So @Skelemental and I were exploring how big you could get a Hellhound to hit. I was surprised after I got one to hit for 900k or so, which sparked his curiosity. Nek minut, he busts out this 1.8m critting machine of a hellhound build.
The Knights of the Eternal Realm crew in the past have often built our teams around pushing tankiness and survival for deep SR runs. And while we’ve had fun with meme teams, we’d never tried something explicitly to build around damage boosting. So for memey fun, I thought we’d build us a team around @Skelemental’s Big Doggo. Enter: The Big Doggo Support Pack.
Enjoy this wonderful screenshot of the doggo hitting for 6,926,785 damage 
You can can watch that from this clip here, at 2:57:
Also look out for other moments where, rather than a single ultra-massive crit, it deals massive crits to everything in a group:
The Concept
- Get as much flat damage in team auras and buffs as possible
- Get as much fire/elemental RR from unique sources as possible
- Get as much crit damage in team auras as possible
- Get enough survivability to allow the team/doggo to apply their debuffs and damage without dying
- Make sure the builds are also still fun to play (sometimes this goal conflicts with raw team optimisation).
Toggle to view team / aura buffs that affect the players and pets:
Key takeaways: With the builds below, we got collective -463% fire RR, +85% crit damage, about 905 flat damage that converts into fire for the doggo, +1,453% fire damage additional to whatever the doggo has from the pet damage on the build.
Click here to view all team buffs and debuffs
OA, DA and Crit Damage
+759 +4% DA
+85% Crit Damage
+1038 +4% OADamage
+44 +66% Acid Damage
+493% All Damage
+115% Bleeding Damage
+751% Burn Damage
+87 +655% Chaos Damage
+466% Electrocute Damage
+348 +465% Elemental Damage
+198 +495% Fire Damage
+256% Frostburn Damage
+211% Internal Trauma Damage
+210% Lightning Damage
+208 +287% Physical Damage
+111% Pierce Damage
+40 Piercing Damage
+66% Poison Damage
+20 +551% Vitality Damage
+551% Vitality Decay Damage
+168 Acid Retaliation Damage
+816% All Retaliation Damage
+720 Chaos Retaliation Damage
+930 Fire Retaliation Damage
+320 Lightning Retaliation Damage
+122 Physical Retaliation DamageHealing and Health
+34% Healing Increase
+355 +53% Health
+245 +125% Health Regen
+1530 +51% Health Restored
+13% LifestealDefensive Buffs
+117 +26% Armor
+336 Damage Absorption
+137% Aether Resistance
+41% Bleeding Resistance
+60% Chaos Resistance
+35% Elemental Resistance
+37% Physical Resistance
+38% Pierce Resistance
+92% Poison & Acid Resistance
+45% Slow Resistance
+25% Vitality ResistanceSpeed Buffs
+16% Attack Speed
+16% Casting Speed
+17% Movement Speed
+10% Total SpeedDebuffs +28% Reduced Target’s All Damage
-35% Aether Resistance
+25 Reduced Target’s All Resistance
-61% Bleeding Resistance
-63% Chaos Resistance
-41% Cold Resistance
-219% + 32 Reduced Target’s Elemental Resistance
-212% Fire Resistance
-112% Physical Resistance
-10% Pierce Resistance
-65% Poison & Acid Resistance
-87% Vitality Resistance
-18% Attack Speed
-131% Movement Speed
+40% Reduced Target’s Total Speed
+21% Fumble
+21% Impaired Aim
-170 + 280 Reduced Target’s DA
-246 + 180 Reduced Target’s OA
The Builds
The Big Dog Pyromancer, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
This is @Skelemental’s build. You can read about it in his post here.
Tactician Tactician, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
This build brings a tonne of flat elemental damage, % All Damage, some nice crit damage, some sweet Damage Absorption and armour buffs for the team, and within the team, was also popping out some real tasty crits, real often. Importantly, it also brings a nice 24% total damage bonus vs Cthonics and Eldritch with Steel Resolve for the team. Important for getting Big Doggo crits.
Within the team it also functioned well, critting as high as ~2.5m with Cadence (possibly higher, need to revisit the videos)
Video highlights: 2,503,905 Cadence Crit:
Crits (multiple hits for 1m-1.4m):
Tactician Cam Footage:
Video note: You’ll notice the boss HP drops drastically as they die. This isn’t necessarily because spike damage took out 50% of their remaining HP, but rather a multiplayer bug where the HP displayed for the players that aren’t hosting the game can be laggy. The HP bar on the host’s game will be accurate, but the other players may see an inaccurate/lagged version of enemy HP bars.
Dr00d Druid, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
I wanted something that used the Mageslayer set for massive fire RR debuffs. Working with Arcanist also meant bringing great crit damage and elemental damage to the team. But I wanted the build to be able to contribute meaningfully to the damage in some way, without being too squishy. Going the Shaman path meant getting lots of additional elemental RR, a Wendigo Totem to support the team, a Briarthorn for extra damage-soaking, damage-buff-receiving and phys-res-buffing. Druid seemd a great choice, and while standalone its damage is low for a pet build, with the combined buffs of the team, it becomes a significant damage addition to the team. Unfortunately I have no screenies or video footage of the damage from this build, but I trust the pets were critting for 1m+ or so.
Oppressor Oppressor, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
With the right items, Necromancer brings a tonne of unique fire RR. This build is definitely the squishiest of the builds and poor @WeaponZero died a lot in the making of these videos. Video footage and screenshots pending, I’ll update the post as I get access to 'em. But I believe this build is churning out 1.2m max crits or thereabouts in the team. As a rapidly-hitting dual-wielder, this is not bad. What’s also exciting is that it has 4 juiced up Guardians of Empyrion to bolster its damage, and to bask in the glory of the team buffs
Edit: Got some videos for ya!
Some raw footage, warts and all, of us playtesting the team from the perspective of the Oppressor. @WeaponZero runs with a number of camera mods for the game so he can get different camera angles and cursors and so on.
The build seems to be getting these sorts of figures: 1.1m top end crits per weapon (12:11 on the vid):
The Guardians seem to be critting for up to 220k damage each
Up to 1.16m DoT ticks (13:17 on the video):
And it attacks FAST. Check out the clip at 28:55 of it shredding down SR Warden Krieg.
Noice.
Now of course it’s got me wondering about other damage-boosting teams… If we can boost a 1.8m critting Doggo to ~7m crits in a team… Can we boost a 3.2m critting Aegis build to 12m+ crits in a team…? Perhaps an avenue to explore! The team doesn’t have an opportunity to play together very often at the moment (we all live in different time zones, and have all sorts of other life duties going on - kids, career changes etc), so it may be a while before our next team shenanigan explorations… But we’ll see!
Special thanks goes to the wonderful Knights of the Eternal Realm pilots and builders for engaging with these whacky antics:
- @Desioner
- @WeaponZero
- @Skelemental (who built Big Dog)
Enjoy~
