So… nearly a month later, the Fwuffy finally got around to actually testing the patch… yes long story and way overdue…
No updates on Blightfiends for now. I still haven’t recovered from not getting enough CDR for the transmuter when using the Ghol set.
Hellhound buff feels nice. But something like making a build focused on hellhounds and being able to compete with say BeastCaller Briarthorns for eg, is a different issue. But a buff to Fluffy Squishy is a buff to Fluffy Squishy and I will take what I can get.
Crucible is still the same despite pets supposedly getting indirectly buffed there due to increased bonuses from blessings.
Fwuffy wakes up in the middle of the night and walks to get ice cream from the fridge… Realizes Ice Cream hasn’t been restocked and fridge is empty Decides to roll Solo Shaman for guide in vengeance against the Ravager for creating hunger…
Not sure how it would go, so will see what happens…
Lvl 10 – 16/16 Summon Briarthorn, 5/16 Devouring Swarm.
Lvl 20 – 16/16 Devouring Swarm, 9/12 Ground Slam.
Lvl 30 – 12/12 Ground Slam, 7/12 Emboldening Presence.
Lvl 40 – 12/12 Emboldening Presence, 12/12 Mogdrogen’s Pact, 12/12 Wendigo Totem, 1/12 Grasping Vines.
Lvl 50 – 1/10 Oak Skin, 12/12 Primal Bond, 12/12 Conjure Primal Spirit, 6/12 Wendigo Totem (-6 points).
Lvl 60 – 12/12 Wendigo Totem, 1/16 Wind Devil, 12/12 Raging Tempest.
Lvl 70 – 10/10 Oak Skin, 10/10 Heart of the Wild.
Lvl 80 – 12/12 Blood Pact, 1/12 Maelstrom, 1/16 Savagery, 5/12 Tenacity of the Boar.
Lvl 90 – 12/12 Tenacity of the Boar, 1/12 Storm Touched, Free Skill Points
Lvl 94 – Respec as needed, according to the build you are going for.
Level 40-50: Korvaak’s Blade was farmed to convert pet physical damage into Fire.
This switches pet damage type to Elemental + Bleed.
Level 57: Loghorrean killed.
Level 58: Kra’vall, Ancient of the Waters killed.
I know that they are comfortable in farming SR to eventually get to the proper endgame version, but can they kill celestials on their own? I assume ravager should be doable with some extensive running, but can it kill Callagadra or Crate? I know I am asking quite a lot from a faction gear build but I know pet builds are very strong against celestials so maybe even such version will suffice.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend trying Celestials with Faction gear.
Except for maybe Lokarr…
Mostly because even with the perfect piloting and such, there is only so much power you can squeeze out of the items and since there is nothing we actually need from Celestials interms of drops for Pet builds to work, it would not be worth it.
If you are thinking of doing it for a challenge, personally even Ravager has been impossible for me. Someone with better piloting skills will have to attempt it.
Crate is, atleast from personal experience, pretty much on a timer. Either you kill it in under 2mins or you just get overwhelmed by the Crate Pets. And I don’t think the budget builds can provide enough DPS for that. But then again, with proper micro and consumables including Aether Clusters, someone might be able to pull it off. Would be a rather insane achievement if they do though.
Callagadra, I can safely say is not happening within any reasonable time frame.
Do note that if someone manages to kill any of the superbosses other than Lokarr or John Bourbon clones with one of my budget builds, I will be kidnapping them to be my personal tester and pilot :3
Cross posting from my Fluffy Squishy thread, just incase:
Do note that the stunts where Shepherd’s Crook is not taken on a Pet build were performed by a trained professional Ice Cream eater and should not be attempted in your kitchen or anywhere else while making your own pet builds.
hi maya, thanks to your guide i was able to learn a LOT from grim dawn (first build ever), but i transitioned from SC to HC, so i was wondering which pet build is the tankiest? doesnt need to be full damage, i just dont wanna die lmao. thank you so much for this guide
While its name might make it seem, well… squishy, the name actually comes from the fact that it used to have Heart of the Mountain amulet’s Chillmane Pet, once upon a time. And I had always found Chillmane to be rather huggable and squishable fluffy thingy…
And when the build changed into a Familiar based one, the name still stayed. It is currently the most defensive oriented pet build that I have atm and very few things should even come close to killing you once you complete it
First off, thanks for the guide, I’m new to the game and it’s been helpful for me both for leveling and as I get towards endgame (currently level 89 ritualist). I have a mechanics question that I’m hoping you know the answer to. I’ve been lucky enough to find a mythical bonescavenger’s deathgrips (which your build uses) as well as a mythical black scourge (which you don’t use). Both of those items have abilities that summon pets and trigger on enemy death, and I’m trying to understand how those triggers work. The wording of XX% chance on enemy death makes me think it would work if any enemy nearby dies, but the description texts say things like “recent kill by your hand” which makes me think that my player character needs to land the final blow, rather than my pets. The latter also seems to be consistent with my play experience, as I’m not noticing these special summons appearing (although admittedly, I’m still running 9 skeletons so it’s hard to tell which of my pets are what). Do you know what determines whether these “on enemy death” abilities trigger, and if they won’t work when my pets get kills is there any good way for me to get the killing blow for these triggers?
I am not Maya but will take a stab and say the proc works only if you score a kill and not the pets. Most procs work in this fashion, like critical hit or on attack.
Btw I am interested, do you keep Skeletons alive easy in ultimate and what do you think about Blight Fiends. If you happen to farm Ghol set in future, you can make your Ritualist dope.
I think you are right on the procs now that I’ve played with them a little more. That’s really too bad I was hoping for those extra pets and the -resists from black scourge.
As for keeping skellies alive in ultimate, I’ve had issues here and there but have mostly been able to solve them with build tweaks and the occassional need to micro them out of ground AoEs. I do have value points in both blight fiend and briarthorn to take some of the aggro, as well as primal spirit for an extra reasonably strong pet. Here’s my current setup: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/eZP1d7mN.
I also am still doing the story on ultimate so I haven’t gotten to the real endgame stuff yet. I expect pet survivability will drop off significantly at that point. Also worth noting I’m playing coop with a friend playing an aether beam spellbinder, and he’s taking ill omen and spectral wrath, which frees up some skill points for me (my understanding is that those debuffs do not stack if we both have them).
First of all welcome to the forums and glad to hear that my guide has been useful
As for your question, apologies for the late reply, but as @Nery said and you yourself seem to have found out, “trigger on enemy death” only applies when you, the player score the killing blow.
However, if you must, you can proc them with a decent amount of success against weaker enemies if you have sufficiently level’ed Reap Spirit, since it also acts as a semi nuke due to the Spell component. While in a Pet build that won’t amount to much actual damage, you could still score a kill or 2 here and there if you focus on doing so.
But mostly it is not reliable and is more of a novelty
Now if you can get the numbers in and make all your pets strong individually, then there is no reason not to.
But that usually requires specific builds and most probably with Green (MI) items that I have come to avoid using in my builds. Not that there is anything wrong with using them, but everyone wanted builds without them to make it easier to farm the items without worrying about particular affixes.
Pet builds tend to be notoriously skill point hungry. And if you spread yourself too thin, you risk getting your entire army wiped out by a few AoE’s against stronger enemies.
Another albeit a personal aspect to this is that I don’t like to have too many buttons and like to keep them to a minimum. More pets = more buttons to keep track of and my motto is “Laziness is Love, Laziness is Life”
(You can also replace “Laziness” with “Pets” instead )
So, all the above reasons combined, I tend to favour focusing on a few pets and go all in on them, making them as strong as possible and using that to overcome the lack of numbers.
But that is not without its downsides. While it provides more QoL and also enables me to beef everything up to be rather tanky, it comes at the cost of sheer damage.
Pet builds benefit more from Flat Dmg sources since it is multiplied by the number of pets. So if you can fit in a lot of damage and also a good number of pets, that will indeed be better provided you can keep them alive and also pilot well enough.
So it is more of a question of personal preference than anything.
…That and Callagadra doesn’t care for how many pets you have. It will wipe your entire army in a second. And I have declared that to be a personal enemy of mine and build around it these days. So having few but individually powerful pets gets me better kill times against Cally.
In the Necromancer leveling , i don’t get why should Remove the points from Skeletons and it’s nodes … at level 40 … then to Respec again into Skeleton at 50 ? why not just keep them ?
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