The Carnival - A Guide to Pets

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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769

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770

Oh i see , i am playing with Duo so i don’t think i need the respec i can keep the Skeletons til later

771

Just another quick question , while leveling should i max the skill 1st then putting points into mastery bar when i need a new skill ?
or go like 2 points into the skill i need to max then 1 point into mastery bar ?

772

For Pet builds, Never put points into the mastery bar unless absolutely necessary.

For non Pet builds it works because you benefit from the raw stats that the mastery bar provides. With Pets, they are your bread and butter, your sword and shield. So beefing up the player (atleast by investing in the mastery bar) does nothing and only wastes points that could have been spent elsewhere.

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773

Hey Maya.
First of all, i guess thanks for sharing your knowledge and spending time with that.

I’d like to ask if you could check my Character rq and maybe help me designing it more in the way to survive harder bosses on ultimate? I started to struggle first when i met Boris -_-

Ofc i know i have some lacks on resistances, but so far imo most enemies are no threat for me, i can even work around the lack of piercing resistance in most cases. When i tried to swap some augments for more resistances i felt i lost waaaay too much health.
I’m aiming on as much flat +dmg for pets so far, doing a good job for me so far. Bad thing would be, i can’t seem to find a way to see actual flat pet damage ;(

btw: I picked up doom bolt while leveling, and would rather swap to Reap Spirit. Also, i think i would rearrange some points from my Blight Fiend to Blood of Dreeg, for the extra flat Poison (or Acid?) damage -> tbh couldn’t be bothered so far to do it :smiley:
on another note im more or less playing SSF so my Itempool may leak alot.

Thanks in advance and sorry if you have answered it somewhere before. I LOVE to play somewhat complex mechanics ARPG’s without relying on a build and stuff :3

nearly forgot this lol https://www.grimtools.com/calc/mN4mnR52

looked through the items i found yesterday, looks somewhat better to me https://www.grimtools.com/calc/vNQyooRN

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774

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4VxjqglN

I wonder if somebody has tried something similar, now that both Briarthorns AND Primal Spirit do full cold (Mythical Heart of the Mountain could be an option too if only all pets’ physical damage was converted to cold).

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775

First of all, welcome to the forums :blush:

Now, looking at the Grimtools links, you don’t seem to have put any augments on any of your gear. If you haven’t got enough reputation with the factions for it, I’d recommend grinding faction reputation in Elite if you can.

Pierce res is indeed your major problem atm and that Aether/Chaos res will also create issues.

You can keep your current components for now if you wish though. But unless your resistances are fixed, stacking health won’t do much good.

Now since I have often seen this coming up in Reddit, I must clarify just incase that you can have both components & augments on the same item and you should get both. So for eg: you can have Mark of Mogdrogen Component & Mankind’s Vigil Augment on Boots.

As for flat pet damage, unfortunately you need to manually calculate it :frowning:
No way around that ingame or in GT.

As for the rest of your build, if I start to tinker with it, the first thing I’d do is remove Skeletons. Mostly because I absolutely hate them. So I am going to refrain from makes suggestions skill wise :yum:

I was tinkering with a Cold Pet build, but it never actually got beyond the conceptual stage. But that was mostly because I just ended up going back to Bleed Briarthorn build.

Cold Beastcaller Briarthorns should definitely work well and would love to see the results if you are willing to test it :blush:

776

Hey Maya, thanks for the input so far. After I managed to complete the game on Ultimate and read your answer, i felt so dumb, not knowing augments and components work together on an item :smiley:

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4VxjALbN
Anyway, this is what i came up with for now. When i played solo, i was really thinking about skipping skeletons, but as I mostly play in a party up to 4 peeps, its actually somehow working… for now [yesterday we ran FG Ultimate for all my mates that are too […] to finish ultimate on their own, and my skeletons got rarely focused thus staying alive veeeery long + it seems at the moment im the carry or rather my xbow skeletons (bad drops for all my meleemates haha)]:stuck_out_tongue: -> Would you suggest if I play solo to swap points then into… what? Passives for Blight Fiend? Or more hardpoints to Hellhound/Raven? Or make a hardhitting Hellhound? :t_rex:

As for the +flat dmg on minions, can i just add them up? Like my minion got 500 base damage and an item yields another 10 chaos damage, its 510? or is it 500(+10) or something? Man, I hate math…:skull:

And how do i calculate damage conversions on top of that or even +flat bleed/poison dmg which is dealt in x seconds, just x dmg/y time as for dps? Should i think about enemies resistances aswell? Oof, sorry Maya so much coming into my mind now >.< :sweat:

Edit: Are there no dualresistance Augments with Aether/X? I only managed to find other double resistances :confused: -> solved

Another edit: I still struggle with Boris, while other Bosses like Rashalga or Nemesis(ses?) are not much of a problem. Is Boris just mad?

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777

So is Pet build like the other build where most of my points should go into Physique ? or is it different ?

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778

First things first, don’t worry too much about raw power as if you like the boner guys and if they are doing fine atm, then there is no need to switch.

But if there ever comes a point where you feel the need to, I’d recommend working towards this: Will O Wisp - Pet Cabalist
There is a Budget setup in that thread too (if scroll down to 2nd post), should you find the need for it.

Regarding Flat damage, the basic calculation is easy enough since it is all straight up addition. But in practice, it does not work like that.

for eg; let us say that your pet deals 100 phy, 100 acid and 100 Vit. Then you add 100 Chaos to it. So 400 dmg in total, yes?

But you won’t have the RR for all of them. Also, you won’t have the means to convert every single bit of damage into your main type.

So, to give another eg; in my Bleed Pet Conjurer, there is no conversion and it is all focused on Bleed. So any non Bleed Flat Pet damage I get is not worth it since I won’t have the RR to make use of it anyway. And hence, it becomes better to focus elsewhere than simply taking all available sources of Flat dmg.

In other words, Flat dmg diminishes in value unless and until you have the RR to support it.

To make it all easier, this is what I’d recommend:

  • To start with, select your main Pet. This is what you will be going all in on, to make it as strong as you can.
  • See its damage type and then try to see if you can convert it all into a single type. Also make note of the dedicated endgame Set for that Pet (like Lost Souls for Skeletons). Some Sets come with their own built in conversions and you need to plan with those in mind.
  • Then see what other Pet you can add in to this, either of the same damage type, or with a type that also gets converted into your main damage type.
  • Then apply the same idea to any available sources of Flat damage. That is, taking only those that either provide your main dmg type or can be converted to it.

For Boris, these are his stats: https://www.grimtools.com/monsterdb/133/skills
I think it might be his DA reduction that might be causing you the trouble.

Correct, all into Physique except as required for equipping weapon/off-hand.

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779

U’r so responsive ! u’r the best ^^ thanks

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780

Hello @Maya thank you for the great guide.

This is my current build https://www.grimtools.com/calc/8NKo49xN

I want to kill Mogdrogen in elite for the mantle, but it seems i can’t bring his health below half (he will lifesteal back to half health). Is there anything that could be optimized (i want to put eldritch mirror int the chest but i don’t have enough ugdenbloom and i am still at the act 4 currently).

I am thinking of switching for the bleeding damage because i have the full set of mogdrogen’s peace, removing wind devil for either conjure primal spirit or wendigo totem, and removing vulnerability for maxing curse of frailty. But i don’t have a suitable relic and crafting a new one would be very expensive. FYI i have a full set of mythical covenant and bysmiel’s influence for consideration. Or am i just stop dreaming about killing mogdrogen because it’s just impossible for now. Or maybe it’s doable with my current build but my piloting sucks.

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781

First of all, welcome to the forums and glad that you like the guide :blush:

I see that you are following my updated devo setup. I would recommend switching back to the old one with Shepherd’s Crook for now: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/L2JkWJ4V

But that aside, Bleeding might be better since Mogdrogen has high lightning Resistance. But I don’t think it would make much of a difference even with drastic changes to the build.

Superbosses are very late game challenges. And getting that lvl 94 Set makes a lot of difference (Bysmiel’s Trinkets here, full Myth Beastcaller’s if going for Bleed). So it is generally recommended to wait until then to try.

Avatar of Mogdrogen for eg, took me the longest to kill, even more than Callagadra due to his resistances + hp regen.

So for the time being, I’d recommend shifting focus into farming up the other stuff instead. Because even if it was doable atm, it will be a very long fight and the drop is kind of niche in its use.

782

Thanks for this, i will definitely look into it at the weekend. And a really really big shoutout to you for the recommendation section, leaving me room to mess around with my build. :pray: :cookie:
Maybe i will just make a twink after killing Lokarr over and over instead of respeccing and stuff.
And maybe after i finally can wreck the crate of entertainment, that is. Mogdrogen surely can wait until i have a better rounded character :sweat: Oh, and Boris finally fell after i could seperate the bosses derp
I even didn’t know there is a Set for Skeletons, maybe someone in my party will find a single piece someday.
On another note i had the question left, if DmgCon on items is global in terms of pets? And we only can convert 100% of a damagetype, right? Not that it’s like if we had 150% conversion of phys to cold for example that 100 phys will be 150 cold then?
So far o/

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783

I have a Lokarr set based endgame Pet Conjurer :yum: OwO - Pet Conjurer

As for damage conversion, note that it needs to specify that it is for pets, like it does on Bysmiel’s Mindweaver, Scorpius Pummeler etc, for eg. Otherwise, it only converts player damage and not Pet damage.

And correct that even if you have 150% conversion, 100 phys will only be 100 cold and not 150 cold. So once you have 100% conversion, any more won’t do any good.

Also, if you wish to know in a bit of detail regarding how I personally go about making new builds, you can refer to Page 84 of my PDF guide linked in the original post of this thread :3

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784

Hi Maya! Have you experimented much with Chaos pet builds before?

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785

Aye. Although, @Crittrain has already made one of the best versions of the current patch: [1.1.8.1] KaosKats V2 Taking pets to the Darkside || EVERYTHING+++ 5.37 Cruci ||

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786

Ooh, ty! :slight_smile:

I’ll check it out!

I’ve just started toying around with something like this (very draft idea with some gaping holes so far) https://www.grimtools.com/calc/eVLRBRPN

It actually looks like a pet/rifle hybrid might be possible based on the weapon damage, too?

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787

That is an interesting concept. Hybrid build will still suffer from lack of options to do both pet and player side as effectively as you could if you had gone just either pet or player. But it would still be interesting :blush:

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788

In case people are wondering how pets are handling the patch, here’s a quick winners and losers based of my tests through Crucible and SR:

Winners:

  1. Witching Hour Cabalist - Witching Hour got a humongous boost thanks to the innate damage bonuses of the pets. Depending on whether mutators are nice to you, you could be able to defeat 3 Crucible runs in one batch of blessings (they weren’t nice to me and ran out on Wave 169 on the 3rd run. Still, the stability is really great).

  2. Hybrid pet builds - I have 4 hybrid pet-player builds that had all run through SR65 with difficulty. With the general pet buffs and SR aggro changes, it’s now super-easy to get good SR runs with hybrid pets. I absolutely love how much these changes buffed the pet skills over using set items.

Losers:

  1. Normal Beastcaller Builds - Conjurers will likely make out fine, but running SR75-76 to get more challenge and loot has become a lot tougher. With a longer down-time on Conjure Primal Spirit, I can definitely feel the pain for my Beastcaller’s Druid and Elementalist. You definitely need to invest in multiple pets in order to stay reasonably viable.

  2. Primal Spirit in general - With a lot of sets reducing their overall pet damage, Primal Spirit doesn’t have the same oopmh that it used to have. In theory, all of the pets would feel the same pain, but the cat feels it worse than others.

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