I wanted to share my thoughts on all the item-granted pets, as they could serve hybrid pet builds very well if they were worth using (not to mention they can combine those with the player-scaled pets since the hybrid player will have decent % bonuses), but currently there aren’t any real good temporary pets out there.
Primal Instinct: The gold standard of temporary pets. Summon limit is 5, 20 seconds is a reasonable amount of life, and they are summoned on attack so it is very easy to keep the max amount of pets flowing, and has roughly 300 weapon damage which gets boosted heavily by flat damage bonuses.
Black Hand of Sanar’Siin: Summon limit is 3 (too low, in my opinion), 15 seconds is too short, and they are summoned on hit, which is okay since Chaos pet builds will either be Melee with the Fang of Cthon’s crazy ADCTH or Caster oriented with Sigils. As I mentioned with my first post, their damage is way, way, way too low, average of 50 Physical Damage and a Chaos damage floor of 6 is laughable. Ramp up the Chaos damage to 100-150 or even 150-200 and they still would look only okay compared to the Primal Instinct critters, as Chaos RR is much harder to obtain than Fire RR. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: No change.
Black Scourge: Summon limit is 3 may be okay considering it’s a kamikaze pet, but not only do they only live for 8 seconds, but they spawn at a 50% chance on enemy death. That means not only do you have to have a good Chaos melee/caster build to even summon one of them, but you have to kill approximately 1 enemy every second just to have a steady flow of critters attacking the enemy. Combine this with the fact that many tough bosses don’t have the steady stream of trash to comb through, and this is simply a failure in design.
Making the explosions damaging Bleeding / Vitality Decay ticks (like 650 damage over 2 seconds or something like that) would make their contributions a little better as you’re not frantically trying to kill enemies just to have these little things spawn. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: I appreciate the change to be 100% Chance on Death, so now there’s a good change you’ll see multiple critters in battle. The fact they still do Chaos damage makes them not worth using because Salazar’s Blade and Witching Hour are far more useful for Chaos pet summoners. My original suggestion still stands.
Salazar’s Sovereign Blade: We know you want this, Zantai.
On a serious note, though, this is what good temporary pet design looks like. A nice elemental resistance Aura that’s in place as soon as it’s summoned, great flat damage (350 flat Physical and 570 Chaos is by far the best numbers on a pet), Spectral Miasma is a wonderful all-damage RR, and the explosion acts like a real explosion.
I had an old dagger that I took out to test and it appears that it’s around as fast as the Blight Fiend pet, so great job fixing the speed on this thing. I would appreciate replacing the bonuses to Raven with bonuses to Sigil of Consumption or Doom Bolt to give us the real thrill of playing like a Salazar look-alike. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: Thank you for lowering the cooldown, especially for low-level players where 80+ seconds would have turned players off.
Karvor’s Conjuring Bone: Frenzied Roar is just a sad, sad buff. 300 Health Recovery with no% recovery? When builds typically have 15K health? Only a 20% boost to damage when the Kings proc gets you over 150%? This boost has to be massively improved for a pet that only has 50% uptime. Also, for a Reckless pet, it’s damage is far too small to be considerable, as it’s only roughly 100-125 Physical Damage. The Swarmlings have that type of damage on much shorter downtime. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: No change to Frenzied Roar = useless item.
Empowered Marrow Band: Yes, I said Empowered, because there’s no Mythical version of this ring. Primal Spirit bonus is a nice touch, and the health pool of this critter is huge, not to mention the nice damage debuff + taunt. However, the only way it’s summoned is a 5% chance on hit, which is extremely low compared to other procs in this game. Also, Bleeding Resistance is the easiest for a Shaman to max, as Emboldening Presence takes out a good chunk of that requirement already. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: No changes to this item. Please increase the chance on hit for this temp pet.
Bonescavenger’s Deathgrips: Lives for 20 seconds (okay), has an average of 170 Cold + 170 Vitality flat weapon damage (good), and virtual immunity to AoE attacks? These are great temporary pets to have. Not only that, but the 128 flat OA bonus is great for hybrid casters and the emphasis on Vitality damage has plenty of item/devotion support. This is a great example of well-designed temporary pets.
Will of Bysmiel: Considering we already have the Salazar Harbinger for temporary Chaos pet on cooldown, I really hope you consider having these pets be summoned on attack instead of how they are currently. Their damage looks hardly better than the Primal Instinct bugs, but they cannot benefit from flat weapon damage, so their damage ultimately is far worse than the Swarmlings. The large AoE attacks make up for their limited number, but keeping them on cooldown utterly hamstrings the Summoner’s total pet DPS. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: No changes to this item,I still stand with these summons being a 15% on attack or something similar. If you want increased pet damage on cooldown, you’re not using this item, you’re using Sovereign Ruby.
Eldritch Hound (from Bysmiel Bonds constellation): About 100 Physical Damage and 105 Acid damage is underwhelming for a temporary pet, especially one that doesn’t perform any Poison attacks, which would really help Poison summoners as they need all the Poison DoT stacking they can get. In keeping with the devotion design, all I ask for the pet is that it has an attack that can do Poison DoTs, something on the order of 150 / s for 2-3 seconds. It would really help give pet users a reason to use Poison. Version 1.0.4.0 Update: lol I’m dumb, this pet does do Poison damage after all. Appreciate having the pet spawn closer to the enemy for maximum effectiveness.
I’ve already laid out my thoughts on the Blightshard Rift Scourge (there needs to be 2-3 scourges that are summoned instead of 1 in order for people to seriously consider this amulet, especially as they do not benefit from flat damage), the Black Grimoire Skeleton (give his Armor group buff some DA or perhaps additional Physical Resistance) and the Chillmane Yeti (it’s good as is), so there goes the extent of my comments. I am really looking forward to how the new update is going to surprise us.