Revenant Devotion Constellation - Raise the Dead Viable?

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hey everybody!

Pretty simple question really… has anyone played around with the “Raise the Dead” skill found on the Revenant Consellation? And if so, how have you used it and how useful/viable has it been?

I’m really intrigued by the idea of using it, but am underwhelmed by which skills you can bind it to. It naturally seems to call for a pet build, but you can’t link the skill to any pets, meaning you need to link it to some sort of “offensive” spell.

Best I’ve come up with so far is linking it to something like Sigil of Consumption. It’ll suit thematically (an Occultist/Necromancer vibe) and I can get the pets from the Occultist tree. But then, there’s probably better constellations I can link to such a skill…

Any thoughts/ideas are welcome. Thanks! :smiley:

2

Seems like something that could work on firestrike/primal strike/savagery/cadence type builds, but that is not something well suited to a pure summoner… I haven’t gotten my summoner high enough to try that so I have no real constructive input, just my opinion. :slight_smile:

3

The problem with this constellation is that while it has a pet skill at the end the previous nodes are more suited for (in my mind at least) a melee build. The developers have put in a lot more of this hybrid build enabling stuff, mostly in items that tend to get ignored because hybrid builds are, well, not exactly the strongest out there.

4

I planned on making one of these, but the appeal of pets went down when they kept standing in the enemy sigil of consumption. I switched to a pure demo for a while, added sorc for mirror, nullify and more offense passives. The best thing about AoE DoT is that they have a chance to proc per enemy, per tick so I’d rather put something more DPS oriented on Sigil. It is pretty funny as a Demo to go around killing packs of mobs easily with flash grenade. It does no damage on its own, but it procs abilities that do damage over time, which in turn proc abilities “on hit” which proc more abilities “on hit.” Sometimes it is hard to tell what’s going on with the wonderful explosions all over.

One thing I did to focus the pet damage was reassigned F1 to select all pets. Hitting F1 and a mob allows me to micromanage better. That’s a way to get kills with Sigil.

5

I used it quite a while in Epic with my elementaist 2/hand rifle build. I wanted to use the skeletons as meatshield. I used it with my primal strike and got a constant flow of 3 -4 skeletons.

Here are the problems:

  1. The skeletons don’t arise at the target you kill with your skill (in my case Primal Strike). They arise in the background right behind you. That means they have to walk till they get to the “front” aka the enemy.

  2. They are to slow, if you kite like i do it, they always running useless from a to b.

  3. They don’t get the aggro, which means the enemy ignore them totally (at least with my build). So my idea to use them as a meat shield failed :slight_smile:

Maybe this will work with a Pet Master build, but frankly i don’t believe that this will work really well, because of Point 1 and 3. But i don’t know for sure.

6

IIRC, the problem with Pet Master build is that the skeletons only pop up from your attacks, not your pets.

7

I made a vid some time ago of my hybrid doing SoT. The skeletons are affected by “pet bonuses” so they do start slow but then move faster than you later in the game.


This one is on elite. But I started taping when I ran into Moosy.

8

Thanks for all your help, everyone - some interesting points/ideas.

This looks quite interesting, Duck_King. How’d you gear the build up, roughly?

9

It’s still using the standard “Beastcaller’s” Legendary set except for the shoulderpads.

I replaced that with “Fiendflesh Mantle”

It uses “Dracarris” as main weapon (mine gives +191% fire damage)
and offhand is “Empowered Wyrmclaw”
The hands and feet are “fire based legendaries” - Wyrmscale Footguards, Wyrmbone Handguards.

Like most of my builds it’s thematic. So all my pets deal “fire/chaos/physical” and so does the caster. It was mostly a test build using a maxed Hellhound.

10

I just wish we had an icon top left showing how many skeletons do we have atm. It often happens to me that I don’t even see them in the heat of battle

11

Thanks again, sir! It looks like it played really cool, and am pleased to see that there might be a shred of viability. Chaos + Fire Melee Pet Hybrid ftw! I’ll have to give it a shot.

12

Great looking build Duck_King, I’ve wanted to make a Hellhound + BWC Pyromancer and this fits the bill.

Interesting use of Primal Instinct relic and Raise the Dead Devotion skill as well!

13

Cheers, the main drawback with that build was the resistance balance. My pets ended up with higher resistances than the player. There were many alternatives but in the end it was better to focus on pets having the higher resistances.

Also Hellhound’s “Infernal Breath” appears to scale with pet cast speed. It noticeably does slow down the HH. Mainly because his attack speed is 4-5 times higher than his cast speed. I would recommend skipping this specially if you already have an AoE devotion proc attached to HH.

14

Thanks, those are good tips. Regarding the HH, that’s probably the biggest issue with Infernal Breath and why a bunch of people recommend not taking it. Plus that frees up 12 points! :smiley:

Anyways, I already had a 50 Pyromancer from back when the cap was 50 that focused on BWC, so there isn’t much change for that character. I really only need to head back and grab the Devotion shrines and redo some skills.