Same here, My guess is that they made the change to compensate for the pet buffs (still cant wrap my head if this overall patch is a buff or nerf to pets).
After all they did increase the other bonus for Bound wraith’s cooldown to 8 seconds and Hallion’s crest medal duration to 6 seconds. So if you wanted to main a primal spirit build, you would have to use these two main items while sacrificing another Briarthorn from the set’s medal. Maybe nature set was too op for them so they take out the primal spirit bonus.
I wish they would make one last post as to what their thought process was for the patch’s pet builds,
I’d assume pretty well? The aether side obviously suffers on Druid vs Ritualist but man this is the set of my dreams overall, gonna run a bunch of wonky aether gunners
There were discussions here on the forums about full sets being mandatory for good pet builds, so they wanted to offer more variety.
But moving the % health from 3-piece Lost Souls set to the 4-piece bonus has the opposite effect.
They spoke on the pet changes awhile ago but the gist is that community players around here have long criticised pet sets like Beastcaller, Ghol, Bysmiel, Diviner etc. for being way too good and overshadowing a ton of pet items that aren’t part of a set but occupy the same item slots that they do (with exceptions here and there of course, like the majority of pet rings that do conversion like Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth for Lightning pets).
So Crate’s objective was to siphon a lot of the general “power” behind pet set items into pets in general but leave the identity for pet sets as enabling more permanent pets intact (e.g. Beastcaller still does double Briarthorns, Bysmiel’s set still does double Familiars, Diviner still does tons of Spirits etc.).
As for whether it’s a general buff or nerf to pet builds needs to be tested as it is a radical shift but the intent is that any previous pet builds shouldn’t change massively in effectiveness, underperforming pet builds should hopefully be stronger.
I GDStashed a lot of items (with new modifiers / global conversions for example)
while analyzing the patch for myself to check out if someone’s interested:
relax right - forgot that the game already add the +% multipliers to the display in the devotion tree. So i was of the impression that ~200 ele dmg got removed what would be quite some impact. imagine that some ppl take some long break from gd and dont have it all immediately back in the head how stuff worked .
Hmmmmn, with some testing (shifted over to mad lee’s acid retal sentinel build) the retal nerf isn’t too bad. Still carves through everything like a blowtorch through butter, though only tested the MQ before I shifted over to mad lee’s build.
Real test would be Ravager (and Cally), but I need to grind more stuff before I dip back into Celestial testing, let alone the nightmare that is Cally.
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right - forgot that the game already add the +% multipliers to the display in the devotion tree. So i was of the impression that ~200 ele dmg got removed what would be quite some impact. imagine that some ppl take some long break from gd and dont have it all immediately back in the head how stuff worked .