Familiar Discussion

[Prometheus]

So lets share our thoughts on familiars. I haven't tried them all yet or gotten them all to high level so my opinions are based on what I've seen. Maybe one of the ones I've written off as bad are strong once they cross a level threshold.

Life: My favorite so far. Accuracy starts out weak but it keeps scaling up and ends up being solid damage. Most notably can cast a heal on us but I think it can't do it until level 50. My first Ritualist win can be attributed to the heal. It pulled through for me.

Earth: My 2nd favorite. Not top DPS but can survive enemies that use wide attacks. Will cast familiar stoneskin on itself to save you a little effort there.

Poison: Great familiar. Uses a weakening effect that I haven't seen happen in other ways. Decent attacker on top of that.

Water: Middling stats. Uses water spells including Absolute. Hitting Absolute is useful and saves you having to spend the mana and wizards on it. If you are doing a Lightning autocrit build it overwrites wet with chill a lot.

Fire: Squish caster. Can do fireball, sear and Infernal Blaze from what I've seen. Better than the objectively bad familiars but every wide attack ever splats it.

Lightning: Another squish caster. Probably higher dps than Fire and will benefit from wet, which is on a 1.88 cooldown spell that is very cheap. Means not using Sear or Absolute though.

Death: Uses Blood Attack a lot making it squishy as it never seems to mitigate the blood attack at all. Decent damage dealer. Can use Soul Collapse with a pretty high health threshold. There are a lot of timings where my DPS hasn't caught up to the autokill threshold and this guy saves a good bit of time. Overall I don't rate this familiar as high because of the blood attacks.

Mind: Bad but not useless. Spams True Strike so DPS is reliable just not as high as others. Not tanky but not as hard squish as fire or death. Maybe gets more spells at higher level but above 50 didn't even pick up Psychic Slam.

Time: Worst familiar so far. Terrible stats all around. Only spell I've seen it cast is Time Contraction. I am not going to rely on a familiar to maintain that ever. Too important.

[archmag]

Death: Uses Blood Attack a lot making it squishy as it never seems to mitigate the blood attack at all. Decent damage dealer. Can use Soul Collapse with a pretty high health threshold. There are a lot of timings where my DPS hasn't caught up to the autokill threshold and this guy saves a good bit of time. Overall I don't rate this familiar as high because of the blood attacks.

Yeah, it's barely mitigated by its own defense growth but you can try to improve familiar's defense.

When I cast my Blood attack which should damage me for 500, I only get damaged by 235 at 478 defense (which seems correct (500-478/2)*0.9=234.9). 0.9 is from Clever Pumpkin damage reduction. So I am pretty sure I understand how damage is calculated for this spell and can try to calculate it backwards.

When my level 70 Skullmass attacks with it, it gets damaged by 1668 with 804 defense (no bonuses to defense) or 1635 with 871 defense (+familiar stone skin), 1503 at 1135 (+ring of coccooned familiar +2), 1272 at 1596 (+7x earth+life synchro board combo = +41% familiar defense). So self-damage for this familiar at level 70 is 2070 (which is surprisingly equal to its attack). Basically you need 2k defense to reduce it to 1000, but familiar doesn't get as much defense without a good Ring of Coccooned Familiar or boosted Familiar Stoneskin or Earth-Life Synchro Board combo or all of those. It's hard to make it survivable against bosses that use wide attacks and you need to sacrifice 1 accessory slot and 6 slots on combo board but it seems useful against normal enemies even without boosting it that much.

Breeder class has another +24% to familiar defense which looks like it may help but it also increases attack so I guess it will get damaged more instead.

[Maticolotto]

Hi! Just want to add a tiny note that the Time Familiar's Time Contraction stacks with the player's.

[Prometheus]

Good to know about Time Familiar. That gives it a role as best when leaving game idle as it will speed up research a bit. Familiars that actually contribute to the fight probably speed up looting at a similar level to Time's contraction though.

Doing a Space/Air run now.

Space: Spends a lot of of its turns doing a channel of a random element. Not useful at all. Stats are decent but nothing big stands out. Does use the Matter attack spells as well. I would rate it in the medium value familiars if it didn't waste so much time channeling elements. With the wasted time its garbage tier.

Air: Love this guy. Does air blasts and twisters mixed in with attacks. My level 60 one right now has .39 attack delay with 696 attack (I think this includes the str buff from fire). Self buffs haste. 418 dodge means it doesn't automatically die to wide attacks though its health and defense are predictably low. Solid and reliable familiar. Big recommend. Probably 2nd or 3rd in my personal ranking.

[P51mus]

I wish I knew what skills they had and what they actually do.

The mind one has what I think is a low cooldown version of mind leech (it does something very often that fills up my mana). This can be useful mid game, but the run I was using it I also ran into the elf forest version. And well, having my mana refill when barely having the stats to beat the elf boss is not a good time.

[archmag]

Originally posted by P51mus:

I wish I knew what skills they had and what they actually do.

Yeah, it would be nice to have a section in Compendium listing all familiars that you summon in all your runs and showing their skills, maybe with relation to level. So initially it displays ??? and after reaching certain familiar levels it displays the name of the skills. Or maybe just display their stats at fixed level so they can be compared and all their skills.

[Serpentarius]

Holy familiar is.... Adorable? but.... not that great on the Offenseive side, Best tank I have found though. First, it's ridiculously fast, on par with if not FASTER than the Air familiar, Unfortunately, that speed comes at the cost of attack, which is low, so low it literally CANNOT hurt the 3 last bosses even WITH Familiar strength. So you need to grab the attack accessory for it. It has an absolutely absurd amounf of HP though, which gets even sillier if you use the HP ring on it. Decent defense and dodge too too.

[P51mus]

For some reason the holy familiar item isn't showing up for me even though I have it as one of my primaries.

[HumbleImp]

it comes at a later level than the other familiars.

[archmag]

It needs Holy Level 62.

[Serpentarius]

Originally posted by archmag:

It needs Holy Level 62.

And a level 60 Pet.