Crate has outdone themselves with this expansion, bringing so many cool skill modifiers for pets. I’ve been planning on doing this build for quite sometime. This is basically a Lost Souls build revolving around the the Wight Frost Channeller off-hand. I tried some alternatives: not using Lost Souls but going for a non-set + Eyes of Mogdrogen’s Chosen style build; I find that this one is better, but the non-set variant is almost as good.
Grimtools link:
*No ascended bonuses used in the video; if you want to add them, prioritze RR, crit damage on auras and defensive ability.
*For Mogdrogen’s fight, equip Beastmonger Powder augment on rings and amulet.
Eyes of Mogdrogen’s Chosen variant:
Videos:
Kill time for each boss*:
N’erfatal 2m42s
Ravager 55s
Avatar of Mogdrogen 1m10s
Min-maxing ascended bonuses will sure boost this.
Levelling:
This build is pretty easy to level; this is the case for most pet builds, really.
Levelling with pets is pretty fluid, you can easily change things along the way so don’t take this small session as law . Sometimes a good drop will change everything levelling-wise.
Start by maxing out Skellies, then put some points into the Familiar and the Hellhound, picking up debuffs like Curse of Frailty and Spectral Wrath and buffs like Blood of Dreeg and Bonds of Bysmiel. Don’t spend attribute points as soon as you get them, since they can (and will) be useful helping you equip items. Prioritize items that have the “Bonus to all pets:” stat on them.
You can get the Wight Frost Channeller pretty early in the game. If you check this link, you can actually find which enemies drop the item:
I guess this is it for now, if you want more details on the levelling aspects of pet builds in general, I believe Maya’s guides are the best. Kudos to every creator that do levelling builds and guides; I sure appreciate their efforts - people normally don’t get how much work goes into making guides, even more levelling ones.
The Ice Archer Skeleton’s promotional impact far outweighs its actual combat performance, probably because neither its equipment bonuses nor its summoning effects are particularly good.
There’s a new off-hand called Wight Frost Channeller that converts all the damage from your skeletons into cold; it also lets you summon only archers.
Most woke epics are not that good. Maybe later, when crate adds new ones for pets I may change something on the build, but for now it is in its strongest variation. As for awakened affixes, they sure are pretty strong, but I (normally) don’t add any on my builds, so people know how well they are without all that min-max investment. If you want to add them, focus on getting reduced resistances on enemies, crit damage on auras or even defensive ability.
Hi,
After Ulo in the devotion order, do you mean 4 points in Viper rather than Eel? Eel is 3 points, and only gives blue affinity which doesn’t seem to fit the following stuff like Typhos. Additionally, the endgame Grimtools link has Viper but not Eel so I thought this might be the case. Thanks!
Just did some quick tests: Unfortunately the build is not as powerful as before - it’s still pretty strong and can kill celestials, but not as good and skellies are even more squishy. Maybe I’ll change things around on the following week to see if I can get the build back to its glory.
Currently, I believe there are three skeleton builds that can be good:
Vitality skeleton ritualist. Their dmg is insane enough to cover the glass part. I saw some guy made a build that killed ravager in 7 sec pre 1.3.1
Chaos mage cabalist. Dmg still insane enough, just not as insane as ritualist. But it should be the second most powerful skeleton build.
Chaos covenant skeleton cabalist. Just a bit weaker than chaos mage, but you can summon skeleton with almost 0 sec cooldown.
Except those three, I’m not aware of other good skeleton builds right now. Bysmiel skel (cold archer or lightning) is kinda too squishy especially that bonus elemental res is gone, and their dmg cannot reach the same potential as the top 2 above. Lost soul skel, Idk, low dmg and skeletons can still die easily from non physical attack with that set.
Not super experienced with pet builds myself, but what do you think of removing a point from either Hellfire, Manipulation or elsewhere to 1-point Infernal Breath? It gets 8 points from gear on your Grimtools and it gives reduced targets’ damage which may help mildly with skeleton tankiness.
I’m just done with the main campaign on cabalist, any recommendations on what build to go for? So far been using skeletons without any specific items but they do start to feel squishy…
