This is a hybrid pet build for playing Rifleman/Crossbowman with Hellhound and Stormraven pets. The build is tri-elemental with focus on fire/lightning. I made an endgame version and a budget variant that requires only the Bysmiel and Malmouth factions at revered status in addition to more easy drops. I will also add guides for people new to this playstyle, which as you may know Grim Dawn wasn’t originally designed for, so these builds are pretty rare. There are however a lot of improvements made for hybrid pet builds since patch 1.2, so this will translate in better late game performance and also make the playstyle more accessible.
Gameplay
In light of that ‘accessibility’, I set the following criteria for this build (both endgame and budget version):
-Gameplay should be similar to a normal (firestrike) build with ‘player-scaling pets’ because pets die very rarely.
-Button count is low, I try to keep it around the same button count as top20 builds with 8 or more ‘easiness’ score.
-Leveling is very straightforward, build is ‘online’ very early, no conversions or rare items needed.
-Useful items will be in the loot pool at all experience levels, can be played SSF or beginner without stash.
-Green items are only single rare.
Performance
Performance for endgame build is SR30 in ~5-9 minutes, depending on player skill, lucky chunks etc. In my opinion it is very good for ‘hybrid pet standards’, especially if you also have to maintain all criteria I mentioned under gameplay. The main goal was to surpass the advertised minimum Ultimate Ascendant campaign difficulty (SR24) without compromising the gameplay. The performance of the budget build will be around SR26.
Video
Note: this is a gameplay demonstration video, not a speedrun, piloting may be dumb at times.
Endgame Build
Budget Build
Mechanics
This build has quite low investment on the summon hellhound and familiar main nodes and instead has all relevant aura skills maxed out, I did dummy tests with DPSyes and this gave me the best results. For hybrid pet builds this makes sense, because regular pet builds are unlikely to benefit much from flat weapon damage from auras to the player character. But in this case both the player character and the pets take maximum benefit. Another plus is that you don’t need to care much for converting your hellhound physical damage, since it will not inflict much of it in the first place.
I did a lot of comparing between Curse of Frailty + Thermite Mines or Flashbang (or TM + FB) and CoF + TM seemed to have best killrate. The build was tanky enough without the fumble and we already got some reduced DA from Eye of Korvaak. You can probably make it to SR26 before you even need the TM, if you don’t like the extra button, making the build even simpler. I recommend combining them in one button with a gaming mouse utility or 3rd party macro application.
Guides
Leveling Guide for Elemental Hybrid Pet Occultist
Early Skill point Investment
Elemental occultist is one of the easiest hybrid pet concepts to level because you can use elemental damage on both yourself and your pets from the very start and this never needs to change. The amount of usable items in the game will be huge. Very early in the game (~1-25) I recommend to invest most skill points into your pets, at this stage it is very easy for the player to keep up with relevant damage using component skills. If you first develop the player skills, you will likely get a good player build mid game, but make it hard to switch into the ‘hybrid pet mentality’ and gear requirements at that stage.
For a good start I like to aim for something like this: raven 8/16, storm spirit 12/12, hellhound 8/16, ember claw 4/12
The strong early focus on storm spirit will enforce the hybrid playstyle. When your pets are roughly at this strength you can start building the attribute bar of your 2nd class to prepare for your main attack skill to take over from component skills.
Midgame Considerations
When you get to higher levels things can get difficult if your pets start dying too often. It is important when playing a hybrid pet build that your pets don’t become a burden otherwise you might as well lose them. For pets +%Health should be considered an uptime stat, it is not what makes them permanent or self-sufficient. For permanence you need resistance and health regen. Regen will be done by blood of dreeg mostly, but for resistance it is good to be aware of the following innate resistances:
Hellhound 75% poison, 22% pierce, 15% aether, 30% chaos
Raven 0% poison, 0% pierce, 25% aether, 25% chaos
For practical purposes you can consider all other resistances at 0% because you can’t raise the hellhound’s 0% cold resistance without increasing its 500% fire resistance as well. So you only need to remember these. The raven will not be aggroed so stays mostly alive as long as the hellhound is alive but you need aspect of the guardian to protect it from poison AOE. Since you get elemental from storm spirit your real weakness will be bleeding and vitality. These resistances will drop on common green items ending with …caged souls and …of the untamed, but since it can be annoying to have to lose/move them when upgrading armor pieces I recommend to use devotion as much as possible to cover resistance requirements.
Leveling Options
At this point I should mention a few things about relics and how they affect your leveling. The development path for Mogdrogen’s Ardor is Hysteria → Savage → Bysmiel’s domination → Mogdrogen’s ardor. Hysteria blueprint is for sale in Homestead and Savage in Malmouth the steelcap district. The higher level blueprints need to be found.
Hysteria and Savage will add another pet button which can complicate piloting. It is wise to check the innate resistances on these pets if you want to use them: Crab Spirit, Stormhound. You have to decide for yourself if you want this, very early in the game you can also use another generic relic instead of hysteria. There are basically 4 options to choose from when you get to forging Savage:
OPTION 1: Forge a second hysteria to produce Ancestor, Ancestor looks more shaman themed, but the +100% elemental damage bonus benefits occultists much more before conversions. You can basically use this relic until the endgame if a level 90 relic is just too much work to bother. You can leverage the vitality resistance on ancestor to get more chaos/aether resist in another slot. In order to get enough skill points later in the game I recommend grabbing the L75 and/or L94 Fettan Masks in Elite and/or Ultimate respectively.
OPTION 2: Loose the Raven and level with Hellhound and Stormhound, Another good option, but can be harder to ‘stabilize’ in endgame because the Stormhound will die more often on average than the bird. On the plus side it saves a lot of skillpoints.
OPTION 3: Loose the Hellhound and level with Raven and Stormhound, Can work decent on a build that focuses on lightning damage, but is even harder to pull off than option 2. You need more pet chaos resistance and the Stormhound has very poor aggro, so you want your character to be tanky.
OPTION 4: Level with 3 pet(button)s. If you have very good resistance on your pets they may die rarely enough that this is doable without disrupting your gameplay. There is a risk that your gameplay gets dragged down by too much ‘pet management’, if that happens I recommend loosing a pet.
The option you choose here will impact which damage type is most prevalent in your build and can impact what makes the most optimal devotion setup. I will expand on this topic in my next guide, which will serve as a followup on this one but can also be read seperately.
Devotion Guide for Elemental Hybrid Pet Occultist
Balance between player and pets
The devotion system plays an important role in making sure your pets don’t fall too far behind in stats to keep the build a proper hybrid. Generally speaking in the final build you can have 1x tier 3 and 1x tier 2 -rr player damage constellations in addition to Rhowan’s Crown. You can also add a special player damage devotion to that like kraken or hydra, but after those you want to fill out most of the rest of your plan with constellations that also have pet bonuses to make sure your pets don’t fall too far behind the player.
Early investment
On most elemental hybrids I end up with getting chaos ascendany (pink) from higher tier devotions, meaning some chaos constellation has to be build up and broken down later. For this reason I like to start with Fiend because it is the best candidate. Buffing the hellhound is great for ranged builds and it also boosts your own rifle/fireblast damage. After Fiend I take Raven and Wolverine to unlock Rhowan’s crown. Wolverine may also end up broken down later but having all those resists covered is very convenient with gear swapping.
If you want to use lightning weapons or happen to like ice spikes for leveling then a good alternative is
Tsunami, Raven, Nighttalon => Rhowan’s Crown, put 2 points in Wolverine for the vitality resist and get bleeding resist from gear.
Midgame Considerations
After you reach the inevitable Rhowan’s Crown Constellation you can use Stag and/or Panther to unlock most strong tier 2 constellations. I will highlight some and for what you should use them on a hybrid pet build:
Staff of Rattosh: best tier 2 devotion for hybrid pet offensive stats.
Behemoth: best tier 2 devotion for hybrid pet defensive stats.
Typhos the Jailor: good alternative for staff of rattosh when following different path, sometimes you can take both.
Ulo: lots of rare pet resists and CC resists.
Solael’s, Widow and Murmur: when a hybrid pet build has a strong focus on one element, these are a must.
Kraken: while not having pet bonuses, often too good on 2h builds to skip.
Hydra: while not having pet bonuses, often too good on ranged builds to skip.
Chariot of the death: fix for low OA and lack of CC resist, alternative for hydra on non-ranged.
Harvestman scythe: fix for energy issues and flimsy class combinations.
Alladrah’s Phoenix: Hybrid pet builds often struggle for skillpoints so you can use this as a cheap alternative for skills like inquisitor seal. You can also turn your hellhound in a fire retal tank, great meme!
Late Game considerations
Many of the above constellations invest a lot in blue, green and pink, therefore Eye of Korvaak for Fire and Ultos for Lightning are well positioned to be the Tier 3 devotion of a hybrid pet setup. This is why I didn’t recommend to start the game with Shepherd’s crook, this easily gets you overinvested in purple, but it is a fine choice if it is in the final build. Elemental Sage, Attak Seru or Leviathan can be used in some elemental hybrid pet setups, but are harder to get right.
- very neat approach
For some DDD builds there’s no way to get more than about 1200-1500% (and they still work well enough!).