Ok so, I have a question about three different hat choices for a fairly standard chaos skeleton cabalist build, I want to know which one is “the best” but also I’d like to learn how to actually evaluate these items so in the future I can judge them myself.
The build itself is fairly standard as far as I can tell, max out skeletons plus the skills that add pet damage, hellhound plus maxed hellfire, get a harbingers dagger of summoning chaos mages. Basically this build: [1.3.0.8 ] HC - Skeletal Mage Chaos Pet Cabalist although at this exact moment in time I’m running Dying God + Ishtak devotions.
Anyways, on to the hats:
These seem to be the best/most common options for headgear so lets look at each one individually.
Start with Ascendant Cowl: it has a small amount of base All Damage, a bunch of Elemental Resist, +4 to legion and then lets you summon 4 more skeletons at a time.
With the right mods (theurgist of caged souls) you get +3 to soul harvest, +3 to blightfiend, and roughly 10% OA and 6% crit damage.
These are all strong stats but not in such an amount that they’re clearly stronger than the purples and the unique attribute is more skeletons per summon, which is either great if you’re casting raise skeleton on cooldown or useless if you cast it once per run.
Now the next one is Eyes of Mogdrogens, which has +1 to all skills, which is hard to beat in terms of skill bonuses for a build like this, as well as 96-144% total pet damage, some lightning damage which is basically meaningless, and 8-12% total speed, which as far as I understand, is really, really good. That being said, I feel like the raw pet stats might be slightly lower than the Ascendant Cowl, since you get OA and Crit and Damage, but of course the unique feature of this one is you get a whole new summon.
Just having any summon seems pretty strong in a build like this, considering how much generic pet stuff you’re stacking, but this pet also comes with -50 DA and -8% resist aura, which is pretty hard to beat.
The third one is Fiend Binder, it has a pretty solid chunk of +skills, although lightning strike and will of the crypt are perhaps among the weaker options for this specific build, but manipulation and call of the grave are great, and it’s not like the other ones are wasted, just less optimal.
Beyond that, you get a slightly higher pet damage bonus (120-180 chaos, whcih is effectively the same as “all damage” in this build) as well as 10-14% health and 32-48% elemental resistance, which is obviously defensive instead of the OA/Speed from the other items, but pet defenses can be pretty good when super bosses are aoeing 5 skeletons to death at a time. But the real kicker is the 8-12 flat chaos damage to all pets. This is, as I currently understand the mechanics, pretty huge, because you’re stacking so many multipliers that it gets to a very large number very quickly (“base” level 26 skeletons have, like, 200 weapon damage + 50 vit damage or something?) so it’s essentially around a flat 4% “total damage” increase.
Beyond that your unique skill mods are +1 skeleton, which typically takes you from 10-11 or 11-12 depending on the other items, which is basically 10% more skeleton damage by itself, as well as +1 projectile to summon familiar (or is it +2? The description is weird). The familiar isn’t a huge damage source in this build, but still, it exists and it hits fairly hard with your +3000% chaos damage stats so increasing its output is not meaningless.
So anyways. There’s the options, what’s the best one, what did my evaluations miss, is there some kind of secret synergy that makes everything I’ve just said pointless, etc.