Has anyone made a build that includes heavy investment in the raven? By heavy investment, I mean at least 16/16 in the main skill plus several points in the other skills.
I’ve always wanted to level a lightning hybrid conjurer using a maxed familiar. The build even has its own meme legendaries, so it can’t be that bad…right?
I dont think it’s worth it. Raven is rather a supportive summon, so maxing him is usually a waste of points.
A mutator to have a swarm of ravens would be awesome.
A few of my hybrids max the raven and Storm Spirit, a dedicated summoner or two maxes Lightning Strike.
People tend to underestimate the raven but ever since the three projectile buff it actually does competent damage all by itself, but you need to invest in +%pet total speed to see it at its best. It also has a natural DoT so it can potentially spam devotion procs.
There’s no such thing as a naturally supportive summon. The raven can be a support pet if you want him to be, but he doesn’t start out that way.
The raven’s AI usually keeps it out of harm’s way, but nevertheless it’s the squishiest mastery pet. On a non-summoner it will probably end up dying a lot of the time.
I tried making a Pyro hybrid with Stormhound and Raven as my pet supports but Stormhound late game scales pretty poorly and Raven’s firing rate is not quite as strong as the melee pets. Itemisation wise most of the legendary hybrid gear leans towards “elementalist’s or conjurer’s” not Pyro’s so you end up with a lot of wasted +skill points unless you find a double-affix green.
At level 16 it will shoot 4 projectiles in an AoE arc. The only good thing about this is the Raven’s ability to proc devotions increases exponentially. The projectiles are too thin and too far spread to shotgun enemies, but perhaps changing the AI so that when he’s set to “Aggressive” he will attempt to shotgun enemies would be a welcome change. His damage output (despite having a low firing rate) when placed on “Aggressive” is pretty decent, not spectacular but decent. Downside is he’ll very rarely heal the team…
I don’t know that you’ll get the damage output. Primal bond boosts physical damage, and, bleeding. So you’d get more out of the hell hound. Even using stormcaller’s pact.
The squad tactics modifer of field command would boost all damage… you could do a sword and board guy with too much self healing and an unreliable stun…
pyromancer seems vaguely plausible http://grimcalc.com/build/1008-LZOJU6