With the release of the addon I decided to play this game once more, after doing my last playthrough a couple years back with a retaliation based character. My current char is a Necromancer/Occultist, scaling its pets. Now that I start to get higher lvl on ultimate finally some gear started to drop, that actually scales pets and what caught my eye were all the “Chance on Enemy Death” pets you can get. Black Scourge, Mythical Bonescavenger’s Deathgrips in particular. Being a complete and utter noob at this game I pretty much lost it seeing that I could increase my minion army’s numbers, until I realized that it doesn’t work that way, at all. As most of you -probably- know the Chance on Enemy Death effect only triggers off of player kills, which is kinda weird given that the gear skills pets, and the summons are scaled with pet dmg. So either you do dmg yourself and get useless pets, or you DO scale your pets and not get those pets? I am completely lost, and honestly disheartened at how to make this work, if at all. Is this intended gameplay? Or maybe just a bug? I will gladly accept this mechanic as it is if someone can explain to me how it is intended to be played, so I can adjust accordingly.
Yours, a summoner
Dear fellow summoner,
The “% chance on enemy death” skills trigger when you, the summoner, kill something - not when your pets do. You are right that it seems counter-intuitive for a pet master to be killing things, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be useful. You don’t have to melee things down for starters - your damage-dealing active or triggered skills that just happen to deal the death blow to an enemy will work.
You can have a look at my Cabalist build here (which uses Black Scourge and is very much a pet build): http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59443
To explain this: one of the key synergies in my build is a huge defensive ability debuff that Blight Fiend applies to enemies near it. This gives enough difference with chatacter offensive ability to ensure a good critical hit chance for my Cabalist, either with a melee swing or through an area-effect spell like Bone Harvest. If the critical hit doesn’t kill something, then I still have 30% chance (on critical hit) to trigger the Witchblaze power on Voidsteel Gauntlets, which deals a large amount of chaos damage to nearby enemies. Having just suffered a critical hit from a strong damage skill, the Witchblaze usually then finishes off one or more enemies - cue the “30% chance on enemy death” summon on Black Scourge.
Yours, another summoner.
Thank you for your reply, fellow summoner ^^
I think I understand now, what I have to do. I completely ignored any “on crit” or other “on hit” effects, if they did not buff my minions. Regular damage effects can be useful, I will try and gear accordingly.
Furthermore your build guide will be quite insightful, thanks. You could accomplish quite a lot of things I didn’t manage to; especially the accommodation of “Raise the Dead”.
Yours, a summoner