Summon Familiar / Hellhound / Briarthorn / Blight Fiend too set-reliant

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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I had considered posting this in the Itemization discussion, but due to the breadth of this topic, I preferred instead to make it its own topic. While discussing the Magi pet rings that convert pet damage into Fire, I was excited to figure out possibilities to use the skill bonuses provided, only to be stopped when I realized that Summon Hellhound, Familiar, and Briarthorn simply can’t carry builds on their own if you’re not using their respective sets. I include Blight Fiend in this discussion as well because if it weren’t for Blight Fiend’s transmuter which makes it hundreds of times more effective, it would also be in the same spot.

I’d love to find a way to use 26/16 Hellhound and see what 22/12 Ember Claw and 22/12 Infernal Breath are capable of. I want to use that Raven Conduit that passes through enemies and not feel instantly gimped by not using the Bysmiel set. I want to build around Fire Hellhound and not have that conversion to Vitality get in the way of having multiple Hellhounds. The thing is, unless you’re stacking the field with Skeletons or Reap Spirits, there are not simply enough bodies on the field to absorb a swarm of enemies circling around your character and using AoE debuffs. Primal Instinct used to be the way to provide AoE for Shaman-based pet builds, but their health are simply too low for AoM and FG content.

It doesn’t help that a baffling 0 sets that give pet bonuses actually provide +All Skills to the pet class in the first place. All the new sets I’ve seen since Fallen Gods easily have +1 to each of the three classes that the set provides bonuses to. None of the pet sets have it, and pet builds need a lot of skill points to be effective.

The way I propose we improve these skills is to increase the Summon Limit as you invest in the above pet skills and decouple the extra summon limit from relying on sets and instead allow players to have 2 summons at a good overcap - I suggest at 23/16 to prevent +All Skills shenanigans from making it too easy to have a pet overload. The major sets would have their 4-set bonus changed so that using the set continues to feel powerful, but not completely mandatory like it is now. As it is now, a 10/16 Briarthorn that uses the Beastcaller’s Set is much more powerful than a 26/16 Briarthorn that doesn’t use the set, simply because the extra body is that much more useful when you’re constantly being swarmed.

The biggest benefit from this change is that people will be able to fully incorporate the lovely addition of Demolitionist and Arcanist pet equipment and make truly unique builds. Dracarris would be great to work around, but a Hellhound with 22% increased speed is nothing compared to having 2 Hellhounds from the Lost Souls set. There are a multitude of chest items that have 10 meter range buffs that I’d love to try on pet builds, but non-Necro classes simply don’t have the bodies to provide the AoE necessary. Having to constantly use Beastcaller’s Set for a pet Elementalist or Druid to even be functional takes away from a lot of choice, especially since you can’t use a Helmet that provides +skills to the class. Fire Pyromancers are simply irrelevant since 1 Hellhound and Swarmlings cannot stand up to the new amounts of AoE being thrown around. I doubt even Shamans can get past most content with just 1 Briarthorn and 1 Primal Spirit.

Maybe Primal Instinct gets buffed to the point where they can serve as good swarm pets again, but until that happens, it’d be nice to decouple summon limits from pet sets. I can’t fathom why skills like PBlades, AAR, Blade Arc get such wide-ranging AoE capabilities and so much equipment that builders can switch around while pet users are stuck with our current arrangement. I bet people would riot if these skills’ damage and AoE were cut in half and the players were told that you can only operate at half capacity unless you use a set. I don’t see why pet players have to be subjected to this.

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Personally I rather have quality over quantity.

If single pets can’t cut it, then make them strong enough to do so and nerf the item sets if needed to compensate for it.

Like perhaps make Familiar Projectiles pierce by default, make Ground Slam a 360 degree attack instead, straight up buff Hellhound’s base stats etc.

The issue I have with balancing with simply increasing pet summon limit is the existence of enemies with strong AoE. I rather have 3 pets that won’t get killed instantly to a single AoE vs 6 that will.

Blightfiends with transmuter have the advantage of being disposable while not being frail like Skeletons. And Reap Spirits are immortal.

Also speaking of Skeletons, I would say they are much worse than all the other pets save for Hellhounds, with or without Sets.

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Pets are in a much more diverse spot than they were before FG. It used to be Beastcaller’s + Will of Bysmiel or WH skeletons + Will of Bysmiel. Reap Spirit wraith’s had 10 second lifetimes making them basically unusable.

Both Ghol’s Malice and Bysmiel’s Trinkets offer many different competitive options, Vitality Lost Souls Skeletons work better than any pet vitality build used to, Wraiths can be used effectively almost anywhere.

That said, here are a couple of things I think could meaningfully boost the pet ecosystem:

  • Decouple most pet conversion from the pet sets.

    1. Cold to Aether on Diviner’s.
      Aether is too unsupported for pets. Unfortunately the most interesting conversions for Reap Spirit conflict with Diviner’s (Stormbringer and Fiendgaze Tome), but it’d be cool to see something that wasn’t tried to it.

    2. Vitality to Elemental on Bysmiel’s Mark
      Bysmiel’s doesn’t really synergize well with Skeletons anyway, and removing this would balance out the above change to Diviner’s when using the sets together. I think the conversion on the rings for Bysmiel’s set is fine, there are no cases I can think of where I’d rather not have it and it’d be hard to make up for without the use of ring slots.

    3. X to Vitality on Lost Souls
      This is the big one. If the conversion to Vitality was optional, it’d open this set up to far more possibilities, both for Hellound (fire/chaos, and maybe vitality/chaos or fire/vitality if other conversion options existed), and for Skeletons (physical, vitality, chaos, elemental, even acid). Vitality conversion could go on rings (Spiritbinder Glyph would be a good option. It used to be the goto for physical builds but there are other options these days), or increase the % on Deathrite Handguards and make Master of Death’s conversion scale with rank, getting to higher values than it does now. Vitality Lost Souls is also a little redundant with Vitality Guardian of Death’s Gate skeletons (although the former is better).

    4. Vitality to Poison on Ghol’s Mark
      This medal would otherwise be quite attractive to Diviner Ritualists due to the skill bonuses, and the conversion would be put on a weapon so that it could still be used with Ghol, and maybe also the same conversion on Rotdrinker Crest? It could maybe make Poison Diviner Cabalist a thing, and it would also make Vitality Ghol Ritualists a more likely concept (via the Blight Fiend Conduit)

  • Increase skeleton resummon rate in general.
    Skeletons are designed as if they were meant to be replaceable and replaced often, but end-game you tend to lose either none or all at once, and resummoning is painfully slow (Guardian of Death’s Gate builds can have 13 skeletons and yet summon only 3 every 7 seconds). End-game builds are basically forced to keep them alive at all costs, and just entirely avoid content where they can’t. It’s a bit worse in Crucible where the lose of buffs means cascading rate of skeleton deaths.

  • Change Crucible buffs for pets be less potent but apply consistently regardless of whether the pets live die (i.e. boost the “bonus to all pets” part and make the rest never apply to pets).

    This is related to the above, but I think it’d just be generally nice. Even without the loss of buffs, letting pets die is guaranteed to be a hit to clear times because most pets have fairly slow resummon rates, and it adds piloting difficulty. I’d happily take a peak performance hit for the large consistency/QoL boost. It would also help Diviner’s builds which are the least performant in Crucible, and allow Skeletons to really live up to their “disposable” nature.

That ended up as more text than I was planning, and also I don’t really expect most of this to happen, but whatever.

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Why do we have to accept the premise that we need to have the Beastcaller’s Set to summon 2 Briarthorns, or have to have the Bysmiel’s Set to have 2 Familiars, or have to have the Lost Souls set to summon 2 Hellhounds? This is the premise I’m disputing. At the moment, you can design all the wonderful equipment with pet bonuses and conversions you want, but if it conflicts with the set, then the chances to make a viable build with that equipment plummet. \

I remember the AoM days where Will of Bysmiel Raven dominated everything, but that could have easily been rectified by reducing the number of projectiles or nerfing Lightning Strike. Those months of testing Will of Bysmiel and the multitude of viable pet builds that came from that should have been the big warning sign to Crate that reliable pet AoE is the difference between a pet build surviving wave 170 and barely surviving wave 100 like my Swarmling Deceiver that intentionally refused to use double Raven to see how far it could go. Yet, the designers still decide that locking the skills’ potential behind the 4-piece set bonus is the way to go.

It’s baffling when you stop thinking of it like a pet ecosystem and compare the pet skills to other Grim Dawn skills. How would people respond if Crate told players that if you want to play a Primal Strike Shaman, you’re only playing with 40% capacity until you get the Ultos set? The difference between 26/16 Bone Harvest that’s not a set and 26/16 Blood Knight’s Bone Harvest isn’t nearly as pronounced, so why do pet builds become this huge exception? All the sets accomplish is that they block the Chest / Head / Amulet / Shoulder / whichever slots from ever having any meaningful choice.

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I actually would like to keep those 2 since it allows for better use of Reap spirit without Diviner’s alongside Trinkets & Ghol’s

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Ok, so did a small experiment to see how effective a Pet build is without a full set.

First the build: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2BWw3KV

I wanted to avoid using item based pets and went with Hellhound instead of including Primal Spirit. Also, Conjurer instead of Cabalist. So no 3x blightfiends or Reap Spirits.

Now the result which I would say is pretty good:

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Well, it does show that the issue may not be the multiple pets by sets.

But your example definitely illustrates that it is made viable behind certain items and parts of sets.

However, this is not that unusual in GD. Many non-pet examples exist as well: ie. bloodrager set (or parts), justicar set parts, etc, etc. :man_shrugging:

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Yeah, most of the BiS items also appear to be parts of the full sets even if you aren’t using the full sets.

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I appreciate you carrying out the tests; it definitely shows that pierce-through Familiar is very strong, but we knew Familiar was strong through most of AoM, much less FG. Getting through that far without Primal Spirit is quite the accomplishment, that’s for sure. I’d highly doubt, however, that Hellhounds or Briarthorns can carry a build the same way Primal Spirit or Raven can carry a build. A little bit is the pets themselves, but a large part of it is that the equipment is so tightly focused around sets. I didn’t exactly have in mind that the way of getting past relying on 1 full set is to instead focus on 3/4 of 2 sets. :expressionless:

Once you try things that go outside the sets, things just crumble. This is a Trickster build that I’m trying out, and though there’s a lot in devotions / skill point allocation / piloting that I have to practice and work through, this build is a total dumpster fire. I had hoped that a 26/16 Briarthorn with a 100% taunt and fully Cold Meteor Shower for AoE would help carry this build, especially since it has the Chillmane, Instinct critters and the Bound Spirits from the gloves doing work, but right now, both the pets and I completely crumble when facing a boss-level enemy.

There’s a lot of equipment that benefits Demolitionist and Arcanist pet builds, but the gear doesn’t bring enough bonuses to the table to be worth it over the bog-standard stuff. Demo has 2 sources of flat damage, good Fire + Lightning % bonuses, & flat OA, but there’s no speed bonuses, resistances, or health. Arcanist does a little better, having flat damage, crit damage, flat OA and Aether resistance, but similarly, no health or speed.

If we want to break the bog-standard of equipment, we need to have items that would break Beastcaller’s or Bysmiel’s that give substantial pet bonuses and skill bonuses that make pet builds want to build around it. How can gloves like Touch of the Everliving Grove possibly beat Iron Grips when the latter has 4% DA, 8% Physical resistance, reduced stun duration & decent pet bonuses, all things a pet build desperately needs? How can you have equipment that gives bonuses to Demo or Arcanist classes but leave them bereft of pet resistances or health which a pet build considering these classes desperately needs.

It just feels like a lot of false choices and noob traps of the level of “HAHAHA, you thought you can make a functional build with equipment we designed for this very purpose? Dunce!” A lot of pet equipment just has no place on builds and nothing’s being done to work towards a solution.

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It makes me sad when all it took was a week of complaints for the player-scaled pets to have extra summons at high ranks, when I was asking for the EXACT same thing for Summon Briarthorn and Hellhound and the idea isn’t even considered. Why is it that Summon Guardian, which provides damage and an RR buff, gets to have 3+ pets at rank 24, but Summon Briarthorn, which provides damage and a Physical Resistance buff, requires a full set just to have 2 of them? I’ve even illustrated why a single Briarthorn build fails even if you take it to 26/16, so I don’t know what more I could have done to state my point.

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Not going to lie, the changes to pseudo pets are indeed making me jealous. Especially after my recent attempt at making a Hellhound build and realizing Lost Souls blocks a lot of items that would have fit perfectly in the build.