Suggestions for helping me tweak a WiP Warlock pet build?

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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I’m not at my gaming PC currently so I don’t know exactly how I distributed my points, especially my devos, but it looks something like this - EDIT: I don’t have enough posts to post links, but basically it’s a Warlock with a lot of points in Iskandra’s and OFF in Arcanist and then mostly pet points (especially under hellhound abilities) in Occultist, plus Curse of Frailty + Vulnerability.

Basically the premise of the build is to try to create as much pet damage as possible via pet elemental damage bonuses. The devotion tree is incomplete in the link because I can’t remember where the pet bonuses are exactly and grimcalc doesn’t tell you.

Main Items:
Dracarris Legendary Dagger, mainly for the Hellspawn proc: (50% enemy death - Pet Bonus: 200% Fire/Chaos damage bonus and 10% attack speed. Also gives +3 to the Hellfire buff your Hellhound does.

Empowered Black Grimoire of Og’Napesh: Summons the Revenant of Og’Napesh, a nice pet with partial fire damage.

Heart of the Mountain: Summons Chillmane who has a pretty good amount of cold damage to boost with our elemental damage bonuses.

Iskandra’s Hood: Just for the 40% all damage buff aura.

Fiendmaster Raiment: For both the pet damage on the item and the pet damage buff.

Empowered Rifthound Leather Boots: For the pet damage and the +skill to your Hellhound.

Beastcaller’s Talisman: For the damage bonus to pets.

Voidmancer’s Cord: For the all damage, and the 10% proc of 1000% lightning damage on your pets helps the familiar out occasionally.

Fiendflesh Mantle: For the AD and more +skills to Hellhound, who is big chunk of your damage.

Wildshorn Leggings: for the +pet damage and the +3 skills to Hellfire.

Relic: Ancestor - Mainly for the 100% elemental damage buff to pets. The regen bonus is also nice because we’re gonna use Hungering Void which has an active health cost.

Components: Enchanted Flint for the %Fire / Flat Fire aura for our pets, Hell’s Bane Ammo for the %Lightning and Flat Lightning aura for our pets. Binding of Bymiel on the chest for the pet damage.

Premise of the Build: Basically, you stack as much flat fire or elemental damage onto your pets as possible, mainly from Hellfire, Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange, Enchanted Flint, Hell’s Bane Ammo, Storm Spirit, etc.

Then you boost the %dmg of all these things using mostly those same auras and all your %pet damage items.

Then you use Olexra’s Flash Freeze and Curse of Frailty on your enemies because they both reduce fire damage resistance by a lot (-134% Fire res?).

Now your pets can do a lot of fire damage even though the scaling isn’t that high. Your pets also have a LOT of retaliation damage, because: Your pants are 450%, Ancestor is 100%, Dracarris is ~1300 flat damage, Bond’s of Bysmiel is quite a bit, Hellfire is another big chunk of flat fire retaliation, and your Revenant of Og’Napesh has a retaliation buff AND a fire damage AOE ability similar to Hellfire.

Now you multiply all that Fire and Chaos bonus damage you have from various sources and the retaliation damage is pretty significant too, especially with the lowered Fire Resistances.

So far I’m just past Homestead on Ultimate with this build and it hasn’t bat an eye at anything. Killing Fabius and one other Nemesis (can’t remember) was easy and didn’t take that long but I haven’t tried any of the others yet.

This build is nowhere near complete or optimal though, and my knowledge of what items are available out there is limited to what I’ve found. Anybody got some great ideas that can make this better?

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I also have a pet warlock that I’ll be posting in the coming days. It’s about 75% similar to yours (with a couple of huge twists), so I’m quite familiar with your premise. Here are some items that you’ll need:

  1. Primal Instinct: You lose far too much DPS from the 6 missing swarmlings if you use Ancestor instead. I also agree with Dying God, but I’d suggest taking either Bat or Wendigo for sustain instead of equipping Ancestor. As a bonus, 67% of swarmling base damage is fire, so it fits into your elemental theme just fine.

  2. Sovereign Ruby of Domination: The bonuses and the castable ability far outweigh the additional pet from Heart of the Mountain, especially given how many other pets you already have.

  3. Mantle of the Patron and 2x Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth: You really need these items to make your Voidmancer’s Cord shine, and ideally the Spark of Ultos too.

Regarding Dracarris: What ability are you using to trigger the death proc, and how often does it trigger? (It shows up as a yellow flaming symbol in your buff bar.) Remember that it only triggers on kills you personally make, and not on your pet’s kills. If you’re not actually triggering it very often, then I’d consider swapping it out for Spark of Ultos for lightning conversion, +% lightning damage, and flat lightning damage on your pets.

Also: IEE flat damage is increased by the player’s +% elemental damage. How high are your +% damage for fire, cold, and electricity? IEE won’t be very powerful unless you can pump those up quite a bit.

EDIT: Also, refer to Avatar of Dreeg’s Voidmancer Summoner for reference. You won’t be able to match the DPS in his videos though due to significant nerfs in 1.0.0.7 to Primal Instinct, Spark of Ultos, and Glyph of Kelphat’Zoth.

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Hey Thanks for the reply!

I guess I glossed over Primal Instinct. I haven’t made it yet so I’ll give it some testing.

Pretty much the only self-cast attacks I use are OFF, Curse, and PRM. The buff uptime is close to 100% of off cooldown time, I’m not really sure what is generating the kills exactly. I haven’t gone out of my way to proc it so I didn’t even know it didn’t proc off pet kills.

My suspicion is that it’s being procced by the Elemental Seeker devotion I have attached to my OFF. Each OFF cast procs 2x Elemental Seekers who do pretty solid damage.

My PRM is only 1/1/1/1 or something like that before +skills, I just use it to proc whatever devo I have attached to it (acid spray maybe?)

Those 3x lightning damage pieces are pretty slick but they’re also kind of moving away from the fire theme into a lightning theme instead. Since I can’t generate a huge lightning res debuff with OFF like I can fire, I wonder if they’re significant. Either way, I didn’t know either of them existed so if I can find some I’ll try it out.

Thanks!

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I am also trying to get a Pet Warlock up to speed with the added difficulty that I’ll try only using Dogs (Hellhound, Stormhound, Guardians)…

So far (lvl54) it’s been fun but I don’t think that it will be sustainable in Ultimate.

For Lightning debuff to go along with Spark of Ultos and Glyphs go for Widow in Devotions.