Raise Skeletons has too many meme items and not enough support items

I have been digging into several Skeleton builds to see how they fare with FG content. There are multiple items that support classes that aren’t Occultist or Shaman, which I found odd because Skeletons are the most fragile pet there are. In my experience, all pets - especially Skeleton pets - need roughly >100% pet health and all resistances capped, as well as a heal (either through the class or through Tree of Life / Bysmiel’s Iris) Otherwise, the pets die before they can get any damage off.

My beef is that Skeleton items are paired with classes that have no pet %Health and nearly no pet resistances: Demolitionist and Arcanist. Additionally, Demo pet items are designed with the idea that Flame Touched is the only skill you’d use on a pet build, despite the fact that any build benefits greatly from Temper, Blast Shield, Blackwater Cocktail + Agonizing Flames, and Vindictive Flame.

Here’s the build I’ve been testing. I’m obviously not going to post it because of the 7 MI’s (technically 6 + the conduit, but the Conduit is just as hard to obtain as the double-rare MI’s), but it does a Skeleton build is meant to do: kill things, but give the player enough space to re-summon them after Nemeses like Grava or Kuba wipe them. Note that this is an Apostate with effective 100% pet Health (Vigor’s flat health bonus helps Skeletons a ton) and nearly all pet resistances capped (Steel Resolve is amazing in particular for pet buids, not least because it’s one of the only skills that give racial bonuses to pets). It raises the question: how do Demo or Arcanist help Skeleton builds at all?

Here’s some of the meme items that I’ve encountered:

  • Warden’s Judgment - Clearly meant to be an Aether Skeletons combined with Mythical Aethereach for 100% Elemental to Aether. It would be nice for something to give 100% Physical to Aether conversion, either for pets in general or as a modifier for Raise Skeletons.
  • Mythical Crimsonbriar Band - The only rings that give bonuses to Will of the Crypt. Unfortunately, both Will of the Crypt & Master of Death convert pet Physical to Vitality, and something like Vitality + Bleeding are too far apart in devotion support to be of real use to pets.
  • Mythical Mantle of the Patron - One of the other few items that give points to Will of the Crypt, and also suffers from no pet resistances of any kind.
  • Mythical Reaper of the Accursed - This item was buffed recently for more pet support, but this item is really meant more for Aether Spellbinders than an actual pet item, especially since Elemental to Aether conversion is a rarity for casters in general. I also want to point out that this item has a worse cooldown than Mark of Divinity, despite the fact that it only has 28% Absorption compared to Divinity’s 100% absorption.

And saving the best for last:

  • Mythical Whispers of the Dead - Elemental! Skeleton! Spellbinders! Let’s ignore the fact that Will of the Crypt converts Physical damage to Vitality while this item converts Vitality to Elemental. Let’s also ignore the fact that it’s an amulet which takes away from Bysmiel’s Iris, which is the best item Skeleton Necromancers can use. Let’s even ignore that there’s no pet resistances (though the pet Health is nice). How in the world is this monstrosity going to work when there’s no Elemental RR between either of the two classes? Neither Occultists nor Shamans have enough flat Vitality damage that the conversion would be worth using, so I have to assume that this item was made with Necomancers in mind. To that, I say, :peanuts:

At least for the Demo side, it would be amazing if there were a modifier that gave something like “+15% Elemental resistance to Flame Touched” for a pet item; at least it would give us something unique that pet builds would actually use. Other than that, Demo is under even Arcanist in the pet realm; I was at the very least able to make a usable Beastcaller’s Druid with the Arcanist items. Demos really have nothing but a lot of points toward Flame Touched and basically nothing else pet builds could use.

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+1 to buffing skeleton related stuff. But…

This I don’t agree with. Demo gets Elemental and Chaos RR and in the case of elemental, both -RR and flat RR. I had much more success using Demo as a secondary mastery than Arcanist.

Ofcourse, I only paired them both with Occultist, so not speaking from the perspective of skeletons.

Demo’s skills are better suited for pet builds than Arcanist skills, but the item support for Demo pets is so pathetic that there’s no way to synergize with either Occultist or Shaman and get meaningful results. I’ve checked out both your Pyromancer and Defiler, and neither build has any bonuses to Demo skills at all. For me, that’s not diversity, as you can simply use your Fluffy Squishy and Ishtar, respectively, and get far better results than anything Demo can add to it.

For example, this would be the Defiler version of the above Apostate (untested, obviously). This build has the benefit of using all the Flame Touched bonuses as well as a few other item changes to get a huge total of 147 flat Fire damage simply by maxing Flame Touched and Temper. Most everything else is the same, but I’m willing to bet money that Inquisitor’s Word of Renewal + Aura of Censure is far better, even though Demo provides about 35% more flat damage per Skeleton than Inquisitor. A total 35% boost may be amazing, but not if it’s at the cost of losing a heal and Aura RR so you don’t have to fret about mines positioning.

At the end, it’s about using the skill bonuses you get from equipment to their fullest advantage, and in that regard, Demo is far below other classes, even one like Inquisitor that doesn’t really have any skill bonuses for pet gear.

Erm… I thought we were talking about Arcanist vs Demo for Pet builds, not Inquisitor :stuck_out_tongue:

Inquisitor obviously blows both away interms of usefulness.
Hell the only Pet build I have that isn’t a combination of Occu/Shaman/Necro and still managed to take down Crate is my Pet Deceiver.

Inquisitor is actually pretty great for pet builds. Infact I would rank it as no.1 choice if not going for 2x Pet Masteries.

I’ve tried running Fire Skellies in the past as a Defiler and the conclusion I came to was while the damage they can put out is fine, survivability for both pets and players was inadequate. That was many updates ago though and since, it has received many buffs like Khonsar rings, Korvaak’s Burning-Blade getting the conversion buffed and the Conduit change so it will be better than when I tried it but I still doubt it will do well.

Comparatively, I have been more fond of pairing Necromancer with Shaman for Fire Skellies. While I’ve yet to test it, this sketch should make for an average pet build looking at it. Alternatively, the rings can be swapped out like this for some more player DA and pet Physical resistance.

Edit: Got the links the wrong way around, derp :sweat_smile:.

+1 to this. Would like to see more item support, it seems like much of the damage is build around Vitality damage.

In early days of AoM I liked how the skeletons worked, but after a while Crate modified the skellies according to DaShiv`s (who seems to be retired?) recommendation to be disposable (re-summoning all the time) which I dislike.

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The changes you’re referring to didn’t affect Skeletons much at all; they shifted some of the Vitality damage from Raise Skeletons to Will of the Crypt. The change was necessary because Raise Skeletons initially had huge Vitality damage per pet for a skill that was meant to have 10+ pets. In fact, by late AoM, Skeleton Cabalists had some of the best-performing Crucible builds, but that was more due to how good the synergy was between Raise Skeletons and Occultist’s Raven.

FG was not nice to Skeletons: the synergy with Raven was cut by forcing a whole set to summon 2 birds, and some of the FG bosses - especially Kaisan and Korvaak - are specifically brutal for builds that don’t have all pet resistances capped. Compounding the problem is that Master of Death is not particularly a good Exclusive, especially as the gearing is diverse enough that you can cover DA and pet OA without it. It doesn’t help that items that give bonuses to essential skills like Will of the Crypt don’t cover the pet resistances you need; not to mention the meme items like Elemental Skeleton Spellbinders with no RR that I pointed to in the OP.

I requested a long while back from Crate that they would add pet RR to Star Pact (for example).

probably like this… https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2Bqv9jN
It is not Skeleton only but works pretty smooth

Chest Armor Features won’t be shown in Pet’s stats within GrimTools.

While I’m fairly new to the game, this is the whole reason I can’t be arsed with pet builds. The only pets I find interesting to play around are skellies, because you can quite literally command an army of 'm and there’s more variety with skellies than any other pet.

I levelled with skeletons and had the most fun I’ve ever had in the game. After it became virtually impossible to keep them alive for any decent amount of time on higher difficulties, I searched for ways to optimize 'm. Only to find out that no matter what you do, they still suck immensely compared to other options.

I accept that they are meant to be squishy pets and that I might need to resummon them multiple times during more difficult fights. But there are just so many drawbacks to them when it comes to higher end content and so few options to mitigate those drawbacks, that it’s just not worth it right now imho. Unless someone else can point me to a build I missed that makes them viable for higher end content?

I too wish they added more support for my precious boney friends. Like adding an unique ‘on death’-effect or something. Or an effect which lowers AoE damage done to them to at least a manageble degree (they’d still die quickly, but at least not vaporize before they get a hit in). Or something which allows you to trade raw damage output for utility/survivability.

I dunno, but… something. Pwetty pwease?

That, or let me have an army of Birbs instead. :crazy_face:

Dear Sacrilicsous.

I think I can understand what you mean when you talk about the fact that Skellies will easily eliminated sometimes. Especially when it comes to a fight against endgame monsters like Nemesis/Superbosses. That was really annoying sometimes. Because then you are on your own and the Nemesis will concentrate on your Character… Which is not what you want with a Pet build.

But I need to state that I had exactly the same feeling and impression when optimizing my Spellbinder Pet build posted above. I can only recommend to read the following points and you will see it is not too bad to have a skelly based build. Of course you will know what I mean. But with a Skelli Build these point are more and more important:

  1. Try to get items to be able to summon at least 6 Skellies in a row
  2. Really important is to get the resistances to max. AND the physical resistance should have at least 20%.
  3. Get items and components and augments that will support the armor of Pets
  4. Get items that will add health to your Pets (130% is OK)

At the end I can say that the damage is not sooo important compared to the points mentioned above. Something around 900% base damage and 1500% with buffs is OK.

I can understand the way that developers want us to go. We need to understand that we have the possibility to summon more than 10 Skellies. More than 10. That is a huge amount. They are strong in a team. Finally of course you need to know your opponent. Do not let the Skellies smash the opponent only. Guide them. Bring them out of the battle sometimes. As example. Kubacabra. This monster spawns this blood pools. If your skellies have no blood resistance they will die fast. So change the playing style. Guide them out of the pools again and again. And if they die eventually… Resummon the team while the oponent is focused on your other Pets. That is the only way to go for me at the moment if you have no class or skill to heal Pets, which I do not have.

I hope this helps a bit. So there is a way. It is not really obvious but it works. And it is still fun :slight_smile:

Thanks for your reply, FernandeZ. As you said, I too understand what the developers intend for skeletons to be. It’s basically the definition of ‘quantity over quality’. And I actually like having that option. However, your given points do not solve the issue at all imho. You can do the exact same things with other pets and they’d still be miles ahead of skeletons in effectiveness with the same resistances/health/gear. That’s where it hurts the most. At the moment, everything you can do for skeletons, you’re better off doing for other pets. Running a skeleton build basically feels like you’re gimping yourself atm (at least, from my admittedly not-so-extensive experience :yum:).

In my experience, skeletons have always been mediocre at best. They probably have the worst build diversity of any pet, the extremes in their DPS potential are vast, the melee variants are usually blown up before they’re able to do much, and AFAIK, only the Revenant variant offers any utility (in the form of a few debuffs).

IMHO, the easiest way to “fix them” as-is would simply make it so Raise Skeletons raises all of them at once, instead of 3 at a time.

Otherwise, maybe add some more utility in the form of buffs or a group heal whenever one of them dies or just bake a bunch of resistances into them. It’s always seemed silly to me skeletons even suffer damage from bleed, cold, lightning, poison or (especially) vitality spells.

Well since this happened in 1.1.7.2 and this thread is somewhat dedicated to meme pet Spellbinders, has anyone tried putting something together recently for Aether pets?

This is what I’ve thrown together so far for an empty affixes setup so player DA/resistances could be patched up and offense improved substantially. Otherwise, only things I don’t like about it are the lack of pet resistances. Not having any of the ones Occultist/Shaman provide is certainly problematic. Thoughts are appreciated.

I am of the opinion that if my pet Fire Apostate didn’t have the damage to consistently beat SR 65, then I doubt Spellbinder is going to do much. If you’d like to test things out, however, I have a few suggestions:

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/p25kp9xZ

Taking Arcanist pets and not also taking Fateweaver’s Raiment is a crime. You’ll have to fish the jewelry MI’s for a “of Caged Souls” so you can get Raise Skeletons to 26/16, but you can’t afford to not take that Chest item - 15% pet resistances all around is amazing and I’ve been waiting for a build to properly incorporate it.

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