I’m pretty pissed of from Malmouth Elite already cause almost every mob leave a pool of damage on the floor to vanish all my pets, specially those poison plants. (my pets have 75% poison resist) but in Ultimate the thing is just out of hand.
My skeletons have full maxed vit resist and in bastion of chaos they all die every single room from the floor pillars that throw vitality damage at every corner.
Even my fully maxed Briarthorne with 70k hp die every single room.
This is not a fun gameplay, not at all.
You’re missing a few min-max things from better gear but that’ll come naturally. The issue with troubleshooting pet builds like these is finding out what they’re dying from. Perhaps all their resistances are close to max, only to realize through playtesting that it may be that their max health, armor or DA are too low.
Hopefully those problems will fix themselves once you manage to get better gear.
Aside from that, I do think Crate should give the Skeletons a passive that makes them take 50% less damage from AOE and stuff on ground on top of very high Life leech resists (Skeletons after all)
Aside from that, things like Wendigo totem might really help you out as they also heal pets. But if they die in 1-2 hits then the totem will not fix that either. It’s great for sustain, but against burst it’s useless.
Ritualist misses out on around +100% pet health that Cabalist has and a whole lot of offensive power, as a pure summoner its a weaker version of Cabalist
There are a few bosses where you will lose your pets no matter what on ultimate, this is tested with 250% health, 30% DA increase and nearly 88% all resist except piercing (18%) and bleeding (45%).
Darius Cronley, your skeletons will die to ground effects no matter what, especially melee ones.
Mad queen, your skeletons will die to her retaliation no matter what, so are your main pets.
Loghrrean, any of your pets can be one shotted during the fight, they literally drop 100-0 in a single second.
Fabius to some extent, because your low pierce resistance.
Alexander nemesis, any of your pets can die to meteor, it does extreme damage.
Beast nemesis, expect team wipe.
These are always a massive headache no matter what, havent encounter any other ones, but aetherial ground effects in general are stupidly painful to pet summoners.
But in general i think skeletons are fine, they are squshy to make up for their immense damage, i just hope crate wont nerf their damage then they’d be useless.
i restarted my file for the expansion and cabalist was my first character (i only have 1 point in bonds of bysmiel too)
i’m steamrolling ultimate SoT with faction gear, no legendaries yet, and my skeletons literally don’t die except for occasionally during alkamos and moosilauke
if you keep skeletons at 26/16 (which is extremely easy thanks to the ‘of caged souls’ suffix) they almost live forever, i barely had to recast at all for the entirety of the game. i’ve used the krieg MI sceptre from level 16 to level 91 lol
I just backed up my save files and cheated through defiler to reset shaman mastery and choose Occultist just for testing
I’ve reseted my devotions and changed 1 piece of equip from what I’ve been using with necro/shaman
The result? +100% pet health basically
Just tested and WHAT? this is what is supposed to be
Fixing Necro/shaman = give it a huge pet health passive
Could be into Primal bond
DONE
I can confirm that even with unoptimal gear skeletons with my cabalist are very strong. Leveled from 1 to 100 with pets and they just kept getting stronger all the way. I don’t know but i think 1 thing here is to kill the enemies fast enough so pets don’t die. My skellies only have like 21k life and i can’t really take on nemesis bosses easily (only tried 2 though) but i’ll get there.
People should probably farm some gear before judging that something is weak.
I’ll admit they have really bones health
Here’s the thing though there’s two PET %vitality damage devotions and a lot stacks varied PET damage so at least they should be able to keep up with the damage requirement.
Have you tried using slows, terrors and confusion holding up the enemy at your minions even if their kasploding is a decent force multiplier then you have beneficial aura’s.
I’m going to be doing a graphical analysis on the trade off between more minions and minion damage increase probably by next week; I have a feeling there’s a point where you really need to start investing more heavily in buffing up your minions rather than focusing on having more.
