Attributes and other stuff for a pet build (general pet related questions)

Ok so I started my first pet build ever yesterday, it is a Cabalist. First of all let’s say I love it so far, skeletons are a bit squishy, but I expect them to get more resilient as I invest more points into that tree.

I’ve been putting all points into phisique because that increases my survival and I don’t see how other 2 options would impact my pets at all. Ok spirit could be obvious if your pets die a lot and you have to recast them all the time, but if that is happening you’re probably not doing it right anyway. So I’m not playing a caster, I’m not playing melee, so I guess no attributes really apply to pets anyway. So my guess would be pretty much everything into physique.

Second question, how do I make my character at least a bit more resilient? I’m playing on HC and obviously this is the biggest issue with pet builds, the weakness of a character without his minions. Putting everything into physique is one way, I guess I just have to strive towards finding the most defensive gear that I’m able to come across, while potentially also giving me pet bonuses obviously.

How do you generally approach a pet build? I need some general advice on it since it’s my first and how this fundamentaly differentiates from basic 2 archetypes of melee/caster/hybrid.

I’m not trying to play as a hybrid, I’m trying to keep other options to a minimum and focus on pets as much as possible. I will be picking up some spells to help my pets and make their work easier though, one of those is already CoF, which is very useful, helps my pets die less and makes their work easier.

I’ve been working on a pure pet build as well. No offensive abilities whatsoever, outside of the pets, and it sure is squishy!

I expect to have a lot of trouble on the harder difficulties but so far I haven’t run into too much resistance. The blight fiend is a must-have for his threat gaining abilities, and the familiar is nice for a little extra ranged DPS.

I was using the bone wave thing but it brought me too close to the enemies (which resulted in many deaths). I specced out of that and now focus on mobility gear to run faster than the enemies chasing (your ranged minions will pluck damage off these guys while you run circles around them).

Physique is pretty important, I agree. Spirit is second, and Cunning is third by a mile. I put a few points into Cunning to help with gear but additional points are wasted (once getting to a reasonable level I think it would be good to focus like 75% of the attribute points into physique with the rest into spirit).