[Pyromancer] Pet-Pistol-Pyro: Build seems crap, please help

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Quick background: I got the game a couple of weeks ago to play with a friend. We decided to play hardcore from the start, and so all of my characters are hardcore. That team is my Lazy Pokemon conjurer and his druid that drops ice bricks on everything. It’s going well.

I’ve made three other characters to goof off with (as much as you can do that in HC). This character is the most recent, created because I didn’t have a ranged weapon (e.g. gun/bow) character. I leveled straight along the Fire Strike line with the intention of maxing the last synergy, but by then I was running for my life a lot so I dropped one point in, went into Occultist, and basically bee-lined for Hellhound. (I’m starting to feel like I should have gone Shaman for more tank-happy pets, but, c’est la vie.) So my current level 33 build looks like this:

http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-zljYwO

This is the theoretical level 85 build:

http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-djuUNS

Because my gear is meh (relative to people who have legendary stashes), I had to build the character on the assumption that if I want to max a skill, I need to put all the points in. That’s left even the level 85 build with not much besides the hound, raven, Bonds of Bysmiel, Fire Strike, and a few points in CC abilities (Stun Jacks/Canister Bomb/Curse of Frailty). Right now the most questionable thing is probably the raven, but I thought it might be useful with the pet buffs in Bonds and devotion stuff; maybe Curse of Frailty is a better use of the points. Or something else entirely.

My biggest point of confusion is having read the odd comment about demos being able to get some crazy chain reactions going, but they were comments made in the context of people who already seemed to know what that meant and thus no clear explanation of how that works was given. I have no idea how any of that works, much less what skills or devotions to use it with. Right now all I want is some guns and some pets, and to make it functional so this character doesn’t get squashed as hard as my spellbreaker.

Final note: my devotions started along the line of the one hellhound-based pyro in the compendium, plus Hawk because why the hell not. For now I left Hawk in, but it’s probably expendable. I just don’t know what I would replace it with. Beyond that, I just did what seemed decent, going for Revenant to get Raise the Dead and after that mostly doing pet stuff, Behemoth for survivability, and Kraken so I could get some kind of damage going.

Haaaaalp.

2

I don’t think that a fire strike and pet build is going to be efficient, due to the limited amount of gear supporting this kind of builds. A pet/caster would be more efficient I think, something like this: http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-eJESvN

It might be ok, lot of crow control, resistance reduction, some aoe with canister bomb and your pets can take care of single target dps

For the devotion, I would pick meteor, elemental storm, and whatever else you want. Note that the revenant constellation proc is a bit annoying to use, since you have to kill mobs with the assigned spell. It could work on canister bomb maybe…

3

Ok, theoretically, what kind of stats would I want? I was thinking Fire Strike would be mainly reliant on fire/pierce, but if I capped out the last ability, that’s chaos and fire. That would seem to be helpful if I was going for, like, shooty/caster pyro since occultist has spells that do chaos damage. But I see Fire Strike builds for other classes, where there isn’t that chaos synergy, and the last FS skill is maxed. Does that mean boosting the fire damage alone is enough to make that a good point investment?

All I can figure is I’d want pet buffs, fire and pierce (and all) damage, and lots of resists. But I’m still scratching the surface of the game, so I’m not even sure if the weapon damage would mean to prioritize physical/pierce, or if the FS damage would mean to prioritize fire.

BTW, I agree that in your revamp Raise the Dead would be harder to use. I was just going to attach it to FS and pop up skeletons ASAP.