I don’t get it: The point of the Hellhound seems to be to boost fire and chaos damage, the Familiar boosts elemental damage. That’s fine, I’m sure, if I or my minions am / are going to be doing elemental damage, particularly fire. The Occulist seems to specialize in vitality or acid / poison / bleed damage, perhaps he could squeeze some out of Sigil (which just isn’t working for me).
But I also don’t see any minions really grooving on fire, chaos, or elemental damage. I mean yes, the Hellhound can use fire and chaos with a bunch of investment, and I suppose the raven could be used to deal lightning damage and could thus buff itself a bit. But…
I’m starting GD playing a Cabalist, because this seems like the obvious choice for a summoner and I’ve always liked summoners. And I can get a Blight Fiend and some Skellies with the Necro. Neither seem to do either fire nor chaos damage, or any kind of elemental damage. The Skellies even have an own branch which buffs their elemental damage, I don’t get that either. Neither the Occultist nor the Summoner have auras that add elemental damage.
So if I am set to do vitality, or acid / poison (like skellies and fiend seem to do), where is the elemental damage supposed to come from that my Hellhound and Raven are supposed to buff? Is the Hellhound even worth it?
I feel like an idiot for missing the obvious. I don’t want to cookie-cut my way into copying someone’s build, but just a gentle nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
The best tip I can give you is to put your focus on your pets life and percentage of damage. To achieve this you will have to make good use of your Devotion points, max out Bonds of Bysmiel and devotion. I’m not really big on posting guides, but you can achieve a good deal of damage if you try. Otherwise they won’t survive very long and you will spend most of your time running in circless, but if you can keep them living beyond the recharging time then you will do alright. For the Hellhound I stopped at Ember Claw, and for the Familiar I placed my focus on Summon Familiar and Lightning Strike.
Edit: forgot to upload second image. You also have to put energy into survival!
You’ve got a few questions so I will try my best to answer.
Long story short on the Raven and Hellhound auras is that you shouldn’t focus TOO hard on what type of damage they add to other pets so much as that they do add flat damage. Any flat damage added to a summon that utilizes a physical type base attack (raven’s attack is not a physical base attack but a magic attack for example) can be boosted by raw total pet damage bonuses, which will typically be much higher than the bonuses they get from particular boosting (like the elemental or fire/chaos).
In the case of skeleton summons, those aura damage boosts you are talking about can be made to be pretty synergistic without much effort with devotion and gear picks.
As to what those auras can do for you, it depends on your setup. If you are running Sigil tree, the Hellfire aura boosts MOST those damage types so it’s a decent buff for you. Typically though, except for some hybrid builds, players will either go all in for the pet design or just barely, in order to enhance their own character somehow.
The most important part of the auras skills on Hellhound and Familiar is flat damage they give. This is boosted by all +% damage boosts on your other pets. 90% of pet damage boost in this game are global.
This means a tiny bit of extra damage can be huge. BTW Familiar aura is the best pick for skeletons as Will of the Crypt gives huge +% elemental damage for them. A quick calculation says it be ~400 extra damage per skeleton and that with out devotions and using the vitality damage gear.