We have to be careful and not be too knee-jerk about Dying God + Hourglass being the One True Path and everything else being trash. While the Night King convincingly demonstrated how effective this combo is for Cabalists, it’s not necessarily the end-all setup for every single pet build.
Looking at the offense bonuses, for example, a Ritualist that already has stacked crit bonuses from Primal Bond and Call of the Grave but lacks Manipulation might increase pet DPS more from the OA+speed from Mogdrogen, and/or could concentrate enough damage into lightning for Ultos to provide the best returns. As I previously described:
Notice that +72% crit bonus from Dying God is wrapped up with OA, so its value fluctuates quite a bit based on existing crit/OA values. For example, using any OA/DA calculator against enemy DA of 2439 (Mad Queen):[ul][li]Eff OA = 3500, crit = 150%, +72% crit = +12.8% DPS[/li]
[li]Eff OA = 4000, crit = 100%, +72% crit = +16.9% DPS[/li]
[li]Eff OA = 4500, crit = 50%, +72% crit = +21.4% DPS[/ul][/li]Meanwhile, Mogdrogen’s speed boost is much more of a pure DPS boost for low-speed builds:[ul]
[li]AS = 220%, +40% AS = +18.2% DPS[/li]
[li]AS = 180%, +40% AS = +22.2% DPS[/li]
[li]AS = 140%, +40% AS = +28.6% DPS[/ul][/li]Of course here we’re only contrasting the two most significant bonuses against each other and not the entire constellation, but you can already see how the offensive bonuses from each constellation can have dramatically different values for different pet builds, which prevents Dying God from being a simple slam dunk every time.
Switch to the health drain for Dying God and there’s a similar set of class-specific considerations, especially with the penalty ramped up from roughly -240/s up to -300/s in AoM. Stacking BoD and TD + Giant’s Blood allows for positive regen, but it’s a lot harder for non-Occultist builds. Relying on only TD + Giant’s Blood will completely destroy player regen, including period of full negative drains during proc reset (due to Giant’s Blood’s on-hit nature, it’s much harder to maintain steady uptime than for on-attack procs). And Wendigo Totem is a terrible method of health regen for most pet builds since it requires being within 5m radius of enemies - generally, it’s the flat damage from Blood Pact that’s more valuable for pet builds, and the totem is there to provide a minor amount of healing for pets and not the summoner. So even with sacrificing huge numbers of additional devotion points (for TD + Giant’s Blood), Dying God’s health drain also means that it’s not necessarily an auto-pickup for every pet build.
I think the devotion picture will look much clearer once we have many more competitive pet builds beyond only the Night King, since Cabalist is such a uniquely great fit for Dying God + Hourglass; the Night King also very effectively maximized the benefits of that particular devotion setup. On the whole I do believe Dying God to be the strongest standalone pet T3, but for different class/damage/itemization setups, there are likely to be competitive or even better alternative devotion setups that can be made without any changes to existing devotions.