Are pet builds really THE easy mode? Think about it, you have get resistances, cdr, health and DA for yourself. You need to have some kind of sustain / circuit breaker in case you are not good at the “Just don’t get hit”-game. Then you also need to get all of this to your pets: sustain, health, +%dmg, flat dmg, devotion procs for AoE, OA, DA, crit dmg. AND you need to control aggro.
Compare this to a vitality caster that can just equip random MI’s, some faction items and then farm Dark One set in about 5 hours and then ready to rock’n roll the real end-game and do some serious farming.
I made this thread so we could continue on this from another thread.
DA is not an attribute, attribute points are Physique, Cunning and spirit. But I get what you mean. Nevertheless, there are more “attributes” in general to keep track of.
You don’t deal damage if most of your pet’s are dead (I am looking at you Raise Skeleton)
Same could be applied to basically any DoT build like bleed Phantasmal blades as you mentioned.
Also, this means that you have to be a good pilot, compared to say retaliation tank where you can just stand still, take hits and deal damage simultaneously.
It is advantage, but does the advantage counter the disadvantages? For ranged builds, this usually means that you can not apply shotgun.
Just out of curiosity, have you played a pet build in AoM and FG where you can have pretty much instant death to all your pets (even with decent resists) due to some big freaking damage pool and then the mobs just get straight to up while you are kiting like a princess trying to re-cast your precious birb and doggy?
Pets are stupid hard for beginners because much about them is obscured. They are heavy in theorycrafting department, although for some the approach of “just collect pet stuff” works well enough. Once you’re done with pooling the necessary knowledge pet builds reduce game content to simple stat checks though.
Ranged is often considered the worst playstyle because they devolve into melee builds that can shoot an enemy for a few seconds at a range. That and several enemies have gap closers, effectively making their ranged capability pointless. Impaired aim also has higher values in some cases compared to fumble, making their ranged advantage even less useful.
So no, i don’t consider ranged in any way “easy mode”.
It can be harder to see debuffs on pets rather than debuffs on yourself, so it might be too late to take them out of the danger zone.
I think about skellies as opposite: fine early on, thrash in endgame unless you have lost souls set.
Depends on the goals I guess. For someone who just wanna “beat the game” (whatever that means) or for someone who wanna clear SR65+ ?? Immortal pseudopets are a bit tricker due to their shorter leash so you must stand closer to the danger yourself.
I do that myself, you do not learn the game properly. And due to the fact that you need to keep track of more stats compared if you were playing without pets.
Good pet builds aren’t that easy to create, since you have to care about your stats and pets have multiple stats, including hidden ones, like innate resistances and %different damage not shown in GT/game.
Pet builds require less precision and reflexes than other builds, mind that tanky builds in general allows room for errors.
Pet builds are usually lacking in AoE but are decent single target killers, Skeletons and Blight Fiends are maybe an exception.
Pet builds can be very tanky and tackle all content. But unlike citality casters they can’t be both super tanky and super fast.
Pet players can afford to not used heavy rotation of skills and time them well and still be good. Having 3 skills or 13 active skills is entirely up to the player.
Pet masters are usually tanky and can afford sometimes to just stand still. I have literally stand in the middle of ground pools and allowed myself to be hit by Nemesis/Bosses in Crucible without caring much. Bug health pool, DA and absorb. Plus you hope pets will draw aggro.
It can make it harder in that sense that you now have more possibilities
I think it all boils down to what we want to achieve how we perceive if something is easy or not. Beat Korvaak in Normal or blast through high SR shards or kill Ravager in sub 1 minute?
Depends on how you build it. If you have less inherit defenses, you need to become very good at the kiting game.
Yes, but if you wanna go with Mogdrogen + something else, will you be able to afford Ishtak? And you can not “force” ishtak proc anyway. Now that you know about devotion bindings to pets, will you still always go for ishtak? Hmm the possibilities, the choices
I mean I can speak for myself, that if it was NOT possible to assign dmg devotions to pets and have them scale with pet’s damage - I would not have made any pet build at all. Period.
True that, your best active defense as pet build is your kiting ability. Still as I said, even with offensive map against most content you can relax and enjoy the view. SR 75+ can be walk in the park, but you still can’t seat at the bench for too long
Both Ishtak and Moggy are generic pet devotions, you benefit a great deal from Mog pet speed bonus.
The number of block pet builds I have seen in my life I can count with the fingers on one hand.
Ishtak has some cooldown and thus not have 100% uptime which you need to account for.
Yes, and it is good with possibilities. And more possibilities does not make the game easier per se.
So by logic, since it reads “All pets” and does not work on e.g. Blade Spirit, it then implies that Blade Spirits are not pets. And that is what we in 99% of the cases on the forum mean by “pets”
It’s a relative thing. Pets are more difficult to theorycraft. It’s more or less a fact.
The “classic” way to build pets is exactly getting Mog and Shepherd’s. For a long time it was considered to be much more efficient than spending devotion points to give your pets some procs. Only recently it began to change a little.
