I mention Normal quite a bit because late Act III and Act IV Normal tend to be the most difficult parts of TQ for passive Petmancers, as it can be a bit of a challenge to keep pets alive. Also, I had a tendency to quit playing a character once it died, which was an unfortunate combination with my naturally poor reaction time (partially due to some genetic neurological issues), and I had a fair number of characters die to my clumsiness in Legendary. As an aside, that’s one reason I like passive pet builds. A bit more strategic, a bit less twitch/micro oriented.
I did build endgame test versions of the characters though using TQ Defiler and equipment I had banked in order to run them through Hades’ Palace and/or the Secret Passage to test endgame viability before committing a huge amount of time to them however, and most did just fine (so long as I dodged Dactyls).
I’m not sure I fully agree with your classification of your (very cool) Occultist Summmoner as a Hybrid. To me, it looks a lot like a pure petmancer that heavily relies on debuffing with Pox and Curse of Frailty and buffing/healing with Blood of Dreeg, making it very similar to TQ pet toons using Plauge and Regrowth to support their pets, which in both cases do the actual damage. Your equipment is heavily slanted toward pet damage rather than personal damage as well. It seems very similar to your Pure Wanderer build in TQ (which was also very cool).
This may to a certain extent be a difference in definition of terms. I view builds where the player character buffs, debuffs, heals and handles crowd control as still within the realm of “pure petmancer”, because pets are by far the largest share of actual DPS (particularly against bosses, who resist %damage to health effects). In any case, adding a pet to a Mastery or two that currently lacks them certainly wouldn’t hurt much. Stormhound already exists as an item skill; I’d guess it wouldn’t even be that much additional work to drop the little guy into the Arcanist tree. He’d synergize quite nicely with a number of Arcanist skills and with a number of Occultist skills. There’s no rule saying permanent pets must have synergy skill trees tacked on to them.
Conjurer is the only way to go for summoning because of the absence of summons and the lack of interesting pet bonuses in other masteries.
Mortar Trap, Thermite Mines and Blade Spirit used to be considered as pets so there was a bit more choice, but honestly I don’t think reverting the changes made to them back would be a good thing.
What if all pets and pseudo-pets scaled with both pet bonuses and the player’s damage, but only partially with the latter? I think that would be a way to make hybrids viable while keeping pure summoners ahead in terms of pet damage, and would also open for more interesting synergies.
That’s very interesting. I wonder if it would be balanced to have only those three skills, Mortar Trap, Thermite Mines and Blade Spirit, scale fully with both personal and pet damage bonuses? I’d think builds that are focused on personal damage would benefit minimally from the change, as they wouldn’t have many incidental pet bonuses in devotion, skills or equipment they’d already be using. On the other hand, it would open things up tremendously for Petmancers.
I’m not sure I fully agree with your classification of your (very cool) Occultist Summmoner as a Hybrid. To me, it looks a lot like a pure petmancer that heavily relies on debuffing with Pox and Curse of Frailty and buffing/healing with Blood of Dreeg, making it very similar to TQ pet toons using Plauge and Regrowth to support their pets, which in both cases do the actual damage. Your equipment is heavily slanted toward pet damage rather than personal damage as well. It seems very similar to your Pure Wanderer build in TQ (which was also very cool).
I consider it a hybrid because it relies heavily on both player damage and pet damage. You can see how player damage is also an important factor in several parts of the vid (the battle against Grand Priest Zarthuzellan shows this nicely, there you can see my minions fighting the boss while I deal with normal mobs).
Between Bloody Pox and Black Death/B30 Solael’s Witchfire/Noxious Poison Bomb and Mark of Dreeg/B30 Blood of Dreeg and Armor of the
Guardian/Possession/B30 Acid Spray and Eldritch Fire, the build used to do a healthy amount of personal damage. I’ve had to move a lot of points around since the B31 change though.
People are always saying that the main reason hybrid summoners are weaker is because you are forced to choose between player bonuses and pet bonuses. So, drawing on my wanderer build for inspiration, I simply focused on getting party-wide buffs/debuffs. It worked out alright fine in the end. My other hybrid summoners builds are designed around similar principles.