The new pet mods are pretty strong, and I am thinking they might change some of the BiS items for pet characters. I found the attached shoulders, and while I have yet to find the Beastcaller shoulders I don’t think I will use them even if I do now. If “of binding” can go on rings and amulets, the bloodsworn signets could be way better than they were in 1.0.0.3 as I have a non-bloodsworn tome of binding that adds 51% pet damage. Does anyone know which of the new mods can go on which items?
of Binding only spawns on off-hands. Keeper’s only spawns on shields. There’s one or two very rare headgear-exclusive affxes with pet bonuses (and you need to be very lucky to get the bonuses you want), Dominator’s and Taskmaster’s only spawns on torso armors and pants and most pet affixes (Subjugator’s, etc) only spawn on accessories (rings, amulets, belts) and offhands.
Magicals and rares have -always- been excellent alternatives to legendaries for summoners, and BiS for summoners is purely relative, depending on build. Pretty much the only item that almost all my summoners use, in fact, is the Beastcaller’s Cowl. Everything else depends on the type of summoner.
Beastcaller’s Regalia is good mostly because of the set bonuses. The 3/4 piece bonuses are massive especially for builds like the Lazy Pokemon Master build, which relies almost exclusively on pets for damage. Bestial Rage (the 4 piece bonus) even doubles as a pet taunt skill on top of granting pets a +%total speed bonus with 40% uptime. You could say that Beastcaller’s was designed to be THE set for such builds.
As I already said in a previous thread, torso/leg armors still carry some of the best defensive affixes/bonuses (affix numerical values vary between different pieces of gear, with torso/leg armors getting the highest bonuses) and many powerful defensive affixes also only spawn on specific gear slots (including torso and leg armor slots).
Interestingly, the new affixes (which are prefixes, so complementary defensive suffix options are limited) seem to be designed for either hybrids (player-specific bonuses to total damage/OA/health/mana regen on top of pet bonuses) or end-game summoners who wish to equip specific items (like specific bracers/boots/headgear/accessories/etc). With some tweaking and the right complementary suffix (or MI, if you’re a hardcore farmer) on a Dominator’s/Taskmaster’s piece, you could “move around” bonuses so can equip the gear you want without losing a massive chunk of your survivability/some other stats.