Allow me to introduce myself.
I am pretty much the reason for why pet builds are considered as walking simulators. The reason for that has to do with how I build them - facetanking and facerolling while being lazy enough to play half asleep.
Medea already posted my Mnemosyne pet Conjurer and you can check out my up-to-date heavy hitter builds here, tuned for deep SR and superbosses - The Carnival - A Guide to Pets
You don’t need to use wendigo totem at all and can do just fine. Placement is essentially plop it infront of you and stand in it, not that different from seals.
Devouring swarm is only needed for vitality/bleed pet builds, otherwise ignore.
Primal spirit is not necessary at all.
Call of the grave, bone harvest, ill omen, mark of torment are all optional.
Reap spirit can be bound to left click.
Pet attack command is not necessary at all. if anything, using it makes my setups worse to play…
My tankiest setup - The Fluffy Squishy - Pet Conjurer :3 essentially plays like this;
- summon pets
- summon superboss
- put totem infront
- cast blood of dreeg and curse of frailty
- repeat 1,3,4 as needed.
- collect loot.
for anything that is not even nemesis tier, you just walk around and collect loot.
now, why do pet builds get the “lazy” tag when melee setups can have even less buttons or just hold down attack?
the answer is essentially that with pets, if you build them for defense, they can be extremely forgiving to mistakes at endgame without loosing too much damage compared to non pet setups where it is easier to die since you do not have meatshields tanking for you.
a good example of this is deep SR runs being dominated by pet builds since you can throw bodies at your enemies while just chilling half a screen away. case in point, iirc, my fluffy squishy still holds the record for deepest SR run solo without the perma freeze trick -
(this was before shard levels were consolidated)