Naive questions based around Hungering Void

[DaShiv]

The entry for Dying God in my Pet Devotion guide has the relevant details, as quoted below:

[1.0.2.1] The Night King: Pet/Vitality Hybrid Cabalist. 5s MQ, 3.5m Glad. Necro & Devotion Guides.

1. Dying God

Pet bonuses:[ul]
[li]+72% crit damage[/li]
[li]+290% to all damage[/li]
[li]+289% vitality damage[/li]
[li]+289% chaos damage[/li]
[li]+15% attack speed[/li]
[li]+10% movement speed[/li]
[li]10% chance to stun for 1s[/li]
[li]56% chance of 30% slow for 3s[/li]
[li]70% chance of terrify retaliation for 3s[/li]
[li]720 chaos retaliation[/ul]The combined pet bonuses from this devotion are unbeatable, especially for pet vitality or chaos conversion builds. AoM’s introduction of additional sources of +% OA for pets – from mythical items, new devotions, and the Master of Death exclusive – makes Dying God’s massive crit bonus even more valuable than it was before. This is because the higher the rate of critical hits, the more important it is to increase critical hit damage. Endgame pet builds in AoM can easily reach 60-100% OA or more, and at that OA level it’s imperative to make the most of crit damage.[/li]
Note that Dying God is the only devotion with a serious penalty: the constant health drain from Hungering Void will force pet builds to divert resources away from pets and invest into health sustain instead. This can be a harder task than for most other build types, since pet builds can’t simply equip an item or component to heal themselves using ADCTH from their pet’s attacks. Thus, the cost of Dying God is actually higher than implied by its affinity requirements. Nevertheless, paying this price of admission is well worth the results from the strongest pet devotion available.

Any cabalist pet build should automatically take Dying God over Mogdrogen, because cabalist provides easy +% pet OA (Master of Death), +pet speed (Manipulation), and regen (Blood of Dreeg) to complement Dying God.

Given the above, your questions are pretty straightforward:

1. Yes, health drain applies only to the player. In fact, as with other pet buffs, Hungering Void cannot be bound to pets.

2. As you can see from the list of bonuses above, there’s a lot more than just vitality or chaos damage bonuses for pets. The guide explains why the most important bonus on the list is pet crit.

3. It’s better to take Dying God and learn how to cope with its drawbacks. Per the guide, this is the only devotion with a drawback like this, but there are many ways of “diverting resources” to help address it: via devotions, items, mastery skills, etc. The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike other devotions, you need to invest in additional sustain as part of the cost of the devotion, and this can be especially tricky for pet builds since they don’t have easy use of weapon-based ADCTH. Because of this, Dying God is easily the most expensive devotion of them all, and that’s why it has such an impressive list of pet bonuses.

4. Healing Rain would be one example of the additional investment needed for Dying God, but it’s one of the more expensive solutions as well. If you look at the various builds that use Dying God, you’ll see lots of different solutions used.

5. Generally, offense is more valuable defense because it’s quite feasible to make an immortal character in the game, but that character wouldn’t be able to clear much content, which makes it pretty useless. Also, having a high enough offense decreases the need for defense by shortening fight times and reducing the risk of being overrun. The trick is to give up as little offense as possible to reach just “enough” defense, with “enough” being defined by whatever your goals are, such as beating Ultimate, soloing Gladiator, etc.

Good luck!