Could a pet based build work?

[Selvera]

For curiosity sake, I’ve been thinking about the viability of a pet-based build.

With 3 druid pastlives, augment summon, improved augment summon, Scion of Elysium and the Haper tree, ALL pets, summons and hirelings will get +22 all stats, 150% fortification, 10% dodge, 102+level HP, 25 PRR, 25 MRR, 20 melee power and a 5% chance to ignore damage.

Which sounds impressive, even if it is gated by pets/hirelings having bad AI, no past lives, very limited gear selections and generally low damage. Even so, it could have enough strength to pull the lever in legendary tempest spine on hard without items or buffs, which is better than I can say for my current barbarian.

However, I am unsure of what class is best with pets. Druid sounds like it should be, as it’s the class that has a pet-based past life and a few pet-based spells, however it has only one enhancement in either of its trees that I can see give any benefit to pets (Blood Moon Frenzy), and that isn’t a permanent buff at that.

Artificers come along with a dog, who’s pretty cool and the only pet I managed to find solid stats about (level 20 dogs have 34 str, 23 dex, 34 con, 10 Int, 19 Wis, 14 cha, 308 base HP, 26 base AC). Artificers do have enhancements to improve the dog, and often these bonuses overflow and help the artificer as well. With the enhancements and feats available, I believe this works out to a 950 HP dog at level 30, which is better than the average player I see in many of these legendary raids.

Wizards can get themselves a skeleton which is advertised as a fighter at their level. Their enhancements to improve it sound quite impressive (45% doublestrike, bypass DR as if metaline, 15 PRR, and PRR equal to wearing heavy armour). Also skeletons seem unique, as it’s the only pet I know of that goes up to level 30, making that +22 con 50% much more impressive on it. However it does not have its own enhancement tree like the wolf or dog, and doesn’t use items, so you can’t throw a ToEE collar or LTS armour on it for all those awesome bonuses.

Warlock, for no reason I can see, has some awesome pet bonuses but doesn’t have a pet to go with it. Maybe I’m misreading the class and it has a pet somewhere I haven’t seen before. However, multicasting any class that has a pet subtracts levels from the pet, which severely weakens the pet. (less so for wizard, who can take 5 levels in something else and still have a level 25 fighter).

So here’s what I got:
Wolf: Movespeed, Attackspeed, Evasion, Sneak attacks, equipment
Dog: AC, Alignment DR bypass, doublestrike, self-repair, equipment
Wizard: PRR, Metaline DR bypass, doublestrike, levels

However I can’t get stats on any of these pets except the dog, so I don’t know if there’s severe variance in the damage/tankyness of a dog vs a wolf vs a wizard.

As a bonus, a build like this would have some pretty non-trivial hirelings.

[Livmo]

I've used all the 3 and the wolf is a no-go IMO (too squishy). The dog and the skeli are much better, and I can get allot tank and aggro managment out of them.

Dogs use docents and collars and the wolf uses leathers and collars. Handwraps can be converted to collars in House C.

[Blastyswa]

That's a pretty old (1 year+) image of what my arti pet used to look like; keep in mind that while that does include 3x druid past lives, I'm level 28 (Cap at the time), not using augment summoning feats, and overall wasn't really maxing out the pet completely. With new feats and everything, I'm fairly sure you could get an arti dog to 3k+ HP with 100+ Str. Keep in mind that the DPS of any pet is going to be pretty terrible though (That defender died in his first confrontation with a dog in EE LoD when I tried to let him solo it) so they should only be used for a distraction.

I would note though that my wizard uses a skeletal knight to great effect even in LE raids, with the knight dying basically never (Unless I forget about him and the rainbow wall gets him in phase 3). Skelly knights can't be equipped with items which is a huge downside, but PRR is insane, even without much boosting (My skelly knight, by my testing, has 400+ PRR at level 30 without Scion of Elysium) to make them somewhat survivable, they heal somewhat passively if you're a PM using aura, and my skelly's intimidate actually works in LH raids (excluding sor'jek/momma dog), so I imagine with some actual investment a skelly could take aggro off of you in LE shroud. The DPS of said skelly, as measured fighting gardak bruntsmash without helping it any except for buffs, was around 500 though, so I certainly wouldn't count on it soloing a quest for you.

[Selvera]

That is an impressive dog there.

Either I'm missing a bunch of ways to buff up pets or I'm mistaken and the dog (and probably the wolf) DO gain levels into epic levels, because those stats and that HP is well above the theoretical maximum I thought was possible, and you said you were missing a +12 to all stats on it (augment summoning feats).

[unbongwah]

Either I'm missing a bunch of ways to buff up pets or I'm mistaken and the dog (and probably the wolf) DO gain levels into epic levels, because those stats and that HP is well above the theoretical maximum I thought was possible, and you said you were missing a +12 to all stats on it (augment summoning feats).

AFAICT, pet level is based on caster level which includes ED levels but not epic levels. Which means on a pure caster build in a relevant Sphere, your pet level should max out at 25. That's...not great by endgame.

Since Grand Summoner (Magister) can't be twisted, the best summoner-focused build is probably pure wiz (or maybe arty) in Magister with Natural Shielding + Oncoming Storm twisted plus relevant feats, Enhancements, etc. Note that "best" = "least bad" != "endgame-viable."

[C-Dog]

If (as it appears) that a pet will not pull the whole weight, the question then is whether you can optimize a pet without completely gimping the Caster itself, so that the resulting combination is still "enough".

If the testimony above is accurate, looks like Wiz's Skelly is the toughest bodyguard. Since Wiz also gives most extra Feats, and since it's "only" 1 Heroic Feat for Augment Summoning plus a minimum number of Enhancements, that shouldn't be a complete dealbreaker for many legit builds.

[Enderoc]

With the new gear, feats etc. you could make a pretty fierce pet I would imagine beyond what you are now seeing being the screenshots were from a year ago.

[Blastyswa]

AFAICT, pet level is based on caster level which includes ED levels but not epic levels. Which means on a pure caster build in a relevant Sphere, your pet level should max out at 25.

That's actually not quite correct; the formula for pet level is heroic class levels (Not caster levels, i.e. equipping something or using an enhancement/feat to increase caster level won't increase pet level)+epic levels. So for my pure 20 wizard, this is what his skelly looks like:


That's 20 levels for being a pure 20 wizard, +10 levels for each level after 20 (I'm at level 30, so that ends up being 20+10 for a level 30 skeleton). Playing in a different destiny doesn't affect my pet's levels, nor does swapping around caster level bonuses. Keep in mind also that the skeleton ends up being called a level 20 fighter with 10 epic levels, not a level 30 fighter or a level 30 skeleton. Based on my testing with my iron defender back in the day, these epic levels actually give the bonuses of epic levels, excluding feats and destinies, to the pets instead of their initial class, meaning that your pet will get 10 HP per level, +1 saves per 2 levels, and +1 BaB per 2 odd levels instead of the more significant bonuses they receive in heroic levels. I haven't tested any of this extensively in quite a while, and skeleton's don't have a character sheet to view to check if they also progress in that fashion, but based off of just my own observation I'd strongly presume skellies progress in that manner as well.

For some comparison, here is what the skeleton knight of my level 30 character with 6 levels of wizard looks like.


Note that the level of the knight is 16 fighter, as opposed to being 6 fighter/10 epic or anything. It's not possible to take epic levels without having 20 heroic levels for pets just like PCs, so any epic levels that need to count as heroic will do so. If I had a pet character with 10-19 levels of the pet class I could also show that, in the case of for example a level 30 wizard with 15 wizard levels, the skeleton knight would have 20 fighter levels and 5 epic levels. The skeleton can't actually get access to core 6 stalwart defender enhancements or master's blitz, but heroic vs. epic levels do scale power differently, with heroic being larger power increases.

Based on that, for a completely max power pet going level 30 pure class would maximize your pets combat capabilities, although a pet build with the pet focused on DPS is still not realistically viable if attempting to go through somewhat difficult quests at a somewhat reasonable pace. Going 10 levels of the pet class would still get you the 20 most important pet levels, where the main things you'd end up missing on the pet would be some HP, 5 BAB, and 5 saves. Keep in mind also though that gear level requirements apply to the pet based on its own levels. If you want a level 30 item on your iron defender or wolf, you need to be level 30 yourself and pure artificer/druid. Skeleton's can't be equipped with gear, so it isn't an issue for wizards.

If I think of anything else to mention about pets I'll post it in this thread, but I think that sums up the main gist of things. I very much wanted to make a pet build work for years, but AI mechanics and simple attack speed/base damage restrictions make pets damage output just too low. I do use the level 30 skeleton in LE raids with good results (The wizard he's on is my con dump project with <500 HP, so positioning him to block meteor swarms in phase 4 LE shroud or fireballs in phase 2 fire elemental fighting is both important and effective. The skeleton honestly hasn't ever died thanks to being too squishy, It's always been either leaving him in phase 3 and having the rainbow wall take him out or not watching him for several minutes while he gets beaten down: He can take a hit from LE Sor'jek as the absolute pinnacle of his defensive capabilities.

[theseriousone23]

Wizard is still the way to go because that skele is a beast. Unfortunately his attack speed and animation is fairly slow. 18 wiz/2 arti using Harper Agent's Int for hit/dmg using repeating crossbows does really well on its own. You save a lot of SP and do constant damage. You could also try an 18 wiz/2 druid for Nature's Warrior T2 Blood Moon Frenzy and the lv 2 spell Pack Presence to control hate generation. If the skele would scale off of arcane caster lvs that would be great. I could see a 15 wiz/5 wrlk summons build. An epic Wolf's Whistle (http://ddowiki.com/page/Epic_Wolf_Whistle) would make for a fantastic addition to the party of summons. Check out http://ddowiki.com/page/Summons for ideas on maximizing summons. I'd be interesting to see how many things you could have summoned at once. I wonder if you hireling's summoned creatures would benefit from your summon augmenting choices. The possibility to charm hire/other players summons to increase their strengths could be another topic of discussion.