Underused pet items

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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This list does not include MI’s or epics.

Mythical Black Scourge - Used to have good stats. Got hit with a double nerf in terms of stats and the damage scaling of non-mastery pets. Will be better in 1.2.1.6 thanks to occultist getting chaos RR, but Salazar’s blade is still just better. I personally like the approach of leaning into the unique aspects of items when rebalancing them. In this case it would be the pets given by the item.

Mythical Spark of Ultos - Can you even call this a pet item? Zero bonuses to any relevant skills. Frees up a ring slot if you don’t want to run 2 Glyphs of Kelphat’Zoth i guess.

Gate to Many Worlds - Offhand is a tightly contested slot and this one simply doesn’t offer enough. Needs something really crazy if you want to enable arcanist as a pet class. Cool concept though.

Mythical Blood Orb of Ch’thon - Used to be a way to get ele to chaos conversion before fiendgaze tome changes. Currently the only way to get 100% acid to vit conversion, but there aren’t good enough use cases for this. Maybe increase the health loss and buff the stats to lean into this unique mechanic more. Still one of the cooler items conceptually.

Mythical Crown of the Winter King - Something something FoA… Cold pets are a bit of a meme currently. Hybrid builds just aren’t a thing sadly.

Mythical Bane of the Winter King - Has partial conversion which can only be completed by Crown of the Winter King. But wait, the crown gives full conversion so the sword isn’t even needed. Has tons of flat damage, but again, cold pets are underwhelming and two-handers are hard to justify for pets.

Mythical Guardian of Death’s Gates - (This is mostly for death knight) Playing a single RR mastery for a vit build is painful. As much as I want to make a viable skeleton death knight, ritualist always ends up being better in almost every way possible. I don’t know if soldier skills have the capability to add anything interesting for pets aside from juicing up Field command.

Mythical Witching Hour - Suffers most from being a two-hander. No fiendgaze tome, which is a huge dps loss for chaos builds. Almost requires you to use 2 voidwhisper bands to maximize phys to chaos conversion uptime, but you will probably use them regardless. Also, maybe the proc should be changed back to a button press, since it is such a massive part of the item and the uptime is only 50%. You sometimes end up having the proc on cooldown when you need it the most.

Mythical Plaguebearer of Dreeg - Can achieve 100% vit to acid conversion with ghol’s mark. But then you need to enable dual-wielding to get 100% phys to acid. Gets indirectly nerfed in 1.2.1.6 with the addition of acid RR to necro. I think the pet bonuses could be redesigned to enable acid skeletons.

Claw of Hagaraz - Good stats, but thats it. Ends up being an item you use when there is nothing better. The call of the grave mod doesn’t even work on pets, maybe it should be changed to duration or flat cdr (same thing for Guardian of Death’s gates).

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What is the metric for “viable” here? DK skeletons with Guardian performs pretty well up to SR40, it’s really only subpar vs celestials due to their massive vitality resistance numbers. While I’m in agreement that the single RR mastery issue could use work (and not just for pet builds), there is definitely something to be said for build variety dictating different purposes for different builds. Not every build needs to be able to faceroll all content when optimized.

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It’s not really the case of “viability” in terms of objective performance. It’s more to do with having a meaningful choice between a death knight, ritualist or cabalist. Death knight doesn’t give you any significant reason to play the class other than just doing it for fun.

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If I remember correctly, the team have plans in FoA with revisiting these two items and making it a set or putting FoA related affixes.

Put 100% conversion of physical and elemental to chaos and I think that solves one of the main issues.

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Well if a meaningful choice is what you see lacking here, I have to disagree. DK sacrifices a substantial amount of RR in exchange for large boosts to armor and speed/vitality damage mods on Field Command. The DK build doesn’t need to take the Mogdrogen devotion since it gets such a substantial boost to speed already, which can make for a much different devotion path. With Ishtak/Field Command flat OA boosts + gear, it is easy for skeletons/wraiths to reliably t3+ crit, and going the blue route with devotion allows you to take Dying God which is a much stronger damage devo than Mogdrogen if speed isn’t an issue. I think the tradeoff basically boils down to generally faster, simpler, and more stable SR clearing, and slower kills vs bosses with 90+ vitality resistance when compared to Ritualist. Seems meaningful enough to me.

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Against a zero resist mob devouring swarm is about a 44% dps multiplier. This is still more than what you get from the attack speed boost from field command. Ritualist also gets the same OA, DA and %dmg as DK and actually gets twice as much flat damage from Mogdrogen’s pact. Then there is also health, health regen, and resists for pets. So if your idea of a meaningful difference is having about 20% faster attack rate while having less dps and quality of life then I don’t know what to tell you.

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The 30 flat RR on Guardian offsets that advantage substantially, and the flat damage is a wash due to Ishtak, which has near 100% uptime if you build for it. Ooh, this could be fun. Why don’t you GDStash your optimal Rit skeleton build and report back with your best SR30-31 time/5 runs? I’ll do the same with my DK build. I think it works out a lot differently than you’re postulating in practice, but I’m open to being proven wrong!

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I think you’re missing the point. You keep saying it performs better, but is that based on? The numbers are what they are. DK only has a slight attack rate advantage, but that else does it offer? Also saying the flat damage from shaman is a wash is just wrong. Shaman gets you around 100-170 flat while Ishtak gives you 40…

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Ah, you said double so I assumed it was in the 80-90 range. I don’t have this stuff pulled up in front of me right now. If you’re not open to a 30/31-off then I’ll do some napkin math and report back with my findings when I get home. I can’t believe I’m missing the point! Again! I need help!

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Some of my comments regarding these items

The scepter used to be my go to for beastcaller conjurer back when +pet skill is still have fewer points than now. Nowadays the item is still a nice stat stick for leveling Shaman, and being good for leveling since it is a lvl 84 items that is easier to drop during leveling, but lose it place as final item to choose due to it’s lacking modifier or pet conversion.

Same case with Black Scourge, offhand MI mod is so powerful that this item is used for stat stick.

One of the easiest weapon to get for SSF pet, similar to Black Scourge but for leveling Necro or Occultist and more available due to being a faction item.

For Warlock the concept seems to make IEE, overload, and storm spirit reach 22/12 level to stack big flat elemental damage and chance for elemental dot, especially since currently it’s not that hard to reach +2000% damage with pets. Sadly the item is still easily replaceable for the hellhound MI if the goal is for elemental hellhound.

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*someone. Hello.

Cold warlock is not a top-tier pet build, but definitely the good-tier for a single-pet mastery+single-rr class.The only real threat is Cally cause 80% of the time all pets are dead.

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Nice job. Have you tried it with with a different helmet? I think even with the crown hellhound does mostly lightning damage.

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Doggo is just a tank+DoT source here. It’s impossible to convert all doggo’s dmg to cold with Bysmiel’s set equipped.

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So rather than “napkin math”, I decided to go ahead and build a mostly skeleton-focused Ritualist to test my “faster, simpler, and more stable in SR30-31” hypothesis. I already had a DK build I was happy with, but I’ve made a few edits in the interest of SR-targeted optimizations. It can be argued that it would be optimal to go for the Mogdrogen (and optionally Rattosh as well) devotion path and swap certain pieces of gear out on the Rit build, but I wanted to minimize variance between the builds in order to provide a clearer picture of what each class has to offer when equipped with similar setups. The variables that differ (aside from skill point allocation, duh) are 1 ring, 4 components, and a few augments.

DK Grimtools: Death Knight, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
Rit Grimtools: Ritualist, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

I have done *5 timed SR30-31 runs with each. Will make an edit once I’ve completed a few more in order to provide updated results. Each of these runs was “naked”, meaning no potions or buff stones were used.

DK: 6:21, 6:59, 7:32, 5:47, 7:15
Rit: 6:45, 6:46, 6:57, 6:55, 6:53

The worst DK run was while I was fairly inebriated, and I got a couple of bad stages on that one as well - a bigger sample size will provide better info than what I have right now, and I anticipate faster times as I get more comfortable with both builds. So far the times don’t necessarily support DK being considerably “faster”, and the Rit build looks more consistent. I could see both of these builds posting times in the ~5 minute range with the right level progression and good piloting. A few anecdotal observations: DK is substantially more stable and more capable of multi pulling bosses, mostly due to obvious factors: more HP, better armor, better DA, and access to War Cry + Menhir’s Will. Skeletons seem to have a shorter “leash” than other permanent pets, making staying power somewhat more important than it might be on other pet builds. This could be mitigated somewhat if the Rit build sacrificed some skill points currently allocated to damage in favor of Pact’s modifiers and/or found another way to shoehorn in some more armor and DA. Rit’s time to kill bosses can be noticeably faster (as expected), but this build can struggle if too many packs are pulled at once, and warrants a greater degree of caution when facetanking.

In terms of damage-related differences between these specific setups (I may be missing a thing or two, feel free to correct), Ritualist has an advantage of 44-64 flat damage, 33% additional RR, converts 100% of pet elemental damage to vitality (as opposed to 60% on the DK build), and has a very strong additional pet. DK has the Field Command boosts (18% attack/cast speed, 18% total speed, 220% vitality/decay damage - flat was subtracted from Rit’s total flat), which amount to a comparable but admittedly weaker boost to total damage (somewhere in the neighborhood of 20.5%), and more skill points to throw at Blight Fiend. War Cry can also deal substantial damage to large packs of white mobs, but this advantage is difficult to quantify.

I think the item is fine as-is in terms of endgame performance on Death Knight builds. DK skelemancer offers a great SR and campaign experience with fairly competitive 30-31 times. As I said previously (in not so many words), not every build needs to math out the same way and be able to take down celestials in record time. If anything, I would prefer to see vitality resistance on celestials reworked so that it’s not balanced around Swarm in particular (which would probably necessitate a Swarm nerf), as currently seems to be the case.

Now, to get to the real point: I don’t see the purpose of complaining about balance if you’re unwilling to build and test an item or class combination in order to gauge the pros and cons in actual gameplay. Allowing theorycrafting on paper to dictate what you will or will not engage with in-game is a personal decision, and frankly it seems pretty silly to base criticism on that if you’re looking to provide meaningful feedback to the developers. But that’s just my opinion.

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Death’s gate has been shown to be faster/stronger “as usual” on regular pet builds over hybrid builds, it’s also why it got nerfed last, because it was just too strong for regular pet builds, and it’s been such a consensus by the pet testers that DK just wasn’t even close by comparison, this not based on paper math but them trying testing and posting Death Knights at the time.
Last round of feedback, in attempt to get it buffed, Zantai outright questioned what it needed buffs for when it was clearly so strong, until realizing “oh, you’re using it on a Death Knight - well yea that’s always going to be behind”(paraphrasing since i didn’t snap the direct quote)

So, why do you not notice that much of a difference, if it’s basically “settled” balancing that ritualist/cabalist would be stronger with it than death knight? - well it might come down to overall build and or playstyle
Since GS? was straight up responsible for the Death’s Gates nerf on necro side, maybe he can add more on the regular pet build v “hybrid” pet DK build performance/strenght on it

on topic, i kinda puzzled at the note withcing hour is underused, when it’s used in 2 very strong “recent” post builds :thinking: [1.2.1.2] Witching Hour's undead army Cabalist! [1.1.9.7] The Pet Candulas, Corruptor of Souls Cabalists Crucible 4:20

rest of the items/notes seems relatively on point from my casual experience and browsing

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I think Death’s Gate can turn back to Nec +2 now.
I know it was overwhelming in 1.2.1 PTR for several weeks, but pets got continuously and overall nerfed in next 2-3 PTR patches. At its strongest moment, Death’s Gate gave Field Command 120 global vitality damage, and its pet bonus was higher. Then, all the exceeded stats and modifiers were later removed.
Now, Death’s Gate is not competitive for Ritualist or Cabalist, and pet DK is always meme.

See item description text of Death’s Gate

Rumored to have once been wielded by Uroboruuk himself, this weapon’s edge traps souls with the slightest touch.

“wielded by Uroboruuk himself”, but not have “+2 to all Nec skills”. :rofl: :rofl:

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wait was that during ptr too? because according to patch changes that seems like it’s never been a live thing :thinking:

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the 1.1.9.7 build is undoubtedly outdated. As for the other one, it’s hard to say how how much of its power can be attributed to witching hour rather than other chaos pet items such as fiendmaster, bysmiel’s domination, voidwhisper band. Something like cabalist performs better at the moment. I kinda wanted to leave the item off the list since fiendgaze tome get devalued next patch.

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Yes, during PTR. In my impression, pets went through a crazy month, like ravager under 20 seconds, SR 9091 about 5 minutes. All pet items were formidable. Z was on vacation at that time, so it last for several weeks. Many changes were canceled or reduced after Z came back.

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Guilty. This not the best kill + some lucky sub 50 sec Cally. And then I explained that the nerf was partly ok :grin:

The reason why 2h vit DK sucks is that you just can’t get enough dmg no matter what you’re doing. -1 comp, -pet stats from affixes, no %cdr, no flats, no -%rr, no healing, not enough skill point to make the green fat guy a true tank, etc, etc, etc. Yes, you can make a tanky regen-based build with almost 0 dmg, but why? Cabalist/ritualist just do it better in any cases, even after the wep nerf.

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