Hey all, I’m not a build poster so apologies for any lack of sophistication. This isn’t supposed to be a full guide but since I’ve never seen anybody use this specific iteration of pet DOT stacking I thought I’d write down what I’ve been doing.
I’m playing on the current Grim League season but as long as you’re ok with GDStashing gear there’s no reason this can’t be played vanilla. I also haven’t really optimized other than the prefixes, so it may have much more potential, league or vanilla.
3,597,723 bleed tick per second.
Basic explanation of whats happening here
So it’s relatively common knowledge that each pet entity will apply their own stack of DOT. This applies to spammable player scaling pets like Wind Devil or Guardian of Empyrion and their devotions procs. This is usually of limited use as the spammable pets take a moment to activate their abilities or attack, meaning that spamming will result in no damage or Devotion procs. The exception is Blade Spirit. Spamming pets also must provide more damage than any other action taken or there is no point. There is also the opportunity cost of leech or other utility action. So a build wanting to use pet spam must make up for what it lacks in other ways. The theory behind this build is to mitigate the weaknesses as much as possible so that its strengths can come out. The vehicle for this is the Trickster tool-set and increased bleed duration.
Gameplay
Combat is very simple. Rend on Wind Devils paired with dual Whirling Blades, Fleshcarver procs, and Deathstalker takes down trash, Devouring Swarm and ignore finishes medium targets, and you drop Wendigo Totem and spam Blade Spirit on any hard targets. Focused gearing of bleed duration makes each Blade Spirit’s bleed last 16+ seconds and with my in-game casting speed at 197% that’s a lot of bleed stacking. So much that I gave up pretty quickly trying to pull a max bleed tick as the dummies will permanently die if their life is depleted before the 5 second cool-down on their invulnerability and heal happens. Regular dummy ticks should be about 3.2 million on my build and I would see above 1 million ticks on the Celestials. I’ve taken down all Superbosses including Grim League ones except Moira as I can’t be bothered to learn her, though I don’t see a reason it couldn’t succeed. Sorry for the spotty reporting but I’m hoping this will lead to someone else experimenting and I don’t want to invest too much time here.
Limitations
Though this build kites very well and I completed the 16+ Shattered Realm league equivalent with it, it’s not made around kiting: Its full strength comes from sitting and spamming. As long as I kept moving PB healing and the slight leech from DS and Scion procs were all I needed, however you are tied to your Totem if you want to go all out. If your defense doesn’t allow you to sit and spam you won’t achieve the strongest result. Or maybe you can try all out offense with stick and move and do better, that’s the fun of build creation. I’m done with the build for now, if you like the idea, try something new out.
Thanks for reading
Though this build has been possible for a while, it’s only with recent patches that it has been so easily viable. It now costs nothing to spam BS, and the 4th spirit at level 24 allows high cast speeds to not overwrite the previous spirit before the already short AOE tick takes place. However spamming still prevents the invisible auto-attack to take place that would allow Devotions to proc, which is why BS is unbound. All in all a unique and fun manipulation of mechanics without a true exploit to achieve high damage. This build creates super simple game-play with semi-walking simulator aspects and crazy high damage when it’s time to sit. This has all been written on the quick so if I made a mistake let me know and I’ll try and fix. Thanks to Crate, Dammitt, and everyone over the years who helped make this game great and to the Grim League team!
