So Zantai, it looks like I might have to eat some of my earlier words in my necro thread, I apologize. I decided to actually start testing skelly builds out to see how the pet nerfs are treating them. I will use this thread to start playing pet builds through juiced ascendant with the altar of 3 ashes 2 asters.
I have been playtesting Maya’s Lost Souls Set Cabalist:
Ravager kill time 2:10. Pretty terrible by modern standards, but I wasn’t even trying to get a good time. Just mindlessly spammed my keys and sometimes walked away from his nullify totems. If I kited him more effectively away from his totems I could probably get the time down by 30 seconds. I was resummoning pets while they were still alive, interrupting their attacks, I was letting them die to nullify tokens just to see how much punishment they could take, etc.
If I understand correctly, the anti-pet buffs bosses have are still not removed?
That is NOT the point. The point is that I had completely forgotten how SAFE pet builds are. I did not have to engage with Ravager’s mechanics at all. Playing through juiced campaign content as well, I was stunned by how safe the build pilots. This is the safest I’ve felt on a character since FoA release.
Callagadra 3:45 to kill. Rough as expected with skellies, but again, felt pretty darn safe.
Please note: I am playing Maya’s build with ZERO ascended item bonuses (not that pets have great options), and I’m even wearing a faction chest piece with it. Average item stat rolls.
Also worth noting that this build benefits from having 8s cd on skelly and 1s cooldown on hellhound. This constant resummoning of my pets made the fights a lot easier. I’m nervous to try builds without this QoL on them.
For potions I put health potion to have -5 cd, -% damage to enemies, and grant its healing to my pets instead of me.
For energy potion I did increased potency base with % health shield and health regen.
From what has been said at least, yes, in the current public playtest as of this writing it is only a partial, incomplete patch regarding pets. As a result, this window seems like technically the worst time for pets because they are no longer damage immune, but all the stuff that has been added to try to kill damage immune pets over the last 5-10 years is still currently present.
Playtested this vitality Ritualist next.
I gave up after a couple attempts on Callagadra. If I play against her super guerilla style can down her at 5+ min in the current state.
1:45 time on Ravager of Minds, this build does more damage but has squishier pets so not surprised.
Ascendant mode in campaign was actually overall smoother than the cabalist above because of offense being the best defense, but when the pets are downed it was definitely clunkier.
I will hold off on testing more builds until the rest of the pet changes are in since I saw Z’s post about normalizing their resists and whatnot.
Cabalist kill-time improved to 1:50, played it just as casually. My skeletons notably died less.
Ritualist killtime stayed about 1:45. Didn’t feel very different at all.
Again, doing Ravager of Minds so the nullify is pretty anti-pet and might be skewing things. I think against Ravager of Flesh I’d see more improvement on times. I’m not a pet player main so Idk if I could be piloting the fight a lot better or something but I mainly just try to wedge Ravager into being surrounded by my skellies and just move when he spawns a few nullify totems.
Nah, no version of Ravager is anti pet since he gets eaten alive by pets either way.
Reason for the times has to do with the fact that it is a MayaTM build . It was never supposed to be dps focused, but was made during FG era playtest to show that skeletons could be made immortal vs Cally back then by stacking phys res, which prompted Zantai to remove it from all the green affixes and the Faction chest item .
For Ravager to become a viable metric for testing, he needs another pass imo. He is too weak for pretty much all strong endgame builds, due to power creep turning him into a “how fast can I kill this thing?” rather than “can I survive this?”.
Regarding pets specifically, Ravager still has the issue with his AI where he gets stuttered pretty easily.
Actually Ravager of Flesh may be a bit harder vs due to his blood pools being AoE
Also, testing Ravager of minds on 1.3.0.8, I average around 2 minutes on that build, so you are already doing better than me .
Hm… disregard what I said earlier about flesh being harder. Ravager of Flesh with the same build on the same patch clocks at an average of 1:30 minutes.
The tests were done with minimal kiting and eating a lot of nulls and also bleed stacks (from minds and flesh).
I think the Cabalist is currently fine for all Super Bosses. The speed mainly depends on the build’s DPS. If you’re using the Lost Soul set, it definitely won’t match the current chaos, poison, or vitality builds made with nonset pieces, because the Lost Soul set hasn’t received any buffs yet. The bigger focus should still be on daily farming of 5 Ashes dungeons, or performance in CR and SR, since those are the main recurring farm scenarios.
I have yet to meet a pet build that has issues farming 5 ashes dungeons or can’t clear SR reasonably. I am totally fine with them being slower then top performing casters and melee builds due to how inherently safe they are.
Based on your testing, the impact of the resistance adjustments is relatively minor.
So the remaining issue is just about speed. Based on the advantage that Conjurer’s pets have higher health and physical resistance than the other two, it should definitely clear Super Bosses faster than Cabalist and Ritualist — just like non-pet builds, there are faster and slower ones, this can be accepted.
Just interested: How about using Vial with Revurrum+Expulsimum for pet builds? That could reduce enemy’s dmg by 50% up to 4 secs, which is a good emergency button against Ravager if it uses Sunder.
Also, how is the test against Mog 2.0 so far? Better than ravager? Mog does not have rr and if you are playing cabalist or conjurer, then you have big advantage vs him. Ritualist got short end of the stick here.
@minh_pham Please understand, I am using skellies with 0 ascended bonuses, to no bonus health to skellies. Attacks that are going to wipe them are likely going to wipe them anway, and Ravager totems are often what’s killing them and they count as separate entities so often not affected by the reduced enemy damage. It’s very difficult to time the expulsium to keep enemies alive. As such, my view tends to be “attacks that are going to wipe my skellies are going to wipe them with or without expulsimum most of the time.” So I value having it up more often and just mitigating more normal attacks more frequently and healing my pets with health potion on a shorter cooldown more frequently so they are alive more often during the non boss-nukes. This is working well. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t think it’d help much on Ravager specifically and maybe if I tank up my skellies health with ascended bonuses it’d be worth testing.
Mog2 is destroying the lost souls build, but again it’s not super optimized and lacks ascended bonuses. Pets die occassionally but I am resummoning them faster than Mog2 can kill the, but the problem is more the lightning spam and Mog2 charging me, the summoner. We’re looking at a 4 minute kill time if I tried hard.
Mog2 Ritualist was able to do it on my second try, 2 minutes 40 seconds. THAT WAS FUN, hardest celestial fight I’ve felt in a while lol. I had to actually use my brain really hard on timing mark of torment, shifting between my 2 skill bars to resummon pets frequently, sometimes summoning them just to “heal” them by resetting their health, managing their movement when he summoned minions. Holy shit he’s rough on pets. Again, no ascended bonuses and idk how optimized these builds are.
Was able to get 30s on Ravager of Minds in playtest with this skelly build:
I generated the character so not all high rolls + didn’t use the entirety of his pre-boss setup. Can probably halve the time if I do all the tricks with potions tinctures, etc.
At least I want their tankiness improved before nerfing their dmg if they intent to. This one is the vit ritualist, the strongest and optimized version, and there are like, a lot of other version that will be potentially glassier and less stronger, such as pure cold archer from wight frost channeller, or aether skeletons (both cabalist and ritualist)
Regardless, how does everyone think about skeletons in current state? Should they have defense buff (with some dmg nerf), should they have increased cdr, or should they have current state? I would like to see how pet players think and compare them with other builds (sundered wraith, blight fiend, conjurer builds)?
Personally not a fan of Skeletons at all since they require a lot more micro and are harder to keep alive compared to Conjurer pets, even if they have a lot of high damage potential.
But that is their design, so I can’t really complain.
Sundered Wraith is at a bad spot imo, because they can’t tank for you and the player is extremely glassy if you build for DPS. It also does not help that they have a delay before they start attacking, so having a lot of cooldown reduction on the skill hurts dps even more.
I have no complaints about Blight Fiend. It feels strong enough.
For Conjurer, I wish Familiar had better AI because it requires constant micro managing if you want to get the most out of its auto attack.
Currently I’m fine with skeletons as long as they receive more cdr. If their goal is to die fast and being resummoned fast then please give them increased cdr please.
I honestly think you’re nailing the biggest pain point. Skelly builds, if they’re going to stay this squishy, all benefit from more reduced cooldown in the end game. It feels good to raise horde after horde of skeletons.
Lost souls feels pretty good but that’s largely the 1s cooldown on hell hound is super useful.
Skelly builds without access to much lower cooldowns on their other summons, NEED lower skelly cooldown in ultimate to keep resummoning them in hard fights.
. It was never supposed to be dps focused, but was made during FG era playtest to show that skeletons could be made immortal vs Cally back then by stacking phys res, which prompted Zantai to remove it from all the green affixes and the Faction chest item 
.
due to his blood pools being AoE 
.