Combined with my previous entries on pet itemization, pet sets, and pet skills, this thread serves as the megathread as I list the potential viability of every type of pet build the itemization provides for. Zantai and group have done a great job making pet builds of different damage types flourish, but the constrained design philosophy behind the successful pet builds and poor skill design hamstrings pet builds in ways other types of builds don’t have. I preface this thread by first sharing some great news: shortly, I will be taking on some serious life responsibilities that will almost guarantee that I won’t have the active energy to provide this sort of feedback in the future. In this case, real life has provided me a blessing, and though I love this game and the people who have been willing to discuss the finer points of this game (DaShiv in particular for being the pioneer of pet build design), I have too much at stake in real life to risk anything for a game. Everything I’ve written in this thread is the culmination of several weeks of writing and researching, and I also have the links of most pet equipment ready in case I wanted to discuss a piece of equipment specifically, but this thread is going to be bloated as is.
First and foremost, I watched the dev stream for the first time yesterday and wanted to thank everyone who asked Zantai questions related to pet builds. To avoid providing spoilers to anyone who wants to wait until v1.0.6.0, I will place my thoughts in spoiler tags.
[spoiler]Firstly, between Ancient Grove not providing anything related to pets- despite the fact that the quest came from Mogdrogen itself and everything Mogdrogen had provided in the past benefited pet builds (Mogdrogen’s Ardor, Mogdrogen Sets, Mogdrogen Spaulders) - I find it a little upsetting that Deathstalker and now the DK set has player scaled pets and nothing for pet-scaled pets. I guess I should count my blessings considering we just had a new Necromancer class, but I would have loved seeing classes that don’t normally cater to pets have something that benefits it. Seeing as multiple classes have auras that provide great benefits to pets (Demo, Inquisitor, Arcanist), it would have been really neat seeing those classes get something the standard Conjurer / Cabalist wouldn’t have access to.
Now for the stream itself: Zantai said on stream that we won’t have access to extra pets by investing in the pet skills but investing in the pet skills will provide the pets with extra %Weapon Damage along with the regular damage from their auxiliary skills, meaning things like the Raven and magi Skeletons will see a good buff. From what I’ve heard, skills like Ember Claw will only have increased damage if you invest in them (40% Weapon damage was what I’ve heard) and I didn’t hear anything about changing their effects like making Ground Slam a Knockdown or Ember Claw providing a debuff of some kind. Considering the cast time, lack of IASA frames (meaning the move takes too long before the pet can go back to attacking) and infrequent casting of these skills, my initial thought is these skills will still be useless. We’ll see what the skills really look like when they come out.
The Hellhound having stronger explosions intrigues me (Zantai taking inspiration from unusual sources). If you’re going in that direction, I definitely recommend revamping the Lost Souls set by removing the skill bonuses from the Blight Fiend and focus more on buffing the Hellhound’s skills. The generic +2 to a whole bunch of Necro skills - with little else beyond that - just makes it a very inferior version of the Witching Hour, which only uses the equipment slot compared to the 4-piece set.
Bleeding pets still have no representation, with there being no flat Bleeding damage modifier equivalent to the Blood of Dreeg modifier in Viperfang Grips. I might try Vitality / Bleeding Ritualist using the DK set for the player scaled pets while using the other equipment pieces (Ravager’s Bite being the main weapon here) to get 22/12 Blood Pact and 22/12 Primal Bond (hopefully with Primal Bond giving flat bleeding for pets).[/spoiler]
I’d like to thank the Grim Dawn Discord for exchanging PMs with me and providing feedback on some of the pet build concepts I haven’t personally checked. In the full interest of disclosure, I will list here every pet build I have tested. With my Steam controller still broken, I’m not able to further flesh out my build ideas at the moment:
Standard Pet Builds:
Beastcaller’s Physical Pets with Pierce Retaliation (Conjurer + Elementalist): The job of this build was to test how well you can balance offense and defense for pet builds, as well as what happens when you go for the flat Physical damage procs (Beastcaller’s Helmet + Ishtak). This is my “main” build that I use for gauging how difficult content can get.
Witching Hour Chaos Pets Cabalist: Sneaky Parrot deserves all the praise for his Crucible-clearing Cabalist, so any remarks about Witching Hour are solely credited to the parrot. I had my own Witching Hour Cabalist that I tested for Crucible, but parrot’s build far surpasses my own in clearing ability.
Cold / Elemental Druid Pets: This build tested how pet builds can do with all of its Physical damage converted into Elemental damage (mainly cold, as the Winter King sword has the most conversion out of the pet Physical -> Elemental items. The Discord further explained the benefits of using an Elemental Pets Warlock, so anything I mention about that will be sole credit to the discord.
Poison Pets Cabalist: This build combines the Viperfang gloves with its flat Poison with the Elemental -> Acid conversion from the Venom Launcher gun + Putrid Necklace. This build also attempted to use the Blight Fiend’s Unstable Anomaly transmuter to determine its effectiveness (spoiler: it’s not).
Deceiver Pet Build: My Steam controller broke before I was able to thoroughly test this build out in AoM, but I was most excited to test out this build’s abilities against the much tougher AoM Nemeses like Aleksander and Grava. I’ll discuss both the “general flat damage stacking” build that I have already showcased as well as the Desecrator Covenant set build that served as the no-MI equivalent, though I am aware that there are other Deceiver pet builds that wildly vary in build performance.
Diviner’s Reap Spirit Spellbinder: Not much comments I haven’t already went through in my analysis of the Diviner’s Set (with regards to pet build performance, that is).
I haven’t played a Dracarris Pyromancer myself, so any comments about Fire pets will be attributed to the Discord.
Hybrid Pet Builds:
Winter King Trickster: This build was to test whether the Nightblade skills granted from the Winter King could allow a player to make a real hybrid worthy of the name.
Winter King Cold/Vitality Ritualist: This build tested the Corruptor of Souls set and its bonuses skewing toward Bone Harvest, using the 2H modifier to reliably summon Bonescavenger Deathgrip Spirits while investing heavily in Reap Spirit to have multiple Cold/Vitality pets.
Stormbringer Raven / Storm Totem Lightning Conjurer: A Hybrid Lightning build that tested whether the Stormbringer Tome’s bonuses to Storm Totem (investing 26/16 into Storm Totem) could contribute to a decent Lightning Conjurer. This build also tested the performance of the Occultist Conduit with a 26/16 Raven that pierces through enemies.
Black Scourge Chaos Witchblade: This build was created to assure the developer of equipment design that someone, somewhere is really using the Hellfire / Field Command Reaper pants. Wait… I mean… this build was created to test how well the Black Scourge pets perform combined with the Chaos Voidfiends from the regular Will of Bysmiel amulet, focusing on abusing all the “On Death” bonus procs like the Bonescavenger Spirits and the Abomination Chaos devoton thanks to Riftstone’s Chaos Strike ability.
What’s good about Chaos Pets: 28 flat RR, +2 to all Cabalist Skills, 49 flat Chaos damage, 750% Chaos damage
Witching Hour is, bar none, the best pet item in the game now. It practically provides pet offense by itself, allowing players to better equip for pet defenses (see sneaky parrot’s Witching Hour build to see what I mean). In addition to that, you have items that grant great Chaos damage (Fiendmaster Raiment), a relic that provides huge pet OA, Crit, and a proc with 60% pet speed (Bysmiel’s Domination), and an item that grants 100% Physical to Chaos (Voidwhisper Band). Hellfire is very easy to get to 22/12, especially as Voidwhisper Band gives skill bonus to both Hellfire and Raise Skeletons.
What’s good about Lightning Pets: Easy 50% conversion from Physical to Lightning thanks to Spark of Ultos and Glyph Rings. Stormbringer of Malmouth, Glyph Rings, Mantle of the Patron, Voidmancer’s Cord. Lightning pets are filled with large damage bonuses, making it the highest %Damage bonuses you can get from a pet build. Thanks to the generous bonuses from the tome and the rings, Crit damage can get very high, especially if you’re using Primal Bond as an exclusive skill. The 1.0.6.0 buffs granting innate pet Crit damage makes Lightning pets even more formidable, making it the easy candidate to run a train through Gladiator 170.
What’s not good about Lightning Pets: Conversion relies on Glyph ring procs, which adds to the large damage variances Lightning builds already have. Other than that, Lightning pets are the gold standard in designing for pet builds.
Lightning Pets (Hybrid Summoner)
Flat Damage:
Eye of the Storm - 38 AVG Lightning Damage, 106/s Electrocute Damage
Campaign Viability: All Content easily cleared, including AoM Nemeses and Secret Content Crucible Viability: 170 Gladiator complete
What’s good about Lightning Hybrid: 26/16 Raven attacks with 5 projectiles, and it appears from Snazzblaster’s build that 2 Ravens is far superior to one that pierces. Taking the upper right devotions helps tremendously with defenses, making the build tanky enough to make good use of Savagery.
What’s not good about Lightning hybrid: Getting the Raven to 26/16 (not an easy task when trying to grab all the pet Lightning items, mind you) grants it 5 projectiles, but the vast majority of the time, at least 3 of the 5 projectiles ends up hitting walls or useless obstacles, meaning the Raven is a very poor choice for a shotgun type pet. It’s a shame, too, as the 100% passing through enemies is the best pet-related Conduit in the game, in the sense that it’s a real build-defining skill as opposed to the other Conduits that give you a middle amount of damage to a single pet (Briarthorn, Hellhound, Blight Fiend). Even more of a shame in that you can’t combine it with the amulet that gives you 2 Ravens.
Melee Savagery looks like the way to go, so if you like to play a kiting caster with Storm Totem like I did, you’ll face the following issues. Gearing is extremely hard to get properly (you need over 1000 Physique to equip the Light’s Defender set and 724 Spirit to equip the Stormbringer Tome); the new Valguur’s set would have been perfect for the Storm Totem bonuses + Conjurer skills on the helmet, but the Lightning conversion to Vitality tosses that idea right out. Not only that, but obtaining all the necessary skill points requires extreme luck on the greens (the right prefix and suffix are vital), and even if you get that far, the build suffers from poor OA and DA. This is not a build I’d recommend.
What’s good about Vitality Pets: Skeletons are the best pet DPS source you can get, and Skeletons are chock full of Vitality damage. Overcapping Will of the Crypt and Soul Harvest provides a great amount of flat Vitality. Benefits greatly from Dying God, especially with the huge Crit damage bonuses. Vitality provides the most RR out of any pet build, as not only multiple mastery skills provide RR, but equipment does as well if you want to experiment a bit further with the concept. That doesn’t even get into additional sources, that being Wendigo Totem’s Blood Pact and Guardian of Death’s Gates. The former provides constant healing and huge flat damage bonuses, while the latter adds additional conversion, so that over 50% of Physical damage is converted without Skeletons, while Skeletons get around 70% conversion when Will of the Crypt is factored.
What’s not good about Vitality Pets: Like with Bleeding Pets, Wendigo Totem needs buffs in terms of a range modifier in order for Skeleton Builds to get any use from it. Dirge of Arkovia pet was also added to do Physical / Vitality damage, but it’s very slow and runs into the same pet AI problems as Raven and Hysteria Crab.
What’s good about Physical Pets: Enemies not having a lot of Physical Resistance makes having good Physical RR that much more vital, and using an Occultist or Necromancer gives a lot of good help in attaining that RR. Beastcaller’s Set + Fleshwarped Bulwark leads to far better defenses, three classes having flat Physical damage can lead to quite a few different builds (Demolitionist, Inquisitor, Shaman). Beastcaller’s Cowl is one of the best pet items in the whole game. Some items are really good auxiliary defensive items like Mythical Golemborn Greaves, Mythical Hammerfall Girdle.
What’s not good about Physical Pets: Not much pet %Physical bounses (only Beastcaller’s Medal provides that for equipment, Temper and Steel Resolve for additional %Physical bonus), so if you don’t have ~2,000% to all damage, your pet build is rather weak, so you’ll struggle to get past the higher waves of Crucible that something like Lightning Pets will have no problems getting past. Nature’s Guardians has very poor uptime (20 second cooldown for 6 second activation), so while damage absorption and flat Physical damage is nice, it’s not something you can rely on.
What’s good about Poison Pets: Blood of Dreeg is an amazing ability for pets, providing flat OA, flat Poison damage, more than enough Poison & Acid Resistance, and Physical Resistance to boot. Viperfang gloves provides flat Poison to pets, while the Venom Launcher gun + Putrid Necklace converts 90% of Elemental to Acid, giving a lot more flexibility for skill points + Devotion points. The Rotmender rings give great Poison & Acid bonuses while providing an alright heal, and pet build’s innate large Crit bonuses (with Hungering Void) can lead to some very potent DoTs.
Blight Fiend’s abilities are the best of all Mastery pets, with Rotting Fumes providing huge DA reduction and good fumble chance and Blight Burst providing good AoE capabilities. With the transmuter, the build is theoretically capable of having 3 Blight Fiends up at a time.
What’s not good about Poison Pets: The Elemental to Acid conversion and flat Poison from Viperfang requires using Blood of Dreeg, and yet the Great Serpent helmet gives all bonuses to Shaman. As it is, there’s no way for Shaman Poison pets to have any flat Poison at all since the Great Serpent helmet removed its proc. Primal Spirit’s own Poison is not nearly enough to make up for losing Blood of Dreeg + Skeletons having flat damage + Storm Spirit’s converted flat Acid damage, even if you include the Blightshard pets amulet that you wouldn’t normally get using the Cabalist. There are several nice weapons that a regular Poison pet summoner can use (Plagubearer of Dreeg, Blightshard Invoker), but there’s no off-hand that makes the trade-off worth it (Mythical Fiend’s Resolve gives nothing to pets, Mythical Contagion gives no bonus to All Necromancer skills (Why Nightblade?), Wretched Tome of Nar’Adin is Occultist based, the Black Grimoire pet uses Fire Damage which doesn’t get converted, only two off-hands give +Skills to Shaman and they’re both unrelated to Poison or Pets, etc.)
Fire Pets
Flat Damage:
Flame Touched - 57 Fire Damage @ 22/12 (23 Fire Damage at 12/12)
Campaign Viability: All Content cleared with moderate difficulty, including AoM Nemeses and Secret Content Crucible Viability: 150 Gladiator might be doable (haven’t seen a Dracarris build since the new Crucible update), lol at 170 Gladiator
What’s good about Fire Pets: The equipment surrounding Fire Pets makes it very easy for both Summoner and pets to do large amounts of damage together, maximizing the benefits of Dracarris’ “On Enemy Death” proc. Equipment that grants 22/12 Flame Touched are some of the best items you can get (Ulzuin’s Headguard for the Fire RR, Mark of Divinity for the circuit breaker). Easy to get good Fire RR shred- Thermite Mines may be wonky, but its huge RR shred is formidable.
What’s not good about Fire Pets: Despite their great damage output, builds that focus solely on Swarmlings are going to have a very hard time fighting Nemeses like Grava’ Thul and Kuba. Even regular bosses that pile on death pools like Fleshweaver Harraxis, Naxen Shade, and the Slith boss at the Ancient Grove will give Swarmling builds fits of frustration. It is also the only Elemental damage type that has no “Physical damage converted to,” so Hellhound, Swarmlings, and maybe that Naga’Pesh Skeleton (though you have to give up Wyrmclaw for it) are really your only options if you want to use a Fire pet build.
Bleeding pets
Flat Damage:
Primal Bond - 64/s Bleeding Damage @ 22/12 (28/s Bleeding Damage @ 12/12)
Howl of the Wolf Proc - 28/s Bleeding Damage
Mogdrogen / Huntress Nodes - 14/s Bleeding Damage
What’s good about Bleeding Pets: The 1.0.6.0 update granted flat Bleeding damage to both Primal Bond and Mogdrogen the Wolf’s proc, making it a suitable pet damage type. All credit goes to Safrael for posting his build. Conjure Primal Spirit is- far none- the best pet ability in the game, and Ritualist provides essentially permanent Primal Spirit through the Necrolord’s Gaze and Bound Wraith (Wraithbound Bound Spirit of Binding is the silliest equipment name I’ve seen in a long time).
What’s not good about Bleeding Pets: Pet Bleeding Damage is one of the most undersupported damage types there is, with only one equipment slot (Beastcaller’s Talisman) granting bonus Bleeding damage and only one skill (Blood Pact) doing the same. Especially if you’re playing a Skeletons build, prepare to be disappointed at Wendigo Totem’s short range. Conjure Primal Spirit may have huge Crit Potential, but its base Bleeding damage is fairly low, especially compared to player-scaled abilities like Blade Spirit. As it’s a Mogdrogen- based build, it won’t be able to take advantage of Dying God’s huge Crit bonuses, and the extra speed provided by the proc will only serve to re-apply the Bleeding DoT.
Campaign Viability: Vanilla Content cleared with difficulty, not likely to beat AoM Nemeses Crucible Viability: lol
What might be good about hybrid Chaos pets: If you’re not using Witching Hour, you still have a plethora of options to choose from. Black Scourge provides now-decent pets on kill, Will of Bysmiel (the regular amulet, not the mythical one) provides temporary Voidfiend pets for more Chaos damage, and Salazar’s blade provides a very good pet with all damage RR and great damage. Dying God provides wonderful damage to the player as well as the pets, and Riftstone is a wonderful damage source that can get the “On Enemy Death” procs easily.
What’s not good about Chaos pets (non-Witching Hour): Considering that Witching Hour has finally made pet builds Crucible worthy, it’s a huge indicator as to how much other pet build equipment lacks compared to Witching Hour in every sense of the word. Lost Souls set is completely obsolete, which is ironic that a full set of 4 items can’t hold a candle to a single item. As much as I’ve wanted to make a build around the Black Scourge pets, the combination of pets that only arrive on kill & pets on poor uptime (Salazar’s Blade + Voidfiends), you can’t really combine these pets to make a solid pet build. Getting enough kills to make the Black Scourge pets useful is a daunting task, and my testing for my build specifically designed for this led to it being too squishy and not nearly enough damage (and you’re not going to get any tankier than a Witchblade, that is for sure).
It may be a factor of trying to find the delicate balance between player damage and pet damage, but as long as the Chaos Voidfiends from the Will of Bysmiel amulet continue to have a bad uptime, I consider this a very unviable build.
Cold Pets [Trickster / Druid]
Flat Damage:
Bane of the Winter King - 32 AVG Cold Damage
Frostdread Cuirass - 21 Cold Damage
Campaign Viability: Vanilla Content cleared with difficulty, not likely to beat AoM Nemeses Crucible Viability: lol
What may be good about Cold Pets: A good amount of flat damage bonuses from both Winter King Sword and Frostdread Cuirass. Winter King Sword also provides over 300% Pet Cold damage, Chillmane is a great pet that focuses on Cold Damage, and 50% Physical conversion allows you to either keep the Cold / Physical balance (Trickster) or use other Elemental Conversion to get 100% Conversion (Druid)
To the surprise of precisely nobody, Druid pets are far, far better than Trickster. I know the Winter King sword is meant to use Nightblade and Shaman classes, but why feel stuck with the struggle to get acceptable levels of OA/DA when you can just bring in a Druid, cash in that sweet, sweet 22/12 IEE (which is fairly simple to get thanks to faction shoulders, Magi boots, and that craftable belt) and go to town on everyone.
What’s not good about Cold Pets: As said above, Trickster needs to rely on Savagery to get enough OA/DA just to take on the content, meaning you can’t use the Winter King granted skill as effectively. Damage is okay, but it’s a Swarmling build that’s even worse than Dracarris as you’re not able to put any of its base Fire damage to good use, so take the problems of Fire Pets and multiply that by 2 or so and you get Cold pets.
Note: I didn’t see this until I started doing the numbers, but Cold Pets almost has as much flat damage as Fire Pets (55 with the items against 57 for 22/12 Flame Touched). Now if only you can stack up the % bonuses as well as you can Fire and have more pets that do 200 base Cold damage, and you can have a build that’s as viable as a Fire based pet build.
Cold/Vitality Hybrid Ritualist
Flat Damage:
See separate entries for Vitality and Cold, also
Deathchill - 25 AVG Vitality Damage
Deathchill - 25 AVG Cold Damage
Campaign Viability: Vanilla Content cleared with great difficulty, definitely will not be able to beat AoM Nemeses Crucible Viability: lol
What may be good about Cold / Vitality Pets: Both Reap Spirit and the Bound Spirits from Bonescavenger use Cold + Vitality damage. In addition, you can combine the Winter King Sword and Master of Death to convert 75% of Physical Damage into 50% Cold + 25% Vitality. Thanks to the Corruptor Set’s bonuses to Bone Harvest, you can obtain an overcapped Bone Harvest that’s easy to kill the enemies necessary to get the Bound Spirits.
What’s not good about Cold / Vitality Pets:
1)[spoiler]
It’s not worth it to use Raise Skeletons in this build, as not only do you need a lot of assistance (+5 BoM) to get Raise Skeletons to 26/16, but even if you did, their damage output is piddling, going for around 25K crits when you can easily get 60K+ crits on other pet casters.
As for Reap Spirit, here are the numbers on that:
23/16 (the minimum to get 3 Reap Spirits) cast costs 366 Energy. With the 6 second cooldown, that comes to 61 Energy per second, which is extremely difficult to get if you’re not using a caster off-hand (and that’s using nothing else other than spamming Reap Spirit). Secondly, the 10 second Reap Spirit life is far too short to get 3 Reap Spirits going, in fact you’d be lucky to get even 2 Spirits fighting with you. Using the Diviner’s Set to lower the Reap Spirit cooldown also kills the Corruptor’s Set, and you’d rather go for the whole set anyway with the off-hand than trying to use it with the 2H Winter King Sword. Considering how much you have to invest just to get to 23/16 Reap Spirit, I’d much rather see the regular life of the Reap Spirit pet to be 20 seconds and have the full Diviner’s Set give it something a little more oomph, like adding a particular debuff to the Reap Spirit cast.
Witching Hour is, bar none, the best pet item in the game now. It practically provides pet offense by itself, allowing players to better equip for pet defenses (see sneaky parrot’s Witching Hour build to see what I mean). In addition to that, you have items that grant great Chaos damage (Fiendmaster Raiment), a relic that provides huge pet OA, Crit, and a proc with 60% pet speed (Bysmiel’s Domination), and an item that grants 100% Physical to Chaos (Voidwhisper Band). Hellfire is very easy to get to 22/12, especially as Voidwhisper Band gives skill bonus to both Hellfire and Raise Skeletons.
Thanks for the amazing job on analyzing different possibilities of pet builds!
Thanks a lot for the long time support and council, it’s always an honor to hear from you. I will put you in the credits section of my build guide.
I think it will be much more creative if we could have something like— mass enchant pet build or mass resurrect pet build, even mass detonation one would be fresh air. There should be more ways on how we interact with pets (like we can manually taunt them or give them divine shields of some sort, mass teleportation from d2[like rune word enigma] is pretty cool too).
If the summoner could transfer some of the damage dealt to him to pets, it will be much easier to deal with enemies that just aggro the summoner.
I think some obvious issues should be addressed too, like------
1.Skeletal Servant from dirge would actually be useful if it has a real high threat level to attract aggro and BTW he moves like turtle too.
2.Guardian of death gates, need a skill buff to actually be useful.
3 Bysmiel’s Domination is reactive and the trigger is tied to the summoner.
The thing is----you can only take damage from trash mobs but you can clear them anyway. Hard bosses and nemesis encounter is the time you really need the help of the relic, but you discover that you can’t take a punch. My 2cents: tie the skill trigger to pets or you can proactively trigger its effect.
4primal instincts’ insects need a survivability buff (more health)----The insects are damn slow too, they should probably move faster.
I guess there are many things to improve what comes to pets, as proven in the long post above. Just to conclude, I`d hope that Crate gives as much love/support to other pet damage types than just lightning (which has good devotion/skill/item support).
I didn’t include Bleeding as a pet archetype because there’s not nearly enough itemization or skills that grants flat Bleeding for it to stand out from a standard pet build. Mogdrogen devotion and Huntress gives about 14 Bleeding damage per second; when you compare to Poison that gets 108 damage per second from the Viperfang gloves, it falls short.
I do have a section on builds that focus on permanent Primal Spirit, where I will include both your pet build and the CDR Primal Spirit build that’s also posted in the forums. I haven’t taken the time to format it the way I’ve done with the other sections, but the gist of it is that Primal Spirit needs far more potent DoTs to justify it as a temporary pet ability with average uptime.
Speaking of which, is there a way I can add additional posts to the top of the thread? I wanted to make a post linking all the previous feedback threads and how they all tie together, and I’d like for that to be with my other two threads at the top so people can see it better.
DaShiv’s build died in 1.0.1.1, and it doesn’t focus on elemental damage.
Here’s my elemental pets warlock, I decided to never post it because it’s only a little bit better than Dracarris Incarnate, and I’m 100% sure that someone else here could improve it. Also 4 MIs is too much for a build imo.
This build can do the bourbon fight no problem if you replace the gloves with the overlord ones and swap some components/augments.
For sub10 MQ, you should also use those gloves, take some points out of the arcanist mastery bar, take fevered rage and max overload. You will die for sure in your first few tries, but it can be done.
Itemization is really limited for Elemental Pets, there’s only 45% Physical to Elemental, meaning you’re either stuck with pets still doing majority Physical damage, or you use Cold conversion to get to 100% conversion (which I use on my Druid) or Lightning conversion, which just makes you a somewhat less capable version of Thundercats. It doesn’t seem to have any real identity outside of “use greens to get to 22/12 IEE,” even Dracarris had more interesting ways to get 22/12 Flame Touched.
Not to knock on the build’s actual performance, however. Raw numbers-wise, Toast’s Warlock probably does a better job in boss killing than my Druid. It’s just that it looks more like an amalgamation of pet items put together rather than a build with a real identity, the way that Chaos, Lightning, Fire, and Poison pets have.
I’ll comb through this section further once I test my multiple build options, but for now, I updated this to include Safrael’s Bleeding Pets and credited Snazzblaster’s Lightning Hybrid for completing Gladiator 170.
Lightning Pets in general are probably going to be fierce, especially as I’ve seen them beat Gladiator 170 before update 1.0.6.0 blessed us with the huge Blessing buffs. To a somewhat lesser degree, Witching Hour pets should be fine as well, even with the nerfs.
2 month bump - Since the new expansion is going to come out in a few months, I’m going to refine this thread to make it a feedback hub filled with links suggesting buffs for pet builds. I’m going to re-do the damage types that need to be fixed (especially Vitality, thanks to Superfluff’s amazing build) and keep a separate section in a spoiler tag for the failed hybrid concepts, but hopefully it will turn into something pet users can look to in testing for new concepts that come out in the next expansion.
For now, the major update is including all the pet build threads to give credit to everyone who’s made a successful pet build. I’ll be using their threads to refine my damage type write-ups. I haven’t forgotten about Ayylmao’s Poison Hybrid pets, but I will need to write up a section for Poison Hybrid so that will likely fall lower on the list.
but investing in the pet skills will provide the pets with extra %Weapon Damage along with the regular damage from their auxiliary skills, meaning things like the Raven and magi Skeletons will see a good buff. From what I’ve heard, skills like Ember Claw will only have increased damage if you invest in them (40% Weapon damage was what I’ve heard) and I didn’t hear anything about changing their effects like making Ground Slam a Knockdown or Ember Claw providing a debuff of some kind. Considering the cast time, lack of IASA frames (meaning the move takes too long before the pet can go back to attacking) and infrequent casting of these skills, my initial thought is these skills will still be useless. We’ll see what the skills really look like when they come out.