Pet Item & Gameplay Feedback Thread FoA Version

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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As is tradition after every expansion / major version update, it is proper to provide feedback on how it feels to play pet builds. @Maya has her own thread related to the matter, and while “pets need buffs because they can’t beat superbosses at the same rate as other non-pet builds” doesn’t give Zantai much to go off of, her frustrations are certainly relatable. At the core, it comes down to a few key items:

  1. Pet Speed
    Considering the expansion gave players new ways to increase maximum attack / casting speed while also having multiple blitz / movement skills, why did you make it a priority to nerf every source of pet %Total Speed? Any time I try to make a non-Occultist pet build that would prefer a different constellation route other than Mogdrogen the Wolf (Dying God + Aeon’s or Dying God + Tree of Life), I close Grimtools in disgust because I look at the pet sheet and see 20% Pet Total Speed when most pet builds would love to see 100+% at a minimum. We need some other source of pet %Total Speed other than Occultist’s Manipulation or Mogdrogen the Wolf. Ishtak would be the best choice as you can’t reach both it and Mogdrogen at the same time.

  2. Pet Damage
    Obviously there are pet builds whose single-target DPS is very good and comparable to non-pet builds. I’m more referring to the mechanics of pets in general. Guess who doesn’t have access to Onslaught mechanics and the ability to turbocharge a CD skill? Pet builds. Who doesn’t have access to 50% Execution + 50% Necrotic Edge auto-attacks where you can have single-target and AoE clear in a single button? Pet builds. We can stuff TDM modifiers all we want, but all that accomplishes is making any gear that conflicts with the TDM gear completely useless. It would be awesome if Briarthorn had its own Onslaught stack-up so that it could build up a Ground Slam to be as powerful as an Onslaught + Grenado combo.

  3. More Pet Health and Resistances
    When needing 50% Overcap in all main resistances + capped Stun / Slow / Freeze Resistance is more important than ever, many pet items - particularly in the augment and component section - feel like the pet bonuses were just add-ons with no thought put into it. We only have two armor components that give bonuses to pets: Eldritch Mirror and Bysmiel’s Bindings. Bysmiel’s Bindings desperately need pet resistances, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve equipped Eldritch Mirror in Grimtools only to see that my build’s Vitality resistance is 90% overcap before I even put the component on in the first place.

  • Similarly, if we’re hunting for specific MI’s, there are only TWO Prefixes that give pet bonuses, and only one of them gives pet resistances. Meanwhile, FoA added numerous suffixes in a pool that was already saturated with good pet suffixes (“Of the Wild” and “Of Caged Souls” giving us needed pet Elemental Resistance and Pet Bleeding Resistance, respectively). The prefixes for MI weapons / off-hands (Tamer’s / Motivator’s) are really good, and we appreciate that you added those to the game.

  • Augments are in the same boat. There are 11 augments for weapon / off-hand that give pet bonuses. ZERO of them give resistances to pets. Spikeshell Powder or Eldritch Bloom Powder are good candidates to place a pet resistance.

  1. Pet Conversions
    Kurn Beastbinding Rod & Mythical Fiendblood Spellblade - These two items have unique conversions for pets, but there is no way to get that conversion to 100% by any means, so we’re stuck with a 30% - 50% on one item and no idea what to do with the rest of the damage. When there are several set-ups that have 200-300% conversion from one type to another, why do some of these partial conversions remain?

As mentioned before, having few ways to convert pet Acid damage hurts. The only viable options are Acid to Lightning & Acid to Vitality; there is Acid to tri-Elemental, but Necromancer only has access to Cold RR innately. Fire Blight Fiends would be incredible, and if I had any ability in creating skins, I would have already made a Fire Blight Fiend set in the Grimarillion mod. Who wouldn’t want a pet that is basically pure magma?

In short, we appreciate what you have given us in FoA. The new Ice King set is incredible! The new Wolf pet given to us from Mogdrogen is great! Skeletons are really squishy and can’t Crucible at all, but the items that give custon Skeleton layouts are awesome! The playerbase is just a little frustrated that we can’t get super creative in the ways that auto-attack builds and Onslaught cooldown builds can get creative.

And to end on a positive note, here is a pet build that shows all the positives that FoA have brought us:

Making good use of an Awakened item, a Raven with double the projectiles it would normally have, and good incorporation of the new gear FoA has given us. Is it as competitive as a standard Beastcaller’s Conjurer or Ghol’s Ritualist? No, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a good build, capable of handling what the game has to offer, and that in of itself is what we’re really seeking in this game.

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A neat idea I think would be for the individual pet skill upgrades that grant them castable kills that would become active put-skill-on-the-bar buttons where you press button, and it directs the pet in question to do the skill in question to the target/area in question. To go even further, I would honestly make the (maybe some, not all) pets auto-summon on cooldown (making the energy bar be a summoner’s health bar in essence) to make space for more pet command related stuff.

  1. AFK zoo builds could dump points into base pets to have their army. Maybe have a primary benefit of pumping the pet itself be focused on uptime (lower energy cost, lower resummon cooldown kind of thing) shifting more of the damage/combo shenanigans into the skill upgrades.
  2. Shift the piano from weird shit like having to spam completley unrelated skills like Bone Harvest for a pet-buff shoehorned into it to something that feels more like a pet centric thing.
  3. Create more opportunity for variety - like onslaught mechanic would make a decent amount of sense in this set up where your Raven isn’t going to insta-snipe a trash mob afking to the side and waste the onslaught stacks.

Maybe this would be more of a project for Grim Dawn 2, but I would love for them to grow on this pet divide between the AFK goon squad and the puppetmaster style builds; and it would help add more levers to balance the pet vs non-pet stuff. I think it would also help with the weird skill point starvation situation where trying to build up multiple pets is squeezing skillpoints from stone in an optimization puzzle that needlessly more complex compared to other build archetypes without creating any interesting gameplay to compensate for it.

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I don’t understand, you need 130% in all resistances? why?

eldritch mirror adds vitality resist to the player, so I don’t understand the point, pet sets have too much vitality resist on the player?

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@konfeta: A Last Epoch-style mapping where pressing the Summon Briarthorn button when it is already summoned allows the player to manually activate Ground Slam is technically impossible with the Titan Quest engine we have. It’s not a bad idea, and it’s really good how LE handles pet skills, but it’s not something we can incorporate in Grim Dawn.

I was going to link how many new resistance shred moves came with the expansion, but it looks like the tuning pass from one of the prior patches removed most of the big offenders, and basically none of the new monsters have RR shred in their moves. It’s more OA / DA / Armor that we really need more than resistances.

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Seems more “The few pet buffing components that exist don’t give meaningful player benefits”

Eldritch Mirror gives 5% AS/CS and 10% Vit resist…

Pet builds don’t really need AS/CS because they’re only maintaining buffs/debuffs unlike normal builds who are actually throwing out damage skills.

While the Vit resist is low, easily obtained through jewellery components (As there’s little else other than Vit resist and DA in those slots) and can be attained through gear (It’s one of the more common resists. I can’t really think of a build I’ve made that wasn’t at least 75% Vit resist pre-components/devotion)

Ideally you’d want your pet buffing components to help fill out player defences so you can focus more on items and components that complete your pets.

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The game is more than just about sets, and plenty of non-set combinations are just overflowing with Vitality Resist.

This Grimtools above has 117% Vitality overcap, and that’s while using Primal Bond as the exclusive instead of Master of Death. Some equipment pieces like Spiritseeker Cord only have Vitality Resistance for the player, and Shadowfiend’s Cord still doesn’t have any player resistances to speak of.

The Attack and Cast Speed are fine; even if you’re only casting debuffs, having the extra speed is useful to get around Slow effects.

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removing those would be a disaster for hybrid pet builds, also I think some non-pet builds use them as well.

I think the vit res on the mirror is a good thing because you can plan ahead for vitality on your headpiece since prismatic diamond adds vitality too.

Still find it hard to find real culprit here, you don’t have much vit on armor, the amulet and pendant could have been many other choices on a ritualist. Maybe you could argue the spiritseeker cord or relic could use something else since they are clearly necro themed and necro is most likely to get overinvested in vitality.

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