Soothsayer Build Guide "I have minions for that" Achievement

Soothsayer Build Guide "I have minions for that" Achievement

Introduction

Luna, the natural necromancer
Mastery: Soothsayer (Nature/Spirit)
Build: Pet pure caster

The 'I have minions for that' steam achievement requires one to complete Titan Quest normal (Act 4 without Ragnarok, Act 5 with Ragnarok) with a personal kill count of less than 100.



Completing this achievement requires one to get their kills via 'minions' or 'pets' instead of personally killing with skills or weapons. These pets can be either permanent spawns (ex: core dweller, wolves, wisp, liche king, nightmare) or time limited spawns (outsider, ancestral horn, etc.). Rogue traps also count as pets.

Soothsayer combines the nature support tree with the spirit caster tree. The class offers a number of good pets, buffs and debuffs. Caster fits best for soothsayer in my opinion; the mastery bonuses are best for them and you won't have a good LMB for archer/melee. If you prefer melee and want to play a pet build then Champion (Warfare/Nature) is a good build for you but isn't as good a 'pure pet' build as required for the achievement.

Advantages of a soothsayer pure pet build:

• Not very gear dependent; you can get away with terrible resists if you don't get hit nor do you require anything exotic or specific gear
  
• Fairly easy to play
  
• Can farm certain difficult bosses fairly easily
  
• Large health pool
  
• Lots of pets

Disadvantages of a soothsayer pure pet build:

• You're wearing caster gear so even with the health pool you're still kind of squishy
  
• Reactionary play style; you're often just standing there casting heals every now and then, it can be a little dull sometimes and the pets sometimes can't hold aggro
  
• You're entirely dependent on your pets for damage so bosses that can do big damage to multi-targets can challenging

For the achievement you want a build that immediately gives you access to a pet and a way to support it. As such, you need...

Nature Mastery

With nature mastery you'll get a heal and a wolf on your first level up. This will give you a pet that can kill things for you and keep your enemies from attacking you. The heal will allow you to top up your pets between fights and keep them alive during major fights.

Call of the Wild


The main workhorse of the build. Summon limit increased to two at 7/16 and three at 18/16.
Your wolves will be your main tanks, dish out physical damage and keep aggro off you. They can be buffed with a few synergies skills. Maul will add some more damage but other skills take priority. Survival Instinct is useful for making a wounded wolf extra tanky preventing them from getting burned down too fast. Strength of the Pack will buff nearby allies damage and give a nice speed buff.

Regrowth


As a pure pet build you'll be primarily using regrowth to keep your pets alive. Put further points into regrowth when you find your heals can't keep pace anymore. Accelerated growth is worth investing at least a few points into. The faster regrowth cools down, the more you can spam it. This can be very helpful when you're fighting a boss that can damage multiple of your wolves at once and you need to spread around a few heals. With so many pets out, Dissemination can help spread around some heals. It's not as important as other skills so one point backed by +skill items is usually fine.

Heart of Oak


Gives a speed buff on the first point, maxxed out it gives a huge boost to health for you and your pets. It doesn't matter as much for the pets as their health pools get huge buffs elsewhere but this can help give you an enormous health pool. Tranquility of Water will give a chance to get discount energy cost, Permanence of Stone will give you and your pets elemental buffs. Not as important as other skills, drop a single point into them and buff with +skill items.

Sylvan Nymph


Nymph is the second pet in the nature tree. Ranged attacker with bow. Drop points into the base skill and the Nature's Wrath synergy skill.

Refresh


Refresh cuts cooldowns. Worth dropping considerable points into the skill so that you can cut Outsider's long cooldown and cast two wolves in quick sequence. Shorter cooldown on Outsider means you can use him more often in normal fights rather than trying to save the cooldown for just bosses. In tough boss fights where two wolves die quickly, you can wolf, refresh, wolf again to get two wolves back out immediately.

Spirit Mastery

Spirit mastery gives you an undead caster pet which is actually very tank and a big temporary minion on a long cooldown that provides extra muscle for boss fights. The mastery also has anti-undead abilities and some interesting buffs/debuffs.

Summon Liche King


Possibly the best overall minion in the game. Good damage and very tanky. Max it out and its synergies.

Summon Outsider


Extra muscle for boss fights. With heavy investment in refresh you can get him out more often. Drop a single point into him when he becomes available but invest in your permanent pets first. Max out long term.

Death Ward


Even with your huge health pool, int gear doesn't exactly provide much protection. Death Ward provides further padding, giving you an emergency health buff and some damage absorption in case your pets screw up and don't hold aggro properly and you take a few hits.

Circle of Power


Boosts recharge, energy reduction, casting speed, vit/bleed damage. Bleed damage from Maul will get buffed as will Liche King's attacks. Standing it will allow you to spam heals quickly and cheapily and recharge your skills faster. Lasts only a short while and I wouldn't call it required but useful.

Spirit Ward


Cuts incoming damage from undead and the synergy skill buffs your damage to them. Undead are annoying for sure but honestly, there's too many other skills worth investing for something so specialized in my opinion.

Enslave Spirit


Allows you to mind control enemies to add them to your army. On one hand you basically get some temporary minions, on the other hand they'll start trying to kill you again when it wears off. It also doesn't work on enemies 5 or more levels than you which can be an issue at later stages. I'd rather concentrate on other skills but it's up to you.

Stats

So what should you be dropping your attributes into?

Health: Any spare points after satisfying your int / dex requirements.

Mana: Doesn't require any points.

Strength: Doesn't require any points.

Intellect: Your primary stat. Enough to equip your gear.

Dexterity: Enough to equip you gear. Doesn't require too much unless you want to wear legendary stonebinder's cuffs.

Equipment

So what sort of equipment should you be looking out for?

Generally you'll want lots of +skill items. You should have +4 skill at a min. Extra will allow you to spread points around more and allow you to get great advantage from skills even if you only drop a single point into them.

You can get away with having pretty bad resists because your pets will be doing the tanking for you.
Even with the big health pool you can easily get killed through with bad resists so it's not really for a hardcore build.

Avoid gear with retaliation; I believe retaliation damage counts as coming from you so if it kills something it will count as a personal kill. You don't want to spend all this time working on the achievement and find you accidentally got too many kills.


Rings / Amulet: Generally, equip accessories with pet buffs and drop your favourite relic/charm into them. You can also use a +2 nature mastery (lvl 25+) or +2 skills (lvl 50+) amulet if you're missing +skill. There's a few good pet epic/legendary accessories out there (Black Pearl, Sindri's Loop, etc.)

Weapon: Anything with +skill, pet buffs, recharge, etc. as primary weapon. Alternative weapon should be a stat stick for resists in case you need it for certain fights. Geras' Walking Stick is pretty good for that.

Artifact: Druidic Wreath at lvl 25 for +nature buff.

The rest of the slots: Stuff that buffs +skill / pets first then whatever stuff that gives you the most health, resists, reduces dmg %, etc.

Leveling

At lvl 2, drop one point into Nature Mastery and pick up Refresh and Call of the Wild. Drop points into Call of the Wild until you max it out. Your own stats aren't important; you want to buff your pet stats and get a second wolf as soon as possible.

Put points in Nature mastery till 4 and pick up Heart Of Oak and Maul.

At lvl 8, start pumping points into Spirt Mastery until you can unlock Liche King.
If you feel Refresh is lacking put some points into that.
Each level up put one point into Liche King.

Level up masteries and use +skill items to buff the skills you pickup. Maybe concentrate on Nature to get Nymph for an extra pet, but the wolves and Liche King are your main pets and Nymph is mostly for support.

Drop a single point into Outsider and Refresh when they're available and concentrate on other skills first.

Pet Basics

Pets have a stance. They can be set to Aggressive, Normal or Defensive. Aggressive is the best stance; it will target anything nearby. Other stances the pets won't really start attacking until you attack and you want the pets to be getting aggro first. When you first summon that pet type it is set to Normal by default.

Right click on the pet icon you want to change. Then select 'Set to Aggressive'. You can also disband the pet from the same window.



You can select all your pets at once with F7. Target an empty space and the pets will move there. Target an enemy and the pets will focus fire that enemy. This is most useful for ordering your pets out of big aoe attacks (ie: Typhon's meteors) or killing spawners (ie: the pillars that spawn infinite undead)


Items that buff pets will specifically say 'Bonus to all pets'


Pets that fall behind you will automatically teleport near you if you get too far. Don't way about leaving them behind if they chase something.

I've Finished The Achievement Now What?

Congratulations on finishing normal as a pure pet build and completing the achievement.

You now can:

• Decide that pet builds aren't for you and retire the character
  
• Continue on as a pure pet build. Pure damage from pets is perfectly legendary viable.
  
• Continue on as a pet build with support damage from yourself.

Plague


Cast on a monster and it will spread to nearby targets. Does okay damage but is primarily used for it's synergy skills which both apply fantastic debuffs. Cast plague and let your pets tear them up.

Briar Ward


Briar Ward creates a protective shield of plants around you. With Sanctuary you'll get a big chunk of damage absorption, Stinging Nettle does some retaliation and should be skipped minus the point you need to unlock Sanctuary. Useful as a 'Oh ♥♥♥♥!' option if your pets lose aggro. I didn't use this on my build so I'm not sure if Stinging Nettle will count as a personal kill or not.

Deathchill Aura


Nice debuffing aura combined with it's synergy skills. Reduces health, speed, armour and resists. Has limited range through.

Ternion


Spammable LMB staff attack. Needs multiple points to be effective. Drains mana a bit.

Life Drain


Doesn't scale too well from my understanding. Not worth it.

[Raikao]

To anyone sturggleig with the achievement: Just make sure you put pet attack on left mouse and none of your items have retaliation damage. Don't skill Overgrowth on the Dryad either. Those extra kills you're getting are from retaliation damage 100%. Don't click the green retaliation shrines either!

[Titler]

New to this game, thought I'd go for this achievement when playing a pet profile; I was slowly creeping up with kills too, got to 53 by the end of Act 1... and the solution is to replace the left/right mouse click powers with Pet Attack; occasionally moving around was triggering ranged attacks and giving credit if it hit a monster.

[Gittun]

Anyone know when this is supposed to trigger? I have finished up to killing the final boss of Ragnarok, got the end credits, but no achievement. I have 38 kills, so the achievement should be done now, right?

What am I missing here?

[materafa13]

normally "normal" is end of ragnarok act. The first 3-4 lvls are suffering, after that with 2 wolves are easier and faster for the achievement. Avoid all retaliation dmg items !!!

[inovade]

any retaliation dmg from yourself is counted as your kill, it's so dumb i can't even try any skill even when they have such low dmg.

btw what is counted as "normal" here? i just finish killing the titan at act 3

[Дядя Максим]

i suppose that bosses minons who dies after their master count as your kills not wolfs

[Дядя Максим]

even without the Plauge, only doing pet attack my monsters kill count always rising! It was 34 before ive reached 2lvl and got the wolfs. now it is 55 and only 2 act... a dont know why but is seems impossible to beat ragnarhok less then 100 kilss persanaly

[Endev]

I like this guide a lot as I prefer to be support character with minions as my main dps. So I would be happy if you can revisit that guide and add the stuff that you're writing in your new guides. Like, final trees for example.

[GenSec39]

That's exactly the build I was planning to try for this achiev. There is only one question hanging in the air - how do I lvl up without pets, until I get lvl 2 for the first mastery points? I still need to kill few dozens of enemies... Does it worth the risk? Or better to try in MP?

[Rapskallion]

One tip to add is that if you find a Mastery Shrine that gives a temporary +4 to all skills, you can resummon your pets and they will gain the stats/bonuses of the +4 skill points and keep them even after the shrine effect wears off. I managed to have 3 level 20 wolves by lvl 9 and even after the shrine wore off the 3rd wolf remained and they all stayed lvl 20 rather than reverting back to 16 as my unmodified cap.