If you want maximum damage then Mogdrogen is way to go.
Dying God is not bad but total speed + OA outperforms 200% dmg/some cirt + losing health. Next thing is that many good damage devotions are on the road to Mogdrogen. Korvaak or Empyrion does not really make sense for me.
Why Mogdrogen isn’t thematically correct for pets? He is God of beasts.
Korvaak is a hilariously underperforming devotion, atleast on pet builds. Judging other devotions by comparing with it is like judging all Legendary pet items by comparing them to Dracarris.
And Empyrion is not a Pet devotion just because it has Pet bonuses, lol.
I’m trying to see it from perspective of people who designed the devotion system, korvaak is eldritsch = green, and therefore same color as fire devotions such as mage, fiend ulzuin etc. So you would expect offensive fire pet builds to go there since it is most +% Dmg devotion for pets but I think it loses to mogdrogen unintentionally (from developer perspective).
Don’t get me wrong I don’t want mogdrogen nerfed overall, I want it to be strong for physical/bleed builds but also not be a one tier 3 devotion to rule all pet devotions, then all pet builds will end up using the same devotion regardless of damage type.
Are you trying to say that the devs who designed korvaak are not the same ones who designed Mogdrogen?
Or that Mogdrogen doesn’t have green color requirement?
Or that Mogdrogen having Purple is an issue even though Shepherd’s Call, the best Tier1 Pet devotion is also Purple, not to mention all the other Purple Pet Devos.
Or that Korvaak doesn’t also need blue?
Or that Ishtak, being blue/yellow is not a Pet devotion?
Or that people don’t use Dying God in pet builds, which requires Red?
Or that you are now an authority on Dev perspective?
Are you now going to pretend that Ishtak and Dying God do not exist?
Mogdrogen can be paired with other tier 3 devotions too but they are going to be just some proc binded to pets. Mogdrogen got has so high buff for both oa and speed (very important) that’s it’s hard to beat it in terms of damage. Also I would never call it overpowered really and it fits perfectly bleeding and physical which is already strong: [1.1.9.0] Beastcaller Conjurers - Bleeding and Chaos/Bleeding hybrid-> Crucible 4:49-5:20/ SR 115/ Callagadra 2:53-3:27 + Ravager 1:23 + Crate ~30 seconds
First setup is focusing on bleed mostly but physical damage is still there due to lack of converions. Damage is not overpowered but not bad either. If you want to go pure physical without any supportive damage then yes, it’s going to be underperforming sadly.
@Maya you read too much in my posts, it is obvious from the phrasing of my post that I never claimed any authority,
I also don’t know what the bar is in terms of cruci time for the developer to call something overpowered however, now AlkamosHater shows me more builds with amazing celestial kill times and they all use mogdrogen I’m inclined to believe that if there is a balance issue with pet builds at all it resolves around this devotion.
100% conversions on pets are available for many dmg types and a major source for build creativity. I don’t think they should take the blame for it.