That’s hilarious.
News to me since I have 5 different hybrid pet builds right now. One of those is an updated version of this old pyro build by Duck_King, which you can see easily taking out Ultimate MQ. Pet hybrids for endgame have been around for a long time.
The devs have already provided plenty of tools to allow viable pet hybrids by making most pet devotions and items also grant useful character bonuses. It’s the players who haven’t been sufficiently creative in actually designing builds to take advantage of this, due to large numbers of existing Flavor of the Month builds that are simpler to exploit.
Example: Dracarris (used by Duck_King’s build linked above) received a huge buff in 1.0.0.8. The upcoming hotfix will contain even more changes very friendly to pet hybrids.
There’s no need for huge wholesale changes across ALL pet items to support what is already a viable pet hybrid playstyle, especially given the time/effort involved. I’d rather they spend that level of effort to improve build diversity across the board with new items.
I somewhat agree: unlimited access to double rares would make pet hybrids easier to tailor, but it’s already extremely feasible to build pet hybrids using existing legendaries. For instance, here’s one of my hybrid pet builds at an earlier development stage. In that test run she was wielding a Decree with Iskandra’s set (4/5) and only a single rare (Bysmiel-Sect Legguards), yet at 1:55 in the video her skeletons still manage to land over 32k crits. In the current build she uses 4 rares (feet, legs, and both rings), mostly to cap resistances. As you can see, existing legendaries are perfectly serviceable for the task.
Designing a pet hybrid is more about how the items support the build concept, rather than collecting the perfect set of player-and-pet bonuses on rares.
“And hybrids don’t work, not if you want to finish Ultimate” - See the Duck_King video above for an example of a pet hybrid that can easily finish Ultimate. Also, finishing Ultimate is trivial these days - most people are far more interested in whether a build can solo Gladiator.
“You won’t have anywhere near as many pets” - You have this exactly backwards: pet hybrids have have more pets than pure pet builds, because they can summon using direct damage to trigger on-enemy-death procs, whereas pure summoners can’t. For example, Black Scourge adds 3 pets, Necromancer’s Deathgrips also adds 3 pets, and Raise the Dead adds 5 more pets. In fact, this is one of the major incentives to play a pet hybrid instead of a pure summoner.
“You just end up being half as powerful in two areas than being strong in one” - You don’t seem to understand how build synergies work in Grim Dawn. Tyr is correct in pointing out that instead of simply scaling more and more +% pet damage, pet hybrids invest far more in party buffs and debuffs to produce very effective results. For example, you won’t find a pure summoner that can scale enough +% damage to produce a lowly skeleton capable of 32k crits as in the video. Another example is the list of on-enemy-death summon procs I mentioned above: neither pure summoner nor pure direct damage builds can effectively take advantage of this feature. It was designed for pet hybrids.
the reason being that pet set sucked, the pets didn’t had the usual 99.8% DR players had
when summoner got buffed to top tier everyone played it (obviously)
and ALL D3 need specific item to make it worthwhile
nothing pointing at pet scales off player bonus as a culprit, really
5ets didn’t had the usual 99.8% DR players had
when summoner got buffed to top tier everyone played it (obviously)
and ALL D3 need specific item to make it worthwhile
nothing pointing at pet scales off player bonus as a culprit, really
Except that’s like saying they decided to fix the problem by introducing massive +pet bonus items.
In the current build she uses 4 rares (feet, legs, and both rings), mostly to cap resistances. As you can see, existing legendaries are perfectly serviceable for the task.
Perhaps, but at some point you just want to make an affix like “Taskmaster’s” or even “of Kings” spawn a lot more frequently on these rare items in conjunction with other useful affixes (especially on MIs, which have their own innate resistances/pet bonuses), because these are basically your equivalent of the legendaries other people work so hard to find - and which in many cases they do ultimately find, one way or another.
So far most such items continue to elude me.
Maybe pets themselves should support the hybrid style of buffs/debuffs? Like the Lich King in Titanquest had a great debuff that worked on bosses that made him valuable in a hybrid style because he (lichking) helped the player damage and the pets damage. Wolves had buffs too with their howling buff which they casted on everyone like every 5 seconds which could drive you a little crazy. Coredweller contributed to the hybrid style by being a tank with a taunt that actually worked. Etc… Right now we have a pet like that (raven) but from what I heard the heal is implemented to heal you when you are lower than 40% health and I’m not sure if it’s actually working well for the hybrid style. And people say the elemental buff is unreliable but I’m not sure how to take that. The storm wisp buff wasn’t perfectly reliable but it still was an awesome buff over all in that it could support the hybrid style of buffing a characters damage. As I said the wolves were perfectly reliable with their strength of the pack buff as they cast it like every other second.
So my answer would be to give the pets (that you want to be hybrid supporters) buffs to synergies with the hybrid style and make sure their existing ones like the raven or the taunts are working well enough i.e. implemented correctly such that they are desirable outside of pure summoner builds.
All permanent mastery pets have party buffs and hybrid summoner players do use these buffs. They even feature prominently in a few build guides. I’m not saying there’s no room for improvement, but they’re there.
You can even go the extra mile by giving your pets supportive devotions, like Scorpion. Huntress or even Mogdrogen the Wolf (massive DA debuff). It’s important to note that all mastery pets have/can learn DoT skills, which means they can potentially spam devotion procs.
People just tend to stick to outdated metas and theories.
The summoner playstyle has always been rather niche and summoner builds just aren’t very popular with the notable exception of the Lazy Pokemon Master build, because D2 Necromancer.
Tyr, yeah I’m not familiar enough with GD yet to know it much. But in Titanquest Warfare/Nature or Hunting/Nature benefited from wolves just from the the Strength of the Pack buff. They didn’t even need the wolves themselves damage. My idea is for pets to be flexible enough to support both pure summoning builds (which itemization in GD from what I see is a LOT better than TQ), but also see the pets in builds that are just using the pets as a utility/buff/debuff. I was actually thinking of adding the raven to a couple of non-summoning builds but I was discouraged because I read that the healing isn’t implemented well and question marks with the elemental buff too.
GD pet buffs (Storm Spirit, Hellfire, Emboldening Roar) are similar to those from TQ (Howl of the Pack, Eye of the Storm, etc). The main complaint about Storm Spirit (the raven buff) actually comes from pure summoners, because the raven will only buff itself, the caster and NPCs (the buff has a tiny AoE). Most others pets don’t get included.
While GD has nothing on the level of the TQ Liche King’s Soul Blight you can attach debuff devotions on your pets to make them even more useful, as I mentioned.
Now TQ itself doesn’t actually support a pure summoner build - you don’t have to choose between improving personal DPS/survivability/pet damage in TQ and you can work on all three at the same time - so pure summoning there is really more of a playstyle choice. Everyone is basically a hybrid by default.
GD refines the system in several ways: by significantly reducing the number of +skills available to you, by streamlining the debuff system (significantly less stacking compared to TQ) and in general just introducing more challenging mechanics.
This gives rise a truly unique summoner build, along with hybrid summoners.
One thing that TQ does do differently (and which GD has no equivalent) is pet scaling between difficulties - in TQ, pets got a massive bonus to stats at higher difficulties which allowed them to survive.
User rmsinj brought up the issue earlier in the thread - in GD pets can useful for buffs/utility, but at higher difficulties they simply die too fast. While using pets for DPS is obviously encroaching into pure/hybrid summoner playstyle territory, I do agree that non-summoners should also get some use out of them. More than a few times people have brought up wanting to play a character that uses a specific summon, like a user who wanted a sort of boy-and-his-dog hellhound build that relied on the hellhound as more of a utility/support pet. And it’s not just an idea that could work for story reasons - Hellfire (the hellhound’s buff) can actually start to catch up to Possession’s +%damage bonus at ultimate levels, and the hellhound comes with its own taunt AND a DoT skill.
This is why I suggested my compromise - that pets should at least scale with player stats defensively.
Sounds good and good analysis. I would like the flexibility to have pure summoners, hybrids, and builds like the ‘boy and his hell pup or raven’. The way to go about it I think is to use things that can be changed without changing everything in the game of course. I don’t have much insight into that problem! But I’m sure the experts and mathematics people could figure it out or at least find a good improvement.
I’m getting tired of saying the same thing over and over.
Tyr, I don’t know why you keep bringing up pure summoners and their meta. I don’t care about the meta. The only concern regarding pure summoners is that they aren’t negatively affected or too positively affected, and I’ve already explained why that won’t be the case. Everything regarding the pure summoner meta has literally nothing to do with this. I keep saying it’s irrelevant to the suggestion and yet you keep harping on about it. This suggestion is about making mastery pets less restrictive for non pure summoners. That’s it.
You haven’t made a single point as to why this would be bad or unnecessary for the game.
Those aren’t mastery pets. And Raise the Dead scales off the player. And even then, you’re counting pure quantity. Pure summoners have quantity of quality in addition to all of them scaling off pet gear. Just because an item summons 3 doesn’t make it 3 times more powerful.
If you invest 20+ points into hellhound and then gimp yourself further by wearing pet gear, was the hellhound really worth it? Who is the hellhound worth it for then?
And again, for the last time, the suggestion is regarding mastery pets.
Because without understanding the entire situation you are basically just being a child throwing a tantrum because you can’t get what you want.
And I have brought up a lot of important points, you just seem to want to go out of your way to ignore them or bash them.
It’s one thing to complain about something that’s universal to all games like control issues or ease-of-use - you are then free to wash your hands of anything related to the game meta - but what you are suggesting is clearly GD-specific will directly affect the GD meta.
I’m really not sure how anyone would fail to see this.
Everything regarding the pure summoner meta has literally nothing to do with this.
Just because you keep saying something doesn’t make it true.
For someone who makes a point to say how tired you are for repeating the same point over and over again, you do a great job of obfuscating what your point actually is. Are you saying that you want to invest points into a pet and have them survive well and do considerable amounts of damage, and do so without having to invest any gear / devotions / additional skill points into the pets? Before going off such rants and assuming you know more than the devs and the people who actually play pet builds, it’d be wise to be more specific in what you’re saying:
- How many points would you believe be necessary to invest in a pet in order to do the things that you’re asking of it? Are you talking about going 16/16 and having the pet be serviceable, regardless of whether you invest a full 16 points or you go for equipment that gives +Summon Pet?
- What specifically is wrong with the Summoner Gear? Is it that it’s mainly limited to one Legendary Set or finding very rare Double Prefix gear? I’m assuming you would be aiming for the same damage type as the pet you’re running with, so is it that there isn’t enough gear that gives +damage, +OA/DA, +Resistances that allow you to survive as well as +Pet Bonuses that allow the pets to survive? How many pieces of gear would you want to dedicate to helping your pet survive before it becomes “all-in Summoner?”
Grim Dawn is supposed to punish builds that are built haphazardly - if they lowered the difficulty so that you could afford to spend points in something and then not support it with any gear, anybody else can take those points and use them to min/max the skills that actually support the skills they’re using and steamroll the game even further. It’s like putting points in Sigil of Consumption / Destruction and then saying you want to make a Poison/Bleeding build while also having the Sigil give you something unique and useful. You’re asking for two contradictory things.
Further point: Pure Summoners, by gearing exclusively for pets, are able to go through the game without investing many points in any particular (permanent) pet. The Thunderpets build- one that is capable of beating Gladiator and Ultimate Mog- has only one point invested in each of the three Mastery Pets, but they are still able to have enough DPS to crush all the game content because the gear is specifically designed to max out their possible damage. The only pet that is fully invested is the temporary Primal Spirit pet.
The way you phrase your posts, it sounds like you want the opposite, which is to invest points in the pets but not feel forced to use up all your gear/devotions keeping them serviceable. Nobody is using all 48 points on a pet, despite your repeated assertions. Looking up the Pet Mechanics, it appears that the pets Health and Damage have a set formula that is based on the player’s level, which is then multiplied by an additional factor based off how many points you invest in it. The only thing that would make sense for the goal you’re seeking is to allow for the pet’s natural abilities (its own +% Health and Damage) to increase rapidly as you invest more points into it, but not so much that it overshadows the Summoner gear, the job of which is to give large pet bonuses to every pet that you have (as opposed to just the one).