Honorable mentions are the builds that received any score from anyone, not necessarily “the next top 15 builds”. If we were making the lists with C-tiers as well, we would have a bigger range of “honorable mentions” and some of them would definitely have scores higher than some of the lower scored honorable mentions. There are very strong builds that didn’t make the list, Mageslayer Breaker was one of them. I will list them some other time.
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I’d love to see that, personally.
I guess you have ratings for them as well ? Just so we have a point of comparison.
Last but not least, it would be interesting to know if some of those builds didn’t quite make the list, but were particularly good in one specific area, like SR, crucible speed or ease of play, for example.
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There were few builds, which didn’t score any points but are pretty good. I kinda regret not giving Ultos Archon any points, cause the build isn’t even in honorable mentions and it’s really cool build to play!
About balance, I am disappointing at the performance of 5 pieces sets boosting single class with +2 skills.
Ultos is perhaps the best of the bunch but take look at the others. Markovian Warlord is inferior to custom Blitz. Virtue works better with MI shield and still doesn’t make the cut. Few Runebinders were tested and they weren’t top tier. Deathmarked fall of favor. Ulzuin is beyond bad, worse than the carrot set! Actually Demo spells are underwhelming, set is focused on Canister (overnerfed) and Grenado. Don’t want to comment even Stun Jacks.
About builds being tested and not making the cut, despite having quality in some of areas. I have few on top of my mind. Lee’s Invoker PRM Mage Hunter isn’t on the list, same as my Lightning AAR Mage Hunter. Cold DW Sabo is decent build for DW melee (how the mighty archetype has fallen) but doesn’t made the cut. Also Banana’s Stronghold Purifier, Afanasenkov’s Veilkeeper, Druid, DW pierce Cadence BM, S&B Bleeding Trickster (probably Lee’s), Grey’s Wildblood Archon was quite insane. Then there are multiple physical builds like Targo WL or physical shield RF and few ranged builds. Goredrinker should still be a good option any player.
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No pet builds in top 20… It is time to nerf non-pet builds
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do we really need to bring up this discussion for the 20th time?..
I would rather like to see them buffed instead of nerfing all the other builds tbh. 
But as afan just said, scroll up a bit… pet’s have always been discussed a ton.
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Well, I guess nobody would have something against a thread called “Top 10 Softcore pet builds in Grim Dawn (An Opinion)” …
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An even better thread than just “best pet builds” would be one with an objectively interesting broader focus that happens to be one of pet build’s strong suits : ease of play
Let’s face it: not everyone has good piloting skills, and not everyone will get good results from all the builds in this thread.
A thread where builds are evaluated by how EASY they are to take through SR75-76 without dying, regardless of time, would probably see a lot of pet builds shine.
I know this is a metric that has been evaluated here as well, but it wasn’t the main focus, and I know there are people who would be interested in that.
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I tried to be ironic. Pet builds get lots of nerfs. I dont want any build to be nerfed. Everyone plays the way they want.
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no,
did you not see the list?
you’re now only allowed to play one of these 20 builds in Grim Dawn, all other builds are henceforth banned
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Most of builds are as easy to pilot as you want to make them. It’s all about passive defence layers and stat cushion.
Same applies to pet builds: you can tune them for dmg, you can tune them for sustain. But even if a pet build is absolutely tuned into defence as to let you stay away from the fight and “do nothing” - more often than not you still have a full bar of skills to press for your pets.
That raises the question: is that really easier to play than a build which needs holding a single button and pointing it to the enemy? If you look past a pet peeve of being touched by enemies, i don’t really see where this ease objectively comes from. It’s true that the closest to afk you can get is with a pet build. But those “almost afk” renditions have no dmg whatsoever and would only make their separate category of builds detached from any other “tops”.
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Some links to videos and posts in the descriptions are added.
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I’ll answer that with my particular experience as an example, but I’m sure this applies to a lot more people. I admit that I’m not a great pilot, and I hope that the example still makes sense to someone who can run crucible in his sleep…
When things get chaotic on screen, lots of enemies, lots of things with stars next to their name and such, I tends to lose sight of where my character is, and what I SHOULD be doing (especially if I see my health bar go down and up very fast) … so I kinda just panic and mash the keyboard, hoping to activate circuit-breakers, defensive layers and pharma to just make the problem “go away” … and hopefully I’ll have survived those 2-4 seconds of confusion and be able to rationally go back to controlling my character. Oftentime, that won’t be enough because things are on cooldown or were not enough…
That kinda never happens with pets… There are no buttons to smash… So I’m able to concentrate on just kiting, because I know my firepower is out there doing their thing without my input.
Everything you had to do to kill what’s around you, you’ve already done… you just have to “trust the process” so to speak.
That also sort of applies to PSP builds, assuming you don’t have to resummon them every 18 seconds…
In that sense, not even all pet builds would make it on such a list… skeleton builds that need to protect them from AoE and resummon them regularly, or transmuted Blight fiend builds, for example, will need special care that are outside of just “summon your army and let it get to work”
I hope that makes sense…
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Builds sensitive to timed presses are the hardest to pilot. For almost everyone. Diviner didn’t make it into top20 primarily because it’s so hard to play.
A good number of builds in the top20 list are not that. Have you ever played an optimized Avenger? You literally hold left click. Same for a few gunners. No circuit-breakers, no tracking your stats and enemies on the screen (except the arcane ones). Hold left click.
And if you happen to panic with one button builds designed for facetanking - that’s would be an individual psychological factor and can’t be accounted for in any rankings.
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Yeah, that’s fair enough. (I did play avenger, though that would be silly to say it was anything close to optimized 
)
Which means that in a hypothetical “easiest to play” build list, avenger would also be one of the top dogs. (Also the EoR Warlord, for sure) along with beastcaller and such. Ease of play is one of pets’ strong suits, not that its EXCLUSIVE to pet builds.
I see the builds at the top here, and at least half of them are pretty straightforward. I’m basically playing devil’s advocate here, trying to find a reasonable use case where pet build’s strong points would push them somewhere near the top…
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At this level of performance it’s all about particular builds that have all the right synergies and, let’s not beat around the bush, escaped the major individual nerfs to push them to the top20.
There is nothing inherently inferior about pet builds that pushes them out of contention. If anything, they were likely candidates because in the end we did kinda favor safety over dmg in our rankings. It’s just all about the individual builds and the state of the game.
There was a time when at least one pet build was one of the best in the game.
There also was a time when top10 would have 5 if not more pierce builds.
And not longer than a patch ago Physical S&B Warlord/Shieldbreaker was one of the best if not the best build in the game.
When balance is as tight (for a single player game) as in GD, it is extremely hard to recover from major nerfs.
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Not true. You can get by with very little active skills.
Could do that with pets too- Mnemosyne - Pet Conjurer, Petwalker - Walking Simulator Budget Pet Conjurer by Maya
Depends on how one calculates damage.
If said builds have enough to kill superbosses and complete SR boss rooms in deeper shards, they have enough damage.
Their DPS might be pitiful against the Training Dummy. But since those builds are tailored towards getting away with as low as a dps as possible it would make sense.
Using one’s brain
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Perhaps should use ingame data instead then.
Yeah something like vids of pet builds actually doing damage while being safe at the same time.