I’ve had multiple Beastmaster pet builds since early Beta in 2019, well before Idols became part of the game. Since these characters were too high leveled to enjoy doing the quests to get the Idol slots, I decided to delete them and start fresh. Now, I have one Beastmaster pet build which I’m playing as my main build, but it’s only level 80, so I’m just starting to farm class-specific shards and everything. I’m theorycrafting a secondary build I’d like to try out, but I don’t want to use up the limited shards I have to come up with something that’s crap, so I’m humbly asking for advice.
This is the Primalist build I envision. It’s a cold-based build where both the Wolves and Scorpion should have the Cold tag on them since I take both the nodes that transform them to do Cold-based damage. Thanks to War Cry granting 100% Crit chance in general and another 100% Crit chance for Cold minions, I calculated it out and I should have 100% Crit chance for those 4 seconds after I use War Cry (I can write the calculations out if anyone has questions about it).
My aim is to take Frenzy Totem’s node that expands the Scorpion’s Aura. Combine that with the larger area nodes on the Scorpion tree and I should end up with a very large Poison Nova that stacks Frostbite stacks (since the Nova’s Poison chance is converted to Frostbite) and lower’s enemy Freeze resistance to the point where War Cry’s Freeze should be significantly more effective than a standard War Cry would last. For further defensive countermeasures, I use Earthquake as my “Melee” ability to afflict Stun and Slow while also stacking more Frostbite.
Now I haven’t actually run Empowered Monoliths yet since my only good character is Level 80, so I’m completely in the dark as to what’s considered good enough defenses. I account for resistances and critical hit avoidance, but nothing on Endurance or Dodge or Minion Dodge or anything. I’m hoping that the Earthquake / War Cry combo is enough to keep enemies at bay and let the minion Crit damage heal themselves back up, but it will take several weeks of farming and leveling until I can actually test the build.
So what do people think? Should this end up being effective? Do I need to replace the blessings I propose with something else entirely? Any Primalist pet build experienced with running Empowered Monoliths, send whatever advice you can give.
The main changes are that since Scorpion doesn’t convert Poison chance to Frostbite with the Venom Nova, I’ve switched the Scorpion skill to the Sabertooth. Sadly, it only has a 30 Freeze Rate (compared to Scorpion’s 50 Freeze Rate), but the Sabertooth has a Freeze Rate Multiplier that’s dependent on Attunement, so I’m seeing if the increase Freeze Rate multiplier will help offset the lower rate.
The second change is that I replace Earthquake with Tempest Strike, as Tempest Strike is a great Mana regenerator and provides Chill chance and Freeze while also providing the necessary Frostbite stacks.
Getting the Minion Crit shards has been painful, and it’s very difficult to balance all the resistances while I don’t have the blessings or gear yet, but at least the build is actually coming along.
The intent of me testing this sort of build is testing out skills like Sabertooth and seeing how it stands out and what could be done to further improve it. If a skill is untested for too long, then it lingers in obscurity and no one knows what to do with it.
I’m also trying to test the Shaman synergy with companions, as with Beastmaster, it seems that it’s always best to stack the 3 Beastmaster aspects, even if you’re trying to do non-Physical, non-Poison companion builds. Clearly the intent of building different Uniques is to try and enable different build synergies, and if several skills clearly stand out above others, I want to try and bring that to attention.
I personally want to see Sabertooth’s Frost Nova have a larger AoE so that it has something over the Wolves; and forcing the player to invest valuable skill points just to lower the cooldown times of Frost Nova and Leap is bad design that needs to be removed. Skill points are far too valuable to spend just to have a Sabertooth ability feel usable. Otherwise, why select it at all?
