Pet Build Tips

[Eternal Paladin]

What are some tips for a good pet build? Right now I'm doing a Cabalist with my skeletons maxed out, summon familiar and I plan on going hellhound as well. But I feel as if I gimped myself by doing this and not going for say, Archanist to Elemental Exchange.
What are some things to avoid when looking to make pets do the most of your damage?

[Wafflesaurus Supreme]

No regrets. You can take any class and make it very powerful with some creativity.

Make sure to keep an eye on your Relic, every 10 levels or so, see if there's a better one available for pet classes. Use the search function at the top of the Devotions page. Experiment by reworking your skill points; for example, the skeletons are great for early game, then by mid-game (level 35+) you'll find that they're probably not worth keeping anymore.

[Neit]

Going for Cabalist as a pet class is quite reasonable and some builds should be pretty straightforward. Both classes have pets, both classes have pet support skills and it works quite well.

That being said, rules for pets are similar as for any other build, try to convert as much damage as possible into single type, get resist reduction for said type (as a Cabalist, Curse of Frailty is a good start), don't forget about defenses (even for the pets).

Skeletons are basically just bunch of glass cannons, so I would definitely also pick Hellhound, which serves well enough as a tank, alternatively, Blight Fiend can also handle this role, or even both at once.

[Eternal Paladin]

By damage do you mean bleeding, acid, electric etc?

[Wafflesaurus Supreme]

Choose one or two main damage types that work with your class. Look through the skill trees, and you'll probably find bonuses to certain types of damage. Make those your focus, whether poison, fire, chaos, etc.

[Faust Wither]

get MI item it help alot at leveling proccess. you really dont need deal damage, let the pet take care of it. i usualy search item that reduce cooldown of pet summon, so i will never run out of pets.

https://youtu.be/H_ixsqSg7jY?si=01NvA_ntCiCcHT1_

[Neit]

Originally posted by Eternal Paladin:

By damage do you mean bleeding, acid, electric etc?

Yes, you ideally want to have all of the damage done by your pets converted to a single type, which usually isn't possible, you should try to get as close to that as possible.

On lower levels, this does not matter much, but it gets important as you reach higher levels and/or difficulties. Boosting single type is always easier than boosting 4-5 different types (which is almost impossible).

[Matthew]

While arcanist as pet support has gotten a lot of love with recent items and patches, it is still more difficult to play than two pet masteries put together.

The thing with pets is that quantity is often better than quality. A single briarthorn will never get strong enough to match a mediocre briarthorn, hellhound, and storm birbs.

The benefit of playing 2 pet masteries is you get a lot of pets by default, without relying on items and devotions to try and get more.

In other words, cabalist is fine.

[Eternal Paladin]

Thanks everyone for the input.

[Eternal Paladin]

Originally posted by Neit:

Originally posted by Eternal Paladin:

By damage do you mean bleeding, acid, electric etc?

Yes, you ideally want to have all of the damage done by your pets converted to a single type, which usually isn't possible, you should try to get as close to that as possible.

On lower levels, this does not matter much, but it gets important as you reach higher levels and/or difficulties. Boosting single type is always easier than boosting 4-5 different types (which is almost impossible).

Maybe a dumb question here, but I thought pets only scaled with pet bonus. So, if I want my pets to do say, Cold damage, I need to use my devotion points filling in constellations that give pets that damage type?

[phenir]

Originally posted by Eternal Paladin:

Originally posted by Neit:

Yes, you ideally want to have all of the damage done by your pets converted to a single type, which usually isn't possible, you should try to get as close to that as possible.

On lower levels, this does not matter much, but it gets important as you reach higher levels and/or difficulties. Boosting single type is always easier than boosting 4-5 different types (which is almost impossible).

Maybe a dumb question here, but I thought pets only scaled with pet bonus. So, if I want my pets to do say, Cold damage, I need to use my devotion points filling in constellations that give pets that damage type?

There are items that provide damage conversion for your pets, like bysmiel set (physical/acid/vitality to elemental) or blood orb of cthon (elemental to chaos, acid to vit) or korvak blade[www.grimtools.com] (phys and vit to fire). They work just like stuff that would convert player damage.
That korvak blade is probably the best option for you right now. Then your pets mostly do elemental damage (familiar does lightning, dog does fire and chaos, skeletons do fire) which is easy to shred and naturally leads into bysmiel set at late game. The main point here is getting your pets to do one damage type (elemental, or fire if you drop familiar) so you can easily shred enemy resists, instead of pets doing 5 different damage types (which funnily, curse of frailty does shred 4 of those). With just fire, you can make good use of items that boost pet fire damage, witchblade devotion that shreds fire resist, and any devotion that provides flat physical damage (ishtak, bonds of bysmiel) which gets converted into more fire damage.