There’s been quite the discussion over at the Bugs forum as to whether Venom Launcher + Putrid Necklace conversion actually works. I’ll admit, I hadn’t vigorously looked into this as I assumed BoD’s conversion worked for all pets. If it ends up being the case that the conversion was meant for player only and the tooltip didn’t display that, I’ve been going through alternate ways to keep the flavor of this build (Skeletons taking advantage of 26/16 BoD while having Blight Fiends do the AoE work), and I’ll slowly replace the old guide with the current one.
Am I reading this right that each individual pet will add a stack of posion? So 15 pets could stack 15 instances of poison granted by the mythical viperfang gloves?
Yes, Viperfang gloves with Blood of Dreeg provides an aura where each pet can inflict flat Poison damage, not unlike Primal Bond and its ability to give pets flat Bleeding damage. That is why I go through the effort to put points in Raise Skeletons + Undead Legion, as the damage really stacks up.
Updated the equipment section in the OP. The other sections will come as I get the time to update them.
I’ve updated the OP tonight to edit my guide to further support the current Grimtools and added a FAQ related to the Crucible. I thought I’d have an easy time in the Crucible, but the build is prone to taking burst damage, so a few strong hits from a Nemesis can wipe me out early. I thought the 20,000 damage absorption from the Fiendflesh items would have sufficed while BoD and the on-attack heals are on cooldown. I know other Blight Fiend pet builds were able to get through Crucible easily, so I’ll have to improve my piloting skills to provide a good Crucible screenshot.
While I haven’t put a whole lot of effort into Blight Fiends yet, my experience so far is that they have wonderful area damage but their single target damage is not that great so nemesis tend to survive for a while, and because they only live 12 seconds with Unstable Anomaly they don’t hold agro all that well. So they are great paired with something like 2 x Familiars which are invincible and deal great single-target damage, but on their own they struggle a bit.
It’s time we dust off this old build and give it the 1.2 update.
A complete overhaul of the build is in the first post and the second post contains video performances. It can do Crucible, SR, Ravager and Callagdra just like the other pet builds I’ve posted.
I’ll emphasize that Calla is very hard for this build and I’ve died multiple times trying to get a suitable SR speedrun; Crucible is much safer in terms of getting loot per run.