Jumping from 185% to 365% is a great boost to partially make up for the set nerfs. I wish the Beastcaller’s Set didn’t lose the Offensive Ability buff for the 3-pc bonus, but having the pet resistances and player Physical Resistance is already a significant boost. It is a significant change for pet builds, so I can’t say much about it, especially since I never used Bysmiel’s Set for a Conjurer (I have it for a Cabalist, and unfortunately the performance feels roughly the same to me, or slightly worse).
If you feel that certain non-set pet items are lacking in terms of stats, I’d be glad to raise it over at the feedback thread. It’s tough pinpointing a specific problem because we’re combining significant pet changes with significant SR changes that harshly penalize you when you die (a change I largely hate).
One thing I can say, Hellhound is a really good skill line now. It’s the first time in like 3 years that I can make a build revolve around the Hellhound and beat Crucible with it (this is both Fire Hellhound Conjurer and Lost Souls set Deceiver).
Nothing has changed with pets (in crucible anyway) maya , If anything they got buffed im still waking up, drinking coffee, fumbling keys, and still wrecking the piss out of crucible with birbs and chaos cats
I think Crucible buffs to damage will offset set nerfs and since you have increased health will make your characters tougher to kill and lose buff perks. Skellies time…
SR will be slight Nerf but in my experience pets tend to aggro bosses fast and are tough to avoid CC damage and multiple stacks are detrimental for them. So first few chunks should be slightly tougher and boss chunks up until the super big numbers will be more consistent.
Against super bosses, slight Nerf to damage? But this need testing. I will eventually retry my cold birbs and maybe test non set builds but until then will trust my guts.
At same time want to say that I find Maya’s concerns reasonable. Sets were nerfed, while very few items were actually buffed in order to close the gap to non set builds. Also cat uptime is lower, so there’s that. But I want to see some more feedback and discuss it then. No need for saying #deadbuilds but also these concerns shouldn’t be mocked.
My concern is that people are not even playing the game before writing stuff online. Imagine spending the time writing playing instead
Crate have playtesters and some of them play pet builds afaik. These changes are not just arbitrary “let’s see what happens” but should have been implented for a reason.
You know I don’t play Cruci
Can you try naked Cruci for me? with extra spawns. Should give a better assessement.
The issue I have is this:
As you noted, it is still a significant boost. If you take 3 random non set items, you are still going to be in a worse state than if you had gone for set pieces.
for eg; I love Fiendmaster’s Raiment and could use it in fluffy Squishy. I can also go for maybe Winter king helm + Mog shoulders or Fiend Flesh. But if I make that switch, my build will be much worse than doing nothing.
We don’t have enough non set legendaries to choose from when it comes to the slots that set items usually occupy.
Like when it comes to chest: we have 2 non set items to choose from.
Shoulders: Also 2.
Helmet: 3.
So, unless you were to go out of your way to choose Fiendmasters or Necrolords or something, you will still end up with the usual suspects.
And the reason why this hurts even more is because Crate announced that this is going to be their last major patch.
So I can’t even realistically hope for new items or such to come in the future to help actually promote diversity among choices.
Could still go for it. The issue is that with most of the power locked behind hadcapping skills, Fluffy Squishy suffers from lack of points to max everything and having focus on more than just the Raven. It used all 3 pets to be effective.
Birb auto got nerfed, Hound needs more investment, Briar needs more investment…
It was already complained to be slow and it was built that way, to be a slow moving tank. But I dread going up against Callagadra on Fluffy now while before I have often boasted it as the easiest to do so with.
Some might argue that a build trivializing something like superbosses is too powerful, but if you make a hammer, you expect it to be efficient at hammering stuff. Fluffy was built for a purpose and that just got much harder to actually accomplish with the build.
It is by no means unplayable, but I can no longer confidently tell you to choose a pet conjurer over something like a Vitality build.
And for those who want a Pet build that embodies everything Fluffy stood for, especially the laziness, Will-O-Wisp should be the current choice to go with instead. It even has less skills to bother with and no Wind Devils
@Maya: I don’t even like running high SR, but I would do plenty of testing for my favorite bird. I don’t any tears for a build that can “only” do SR 85 and not SR 90. SR 84 had two Fabiuses, Benn’Jahr, and Shattered Gargobol, so it’s not like I’m cherry-picking the shattered bosses to get an easier layout.
Skeletons only started to fall off against Fabius + Blade Spirits and Shattered Sentinel (who’s a jerk to all pet builds, period), and even then Blight Fiend was study enough to handle aggro until I could get the Skeletons back. Also, Skeleton mages got a big buff to their fire attacks - they’re more like Meteors now instead of the weak attacks they had before.
It’s Witching Hour Skeletons - pardon the double rare MIs, but I wanted to maximize the flat damage by getting Soul Harvest to 22/12, and this was the only way I could manage it.
Blight Fiend being 26/16 is doing a lot of great work soaking up the hits, and the DPS is good enough that Shard Hero AoE’s don’t bother the Skeletons too much. It’s really only certain Nemeses and Shattered Bosses that lay down the hurt, but thanks to the new SR layout, it’s a lot easier to kill the easier Nemeses first then use the expanded rooms to dash around and kite the nastier bosses. That’s how I was able to handle stuff like Shattered Sentinel - blink when he’s about to cast the mind control spell so that only a few of the Skeletons get killed.
You can probably still call Lost Souls Skeletons weak. It feels so out of place compared to Witching Hour or Guardian of Death’s Gate Skeletons.
Speaking of which, I’ve always wanted to see what would happen if you dual-wielded Lost Souls weapon with Veilpiercer to get 2 Dogs with flat resist reduction. It would make for more interesting devotions since you don’t have to go for something like Manticore for the flat RR, but with 0 CDR by not taking an off-hand, I have no clue what would be a good devotion set-up.
I feel like Rattosh is still necessary due to the RR class nerfs, but outside of that, what would be most useful for Skeletons? I feel like Dying God’s the way to go since the 10% Speed boost + the 24% from the Lost Souls set gives you nearly Mogdrogen levels of speed. However, I hate having to deal with the Health Drain with no CDR for Giant’s Blood.
I remember Sig saying that Dying God is better than Rattosh if you had to choose one or the other, for Vitality builds. Not sure if it still holds true though.
I mostly prefer DG over Rattosh because more devo options open up when you don’t need to fish for affinities to get to Rattosh.
So, back to farming I guess!