I am not going to engage the OP because he’s obviously just trolling but as far as general pet discussion goes:
I wonder how Ritualist stacks up to Cabalist now. Primal Bond, Primal Spirit, and Briarthorn all saw some pretty significant buffs. Losing Curse of Frailty is rough, but the survivability of pets with a Shaman is really nice, especially since keeping your pets alive is incentivized now in Crucible. My Conjurer definitely feels stronger. I like the flat damage stacking you can do with a Conjurer especially with a Fleshwarped Bulwark. I am using Nature’s Call with two level 20 Briarthorns and it is pretty effective. Totem pairs well with Briarthorn too since you can get pretty crazy life on them.
I need to decide if I want to finish my Ritualist or my poison pets Cabalist first…
I mean, I don’t disagree with it at all, but Skeletons are so fucking annoying. They die almost instantly all the time, my other pets have 90 - 100% HP and those stupid fucks, I mean those stupid skeletons die fast even if they have okay defense. Playing on Elite. Last time I played, poison was killing my skeletons all the time, and poison is my only weakness, but Briarthorn, Skeletal Servant (relic), Blight Fiend and a fire skeleton from an off-hand didn’t give a fuck at all about it. They could stay in poison for 5 - 10 seconds, with 15% resist only, and then eventually die, while skeletons died after 2 seconds no matter what.
I just wish Skeletons would get a HP buff, but as you can summon multiple of those, I doubt that’ll ever happen as they have high damage to compensate that. Yes, I prefer tanky stuff and I actually think about cheating and removing Necromancer mastery because of that.
Pet builds are not dead, they can reach high tier of damage but problem lies somewhere else. CRATE hates lazy pet builds thus they are forcing cooldowns like sheperd’s call, holw of mog, nature’s guardian, dying god and wants us to sync them with our cooldowns. You can hardly become lazy while using pets. You have to keep summon skelies,raven, blight friend and hound for either damage or suvivability. They want pet builds to be ACTIVE all the time and it is tiring. It just ruins the purpose of pet builds. There is only 1-2 PURE LAZY pet build and they are OK.
Correct style of pet builds must like this; moderate damage, all kiting and that is it. You are already paying the price of not having too much fun due to build style. You chose to play it like this. Not damaging, watching you pets do the stuff is less fun than dealing damage by yourself. Even with that, i like pet builds. Thus constantly trying to keep cooldowns sync is more annoying on top of it. Also don’t link builds that require tons of perfect gear and becomes slightly better than OK. With proper gear, any build has chance and is more fun.
Just add a transmuter to skellies that combines all 7 into 1 with 10x hp, 10x damage (OUTSIDER) and now it will make me want to play skellies.
I have a ritualist build right now, damage wise——inferior, cuz shaman gives way less flat damage than occultist.
Survivability wise—-inferior (hard to overcapp chaos and aether res by30), it has great pierce and bleed res, but these resistances are not important in front of harder contents)
Ritualist has a really like really hard time to Cap skeleton skills.
Ritualist right now is not even campaign friendly(if you are starting new) due to lack of pet health (you need really dreamy MIs for AOM content even Log and croney)
The difference between flat damage of a cabalist and ritualist is insane——example——-ritualist’s skeles, Crit at 3.0 from 6k-15k while cabalist Crit at 1.8 from 18k-25k.
Zantai, Plz buff guardian of deathgates(plus2 to shammy necro skills) or this parrot is gonna roll on the grass like wild fire! I’m really scary right now!:furious::p:D
I play my pet builds in pretty lazy fashion and it works well. Actually, since hard points invested are more worthwhile in mastery pets and their abilities with this patch lazy builds are better off than ever. On my Cabalist I only cast Curse and Reap Spirit for Shepherd’s and Mogdrogen’s and that works fine. Oh though I do also have Blood of Dreeg on a macro.
If we’re already talking about pets, does “Generate additional threat” even work? I seem to never get it to work, I use Reap Spirit and Bone Harvest (devotion proccing) on one enemy (non-hero+) and even if my Briarthorn or Blind Fiend use their appropriate skills, enemies still attack me. It does sometimes work on bosses, though, but I’ve never seen it working on other monsters. The other problem is, even if I push my pets before me, enemies sometimes don’t see those pets, but only me. I don’t know if I have brain issues or something’s wrong with the game.
While levelling a Poison Cabalist and before Unstable Anomaly was buffed, I found Rotting Fumes/Blight Burst with high skill levels to work well when it came to holding aggro. This was while I was racking up ticks from spamming Curse of Frailty/transmuted Dreeg’s.
The exception I found were certain enemies. Flesh Hulks and Dranghouls for example did not care. At the same time, My pets could hold aggro on the majority of all Heroes/Bosses.
