Like this?
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Took 221 replies for this to be posted when banana has been asking for stuff like this since day 1. Discussions would’ve been healthier if this came out earlier smh.
Edit: duskdeep actually posted some stuff already. Still these aren’t what’s in the criteria but better than nothing.
Edit2: now idk how much damage is good damage in SR 125. I’m not used to seeing 5 min boss room clears. I don’t even know if that’s boss room or SR125 cause @Skelemental screwed up OBS and still posted it anyway. Like man, if SR 125 is easily doable you just gotta do it again and get a better vid, right?
And that is why you get people arguing that the criteria is only useful to find top SR farming builds at 75-76.
There are others in the thread as well-
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~10 mins boss room coming from a death. So much for safe and has damage, huh. Looking at the kind of kiting done there, it takes just as much skill as most rotation casters, if not more since there’s screen clutter with that amount of pets. So not easy either. Even without looking at the criteria for this list, this only proves that the build can do SR125 with enough effort. Nothing else.
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I don’t think anyone argued that SR 125 can be done with zero risk of death.
Whether pet builds take as much skill as rotation casters or not would come down to the pilot and how experienced they are at pets/casters. Kiting needs to be done regardless on anything that is not melee facetank or Mageslayer permafreeze at such high shards. Hence it can be argued that pets are easier if you have to kite since they can hold aggro while you merely reposition.
But if the question was regarding damage then there is more than enough evidence to safely say that deep SR pet builds do have plenty and that the claims saying otherwise are simply exaggerated.
If the top builders and pilots of the community however feel that pets are lacking in all departments such as damage, being easy to play, tankiness & gear friendliness then perhaps pets could be unanimously buffed across the board in the upcoming patch or the one after. That should make everyone happy.
tbh it feels like the majority of people are already happy, huh
Very hard to compare builds made for balance of speed and tankiness to SR crawlers, obviously, but a few words on the linked build.
- In the presented variant it is out of contention as it uses multiple items that are impossible to farm and would “score” 0 in gear access department. And i respectfully doubt you would get “95%” of this performance with a realistic build because the greens grant a lot of specific, best +skills bonuses.
- It is by no means an “AFK build”. There is a number of active skills. And even in the fight against Ravager the build has to move around. While most of top20 facetank it with very easy gameplay or outright holding left click.
- Presented videos cannot serve as any indication of pet builds having “plenty” of dmg. 3:47 for Ravager kill is 3x lower solo dps than top20 builds have on average. And most of them have vastly superior AoE dmg as well.
Unfortunately, the only thing the listed videos tell us, we already know: you can tune some pet builds for deep SR gameplay.
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No, it does not.
None of the builds in the presented list are budget and would require farming regardless with drops being random. Hence the presented variant is just as realistic as any of the ones on the list.
No one to my knowledge goes for that afk playstyle with pets other than Maya. x1 asked for videos which Maya does not make(to my knowledge).
Skelemental’s Pet Conjurer also has as many active skills as the Spellscourge Battlemage listed in the op.
Facetanking Ravager with pets while using consumables for health regen is an incredibly easy feat. But whether builders go for that or not is upto them.
How many of the top20 do SR125 while also maintaining 3x faster Ravager kill and vastly superior AoE?
Please link video proof as well.
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That’s a straw man argument. You’ve made a statement about “plenty” of dmg SR125 pet builds have. 4 mins Ravager is not “plenty” by any stretch of imagination. You’ve made a false statement, don’t try, in return, make me prove smth i didn’t state.
This can only be said by someone who 1) either doesn’t play the game and has zero understanding of drops it has 2) or purposely wants to derail the topic and discredit the work by people listed in the OP. In any of two cases, i can’t procede with this conversation.
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4mins Ravager is plenty by every stretch of imagination and it is not a straw man.
I am asking why you would think a faster kill time on Ravager by a couple of builds that would get absolutely demolished in deeper shards is worthy of boast or why you would expect a build tanky enough to do SR 120+ to be just as fast as the ones tuned for 75-76.
That’s a false dilemma fallacy.
As long as the items used can realistically be obtained ingame, calling them unrealistic is objectively false.
Randomness and luck involved also applies to the ones listed in the op unless the argument here is that those legendaries can be target farmed and that the rares with the exact same affixes can be obtained with zero luck involved.
That’s enough…please redirect future posts to discussing builds in this thread or do yourself a favor and don’t post at all.
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Is it possible to ask to share details of the builds you mention?
can I ask why spellbinder cannot make the top 20? cause in the first few patches I see it very high on top.
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Things change, and the race is tight to begin with. As @banana_peel puts it:
Also, if you go by grimsheet, a class with more builds will score more points, that doesn’t mean the individual builds are at the very top.
The only pet build deserving to be in the top 20.
Archon, Level 100 (GD 1.1.9.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
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lol good one
Now this is a great post. I have made it to about 37 on my char and just randomly placing points as I have no idea what do. Maybe I can start over with one of these builds and get more enthused about playing more.
I recommend these sources:
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I’ve dived a little into pets and played several builds:
Lost Souls vitality and chaos Cabalists, Diviner Cabalist, Beastcaller lightning Conjurer, Ghol acid Conjurer
Here is a summary that can also be considered as sort of pets feedback from a non-pet player:
- Summoner is an incredibly weak target. No means to leech, no buff stats on pet gear at all. You are basically forced into either huge regen (that still won’t save you) or Dryad
- Ishtak is basically forced for having Taunt because Generate Additional Threat commonly found on pets… well… doesn’t work. Any active skill from player pulls aggro to the player. Despite doing little to no dmg, which honestly seems like design oversight: why wouldn’t enemies attack mor dangerous targets? And if suddenly they have 200 IQ to attack the summoner, why does pet gear not offer more defensive stats and skills?
- Forced to go Ishtak you miss out on a lot of pet devotions, the majority of setups can’t afford the best dmg boost - Mogdrogen. Pet map with Ishtak and Rattosh (vitality is the most common dmg type for pets) looks pretty horrible
- Solo dmg is actually pretty good on a lot of opmitized setups. But AoE is either lacking or doesn’t exist at all. A lot of custom pets have simple melee range slap and that’s it
- The problem this game has with hitbox collision skyrockets with the amount of pets. Ravager fight on a build with 10 sec dummy kill time can take way over 3 mins because the boss constantly bounces between your pets and they miss a lot
- I have found nothing lazy or safe about the gameplay of dmg focused pet builds. A lot of buttons to press, A LOT of stuff to track, all the while constantly repositioning
In conclusion. I wish i could recommend a pet build to someone new/casual who wants a “very strong build” without any specifics by i cannot. The playstyle needs heavy defensive buffs and buffs to AoE. Even the fastest dmg focused pet builds are far behind the fastest farmers, with hard gameplay and very unforgiving. Defensive focused builds also require some caution because the summoners are inherently weak and have no means for burst regain of health. The speed plummets to the ground, and all that is left is an achievement of crawling deep into SR. Which honestly you can do with a decent variety of characters if you stack enough hp, phys res and leech.
If there is a room for new adjustment in the current playtest, i’d suggest to spray pet gear with defensive buffs for the player like it’s Christmas. Hardly anything will be too much.
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At the very least, it looked like the Vitality Skeleton Lost Souls Cabalist accomplished fairly well in Crucible; that 200% pet attack speed goes a long way in clearing things quickly. Even then, all those pets look like they don’t compare to whacking a big stick and hitting 9 targets with a 200K AoE auto-attack.
It’s hard to even recommend buffs for pet builds because they are intrinsically tied to 1) sets that are specifically tailored to patch pet skills’ weaknesses, and 2) the Mogdrogen devotion route. Any skill modifiers that take away from one of those 2 things have to be extremely strong to make up for taking away one of those 2 ties, and for the most part, they fail in doing so.
Here’s what happens when you try to make a custom pet build that doesn’t use a set:
You’d think that a quasi-permanent Primal Spirit, 3 Reap Spirit Wraiths, and maximum uptime on big temporary buffs like Call of the Grave would make this build somewhat useful, right? No, instead I get an 8+ minute Crucible time and that’s with micromanaging everything as tightly as possible. Looking under the hood, the build is clearly missing in pet total speed and offensive ability, and the Wraiths and Primal Spirit barely add anything because all they have is the basic melee slap, and it’s difficult to steer the pets toward AoE since they’re so busy bouncing around trying to hit their primary target.
Basically, the non-set pet gear needs massive speed boosts or the non-primary pet skills like Primal Spirit and Reap Spirit need a big buff to their AoE in order for custom non-set pet builds to compete with set staples like Lost Souls and Beastcaller’s. Conjure Primal Spirit is especially weak due to the short duration, long downtime, and lack of discernable AoE, and can especially use a buff to make maximizing it worth it over simply stacking pet stats.
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