I’ve recently made the claim that LE has poorly designed pet skills, so this post is specifically to back that up. I’m going to go through every pet skill in the game and rate them on their overall design, so this is going to be a very long post. I don’t intend to be completely negative toward EHG here, so I’ll start with some praise. I think LE has the best implementation of hybrid pet/self builds of any ARPG to date! Second place is Grim Dawn with their player-scaled pets and a couple off-meta sets, but it’s still not particularly close. Unfortunately this post isn’t about hybrid builds, it’s specifically addressing the pet-focused playstyle.
How I’m rating them: These ratings are on the design of these skills as it pertains to use in a dedicated pet playstyle. Skills that happen to scale off of minion damage like totems or Swarmstike with the minion node aren’t included, because those don’t fall into the archetypal pet playstile. Neither do activated attacks used by pets, so no Crowstorm. Playing a Crowstorm build is just a cooldown caster that happens to have some birds flying around him, it’s not a pet build. Abilities that aren’t a direct attack like summoning a mobile Wraith or activating a buff are fine.
These are my criteria because it’s what I’ve come to expect from 22 years of playing pet builds in ARPGs. I think it’s great that a game can offer other options, but if a game is going to support pets then in my opinion it should have this playstyle available as a baseline. It’s also totally fine for some skills to be rated low on this scale because they’re tuned for a different playstyle as long as there are also enough highly rated skills to balance it out.
These ratings have nothing to do with the current efficacy of any of these skills. I don’t care if they’re extremely strong or totally unplayable. It also doesn’t matter if the skill plays really well in builds that aren’t dedicated pet builds. I’m rating them strictly on how well the design integrates into the pet playstyle. I’m also not rating items, because I think the skills should stand on their own and items should be an extra layer of choice that makes for even more complex decisions.
To me an optimal pet design should feel like a Rube Goldberg machine, a whole lot of really interesting and complex choices that you put into place before combat and then see how they play out.
Here’s what each rating means, along with a D2 example because we always have to compare every ARPG to that game:
1/5 - Something with this rating probably shouldn’t be in the game unless it’s really good at supporting a non-pet build and is just qualifying for review on a technicality. Good examples of this are skills that very useless, like a summon with such a long cooldown and short duration that it never really does anything or a summon that pushes the player into a really awkward playstyle. Iron Golem was a 1/5 pet skill as implemented in D2.
2/5 - These skills may be bland and uninteresting or just better tuned for a different playstyle. They can take a supporting slot in an interesting pet build, but won’t ever be the star. D2 examples would include the basic skeletons or the clay golem.
3/5 - These are usually solid enough to form the backbone of a pet build, but they’re nothing to get excited about. Generally they don’t have something that is mechanically interesting enough to feel special, but they can fill their role of getting more pets on the field. Skeleton Mage and Flame Golem in D2 would get this rating.
4/5 - This is a skill that stands out in some way. It has some mechanics interesting enough to really make a pet player want to build around it. Generally it will have difficult tradeoffs that all feel good but the player can’t take them all so they need to make choices about how their build will work. My D2 example would be the blood golem, because it had some interesting interactions that pushed the player to really change how they used it compared to other pets.
5/5 - This is a skill that does something really special. Pet skills that feel good to use while also providing something new that hasn’t really been seen before. D2 doesn’t really have any 5/5 pets in my opinion, but I think they were on the right track with Iron Golem. If it had the implementation fixes that Animate Guardian now has in PoE it would have been a 5/5 skill. This shows that just a small issue with implementation can really be the difference between a great skill and a terrible one.
If you disagree with the ratings I’d love to hear it. If you disagree with the criteria though, I don’t really care. These are the things that make pets fun for me to use in an ARPG. If you like pets for some other reason that’s great, but it isn’t going to matter to me. It would be like trying to convince me that Beef Wellington is great when I don’t like mushrooms, no matter what you say about how well that dish matches your tastes it won’t change the fact that to me all mushroom dishes are inedible.
So, off we go starting with Primalist:
Summon Wolf: 3/5 - Summon Wolf does have a couple interesting ideas. It can be used as a swarm, as 1-2 wolves that use a companion slot, or 0-1 wolves in a build that is otherwise companion capped since the passive tree can give you +1 companion even if you have no wolves. The thing that holds it back is that the wolves just aren’t that interesting. They bite and they howl, and not much else. You can kind of spec them into cold damage or bleed, but it doesn’t change much. The Lightning Strike retaliation would synergize better with the Safety in Numbers side of the tree because you want only wolves so they’re targeted more. Also you’d want leech on them if you’re using retaliation as their DPS, but the leech node is physical only. The damage conversions also cost too many points, forcing it to take up a large part of that budget for something that’s just a numbers change and doesn’t really impact how it plays. It’s a perfectly fine baseline skill, but doesn’t bring much of interest beyond that.
Summon Storm Crows: 2/5 - Storm Crows have a lot of problems. First, a lot of their power budget is dedicated to Crowstorm which as I mentioned doesn’t count as a pet skill to me. If you want to just summon a bunch of crows and watch them lightning things down, they’re locked into being weak because making them stronger would make their use alongside Crowstorm overpowered. A giant swath of their tree is dedicated to making them act as a buffing agent, but that fits better into the hybrid styles or a support roll for totems. They very strangely have better support for Armor Shred than Shock, even though Shock works better with their lightning damage. Thunderstruck takes too many points and still has a bad proc chance with full investment.
A side note on Crow and Wolf, companions that use all your companion slots are inherently flawed in this rating system due to the structure of the skill tree. Assuming you’re not doing a hybrid or totem build, there are few useful options to spend your extra skill slots on so there just aren’t interesting decisions to make. Having this option for build styles that are splitting their focus more is great, but it doesn’t help their ratings on this scale. In general pet builds should feel starved for slots so they have to make hard choices, but builds that use mass Crows or Wolves as their pets don’t have that problem.
Summon Bear: 2/5 - Bear feels like it needs to double the nodes on the skill tree and it might be fine, but the current version is just too limited. You can make him melee or a caster, but both versions of the skill tree pretty much write themselves. Most of the nodes are boring small stat buffs, putting a mediocre health node that nerfs Briar Thorns behind 3 points of investment in that spell is just nonsense, and building around retaliation when you’re probably going to have other pets drawing agro is silly. Not much else to say here.
Summon Scorpion: 3/5 - The baby scorpion stuff is kind of cool, but there’s way too many nodes devoted to spawning them and not enough that interact with the babies themselves. All the poison stuff is interesting, but the problem is that the poison support from other pets is much more limited and the poison mechanic is really all-or-nothing. Still the option to swap it out for pure physical is good, and the lightning skills are better than the wolves but still have the high point cost problem. The cold conversion is strange though, since it just changes the ailment with no way to give it cold damage on its hits. The Ice Thorns skill could have some great potential if given to the Crow or Wolf pets because cross tree synergies are a way to force them into interesting decisions with their abundance of skill slots, but instead we get it on a pet that will be used alongside other pets so it’s already skill slot starved. Adding to that, taking a skill balanced around having no cooldown and giving it to a single pet with a 5 second cooldown is always going to feel bad. If the spell was worth casting once every 5 seconds, then casting it repeatedly would have to be totally broken. It also just has a lot of long cooldowns on its abilities for seemingly no reason.
Summon Sabretooth: 2/5 - Another tree that is just too limited. You can make it an ice tiger with a nuke on a really long cooldown, and then invest 7 points increasing the cast rate so it will use the thing often enough to actually notice it. There’s some hit based options and some bleed based options, and a couple generic defensive points. Very little cross synergy means that there aren’t really hard choices to make, just pick a damage type and take all those nodes and you’re done.
Summon Raptor: 2/5 - We have a bunch of nodes that apply only to Rampage, a buff on a fairly long cooldown that only applies to the Raptor when it’s just one pet in your army. Adaptation has a similar problem, since you can’t control if the Raptor specifically gets kills or if they go to other pets (and it’s not that great even if you proc it). There’s a lot of bleed support which is fine if you’re specifically building around that, which at least has some good support among the other pets. Again we have the long cooldown problem though. Acidic Bile could help support the poison from the Scorpion, but not with an 8 second cooldown. Screech gives a measly 2 phys resist shred on a 10 second cooldown. And the ability that should help with some of these cooldown abilities, Brilliant Display, has an 8 second cooldown and doesn’t affect the Raptor. So basically it comes down to some good bleed synergy and a whole lot of wasted potential.
Summon Spriggan: 3/5 - I was really torn on if it deserved a 2 or a 3 because there’s some neat ideas here but a lot of it is poorly implemented. The buffs are pretty good, particularly for supporting a crit-based pet build. The creeping roots stuff is really cool in theory, but the cooldown is way too long to justify the investment options. Want to turn it into a mediocre heal with a slightly more reasonable cooldown? That’ll cost you 12 points! I like that it has an actual 1 point cold conversion rather than needing to spend 5+ points on a secondary damage type like most of the other companions. Thorn Volley stuff is fine, it’s not super exciting but it is a functional buff to a basic attack. Summon Vine is interesting in theory, a pet that summons turrets, but the vines are balanced around the fact that the Spriggan Form can summon lots of them while the Spriggan summons less and on a cooldown. The Spriggan can also have a hard time synergizing with other pets because most of the Primalist pets are best when using attacks and it’s entirely dedicated to casting. Overall, Spriggan has some good potential if they addressed the cooldown issues and the other pets had better caster synergies to help it work as part of a team.
Swarmblade Form: 1/5 - Absolutely terrible. You have to be in a form so you’re really limited on where to spend your other masteries. Summoning hives to then summon the actual pets is extremely bad. Locust Master was just a repeat of Summon Wraith with less options, and the new buff to it creates a gameplay loop so clunky I couldn’t believe anyone actually thought it was a good idea when I read it. In my opinion this either needs a complete rework, or they should just drop the pets and focus the form entirely on its melee combat. This really is one of the worst pet designs I’ve ever seen in an ARPG.
Overall Primalist rating: 2/5 - When something as basic as the Wolf summon is one of your standouts you’re not in a good place. Many of the sub-abilities the pets can specialize into have extremely long cooldowns but the abilities just aren’t good enough to justify them. Many of the pets lack cross synergy within their own trees making the builds much too easy to figure out. Since most pet builds will want many pets, even if one has an interesting non-physical specialization in its tree it gets it is often held back because there aren’t enough other pets with similarly strong specializations in that same damage type to support it.
Up next we have Acolyte.
Summon Skeleton: 3/5 - For a basic skeleton ability this rating isn’t that bad. There are options to spec into 3 different types or use them all, and there are actual synergies between those branches to give build options. Bone Armor, Elemental Arrow, and Acid Flask are all interesting even with their cooldowns due to the swarm aspect, each individual skeleton has its own cooldown so you can still see a lot of use out of something that would be awkward on a single minion. Immortal is bad, it should either be instant or guaranteed at full investment. It’s just clunky to wait 3 seconds just to know if you need to cast a new skeleton or not. They do have some balance problems though. For being the tanky frontline option, the warriors still die very easily even when specialized into Bone Armor. The rogues are basically made of tissue paper, which makes the Archers the most survivable just because they stay back out of danger. This is all fine as a default, but there should be better ways to specialize them out of this if you want to. Perhaps adding a bunch of health/armor to Dread Phalanx or making improvements to Immortal.
Summon Volatile Zombie: 2/5 - As a walking bomb, this pet is basically only on the list as a technicality. It meets my qualifications for being pet by the slimmest of margins, so it’s already at a huge disadvantage on this scoring system. It’s actually an interesting skill for what it does with some options to specialize in different ways, but it’s really hard for a pet to shine when it always dies after 1-2 attacks. As such, it’s basically limited to being a supporting skill that your summoner casts because they have a free skill slot, rather than a centerpiece of a summoner build. A focused Zombie build isn’t really a pet playstyle, they’re a direct caster that just has AI targeting.
Summon Bone Golem: 2/5 - For a pet build, it’s just really boring. A pet focused Necromancer is probably going to have a lot of other pets out taking aggro so building around the retaliate spell feels bad. The Fire Golem is fine assuming you’re specializing in fire pets, but is basically identical to the Fire Golem of D2 while the genre has had 2 decades to move on. The Spectral Golem is an option if you’re just looking for a support roll but it isn’t great. The Blood Golem would be much cooler if Rip Blood didn’t have a cooldown and used the player’s tree because that would actually be interesting enough to build around and force the player into some hard skill specialization choices, but in its current state the heals are too weak to notice.
Summon Skeletal Mage: 4/5 - When I first posted that I’d review every skill I said that nothing would be better than a 3/5 in this game, but I have to give credit where it’s due. Skeletal Mage has good options for 4 different damage types if you include Sacrifice. It has options to build around crit, multiple mages, a single mage, melee, ranged, AoE, single target, and 3 different ailments. There are some balance issues, but the overall design is really strong. If there were more pet skills that could meet this standard I wouldn’t be writing this post.
Assemble Abomination: 3/5 - This skill probably has the most potential of any pet skill in the game, and with some small adjustments it could be a 5/5. In its original incarnation this was a 1/5, another skill so bad I don’t know how someone playtested it and said “yes, this is fun to use”. Then they added Age of Undeath and the skill became functional, but in the process lost some of the potential it could have had. The idea of fusing a bunch of your pets together into a single monstrosity that has abilities based on the pets sacrificed is amazing. The decaying health while also needing to resummon those pets is a total trainwreck. This makes the node that allows a build to bypass that decaying health problem basically mandatory, and the restriction on it dramatically reduces the potential of the Abomination to interact with other pet types and renders many of the tree’s nodes functionally dead. It can’t access the Stomp, Soul Reave, or Tail Slam abilities because it’s restricted on what it can consume, and all the abilities that interact with the health degen mechanic become pointless. The idea behind this skill has a lot of potential, but it feels like it is held back because the original implementation was unplayable and the fix was basically bolted on top rather than integrated through the whole design.
Summon Wraith: 3/5 - Again we have a skill with good ideas held back by some clunky designs. The ability to transform it into 3 different forms is great, but needing to invest heavily in idol slots to fully convert it is not. Summon Wraith actually has a lot of options to interact with the decaying health which I like. You can cast them faster, cast multiple at once on a cooldown, make them last longer through leech and health, or make them permanent with a lower summon cap. It does have some synergy problems though. It’s strange that some abilities are arbitrarily restricted to melee Wraths when the conversions are ranged, resulting in some lack of synergies. The interaction between Putrid Wraith and its prerequisite Noxious Blades is particularly noticeable, and it’s really hard to imagine that allowing the fire Wraith to get the attack speed nodes would break the game somehow. Having so much of the tree dedicated to interactions with the health decay does make build options limited if you just want to use them as-is in that regard or take the Twin Spirits node.
Overall Acolyte Rating: 3/5 - There’s a very good design in Skeletal Mage, but it falls off after that. The biggest issues with Acolyte pet builds seem to be more with individual skill balance, although there are certainly some awkward designs that could be improved significantly.
Rogue just has a turret which fails to qualify and Mage doesn’t have anything, so moving on to Sentinel. It’s not a focused pet class like the last two, but I did say I’d review every pet skill and it does have a couple.
Manifest Armor: 3/5 - Manifest Armor is pretty interesting, almost enough to get a 4/5. Being able to pick which gear slot(s) it uses to scale is a unique and fun idea. They even gave the ability with a lot of investment a low enough cooldown to make it worth putting the points in it, unlike basically everything on the Primalist tree. The biggest problem with it is that almost every passive just comes down to generic stats. I’d love to see more incentives to find specific stats on specific gear pieces, Force of Impact is a start but there’s a lot more potential in that design.
Forge Strike/Warpath: 2/5 - Grouping these two together because they both create Forged Weapons. This rating reflects a couple issues. It’s obviously intended for use as a hybrid style so it’s not really built to do well on this scale, but that’s totally fine. Using Warpath to summon the weapons allows them to be used outside of melee, but it’s still kind of awkward. The bigger problem is that the shift in focus leaves few options for scaling the Forged Weapons since much of both trees is dedicated to the direct attacks of each ability, making a build that is really focusing on the weapons far too straightforward.
Overall Sentinel rating: 3/5 - Honestly not bad for a class that is not intended as a focused pet class. There’s still some potential here, even with just two skills. A low pet count can still be interesting with the right support. The Sigil of Hope can support the pets beyond just spinning to summon Weapons, but it’s unfortunate you can’t use Forge Strike and Holy Aura at the same time. Some improvements to Manifest Armor and extra options for how to build Forged Weapons and this class could really be on to something.
So there it is, every pet skill reviewed. Mostly 2s and 3s with very few standouts. There’s some potential, but overall in its current state I’d put it slightly below D3 which is not a good place to be.