I have a couple of questions regarding raise skeletons. First of, I am trying to build up a vitality-based cabalist. The general idea is to have a few pets to keep the mobs away and blast them with vitality magic.
Now, among the pets, I thought it’d be nice if they could also supplement my damage a little bit, especially for these moments when I need to stay faaaaar away from the threat. I understand that blight fiend and hellhound are more efficient to keep the aggro, however skellies may be able to deal higher damage?
The last tier of the raise skeleton skill increases their vit damage. Does it stack with my own modifiers? If I use gear and solael withcblade buff, for example, it will increase further their damage? Also, what skellies are dealing vit-based damage? I suppose the normal ones and the archers don’t, but what about the arcanists and the revenants?
Also, skellies seem to be farily weak so far in the sense that they die quite fast (although I have only very mildly invested in them yet). Do I need to heavily invest in them to make them relevant? And do I need to pick constellations specifically oriented towards pets rather than vit damage?
In general, am I better off with just the hellhound and the blight fiend and forget entirely about the skellies?
My thoughts in regards to your overall question is that skeles tend to be an all in or all out skill tree. It’s not that they don’t have an impact at middling levels of SP expenditure, it’s just that in order to keep them on their feet you have to invest a certain amount of focus to supporting them from various other angles.
Which is expensive in build concept for SP, gear, and devotions.
I would imagine that from what you described yourself wanting to do with the character, which is cast, you’d be better served with other pet choices. As you mentioned Hellhound and Blight Fiend, I can recommend those. Either of those can also be very effective at a DPS capacity with less investment.
The balancing act, for any hybrid summoner, will be splitting the pet bonus damage and character bonus damage, or otherwise addressing that split somehow.
Just to support what reapersgaze says says above, the skellys primary issue is low health and probably DA compared with the other pets available to the Cabalist. Without devoting a lot of gear/components/devotion consteallations to keeping them alive they’re just not likely to act as a wall for you. Having played a few different (pre-expack) caster/ranged toons with pets, the thing you need is pets to act as a roadblock to stop enemies that charge you, and no matter which pets you choose they simply can’t do that against the “enemies that matter”. Even if they could, the necromancer skeletons are probably one of the worst pets for the job. They swarm well and do good DPS, but Blight Fiend with its ability to draw aggro and confuse enemies is far superior as a buffer, and the Hellhound is a very strong alternative to or partner for it. Putting in more points you get a range of abilities with the latter two, but you just get more skeletons with the remainder of their line.
Oh, and good boots. Get good boots. Run speed is your friend (120%+ imo).
Thanks a lot! Very apprecaited.
So I think I’m just going to dump them and focus on the blight fiend and the hellhound (although investment will be minimal on them too…).
