Overview:
Pet builds require pets to deal damage, and to be effective they require a balance between the number of pets and how strong those pets are. I’ve made, played, and thoroughly explored a lot of pet builds so thought it might be useful to share my thoughts on the individual pets in Grim Dawn, and how they are used in various builds. I’m not going to discuss item summoned pets from lower level items.
Special thanks to thepowerofmediocrity, Sneaky Parrot, DaShiv, and others for the contributions to the pet community over the years
Also to Crate for making an awesome game, and all the work that I know goes into that.
General Observations:
Before I get into specific pets, I wanted to make a few general observations.
Pet Skills (Ember Claw, Lightning Strike, etc):
A lot of the pet skills are very powerful, but aside from the auras none of them are generally worth investing in unless you are able to summon multiple of that pet. This is particularly impactful for Hellhounds. Itemization for pet skills is pretty lacking overall.
Itemization:
Most equipment slots have several good options for a pet build to select from, but there are two slots that are particularly lacking in useful pet options. The most common pants I use on pet builds are Mythical Chausses of Barbaros, and on a large number of builds Cataclysm’s Eye is the best off-hand. I tend to pretty much always use the same Gloves (Mythical Overlord’s Iron Grip) and Boots (Mythical Fiendflesh Greaves), but at least those are pet oriented items.
Crucible Buffs:
It’s a cool idea to have pets get an extra bonus if they are buffed and don’t die, but in practice it ends up being applicable to very few pets, and has the effect of exacerbating balance issues by giving a bonus to already stronger builds.
Dominant Builds:
There are currently effectively 3 archetypes for top-tier pet builds. Familairs, Beastcaller’s, and Skeletons(mostly with Witching Hour). There are lots of other pet builds setups which can clear the campaign, and even some that can reasonably clear the crucible but they tend to land on the fringe, be generally less effective, and/or be far less flexible (Wraith, Blight Fiend, and Hellhound builds are all far less flexible).
This isn’t awful considering there are only 3 classes with major support for pets, but it is extremely hard to make effective pet builds combining with the other classes outside of Familiar/Beastcaller builds. It’d be nice to see more items that boost both pets and non-pet class support skills (IEE, Flaming Touch, etc). Very few such items exist.
Devotions:
Pet support from Devotions is pretty good overall, but even with the 1.0.6.0 buffs to Mogdrogen it’s still the worst of the T3 pet devotions. It’s fine when considered in isolation but devotion setups using the other T3 pet devotions have access to far more critically important movement speed and resistance options making it a huge sacrifice to take Mogdrogen, one that rarely pays off.
Class Pet Skills:
Summon Familiar:
The damage dealt by Ravens scales very effectively with skill points, increasing both damage and number of projectiles. Only a single item slot is required to summon two ravens, and there is a ton of itemization options to boost the skill, making it easy to hit 26/16. There are also a lot of pet items boosting Lightning damage, and Lightning Resistance Reduction is pretty common. The pet also has some really good skills. Lightning Strike is the best offensive pet skill and definitely worth investing in despite the sparsity of items that boost the skill. Storm Spirit provides both flat damage and % elemental damage, and provides a significant resistance bonus making it useful on any pet build, and even some non-pet builds. I have never found Mend Flesh to be very effective. I am a huge fan of healing skills on pet builds, but the few times I’ve tried using this skill I’ve never noticed any impact from it. It’s likely I haven’t used it enough in the right circumstance to get a feel for its benefit.
In my opinion, Summon Familiar is currently the best pet skill in the game. They are almost as powerful on their own as Witching Hour Skeletons, much more durable, and very easy to equip for. You can make a lot of variations of Familiar builds, using a lot of different supporting classes, skills, and pets.
Summon Hellhound:
The Hellhound has a ton of potential that most players overlook. His attack damage is terrible, at 26/16 it deals less than damage a single Swarmling, but he’s pretty fast and can use Celestial Powers. Ember Claw is really quite good, and is used pretty frequently. Infernal Breath seems to be really good against single targets but mostly useless against weaker enemies because most of the ticks will miss while the hound switches targets. The Hellfire Aura is also quite good, but outside of Chaos builds it is strictly worse than Storm Spirit which provides resistance in addition to it’s damage.
The main problem for Hellhounds is that you need the Shepherd of Lost Souls set to summon two Hellhounds, and that uses amulet, head, and weapon slots which prevents the use of the vast majority of items with interesting bonuses to Hellhound. I think Hellhounds would actually be in a good place if it was more reasonable to summon 2 of them, but instead it is prohibitively difficult to make them useful. Equipment options boosting Ember Claw and Infernal Breath, while they exist, are usually way too far from best in slot to be used.
Summon Briarthorn:
Briarthorns deal mediocre damage, are decently tough, and relatively slow. They are a decent pet, and part of one of the most successful and versatile pet build archetypes, but Briarthorns frustrate me for a lot of reasons. Their damage is okay, but certainly not good. It is split between Physical and Pierce, and Pierce is almost entirely unsupported for pet builds second only to Aether and some forms of DoT.
Itemization for Briarthorns is pretty bad. There are a decent number of items with skill bonuses for Briarthorn but you can’t use very of them at the same time, or they are outclassed by other items in the same slot. If you’re planning to use Briarthorns offensively, you almost have to use the Beastcaller’s set which while it gives you a second Briarthorn it only gives +2 to the skill while preventing a lot of other items with Briarthorn bonuses. On almost all Beastcaller builds I find Mythical Heart of the Mountain more useful than other amulet alternatives, preferring the extra pet to make up for Briarthorns lack of power. Bloodsworn Codex is wildly outclassed by +1 to all skills.
Emboldening Presence is extremely useful, mostly for the physical resist. Bleed resist is easy to come by for players, and for pets it’s only really needed for skeletons which pair much more effectively with Occultist anyway. Ground Slam is not very good. It’s used less often and deals far less damage than to Lightning Strike, and the few items that boost it either conflict with Beastcaller’s or aren’t otherwise worth using. Even with 2 Briarthorns, I only take Ground Slam when I have no other obvious use of skill points.
Despite my frustrations with this skill, I think it is overall in a decent place. It would be nice to see the pet more useful as a build centerpiece rather than an extra pair of meat shields, but at the end of the day they are an important part of a huge range of great pet builds.
Summon Primal Spirit:
This guy is great. He’s very strong and very fast, takes relatively low skill point investment and is very easy to itemize for. Even at his base uptime of 50% he is useful, but it’s fairly easy to bring his uptime into the 80+% range between items and Time Dilation. You can’t make a top tier build around just this pet, but with this easy itemization and high burst power he is a great asset to any Shaman base pet build, and an integral part of Beastcaller builds.
I think this pet is in a great spot. He’s strong, very useful, but not overpowered.
Raise Skeletons:
I imagine that skeletons are a very difficult pet skill to balance correctly, and I don’t think their balance issues are any particular secret. They deal medicore damage and die very easily, but there are a lot of them so their numbers magnify flat damage bonuses. If they can kill things within a couple of seconds they dominate, otherwise they start to die and things fall apart very quickly. There is a very thin line between them steamrolling everything and getting completely destroyed.
They are great in the campaign up until Ultimate where they start to die a lot more, but even with self-found gear they can easily finish the campaign with a little patience. The place where their balance issues are really brought to light is the Crucible and Super Bosses. While being an integral part of the most powerful current pet build, they have extremely little room for build versatility. Skeletons have a ton of available itemization, but the vast majority of the legendaries are Cabalist focused, which doesn’t help their diversity problem.
I think it’d be good if skeletons were a little bit more robust - mainly because it is far too easy for AoE attacks to kill all of your skeletons simultaneously, even with good resists - and I think it’d probably be good to increase their base damage while proportionally decreasing their attack speed, so they keep the same base DPS while reducing the impact of flat damage bonuses. The Witching Hour is also still way too powerful, but that is mostly a separate issue. It’d probably be best if the item didn’t bonus Skeletons/Necromancers skills while synergizing heavily with the already powerful Dying God.
Summon Blight Fiend:
Blight Fiends have great AoE damage and some decent crowd control and debuffs, but are fairly slow with their attacks and that means that even with 3 of them using the Unstable Anomaly they are not particularly strong against single targets. This leaves them somewhat lacking of a niche of their own, as skeletons already deal great area damage due to their numbers, while being more effective on single targets. The Blight Fiends pet skills are both really good and worth investing in.
There are a ton of itemization that supports Blight Fiends, including a lot of otherwise useful items that boost the Blight Fiends skills, making it common to invest a single point in each for significant benefit. As with skeletons, the vast majority of items are Cabalist focused, and since there are not many resistance reduction options for Acid/Poison, these too are not very viable outside of Cabalist builds.
I think Blight Fiends are a okay when looked at in isolation, but in most builds they fill the same role as Hellhounds - a single point in the summon with a single point in one or two of the skills. They are possible to build around, but barely.
Reap Spirit:
The Wraiths are quite strong, but they come with some serious downsides. They have very short lifetime, you can’t summon them without attacking enemies, and they can’t proc Celestial Powers with their attacks. I know Crate likes to encourage active summoner playstyles, but this is the more extreme case as you don’t have your summons until after you’ve started the fight and it takes time to ramp them up.
The Diviner set helps significantly with their uptime but the set doesn’t provide very strong bonuses to pets otherwise. There are a lot of other items that boost the skill, and a couple of them provide nice pet bonuses but a lot of them do not, geared more towards the initial attack aspect of the skill. Their damage type combination does not really synergize with any existing skills or items, and also makes them very hard to use outside of Conjurer/Cabalist builds which can both reduce both elemental and vitality resistance. The available itemization for Reap Spirit also makes them relatively hard to meaninffully combine them with other pets.
Overall I think the wraiths are pretty good, but it’d be nice if there were less restrictive ways to make them useful as pets because it leaves very little room for effective variety.
Item Pet Skills:
Summon Swarmlings (Primal Instict):
These guys used to be the centerpiece of a lot of pet builds. These days they aren’t enough to provide the primary source of damage for a pet build, but they are a great and meaningful addition to almost any build that uses pets. These fit a similar role to Primal Spirit in that regard.
That said, I end up using these on the vast major of pet builds I’ve played I use these because they alone are more valuable than the benefits of any other relic for pet builds except when Mogdrogen’s Ardor is needed to provide a 10th skill point bonus for Familiars, or Aether/Chaos from resistance for skeletons in the Crucible.
Summon Skeletal Servant (Dirge of Akrovia):
Skeletal Servant is pretty good, and the relic he’s on is also pretty good, but the majority of the time Necromancer builds are better off using Mogdrogen’s Ardor, Bysmiel’s Domination, or even Primal Instinct. A pet with these stats on an Occultist or Shaman relic he’d be used a lot, Necromancers already have a large number of pets on the field so he really doesn’t stand out.
Summon Chillmane (Mythical Heart of the Mountain):
Chillmane is decent. It’s damage is okay, it’s got some useful AoE skills, it’s reasonably fast, and can take a few hits. The main thing I have to say about Chillmane is that it pairs very well with the Beastcaller’s set, and because of this is by far the most used Item based pet skill for me. The bonuses on the item, plus the pet it provides are enough to outweigh any alternative for that slot on Beastcaller builds. This pet/item combination is good enough to be used, but not so good to be required, especially outside of the crucible.
Summon Revenant (Mythical Black Grimoire of Og’Napesh):
This pet and item to me are worse versions of Chillmane + Heart of the Mountain. The pet deals similar damage but is slower, the pet bonuses are lower, and the skill bonuses are less useful. The skill bonuses are geared towards skeleton builds, but for skeleton builds this pet isn’t particularly useful.
On the whole he’s not bad but not special. I almost always prefer +1 all skills from my off-hands, even without any pet bonuses.
Call Forth the Harbinger (Salazar’s Sovereign Blade):
This pet looks really impressive on paper, having huge damage, pretty good uptime, and some useful abilities, but he is incredibly slow so his damage output is really quite low.
Because of how slow he is, I find the Harbinger effectively useless in the campaign as by the time he reaches enemies they are usually already dead. He has some use during boss fights, but that doesn’t really warrant the item slot. In the Crucible I find the Harbinger a little more useful because you don’t need to chase down enemies or cover a lot of distance, but I still rarely use him.
Bysmiel’s Command:
The Eldritch Hound is one of the least useful pets in the game. He is really far too weak for the effort required to attain him and the need to bind an additional skill to the Celestial Power.
I’d just say some builds need a bit more flat dmg.