Hi Maya. Gotta ask, i’m building a Ritualist with max survivability for me and my pets. Tree of Life and Typhos are already in, should i try to fit Behemoth as well (also for Rumor since it’s a Ghol Ritualist)?
Ritualist, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator i’m using this build right now. the only changes i made recently were giving up Bindings of Bysmiel and Rumor for Toad and Typhos
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First of all, apologies for the late reply 
Now… I must apologize for being the bearer of bad news…
- The Ghol’s set is tuned for DPS rather than tanking.
- Skeletons are not what you want if max survivability for pets is part of the goal. I made them invincible during a public test patch some time ago and that was nerfed with extreme prejudice. But, given your Weapon and Helmet choices, I assume you are planning less on keeping them alive and are fine with resummoning them constantly.
- Guardian of Death’s Gates weapon is best used in Vitality Pet builds due to the damage conversion while Ghol’s set converts away from Vitality into Acid.
- While you can theoretically support two different damage types, especially on a pet build, it is still costly to find enough Resistance Reduction for both types. Here, you will need 16/16 Devouring Swarm and Spectral Wrath at the very least because Damage Conversion happens only once and the Physical Damage Converted to Vitality by your weapon is not getting Converted again into Acid. So, you need Vitality Resistance as well.
- You need more Elemental Resistance for the player (Chaos and Aether wouldnt hurt either) and more Vitality Resistance for your Pets if you have removed Bysmiel’s Bonds devotion. Even with all the changes made to the game over multiple patches, Resistance still plays a rather important role in keeping both the player and pets alive.
- Physical Resistance will become an issue since pretty much every single thing that can easily kill you tends to deal a good amount of physical damage as well.
- I was going to comment on Pet Crit Damage and Offensive Ability, but Toad and Typhos certainly help with that. Sadly, the loss of Murmur means a ton of DPS lost since Resistance Reduction is absolutely vital for dealing damage.
- The Resistance reduction provided by your Weapon and the Resistance Reduction on Mogdrogen’s Pact, provided by Ghol’ set do not stack with each other.
Taking all the above into consideration… not ideal to go for such a setup 
Now… if you are looking for an absolute tank pet build, consider something like this instead - Conjurer, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
(yes, it is a conjurer, but you are pretty much going to want conjurer if survivability is your goal)
(yes, it is Fluffy Squishy altered for more tankiness… but there is a reason why Fluffy is my tankiest pet build)
I see. That’s kind of a shame, because i was having a blast with that build, killed all the superbosses as well but eh, maybe with Yugol rings for conversion should help a bit more. Tried Conjurer once (your build, and i wanna thank you for that build since you put a lot of work into that ) but i gotta say, i like more a horde of minions with me. Maybe giving up Behemoth i will be able to go both Typhos + Toad and Rumor. P.S the helm wasnt for resummoning purposes, i just liked the extra points on Undead Legion, the Briarthorn aura and the idea of summoning more skellies at once, i’m kinda lazy
Another build i was thinking about was a Lost Souls cabalist (Cabalist, Level 96 (GD 1.2.1.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator, not finished yet), but kinda annoying to hit Blood of Dregg every ten seconds… an interesting idea may be to go Stormbringer of Malmouth for lightning build or dual wielding a Korvan Burning Blade for full Fire (also the aura from the Hellhound)
Unfortunately, I cannot help with Lost Souls or Cabalist
But there should be some good Cabalist Pet builds on the forum though, tuned towards DPS however.
I see, i’ll try to figure out the best build between these two (if Blood of Dreeg was a passive aura tho…), having a built in RR in Occultist is a huge advantage so i can go full Vit and get Typhos route no problem. But then again having the pets being harder to kill in Ritualist feels good too. Thanks very much for the advices
Depends on the goals. If it is to make them truly invincible against Calla, - then yeah, this won’t fly, 100% agree. But if it’s to be able to farm SR30-31 without ever needing to resummon, - possible, though you would need to sacrifice some damage of course.
I mean, using that as metric you can have a level 1 naked classless character with “max survivability” too - if your goal is to survive against the training dummy 
Congrats! You’ve just trashed the main endgame performance benchmark 
I understand that for you Calla’s broken sunder is the only real test, but the truth is 99% players don’t make their builds for Calla.
I am using other pets as metric rather than bosses.
If someone says that they want “max survivability” for pets, I am going to be using Briarthorn as the scale to measure against.
And I think we can both agree that Skeletons are the weakest in terms of surviving when it comes to all mastery pets.
Now if the question is whether Skeletons are capable of clearing all content currently in non modded Grim Dawn then the answer to that is a definite yes. But Skeletons are not what you want if max survivability for pets is part of the goal.
Yes, but I think the question other players are asking is whether it’s possible to make them invincible to the point of not having to resummon as with the tankier pets. And that’s why I said, it depends on the goals. They CAN be made invincible except for maybe two things Calla and Crate.
And the answer is a strict no, because that still compares with other pets.
And you will resummon different pets at different rates, so there is no “invincible to the point of not having to resummon as with the tankier pets” because that in the game’s current state is not possible.
You will not make skeletons invincible to the point of not having to resummon as with briarthorn.
Now, if the question was specifically about the viability of Skeleton based pet builds in regards to the various challenges available in GD, that would have found a different answer. But that was not the question asked.
Not an answer. I have already explained why.
The player’s goal can be simply to complete story mode and I am still going to say that skeletons are terrible choice if they want “max survivability for pets”, which is factually true because something like Briarthorn will “survive” longer in story mode as well.
If someone asks whether a hybrid player/pet build is just as viable as a pure pet build, you dont simply go “depends on the goals” for example, because the hybrid will never be as viable as a proper pet build. To say otherwise is to mislead others who are seeking information.
I am neither going to misinform others nor prefer others do so in my thread. So, if you want to do it, I suggest that you do so by messaging the person or perhaps in a post of your own. It would be unideal for me if someone new stumbles into one off my threads, reads something like that and ends up with the notion that I share that opinion as well.
I would argue that Ravager would quickly dispel the notion of invincible skeletons as well unless you rely on the good old bugging of his AI to make him derp around instead of actually doing anything. But glitchy ai has nothing to do with skeletons being tanky.
Mogdrogen, I can see that being doable against.
As for SR 30-31, that is something designed for farming rather than a challenge. Hardly a metric for survivability.
Here’s my bias. I play HC. Max survivability is key. But I don’t care in the slightest if my pet has 300k or 50k HP if that pet doesn’t die and performs well in the damage department. I don’t resummon my skellies from around level 30 all the way to endgame. The only 2-3 superbosses (3 if we add Ravager), that would require resummoning aren’t the dealbreaker for me. Same way with the top 20 builds, some are labelled as HC viable and super tanky, yet none can actually tank Calla through sunder without farma or going all in on defensive stats and then turning the fight into a 30min AFK agony, waiting for Calla do die out of boredom. A boss is designed so that players have to dash every 5 sec, big deal.
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Then allow me to word this in a way that would convey my issue -
Someone wants to know if Classless characters have Max Survivability in Grim Dawn.
Can I say yes, because people have done HC classless SSF and that proves Classless to be just as Invincible as any other, depending on what your goals are?
Not sure why you would care even if the pet dies the instant it is summoned or what bearing HC has on this since max survivability of pets is definitely not “Key”, when it comes to the survivability of the player. A good example is “Bomb” pet builds.
If you have an issue with any presented there, you should take it up with the authors of those builds.
You need to fix the question here. Can a classless character survive all the challenges of GD? Now it makes more sense.
If at any point during a challenging fight, your pets are all dead, you can RIP too. And you actually need to level a LOT of chars in HC to see my point. The game is designed in such a way that there’s always a room for unprecedented incoming damage spike that can kill even the tankiest char. And when it comes to pet builds, if our pets never die and kill fast, it directly adds to our survivability. While we actually level our builds, farm endgame gear, optimize rolls, we almost never have the luxury of max survivability of our characters.
So suddenly the “goals” of the player does not matter?
You can RIP even if your pets are all alive, so… irrelevant.
No, I do not since HC and SC are different only in the sense of death being permanent. The fights are no more challenging in HC compared to SC.
But you need to have had as much experience with making and playing Pet builds as I do, to see my point.
I have taken on SR 170 solo with a pet build, the same build where we are having this conversation on, as a matter of fact. I believe I know more about the topic in this particular context that you do.
It definitely does not.
Which has absolutely no bearing on this conversation.
I encourage you, for a change, to trash your save file, put aside GDStash, make a fresh HC char and level as pet build on Veteran. This is to make it challenging enough so that you see my point.
Because if we talk just from the top endgame gear perspective and go Black or White, then yes, a briarthorn is the tankiest pet. Period. But that’s not what I’m trying to say here. My main statement is that skellies can be made invincible, except for a few side superbosses.
Likewise, if you disregard the main portion of this game - levelling and gearing up, and only leave max-rolls-optimized stress test against Calla, - well then let’s agree that we are talking about two different games.
Did you see anyone asking about making a fresh HC char and level as pet build on Veteran when you first commented here?
Or do you miss the fully geared level 100 Ritualist GT link that was posted along with the question?
Alright, show me evidence of Skeletons surviving just as long as Briarthorn against any enemy at any point in the game with the condition being that the enemy in question must be strong enough to kill the tankiest possible version of a Briarthorn at that particular point in game.
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Well, this kinda derailed quite a bit.
I would like to share my view that skeletons do indeed, no matter what, will always need resummoning. It’s designed and bound to happen - dogs and cats, however (briar & hellhounds etc), they can survive quite heavier ordeals thanks to their different approach of defenses and skill tree alone.
I won’t say skeletons are useless and it’s impossible to make them at least a bit heavy, but as mentioned before, after u spawn them… there will be always different skeletons (soemtimes archers, sometimes even few knights - u can’t control it at least yet) and even when u do 26/16 / 22/12 / 22/12 on skeletons and add bunch of armor on top of it + health, truth is simple… they will still die no matter what unlike other pets… if we don’t count reap spirits, they act completely different and yeah… Maya knows this. This person has been in very deep shards in past, tested my skeleton version and I tested couple hundred times of my own versions aswell.
For leveling tho, skeletons are alright but in my personal belief, they are the worst pets ever due their unreliability and I did hear they gonna get reworked in future where you can pick which u want to spawn. I would also really like auto re-spawn cuz we all know it’s very hard to tell which skeleton of 14 in group has died, is about to die and won’t die just yet. 
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i’ve seen vids of people somehow managing to do a cruci or SR run without re-summoning (not talking Maya’s ultra tanky setup), and i’ve never been able to replicate it. Don’t know what the difference is, rng, pilot control+attention/and or specific inputs, but from my experience even when copying the best builds, skeletons will have to be resummoned eventually (sometimes more frequent than others)
This will apply even more so during levelling, but the difference is usually it wont mattere there, because they die “slower”/over time so you can resummon then between packs once in a while. They are however super strong to level with because of their absolutely busted dps during campaign.
The “flaw” i feel i often observe when people then complaint about skeletons being poor(er) during levelling than endgame (where imo they are at their strongest), is seemingly from players not taking a support tank pet with decent aoe aggro (which to be fair also was rougher in the past with less taunt available).
Decent comparison of this is probably levelling with Crab pet, which will just constantly die, like skeletons, and likewise survives noticeably longer once it has something competing for that aoe attention. Skeletons is then just “many crabs” that need that beefy boi bodyguard a bit more to help extend their lifespan between summons.
Skeletons are however not “weak” levelling, they are so dang high damadz pets you can comfortably level as some sort of meme like fire defiler, aether binder, or mono necro with boner boiz on full build focus, just bring a loudmouth chonk friend along for them.
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