With the new pets, Jungle Fortitude becomes an exceptional passive as it brings incoming damage 20% closer to the pets base regen. And, theoretically, if you can take incoming damage down as low as base regen then your pets become immortal. And due to how pet Force Armor works, this is probably not possible without some extra life/sec, life/hit, life from damage stats... but with a bit of them it should be possible.
Zombie Handler is also a very strong passive. Assume your Zombie Dogs have x HPs each, or 3x total HPs. Zombie Handler effectively changes this to 4 * (1.2x) or 4.8x. So in addition to getting another dog for more passive biting enemies's asses off damage, but you significantly increase the total HP pool of your dogs.
Does anyone know the scaling on life regen/thorns without Fierce Loyalty? The reason I ask is because at some gear level, unless you're going for a thorns build (which looks like it could be quite legit at this point) it may not be reasonable to take Fierce Loyalty simply for regen - this would be highly dependent on the base regen. The reason I say that is because it's almost always better to spend itemization on better reducing incoming damage as opposed to healing the higher damage.
Does PtV boost pet damage by 20%? I assume it does because it modifies your damage # in the character sheet. That makes PtV a pretty damned good pet passive because pets are, traditionally, significantly less mana-intensive than other abilities such that the 30% mana cost on them is unimportant most of the time.
I'm Leaning towards
Zombie Handler,PtV and Fierce Loyalty at this stage with my current gear set.
22khp (+20% from handler) dogs - Damage reduced to 1140, 2300 life regen from gear - More once we have a value for base regen.
I'm not seeing a need for Jungle fort at this stage but of course this is all theorycrafting. Cant wait to get in a try it out!
And ultimately I will probably drop some regen for more damage!
bad medicine is on the monsters them self so it will not change anything.
Exactly. I will expand on this.
With the video's values:
1) Lets say the monster hits 10 000 normally.
2) Game calculates the damage reduction for pets by using the designated formula (shown in video).
3) The dogs will receive 1140 damage
4) Now you take bad medcine, which reduces monsters' damage by 20%
5) Game calculates the monsters' damage to be 8000 with bad medicine (10 000 * 0.8 = 8 000).
6) Game calculates the damage reduction for pets by using the designated formula (shown in video).
7) The dogs will receive 1140 damage from the monster.
Result: Bad Medicine does nothing for your pets.
A very good combination will be:
Jungle Fortitude
Fierce Loyalty
Blood Ritual (+1% HP regen every second. Works for pets with fierce loyalty)
Templar with Loyalty (+155 hp regen. Works for pets with fierce loyalty)
Haunt - Consuming spirit (+155 hp regen. Also works for pets with fierce loyalty)
Spirit Walk - Healing Journey (+7% HP regen every second for 2 seconds. Also works for pets with fierce loyalty)
With 25 000 HP, you would have 560 HP regeneration for you and your pets. The pets also have their own HP regen (number unknown for now), which means that their HP regeneration would be close to 700 - 1 000.
After posting my WD 1.04 preview video I had a few comments from confused viewers about how exactly zombie dog scaling was going to work so I put together a quick video to hopefully explain it a bit further. Thought I would share it with you guys hopefully some of you find it helpful!
I'm Leaning towards
Zombie Handler,PtV and Fierce Loyalty at this stage with my current gear set.
22khp (+20% from handler) dogs - Damage reduced to 1140, 2300 life regen from gear - More once we have a value for base regen.
I'm not seeing a need for Jungle fort at this stage but of course this is all theorycrafting. Cant wait to get in a try it out!
And ultimately I will probably drop some regen for more damage!
Great post thanks!