Skeletons are an offensive pet by nature, they will be ignored by your enemies but frequently die in the crossfire anyway
Only the blightfiend can keep your enemies busy if you heavily invest in blight burst
but you have not specified the most important part of your hybrid build, which is what skill or spell
you are going to use to attack your enemies. If you want to save skillpoints you should use a component skill, this will save skillpoints that you can invest in your pets.
!? why !?
I thought, every pet damage pet can be used as distraction?
Hmmm… ok, which pet does NOT get ignored then?
Reg. the Rest: I already found a solution to my own post yesterday, several in fact. I think I overestimated the complexity.
When I posted this, I thought of skills like Bysmiels Bonds in Occultist, which is a ‘pet damage pets’ - skill only. Seems to be the only one of it’s kind though, other skills which help with pets are ‘hybrid’ themselves. So… there is not even a Problem here at all.
by ignored I mean a boss will not turn to them and fight them in melee
a boss will always keep running to you and attack you.
A blightfiend with blight burst can trigger a boss to start fighting them until they die, this gives you valuable time to drop a lot of damage on them. Only skills that read ‘generate additional threat’ or ‘taunt’ have this ability.
Helpful, thank you!
Now, I will have to see, if the max-number of Skellies - Swarm can do some good, by just getting in the way of the Bosses 
What you’re not accounting for is that your player character generates aggro by casting any kind of spell or using any kind of attack. Typically skills with a wide AoE like Curse of Frailty or ones that can tick/deal damage multiple times per second will generate far more aggro, doubly so if a skill does both.
Like gargabolo mentioned above, having multiple pets with skills that Generate Additional Threat or Taunt like the Blight Fiend’s Rotting Fumes/Blight Burst, Briarthorn’s Ground Slam, Hellhound’s Ember Claw or effects like Ishtak in devotion help with drawing enemies away but aren’t always a cure-all as certain enemies and Heroes/Bosses can have Taunt resistance or in a hybrid player-pet build, your sheer number of damage ticks just draws attention back to you afterwards. The above pets are also typically more tankier than the Skeletons by a large margin so will last longer.
There is very little room to make pet-scaled pets a “distraction” nor is it efficient sinking up to or more than 50 skill points and potentially multiple gear pieces or devotions if you are also not using them for damage which is what a standard pets user or hybrid pets-player user aims to do.
As others said above. The warden is a perfect example your pets are on him. He goes to second stage & heads right to you even if your not attacking him. You have to be able to take some hits even as a petmancer. Alot of comments have been made over & over that hybrid pets do not work. If you do pets you have to invest points in them. Or again as above said, dont bother with them.
I even tried doing pet scaled with player based pets and its still difficult.
I found an exploit! Don’t attack and you won’t get attacked! Just kidding!
I was thinking about wearing a Morrow Band, the Taunting Roar has a radius of 9, maybe that would help?
Didn’t have that on my Radar, thanx for mentioning it.
Not what I mean
I am with you on this, but I still want to try and test limits.
So, the ‘active’ distraction is not an option then. But the passive one is. If there are 20 Skellies standing around the Enemy, he just can’t get through to me.
I’ve seen that happen with Kuba. I had player damage pets en masse, swarming on him and he just got stuck between them and the… scenery. They slowed him down (not as a mechanic, but just ‘physically’ by standing in his way) and made him take turns to get around them. This helped. By a lot. Not that I have needed help with Kuba, of course…
But is that example understandable? I want to see if pet damage pets can do the same. See myself.
Yeah, I do not have issue with this, this is well handled. Mostly…
Well, that is exactly the reason I am still doing it. I need to see for myself or prove those statements wrong.
Understandable?
Somewhat. My understanding on Taunt in this way though is it’s a singular “explosion” of threat. It’s not continuous compared to say running the Blight Fiend with Rotting Fumes so if you opt on doing any debuffing/attacking, it won’t last long.
Note that the pet doesn’t have full uptime either (22 second lifetime, 33 second cooldown).
Somewhat doable depending on how your pets crowd around him as opposed to rushing him on one side. Though you ideally still want to have them be sturdy enough to not get crushed and keep them healthy too
Yep, that’s clear, and was the reason to ask for ‘essential’ skills. But as it turns out, there are none. Which is exactly, what I hoped.
The statement of hybrids don’t work is inaccurate if looked at what your definition of “doesn’t work” is. You can absolutely make a hybrid that will finish campaign (after all people have finished HC no mastery campaign) and I believe there were build posts that showed hybrids in SR 60 was it?? If your expecting to push SR 80+ or kill celestial super bosses, then your statement likely rings true. Then again if you are willing to kite for hours or run out the timer in SR you might stand a chance. I won’t touch CR as I doubt things would fare as well unless you specific a map and forget about timers or clear time.
Essential skills depends on mastery and playstyle, and end goal. No skill is truly required to achieve the bare minimum of beating the game’s story on Normal/Veteran but for pushing the mid or end-tier difficulties and challenges in this case, I would vouch for a handful of certain ones like Aspect of the Guardian’s Physical/Acid resistances for you and your pets as an example not just making it easier but virtually being mandatory if you want less headaches.
Ah, yes… that is a good example. I rarely use those healing skills, too much bother, but with Pets they could make more sense.
I will also have to check for all the other stuff I ignored up to now, which gives Caster AND Pet a bonus, just like Aspect…
Good reminder!
Yea should correct that. From doesnt work to its doable but hard. Problems I run into myself is being a glass cannon. Or pets dying too fast. I also consider my survivable when I say not doable as I cant really fight myself but must rely on my pets to keep me alive. How hard is it? If Im dying too much I tend to abandon. If I cant survive elite then I definately wont survive ultimate.
Depending on setup & what Im going for I do use healing skills. I feel they are necessary to get to higher level. Especially the heals with bonus to resists.
If you want the pets to survive a bit, you’ll need to invest quite a few points into the base pet node for durability. And then if you do invest that much (it’s not so cheap), then some more investment is arguably also worth it for some more offensive or bonus stuff.
For a hybrid, you’ll need to decide which non-pet skill you like and which pets to use. Sadly, pets will take a lot of skills points because unlike player-scaled, they are not invincible.
An example of a this might be a Fire/Chaos Skeleton/Helhound/ + Fire DEE build
Stuff like better OA and some resistances need attention, but this gives a general idea to what could be a decent campaign hybrid. Also, the rings could be swapped for Morrow Bands, but you lose out some pet damage. That’s a ymmv preference. The amulet could be swapped for a conduit with 100% vit->fire for skeletons, but that would effectively mean no player sustain. And Primal instinct Relic could be swapped for even more pet swarms.
Also note that since there is an order for conversion, of which the right hand is first, I believe that all the pet physical will be converted to fire - even if there are some conversions on other gear (rings, gloves).
yeah, well…
I tested my version a bit, no Hellhound, but Revenant, OgNapesh, Dirge of Arkovia, Harbinger…
Some of the stuff in your example I will have to find first, as I always sold everything with pet bonusses.
I have the gloves though, will have to transfer from other Char.
As per now, the Skellies die to fast. And my Toon dies to fast. 
But the Toon ist LV100 and the itemization is at level 75, so there’s lots of potential.
I have to get used to no longer being able to just stand in the thick of it. And piano-ing skills AND pets is hard. One thing worked as intended though, and that is the distraction part. I just tested it with Blackbriar and Gloomweaver. Especially the Spider ran around like crazy, not knowing, what was happening and had no eye for my toon. I laughed hard! 
Btw, I didnt know what was happening either, so total chaos 
Did you put that build together as an example just for this thread? I am impressed!!
Especially Point 4 is interesting.
I`ll just add that although this conversion can be fun and useful at times …in this previous example, it probably would make more sense to use Fiend instead of Bull, as that would likely allow for a couple more points in Torch - which would improve DEE damage. And Fiend also benefits both areas a bit (fire % and pets).
If you want to see a successful Hybrid pet Cabalist, you will need to work around Reap Spirit.
The first build uses disposable Blight Fiends alongside the Black Scourge pets you get when you kill enemies with Reap Spirit. The second one uses pets that are immortal, so you can focus strictly on your own defenses and don’t have to worry at all about pet survivability.
If you want that swarming feeling, I’d go with the first build - the Chaos one. It’s a hard build to pilot, as all hybrid pet builds are, but it’s capable of doing well in SR and any other Main Campaign content you want to try.
Well, thank you very much for your input, I will check it out.
Especially that sounds interesting.
Buuut… the whole point for me is to have Skellies. Not maxed out Hybrid pet Cabalists, but swarming Skellies. 
Check the ‘missing builds’ - thread again in order to to see, how I think
Hybrid Pet builds are where my knowledge on Pets simply stops existing, so I won’t comment on that.
But… if you are interested in Skeletons, you may also want to take a look at the Revenant devotion and the Blood Knight Set.
Well, as a Fan of Spectral Wrath/Binding 80% of my Cabalists have Revenant, as it wonderfully synergizes, not only in skills but also in Immersion.
The Set I know, but I never found a piece, and crafting in legit way is too costly.