Unfortunately others come in here quoting your “pets are dead” posts and then we get this…
So what choice do I have then but to speak up on the matter?
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*If we take endgame as being able to run Crucible 150-170 and SR 75-76 within the time limit, then I agree completely.
But, powercreep has rendered both to feel less like endgame and more like an activity you do to farm for endgame.
Budget setups, pet or otherwise can safely farm 75-76 in Ultimate these days. So, once you fully gear up your character, those do not come across as proper challenges and people end up resorting to things like looking to see how fast you can do them as opposed the days when say, even Completing Crucible was a challenge.
I understand, but simply saying I have no power over the matter unless I am to give false assurances on how my builds perform.
If they get buffed, I am going to share that info - like with my short lived callagadra tanking immortal Skeletons.
If they get nerfed, I share that as well.
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I like to view the endgame content we have as a sort of puzzle:
- Crucible is generous enough with Blessings and Banners and lower enemy health that pets can get through it with no serious injuries or need to resummon.
- SR is generous enough with its 1v1 boss play that only periodically do you need to resummon your pets.
- Some superbosses like Mogdrogen and Ravager are dangerous IF you don’t avoid the big sunders / special effects like nullification balls but can be micro’d to avoid them to have the pets survive sometimes (except if you’re Skeletons without the Lost Souls set, but that’s a topic for another time).
- I can’t comment on Crate since I never fought it.
- Callagdra is the only enemy in the game with huge AoE unavoidable damage with its sand waves / small tornadoes / big tornadoes and huge damage spikes that kill pets far too easily. You can’t armor stack with pets, and pet Physical resistance is far too rare of a commodity (only really reachable with Occultist / Shaman) and that got nerfed to keep in line with the lowered Physical damage in Crucible / SR, but doesn’t help specifically against Calla and who knows what superbosses will be in the next expansion.
I know you don’t like superbosses to be “solved,” but honestly, figuring out the exact defenses to survive an encounter and then focusing the rest on damage is part of the whole fun of an ARPG. Having to resummon your only damage source on cooldown while running to avoid getting killed is not “action,” it’s tedious. and large unavoidable amounts of damage are only fun if you can find ways to overcome it (by things like mutiple Wendigo Totems or 3 sec BoD bursts, which again are only found on Occultists / Shamans).
If you can’t overcome the damage, it becomes more like a skill/ability that disables your Forcewave / Cadence for 15 seconds before you can use it again. It becomes artificial difficulty instead of natural difficulty (where Mogdrogen and Ravager are in better spots).
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Seems like an issue of a single boss then rather than the game as a whole? An easy problem to solve by adjusting Callagadra’s pet damage bonuses rather than letting pets stack too much Physical Resist that trivializes the rest of the content?
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Ravager could also get a look into, in my opinion. But he is not on the same scale as Callagadra against pets.
Crate fight is fair for pets atm and so is Mogdrogen (since it is all about lightning resistance there).
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I remember ur pets killing 
left and right without any glaring issues from what you and eard posted on discord iirc.
I don’t see why he would need further adjustments towards pets when the results fighting him with them were already pretty decent. 
Unless there’s something big I missed, in that case pls lmk!
Check discord ping :3
For those of you who are not on discord and curious - My strongest Beastcaller Briarthorn build was doing fine against Ravager, the one that could tank Callagadra.
Bysmiel’s Trinkets Familiar, Lost Souls focused on Hellhounds, Ghol Blightfiends, etc still struggled vs Ravager.
Diviner Reap Spirits had the opposite issue with the pets doing fine, but the player having issues surviving due to Reap Spirit being poor at keeping aggro, even while going Ishtak.
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You’ve missed the entire last survival change which made all those previous super runs not a thing anymore. At best they are slower with more active running around and summons at cooldown (which is probably the balance being looked for), at worst completely non starters where pets are dead within 5 seconds of summoning.
On the toxic speed running side of things, I don’t personally see pets being near immortal in sr75-76 or crucible as a problem as long as the summoner has to actively play to reach player build results. Getting to the point where you are resummoning on cooldown on pets (e.g. ghol, but I saw even primal spirit freshly summoned get killed 5 seconds later in 75-76) has a combo of just not especially fun and not able to match player builds damage runs. I posted plenty of runs in PT but I’m also usually cherry picking peak potential and not the various deaths I took a long the way learning how to pilot pets fast but with some safety. And I still had pets/entire army die occasionally in 75-76 prenerf, enough that you need to be paying attention but not to the point where it felt unfun spamming at cooldown.
To be clear, I don’t see a major issue with the changes planned for final patch after revision but will ofc post feedback either way, and there is also the normal sky is falling nonsense which obviously isn’t the case either. Pets got a ton of buffs this patch, as long as survival isn’t clipped too much there is more high performing diversity now.
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Thanks for the detailed explanation Eard! 
If there are certain pets dying faster than others, wouldn’t it make sense to shorten their cooldown in that case so these can be re-summoned faster if/when needed?
Would mean extra buttons to press ofc on the other hand…
I would be ok with it.
The extra button pushes would only be required against hard content, so Z would get his wish on those requiring more active gameplay, while the players still won’t feel like they are forced to just run around waiting for cooldowns.
Kind of like how people don’t really complain about Hellhound’s survivability 
(unless for some odd reason, they want to make non bomb 
build 
)
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Sounds like a fair trade-off.
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I don’t know which builds you played, but I followed Maya’s Squishy and I was able to defeat every boss except for Crate. Not once I needed to pilot my minions, even though I had a very low budget gear.
I’d argue pet builds are perfect for controllers since you don’t have to aim anything and the sticks give you superior character controlability compared to M+K, so you can kite and evade much more easily. Deadzone is also greatly reduced on a controller since your fingers don’t need to travel as far as they do in a keyboard to activate skills, thus you can re-summon much faster.
The only issue I had was having to change their stance to aggressive every time I summoned them but that has been solved in this update.
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Says the game up to this point.
The devs are free to do whatever they wish, as we - so far at least - are also free to complain.
Case in point: Diablo 4.
I imagine you wouldn’t/didn’t direct that kind of dismissive remark towards the players who felt the recent past changes negatively affected that game.
GD devs questionable decisions are not immune from criticism just because they’re indie and not a multi-billion corporation like Blizzard.
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I mean you are correct that nobody is immunite from criticism, neither an Indie nor a big corpo, however that doesn’t mean that Crates Decision are (factual) questionable, or everybody shares your or maya’s view in that regard. And i also have to support Zantai and others on this. Superbosses shouldn’t be able to be pulled off with an lazy afk build where you put no effort (in Gameplay in) at all… that kills the purpose of Superbosses plus also isn’t kinda fair towards people who geniunly put effort into it and have to do something to achieve killing superbosses.
But whatever, this point will be dismissed by some of the pet-build community anyway -.- so don’t see any reason to argue further on this, and rather let handle this by people who have the nerves for it and such.
/Edit:
Plus i want to point out - only because it was an Option until now, it doesn’t mean it was meant to be that way. Considering how much stuff the Game offers have to build with, the amount of combinations and such, plus that (obviously) people always try to break the game, it shouldn’t be a surprise that suff might slip through or stuff isn’t meant o be as strong or weak as it performs. That’s why balancing-updates exist (and is good they exist) to bring them more in-line.
(Not to mention how often people overdrama about such nerfs and than a few week laters it shows it only needed some adjustments on the build).
did not
it was an option, and not the only one
you’re confusing what’s doable vs what’s the “rule”
again, it was always a selfmade criteria, you could even say the best performing pet builds weren’t actually truly lazy, but that would depend on what the measuring stick is ofc
you’d be surprised how frequent i rebuff patch/changelog changes comments about “nerfs” and shrugging off people’s outcry of #DeadBuilds 
because usually, like here, it’s largely knee-jerk reactions - frequently from players that didn’t even play the patch yet
ain’t no one saying that, complaint all you want
but. “this aint it bruh”
-heck devs even gave you the option to provide feedback for 3 months or so, giving you amble opportunity to criticize and comment while the changes was being made
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sorry off-topic…
for context, i only killed most superbosses with pets and just now watched 4 videos of callagadra.
but what’s this “effort in gameplay” ? with pets i kited and those 4 videos facetanked?
it’s just a gear/build check?! which brings me to the thing most people criticize about grim dawn, the lack of interesting boss fights. i don’t care that much about GD bosses basically just being bigger mobs with bigger HP.
but i get their point and if you look to other games i also see their point.
doesn’t mean i think GD should have boss fights with lots of red circles and rectangles as indicators but i would never recommend this game to anyone as having great boss fights. but as binary ones, you either can kill it or not.
so if crate ever makes gd2, boss fights is definitely something that could use something more than just big mob big HP…
Agreed. Good thing I never claimed anything of the sorts.
If you’re playing without any guidance, like I did the first time when I created a Necromancer and just played my own way, you should get your ass handed by superbosses. They are supposed to be the ultimate test of knowledge of this game. No one’s debating that.
What you, and everyone else is conveniently leaving out is that Maya’s pet builds are the result of thousands of hours of effort put into them, carefully crafted to maximize their gameplay efficacy and parameter synergy.
She’s the authority on pet builds, and probably knows more about their quirks and synergy than Zantai himself who’s a dev; and to even imply that the results of her hard work is “low-effort” is honestly very insulting.
We can afford to put “no effort” when using her builds precisely because she’s already done all the effort needed and you’re only seeing the end result.
I never said it was a rule. Just that we could. Stop beating a strawman fallacy.
I’m actually not surprised at all.
Wake me up when you decide to actually contribute something useful to this thread, like for example quoting and rebuking the concerns brought by the actual pet players.
And feedback was provided by the pros, hence why we’re all here right now.
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Because something like this takes effort, right?
I am not going to pretend that pet builds haven’t been lazy upto this point.
But lets also not pretend that they are lazier than some of the player builds out there.
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so you don’t know what a strawman is, nor what you actual said in response to me using the word “rule”/selfmade criteria
^get your replies straight there friendo
i talk with those players, almost on a daily basis, i’ve followed Maya’s and Eards etc feedback and their forth and back, and unlike you i’ve actually also played 1.2 with pets
you’re taking 1 pros feedback, there were others, devs weighed it all, and the posted builds, their performance etc; if you had anything to contribute while the time was ripe then you had the opportunity
might i add this argument is entirely redundant when you even later stipulate to supers not should be able to be played lazy afk
nop, we’re not leaving that out nor ignoring, we’re just able to differentiate and grasp nuance and take multiple pet player’s feedback into consideration
she’s not, she’s the authority on her/a specific style of pet builds, the fact you have other players playing pet builds saying they are fine/tolerable should attest to that, because pet builds are still viable, they just not afk lazy, and Maya don’t enjoy that, which is fine: but as you yourself admitted supers should also not be played like that, and so this change basically puts them in line with more normal player piloting builds
is it a good change or bad change i’m not gonna argue, Maya don’t like it and i can see why when used to something for 6years,
But you’re literally blowing this way out as if pet builds themselves are dead, when they are just reeled into to not be afk mode (which devs was never a big fan of when creaming through ultra high content)
Um… that is factually not true.
No one is saying that pet builds are fine vs superbosses, or if they are, I would like to see them back those claims with proof.
What people are saying is that they are fine in Crucible/SR (and even there, Eard for example brought up that some builds are struggling).
And I dare you to show me a pet build in current patch that can tackle supers with the same laziness as the facetanking player builds can.
So, let us not turn this into a “the problem is that you want to play in lazy afk mode and is fine otherwise”, please.
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