Pet Itemization (Includes thoughts on nearly every pet item in the game)

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
21

Devotions

Expanding from my previous post: Dying God is the devotion constellation to choose if you’re running a pet build, and it’s not even close. The reason? When you put the constellation nodes and proc together, your pets have a total of 72% additional crit damage. How good is 72% crit damage? It is approximately equal to 100 flat damage of your primary type (which is more than about every max overcap skill that gives flat damage to pets), a whopping 630% additional damage of your primary type, or an additional 60% RR (on top of all your already existing RR). That doesn’t even include the extra 290% of all damage or over 550% of vitality/chaos damage if your pets use that damage type. That means that any pet build that isn’t taking Dying God is functionally obsolete. It doesn’t help that there are plenty of very good constellations that provide Red + Blue affinity that gets you to Dying God easily (and with AoM, can also take Aeon’s Hourglass, which is one of the best devotions Necromancers can ask for). The other devotions that grant pet Crit Damage? Panther and Staff of Rattosh, which both grant either Blue affinity or Red affinity or both. Every other constellation just looks pathetic compared to Dying God.

It doesn’t help that any of the Purple constellations that grant pet OA or damage can easily be unlocked by just spending 5 devotion points on Shepherd’s Crook, which combines with Dying God to grant exactly 100% additional pet crit damage. In my opinion, there should be real competition between taking Dying God and taking Mogdrogen the Wolf (setting aside you can currently grab both constellations, but that comes at the cost of heavy RR loss / defensive stats loss), so I will propose some options to help provide some better balance:

[ul][li]Take the 10% Pet Crit Damage node from Dying God and give it to Mogdrogen the Wolf - getting pet OA is much easier now with the Necromancer and its gear bonuses (not to mention Staff of Rattosh also grants pet OA), so there’s really no benefits from taking the Purple + Green route that the Dying God route doesn’t already have (and most times does it better). Giving Mogdrogen some crit damage will help with that.[/li]
[li]Make Mogdrogen the Wolf an AoE buff and double the flat bleeding bonus - I have mentioned before how pets currently have little options for Bleeding damage; only two equipment pieces grant pet or AoE bleeding bonuses and Blood Pact is the only skill that grants an additional bonus to bleeding damage. Making Howl of Mogdrogen an AoE like Dying God will fix some of that and give pet builds at least one damage type that Mogdrogen does better.[/li]
[li]Take the pet Crit bonuses from Panther and give them to Fox or an equivalent animal constellation - Staff of Rattosh already gives pets extra OA and Crit damage while contributing to Dying God. Switching some pet stats to benefit Purple + Green will help make it less unbalanced.[/li]
[li]Give Typhos Pet Physical / Pierce / Bleeding damage instead of Vitality Damage and buff the defensive bonuses - As it currently stands, Typhos is a terrible constellation and not even worth a second look. The player gets Vitality and Aether bonuses; Rattosh, the Veilwarden does that better since it also grants Vitality RR. Pets get 100% Vitality damage, which if you’re using that type, you’re going with Dying God and its 550% additional Vitality damage. For defensive bonuses, summoners get 3% Physical Resistance bonus that will do peanuts against the hordes of mobs that dish out heavy amounts of that damage. The affinity bonuses, thinking about it again, are okay, considering the 2 Light bonus makes it just about self-supporting, but why would any pet user bother with it at its current state? Granting Physical, Bleeding, or Piercing % damage bonuses, to fit with the concept of jailing and roughhousing, give pets users a damage type that isn’t immediately obsoleted by Dying God.[/li]
[li]Make one of the T3 Purple or Green procs pet-scaled instead of player scaled - The T3 constellations I’m referring to are Elemental Seeker from Blind Sage, Arcane Currents from Attak Seru, and Living Shadow from Unknown Soldier. Of the three, Elemental Seeker looks like the best option to turn into pet-scaled as it will really open up options for Arcanist based pet builds that incorporate overcapped IEE. It will also give Fire + Lightning pets a second devotion route, as 62% Crit damage on explosion will be equivalent to the 62% they are losing by giving up Dying God. If I recall correctly, most builds that use Unknown Soldier don’t even bother picking up the proc, and Blind Sage and Attak Seru are rare among endgame builds (I see nothing at the powerful builds thread), so changing any of these won’t affect many builds.[/ul][/li]
I wanted to add this section before the people working on this game come in on Monday and parse through everything. Anyone else have thoughts?

22

I don’t agree with gimping Dying God out to some other devotion unless we are going to share out the health drain as well.

Certainly agree with at least considering some of the other proposals, especially Typhos and Mog Wolf ideas. I like all your proposals for both of those devotions.

Not sure how I feel about swapping some panther to fox simply because they are already balanced as is. Would make more sense to me to tweak fox to accomplish the bridge value. I’d be way more interested in some flat pet bleed on it than +pet crit.

I swear… If any of those player scaled devos get turned pet scaled and we are still stuck with player scaled Raise the Dead… :rolleyes:

23

Standard practice nowadays is to combine Dying God with Giant’s Blood + Aeon’s Hourglass with additional forms of health regeneration (Blood of Dreeg, Wendigo Totem, item proc heals), so the health cost from Dying God is trivial.

Think of it from a balancing issue: imagine that there was a T3 constellation that was so powerful that every single build that wants to claim to be viable - whether that be fire, cold, lightning, physical, piercing, poison, bleed, you name it - has to pick that one constellation because it is just that much better than anything else. If there ever arises a balancing problem, the first thing the devs would look to is find the common factor that ties everything together. Having Dying God be the only viable T3 constellation is horrible for build diversity, though I am just as much of a fan of buffing other constellations to encourage that instead of simply taking the nerf bat, especially when there’s only one pet build that could even be considered a top Gladiator build.

It’s utterly unreasonable to expect another 600% damage (on top of what we already have) or an extra 60% RR (again, on top of what we already have), so the best way to make other constellations enticing is a combination of flat damage and damage bonuses - or better yet, additional pets.

It’s hard to suggest anything else without knowing what’s going to be in store for version 1.0.4.0, so everyone check the first couple of posts and share your thoughts about which equipment you’d like to see buffed. I’d like to see Poison, Chaos, Piercing, Bleeding and Cold be as competitive as the current fire/lightning set-ups, but it will take a lot of effort to make those damage types seem doable.

24

As a preface, I’ll straight up acknowledge you’ve probably got a better grasp of pet mechanics and design. I’m just voicing an opinion even if it’s a poor one. Also, wall text warning:

I get what you are saying, really. I’m not arguing to be a stick in the mud. I’m just saying let’s not move the goalpost (standard practice today) and call it balancing (just for later calls to once again change the “standard practice” via balancing, rinse and repeat). What I mean is, if we could get more options without just shifting the meta to yet another singular endgame design, great.

I don’t want Dying God nerfed any more than I want Primal Instinct or Electro pet support nerfed, as ubiquitous as they may appear to be (coming from someone who got bored with electro pets and bug relics before even DaShiv started dropping his magic). I like where they are at presently and imho, I don’t think they are overpowered (do we need any further proof than the current best pet builds crucible performance and skill requirements in relation to their non-pet counterparts?).

Let’s say for example there was better bleed support for pets (purely devotion talk, no other sources for the sake of clarity). Let’s say it was south and east on the devotion map, Maybe Mog Wolf. Heck, maybe even a solitary flat source on Oleron (hold up and hear me out). Now lets say that opens up the option for a viable pet bleed dot build that is in the same ballpark as the top 2-3 crucible pet builds currently. Now, my first desire would be to get that Dying God in the mix because obviously +all pet damage and even better for DoTs, +pet crit. If that flat source was on Mog Wolf there’s an extremely limited way to get them both. I’m not sure if it would be possible but it would surely be as difficult to snag Oleron and Dying God and you won’t be getting all three for a certainty. You’d be giving up A LOT of options to make that stretch. Perhaps if the flat source was on Oleron you’d be giving up too much and would have to settle for Mog Wolf. There’d certainly be a deep sacrifice, in either case, correct? If snagging both those big pet t3’s (Dying God and Mog Wolf) was all it was about, that’s all it would be about right now. But that’s not the case for well balanced pet builds for endgame content.

So, what I am trying to get at is that you can have some enticing changes that curtail OP outcomes based solely on where you place those enticing changes and what it takes from a build design standpoint to achieve them. That theoretical flat pet bleed on Oleron for instance. That’s going to do exactly nothing for non pet builds to begin with. No change for them. If it was enticing enough to build around and supported enough through additional game design changes to make the stretch for a pet build, it would automatically put pressure on the choice to pursue Dying God just by virtue of where it’s at.

Anyways. That’s my thinking. Sorry if it’s long winded and misinformed.

25

You and I both want the same thing. The purpose of my last couple of posts is to outline the inherent difficulty of adding devotion procs / buffing certain constellations to buff pet usage that won’t immediately end in “lel, don’t bother, Dying God + Aeon’s wholly outclass it.” It especially becomes more difficult knowing that most of the damage types’ RR (Poison, Fire, Lightning, Chaos, Cold) provide the affinity needed to reach Dying God, especially now as Necromancers can use the Plaguebearer’s Spellblade and thus don’t have to worry about getting Manticore.

We both have the same goal: providing a smattering of buffs here and there that would encourage pet build diversity and provide a reasonable explanation for players to bother picking the skill in the first place (Mogdrogen’s 40% Total speed helps a lot in this regard; I don’t know what the standard pet attacks per second is, but raising attack speed is usually a great bet to increase DPS. That’s why Bysmiel’s Domination is a very good proc that players can use if they’re tired of the Primal Instinct bugs).

Since there is some internal melee space issue that prevents 5+ pets from getting very close to the opponent, then one would need either an extremely good devotion skill bound to a pet (ones like Assassin’s Blade that provide a chunk of multiple damage type RR) or spawning multiple pets that can attack at range (like the Blightshard pets, which could really use some good damage buffs since they do not have weapon damage and thus loses out on a lot of aura buffs).

26

I agree with pretty much everything you’ve put forward.

One thing in particular that has been frustrating me is that the two relevant skill modifiers for a Familiar build are mutually exclusive. Like you say, having 2 familiars trumps one slightly stronger raven, so there’s hardly even a choice there. The skill modifier on Conduit of Eldritch Whisper only serves as a tease for what-could-be, had it been possible to apply it on my two flappy friends.

Why?

To make things even worse, the placement of one skill modifier on Mythical Will of Bysmiel meant that the skill “Invocation of Chaos” was removed - a highly relevant skill for anyone trying to make a C’thonic summoner.

I propose that the Familiar modifier ought be moved from Mythical Will of Bysmiel to another item, and a boosted version of Invocation of Chaos added to make up for it. Where, specifically, the familiar modifier should be placed I’m not certain - but for sure not in the amulet slot.

Stormbringer of Malmouth seems like a good alternative - thought it already has a proc and very strong stats. A modifier on top of those might make a great item slightly too good. Likewise with Mythical Spark of Ultos. Perhaps a medal; The Overseer? The Overseer is an item I currently can’t imagine using on any build, and a skill modifier would help to spice it up a little.

The Familiar deserves more love!

27

Not gonna comment on everything here, since…well, it’s a mile long, but just want to stop by and say thanks for the thorough input.

Pet items were one of the things on the radar for v1.0.4.0 and this is a helpful insight from a player’s perspective.

Before fears of dead builds come abound, I just want to make clear that the goal is primarily to bring other pet options up to par with the current pet “meta”, and not to gut what already works to uselessness. There are always going to be top tier builds for every playstyle, but it’d be nice if the other options are fun as well, at least outside of the cutting-edge audience.

28

Would you like a box of chocolates or cigars? Seriously. I love this news.

29

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.

30

Imho prefixes and sufixes for pets are just to weak. Greena aren’t competetive to epics and legs… Harder to get, poor stats… But well… Maybe, just maybe I’m wrong… What’s your opinion on greens?

31

I’m just a beginner in pet builds, so I might be wrong, but the main issue I see with pet build diversity is damage types spread. The lightning pet build that does 5s mad queen achieves it by focusing on single damage type and good RR stack for it, that happen to have decent support. Which is not the case for most of the other combos. E.g. the Lost Souls set boosts 2 summons that have no common damage whatsoever (phys, vit, chaos, fire), and no items that could bring the damage types to 1-2 main ones. Hence, RR is very hard to get and the output struggles. That’s probably the main reason for the Unimaginative Skelemancer, that has such a seemingly great gear support, to show only acceptable performance, nowhere near to top tier non-pet builds.
Other thing I noticed is that most successful pet builds don’t put more than 1 point into the pet itself (except skeletons), because the damage boost from those points is not worth investment compared to damage auras or RR/DA shread. I believe the pet scaling should be addressed to make leveling pet skills worth something.

32

I admit that I was too rash saying that Dying God + Hourglass would be the only choice. I meant that Dying God itself will likely be a mandatory devotion selection and the only choice would be between the secondary constellations - whether that be Dying God + major pet proc (Ultos for Lightning Pets/ Abomination for Blight Fiend/ other high base damage proc attacks) or Dying God + Tree of Life for enhanced Health Regeneration + area-wide heals, or all-out blitz with Dying God + Mogdrogen. That has as much to do with just how good the Primordial constellation defensive bonuses (Eel, Solemn Watcher, Lizard, Ulo for Resistances + Nullification ability) are and how many RR procs either grant Chaos or Primordial affinity (Murmur for Cold + Poison, Solael’s Witchblade for Fire + Chaos, Arcane Bomb for Lightning). It’s also worth mentioning that unless the secondary proc has huge AoE that hits multiple targets, it only boosts the DPS of one set of pets while Dying God affects all of them (Raise Skeletons being the big outlier here, as they will likely make up at least half of your total number of pets.)

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.

As it stands with current itemization, it’s a lot easier to get a PTH of 135-140 (effective OA over 4000) without Mogdrogen than it is to get over 3X Crit Damage multipliers without Dying God. Any major pet build will have either Occultist, Shaman, or Necro as at least one of their classes, and all of them have either flat or multiplicative OA bonuses. Additionally, the Necromancer - as well as other supporting classes (Demolitionist, Inquisitor, Soldier) - have really good DA shred options that make this even easier. That’s not even going to the amount of Crit Damage you have to stack compared to %OA (~200% Crit against ~65-75% OA).

The total speed buff is really the only thing that prevents Mogdrogen from being completely obsolete, and I grant that the speed buff is extremely good.

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.

I admit I may be oversimplifying the design difficulties, but I am assuming that the player will find some way to get past Dying God’s Health Costs, whether it be through Tree of Life / Twin Fangs, Heal procs from Combat Medic Mark / Rotmender’s Ring / Gloves of Everliving Grove or simply having 700+ natural Health Regeneration that won’t mind periodic dips. I would be very surprised if there was a well-designed pet build that exceeds all the damage + survivability requirements and not have multiple ways of making the health cost trivial.

One other major point I wanted to mention for the devs: I would recommend going through the pet damage types and ensure that each Summoner is going to have enough DA to keep from getting Crit. The Beastcaller’s Set is very good in this regard, providing 100 + 6% DA for the whole set. All the other pet items… not so much. For example, Rotmender’s Ring and Rotdrinker’s Crest have no DA at all, meaning Poison Cabalists are going to have an extremely hard time having good survivability. I know there are multiple sources of OA shred (BP + Wasting, Siphon Souls + Blood Boil), but pet builds are strapped for skill points as it is. DA is especially paramount for summoners as they are often relegated to Caster gear and have no life leech autoattacks, so they won’t have the damage absorption tanks or even relatively medium armor melee players get. I would emphasize putting flat DA on as many pet items as you feel is right - even small 25-30 bonuses like you have on the Lightning Glyph ring helps incredibly toward Summoner survivability.

33

It’s good that now we can reach these effective OA levels with Mogdrogen, but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal for every build. For instance, there are pet builds with far higher +%OA bonuses than the Night King, but the Night King still easily out-DPSes them. This is primarily because (1) different builds incur very different opportunity costs for reaching variously levels of flat damage, crit, RR, crit/OA, pet count, etc, and thus it wasn’t efficient for even the Night King to push OA as high as it could have; and (2) it’s simply more DPS-efficient for some builds to invest in other DPS areas (for example, by better aligning flat damage + conversion + RR) than to absolutely maximize the crit/OA combination.

Again, magnitude and opportunity cost. For example, Necros can stack pet OA a lot more effectively than Shamans. Shaman can stack pet crit a lot more effectively than Occultists. And so on. Also, item bonuses are often skewed toward one class or another due to +skills, which means that different class combos can have very different returns for investing in additional OA vs additional crit - or, as I previously mentioned, investing entirely outside the crit/OA bubble, which combine to represent only 1 of 6 pet DPS areas that I had previously listed.

Crit and OA work synergistically, but this works both ways: for example, if you can’t stack both crit and OA very high, then it can make more sense to avoid investing excessively into either since you’ll likely get better returns in other DPS areas.

Incidentally, RR and speed are by far the best ways to increase DPS for most pet builds, since nowadays most pet builds are doing a much better job in the other DPS areas following the Dracarris revolution. Even the Pokemon build has been revamped with a new emphasis on flat damage, OA, etc.

As with OA, it’s certainly possible but it’s also about opportunity costs. For example, look at all the resources the Night King has invested into sustain (TD + BoD + Giant’s Blood + Twin Fangs + Lizard). Cabalist is already the “best” fit for Dying God, and milking BoD with TD resets and +% regen bonuses brought the opportunity costs as low as possible; yet even so, the cost remains non-trivial.

Then, consider other builds that may be forced to use even less efficient methods. This means giving up extra devotion points, skill points, item slots, etc. to offset the health drain. In fact, even some Cabalists (like previous versions of the Skelemancer) already need to supplement BoD with items like Combat Medic’s Mark. Thus, the cost of Dying God is directly proportional to how efficiently a build can offset health drain - and again, that’s going to vary quite a bit by build.

When one considers (a) whether Dying God’s bonuses is the best fit for a build’s DPS profile, and (b) all the offensive bonuses that the build could have added by not needing to divert resources toward offsetting the health drain - how much more offense could one add instead of using a defensive T3 like Tree of Life? - then there remains plenty of room for alternatives to Dying God. For example, off the top of my head I think Dying God is probably the wrong choice for lightning Ritualists using Primal Bond. And there are plenty of other examples, I’m sure.

Dying God can be considered the current default choice and starting point for most pet builds, but I don’t see it being in any danger of becoming the only choice given the current classes and itemization options.

34

I’m surprised Ground Slam didn’t get some kind of love in AoM after seeing the buffs to MP and emboldening presence.

Quite possibly the worst pet skill I’ve tried, it actually feels like a dps loss to take it. Long animation, tiny aoe…

Comparing it to the blightfiends blight burst skill, it’s total dogsh!t - and I still can’t find points for blight burst in my ritualist. It’s obvious crate learned by making the blight fiend skill have a nice area and instant cast, but why didn’t they go back and fix slam?

Even if I had +5 or +6 to all shaman skills I still wouldn’t drop a point in it.

35

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.

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I’ve been testing this item a lot with my current conjurer. It turns out to be very solid. It is very hard to roll good pref/suff on it… so it’s more like Monster Impossibility but… it’s just solid even without good rolls on it. I rate this guy 4/5 comparing to other summoned creatures.

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http://www.grimtools.com/db/prefixes/9980

Keeper’s prefix seems to be made for Soldier Pets

And why exactly can flat damage be added to swarmlings but not to voidfiends?

EDIT:

On the topic of Salazar’s blade, I think a 30 second CD would do wonders for people who want to build around that item. 2x Harbingers sounds badass indeed.
On a side note among the new enemy models that got added, Ryloks are my favorite. I wouldn’t mind a “Writings of Ulto Trieg” that allows us to call forth a permanent Wingless Rylok (I specified Wingless as they’re the weakest among Ryloks) :cool:

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  1. Because, unlike swarmlings and similar to the skeletons from Raise the Dead, they have no default attack. All their damage output comes from spells - i.e. Chaos Pools + Demon’s Breath.

  2. There is HUGE potential for unique summons on legendary Off-hands. With the notable exception of Eye of Dominion and the Malmouth Tome (which is borderline OP) the selection is more than poor and there is no legendary equivalent of the Og’napesh Tome. Fiendgaze, for example, is trash. I would take a strong chaos summon any day of the week instead of the proc on that item.

In fact, as tPoM pointed out, some damage types (i.e. bleed, aether, pierce) are not viable for pet builds right now and there is so much missed potential.
What I would do is:

  1. Give an ability to the big skeleton on Dirge of Arkovia to do bleed/pierce damage, just like Igorr. The two models are even identical so…
  2. Replace cold/vitality on Reap spirit with aether/vitality so that you can convert his damage to aether/lightning which is a natural combination. Pet Apostate or Spellbinder would work that way.
  3. Ritualist needs a vit/bleed pet badly in order to be competitive so either follow point (1) or give a player-bonus pet on Mogdrogen relic.
  4. Remodel the Avenger set to be (wait for it!)…a hybrid-pet build set ! The gimmick of the set seems to be vines, briathorns and nature. As it stands right now, the set will actually kill the user due to lack of physical resistance on the pieces and the masteries it supports, which is essential vs IT damage. It is basically unusable and outclassed by Bloodrager. Make it such that it buffs pierce/physical/bleed instead of physical/bleed/internal trauma and buff the Briathorn pet. Oh, and the proc should be on a 12m radius that way !
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Patch 1.0.4.0 make the guardian of death’s gate has 25 RR, damn.

That scythe is like the coolest weapon in the game. I really want to use that but sadly it only deal physical damage and damage multiplier is quite low for two-handed axe. :frowning:

Does anyone has an idea to utilize the guardian?
Seems like hybrid pet+caster as death knight is the way to go, but I don’t think it has other equipment support.

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While I take the time to parse through each item change version 1.0.4.0 did, I will use this post to point out the missing changes that didn’t make their way into this version:

  1. The -10% Cold and Physical RR from the Crown of the Winter King is not present
  2. The changes to the Conduit of Wild Whispers modifiers for the Summon Briarthorn prefix are not present.
  3. Grimtools lists that the Black Hand of Sanar’Siin is listed as one of the items changed in version 1.0.4.0, but I see nothing that is changed (the devourers still do far too low damage to be worth anything).
  4. The cooldown to Karvor’s Conjuring Bone is reduced, but why did you keep the abysmal buff that the Reckless Guardian gives?

Expect a fuller post from me in a week or two. In the meantime, share your thoughts on the update changes below.