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!
bad medicine is on the monsters them self so it will not change anything.
jungle fortitude on the other hand is probably just calculated in at the same time as armor and resist so thats an additional reduction of 20% and would bring your 1140 max hit down to 912.
now the only question remaining is how much base life regen the dogs will have.and if it is enough to drop fierce loyalty (unless you need the thorns also)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
EU Season Achievement Ladder: Season 1 : #773, 7150/7880 | S2 : #742, 5970/8280 | S3 : #1000+, 810/980 | S4 #? 0/? |
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.
To be more precise, bad medicine does nothing for the pets as long as the reduced monster dmg is higher than the dmg cap, and since we can expect that inferno mobs always do higher dmg than the dmg cap , bad medicine is worthles for the pets.
I had put together a spreadsheet broken up across 5k HP intervals (on the WD) and at 25% armor & resistance reduction intervals to show "hits to death" for the zombie dogs.
It's very reasonable to assume that everything except Reflects Damage is going to be hitting for more than the pet Force Armor threshold. For most people with a semi-balanced gearset, the Force Armor threshold is going to be around 15-1600 damage. I can't think of very much in Inferno which hits less than that, and that's taking into account my resists and armor, which does not apply to the pets except in determining said cutoff.
Therefore, it is my suggestion that Bad Medicine is NOT for a pet-centric build.
It is for the very same reason that I must assume that Jungle Fortitude is applied AFTER the cutoff from pet Force Armor, since if it's applied BEFORE then it's just as useless as Bad Medicine.
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 have to say that all this discussion about pets has me giddy. Can you tell?
EDIT
It also makes items with +armor quite valuable for pet survivability since most WDs aren't exactly rocking out tons and tons of armor. Furthermore, teaming up with a Barb with War Cry (Impunity) is going to make your pets fuckin AWESOME!
PtV affecting pets would be awesome. overall i really am happy pets are being changed (although all talk is about dogs, does the gargantuan not get the same "force armor" or anything?), i don't want D2 necro where i summoned skeletons then kicked back with a sandwhich and a cold one, but it'd be nice is they did do a bit more than now with a total tank gear set.
Pierce the Veil affects pets (as does Gruesome Feast).
Gargantuan gets similar "force armor" as dogs. Gargantuan will scale with players life and on top of that, at lv60 he gets additional +50% from the players life (according to blue-post by lyrilla). It seems that they will make the Gargantuan to be both Damage Dealer and Tank (while the dogs are distractions and meatshields).
The kill-speed increase by using pets won't be significant compared to now, but at least it will be noticeable.
awesome, and also a good reason not to go crazy over datamined notes. I'm perfectly content now.
PS: Pets are only immortal if they take less damage than their hp regeneration is per second. For example when fighting multiple enemies, it is very likely that some of the pets take 2-3 hits in one second.
Of course.
But there is a theoretical point at which you can reduce your pets incoming damage and increase their regen in such a manner that you're going to approach 100% uptime. Obviously immortality is not theoretically possible since it's possible for 47 mobs to decide to focus on one dog and no amount of force armor or regen is going to fix that. I suppose I phrased that in a poor manner, though.
A lot of this is going to depend on where their base regen is which we likely won't know until the official patch notes.
EDIT
The reason I brought that up in the first place was simply because at some point, unless you're using thorns, you're probably better off not using Fierce Loyalty. The reason being is that their base regen, which is supposedly significant, exists with or without Fierce Loyalty. So you're almost certainly better not taking Fierce Loyalty for the regeneration component alone.
The theoretical point of no return is probably going to be once your pets can stand up to 6-10 seconds of average abuse individually. Past this point, and you start getting into the realm of resummoning as they go down, which translates to effective immortality. Given a perfect or near-perfect gear setup, the cooldown on Zombie Dogs can literally hit ZERO post-patch before even taking passives into account (45 base -8 SoJ -8 Mara's -8 Skull Grasp -15 Homunculus -9 Chest = -3...)
Anyone know if Leeching Beasts works with Thorns? If so, then I think you have your immortality right there, as long as your thorns is double the damage cap or more. Given that I've seen damage caps go down to 1500, this is not going to be particularly difficult to achieve.
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.
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!
Ah, well. Thanks for the clarification, Derwiv33. Still going to be using Leeching Beasts in the coming patch as my tanks of choice, since even in my sucky gear they'll take at least 4-5 hits each to go down. On a 45 second base cooldown, this means that I actually have semi-dependable tanks in A2 Inferno in most circumstances (and those never-to-be-sufficiently-accursed exploders won't keep randomly killing me...). It's a nice change of pace, that.
Running around Act III Inferno now with 84k hp, ~1900 life regen, ~3500 armor (54% reduction) and ~650 resists (69% reduction) and dogs simply will not die. Now they don't always hold everything's attention and they don't always go where you want them but, by and large they have the elite pack focused on them and life is good. I was thinking to stack more regen but likely I can back off and start adding damage.
Passives are Blood Ritual (840 Regen right there) and Fierce Loyalty. Started with Jungle Fortitude as third but don't seem to need it so moved it to Pierce the Veil for the extra damage.
EDIT: found something that can kill them -- Fallen Maniacs That's pretty much it though.
On a less comical note, Electrified also seems to be able to kill them but slooowly - so resummon and go. Also, Great Horned Goliath charge -- pretty much one shots all three dogs -- but this is clearly bugged and is ignoring max hit cap.
I was running a RoT sort tankdoc kinda build. Between pet survivability increase, mana regen buff, and RoT mana reduction, pretty sure i can throw bears on my right click for on demand burst and do amazingly well (as well as change From Honored Gues to Healing Journey on spirit walk).
So far i'm very impressed with pet changes. they're more useful and capable, but not D2 summonmancer where you'd kick back and let them do all the work.
Emberos, which rune of the Dogs are you using? Like I said, I'm using Leeching Beasts, but I'm considering swapping out to Burning or Plague
Profile link is in my signature. Using Burning Dogs and Humongoid Gargantuan. Based on pre-patch calculations, I had a good hunch that a very high health pool with Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty plus regen on gear would make dogs very survivable so I had acquired alot of high INT/VIT, %Life, All Resist, Regen gear. The competition for it wasn't that high pre-patch though I suspect it will be soon.
Although it looked very good on paper, I honestly didn't expect it to work as well as it is. I wasn't sure how well the pets would keep the elite pack's focus. They are doing a great job. I've swapped in more damage oriented gear since my initial post but also raised health another 10k to 94k now. I took out almost all my life on hit gear in favor of more dps and just generally am aiming for more damage now. Survivability is extremely high and my damage is rising with each piece I'm adding in. At this point with a 5 stack Soul Harvest I'm around 31k damage now so packs are starting to drop fairly quickly.
I had thought to use Templar for more passive regen but honestly don't need it so I'm just using Enchantress for Armor buff plus attack speed and the fact that I have her geared for about 6k damage as well. We both just sit back and plunk away from range while the pets hold things away in melee.
Desecrator destroys my pets (and I didn't notice that pets got any passive reduction bonus against it in the patch notes). Even worse than Desecrator is the fire puddle from the Act 2 burning constructs. That tears through them very quickly.
EDIT
Also Dune Dervishes whirlwind is not effected by the damage cap.
I'm thinking perhaps we need to consolodate this into a single thread - the stuff that our pets are taking absurd amounts of damage from.
Confirmed my setup works extremely well for all of Act III -- not skipping any packs / bosses on three full runs. Now going through Act IV -- don't expect any issues with packs -- just making sure no issues with say Rakanoth or Shadow Clones specifically.
EDIT: Hurdle 1 through. Rakanoth definitely did more incoming then they regen'd but it was workable. Took him a good bit to kill the first 3 (well first 2). I resummoned and then was wiser about using Spirit Walk Healing Journey on cooldown for some additional pet heal (14% is a fairly hefty heal at my hp). He killed one more of the dogs but still had 2 up when he went down. Gargantuan was never really in any danger that I saw.
EDIT 2: Hammer mobs guarding the Hell Rifts seem to have been missed on cap hit. They pretty much one shot Gargantuan and dogs on both summons. Just kited away and killed them anyway but yeah, broken Actually appears to be all mallet lords that have the issue.
EDIT 3: Elite Oppressor pack killed both Garg and Dog pack once. Resummoned and they lived through the rest. Fire breath sustained from oppressor is the culprit. Second oppressor pack, timed Healing Journey to breath and it worked well to keep them up.
EDIT 4: Izual down no problems -- didn't expect any. Morlu Incinerator packs annoying -- more for my survivability than my pets though. Just a chaotic fight ( especially with when the first pack was Illusionist and the second was Horde )
EDIT 5: Diablo was fine phase 1. Phase 2/3 sketchy because of the fire pools. Pets just wouldn't live through them and you have to run quite a distance before they pull out of them. Also WD Shadow Clone dots killed them as well at least once. Definitely not faceroll -- had to kite buy time resummon, etc but still one shot.
Going back to Act III now as it's more profitable place to be -- just wanted to see if the spec and gear would stand-up to all of Act IV or not -- confirmed. If I can find time, may put out a quick vid of the setup -- definitely going to be a good solid setup for 1.0.4 unless they back off or adjust the changes.
Desecrator destroys my pets (and I didn't notice that pets got any passive reduction bonus against it in the patch notes). Even worse than Desecrator is the fire puddle from the Act 2 burning constructs. That tears through them very quickly.
The worst thing for my pets I've noticed is those damn kamakazi imps in Act 2/3. If I run into one of those ALL of my pets die So much for force armor. Despite that, I enjoy them though.
First of thanks TC for the video, helped me alot with my current build.
Secondly, for those of you that are curious, leeching beasts does not have synergy with thorns. i have play tested it with 7.5k thorns and there was no evident life return from the thorns however... i did find out that thorns damage is not mitigated but applied as straight damage to the attacker (no reductions from mob armor/res).
A question i have however is if ZD/gargs armor calculation is constantly updated or just calculated on the intial cast, one would assume and from experience that the 100% armor howl, followed by a cast would mean that my summons would have the 100% armor bonus for the entirety of their life span. I could be entirely wrong but I have been switching in a +80 res +armor shield for summon and howl, prior to summoning them before switching back to my weapon.
Desecrator, Molten, Dervish whirlwind and other such are not broken. The problem is that those tick VERY frequently for relatively small amounts per tick, which means that the "damage cap" the summons have really doesn't help them.
I did notice that certain mobs are demolishing my pets in 1-2 shots, though, my example is the unique Sand Golem that pops up when you pull ZK's head.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
bad medicine is on the monsters them self so it will not change anything.
jungle fortitude on the other hand is probably just calculated in at the same time as armor and resist so thats an additional reduction of 20% and would bring your 1140 max hit down to 912.
now the only question remaining is how much base life regen the dogs will have.and if it is enough to drop fierce loyalty (unless you need the thorns also)
EU Season Achievement Ladder: Season 1 : #773, 7150/7880 | S2 : #742, 5970/8280 | S3 : #1000+, 810/980 | S4 #? 0/? |
I had put together a spreadsheet broken up across 5k HP intervals (on the WD) and at 25% armor & resistance reduction intervals to show "hits to death" for the zombie dogs.
It's very reasonable to assume that everything except Reflects Damage is going to be hitting for more than the pet Force Armor threshold. For most people with a semi-balanced gearset, the Force Armor threshold is going to be around 15-1600 damage. I can't think of very much in Inferno which hits less than that, and that's taking into account my resists and armor, which does not apply to the pets except in determining said cutoff.
Therefore, it is my suggestion that Bad Medicine is NOT for a pet-centric build.
It is for the very same reason that I must assume that Jungle Fortitude is applied AFTER the cutoff from pet Force Armor, since if it's applied BEFORE then it's just as useless as Bad Medicine.
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 have to say that all this discussion about pets has me giddy. Can you tell?
EDIT
It also makes items with +armor quite valuable for pet survivability since most WDs aren't exactly rocking out tons and tons of armor. Furthermore, teaming up with a Barb with War Cry (Impunity) is going to make your pets fuckin AWESOME!
awesome, and also a good reason not to go crazy over datamined notes. I'm perfectly content now.
Of course.
But there is a theoretical point at which you can reduce your pets incoming damage and increase their regen in such a manner that you're going to approach 100% uptime. Obviously immortality is not theoretically possible since it's possible for 47 mobs to decide to focus on one dog and no amount of force armor or regen is going to fix that. I suppose I phrased that in a poor manner, though.
A lot of this is going to depend on where their base regen is which we likely won't know until the official patch notes.
EDIT
The reason I brought that up in the first place was simply because at some point, unless you're using thorns, you're probably better off not using Fierce Loyalty. The reason being is that their base regen, which is supposedly significant, exists with or without Fierce Loyalty. So you're almost certainly better not taking Fierce Loyalty for the regeneration component alone.
Anyone know if Leeching Beasts works with Thorns? If so, then I think you have your immortality right there, as long as your thorns is double the damage cap or more. Given that I've seen damage caps go down to 1500, this is not going to be particularly difficult to achieve.
Great post thanks!
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!
Passives are Blood Ritual (840 Regen right there) and Fierce Loyalty. Started with Jungle Fortitude as third but don't seem to need it so moved it to Pierce the Veil for the extra damage.
EDIT: found something that can kill them -- Fallen Maniacs That's pretty much it though.
On a less comical note, Electrified also seems to be able to kill them but slooowly - so resummon and go. Also, Great Horned Goliath charge -- pretty much one shots all three dogs -- but this is clearly bugged and is ignoring max hit cap.
D3Progress: http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/emberos-1608/Emberos/51824579
So far i'm very impressed with pet changes. they're more useful and capable, but not D2 summonmancer where you'd kick back and let them do all the work.
Profile link is in my signature. Using Burning Dogs and Humongoid Gargantuan. Based on pre-patch calculations, I had a good hunch that a very high health pool with Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty plus regen on gear would make dogs very survivable so I had acquired alot of high INT/VIT, %Life, All Resist, Regen gear. The competition for it wasn't that high pre-patch though I suspect it will be soon.
Although it looked very good on paper, I honestly didn't expect it to work as well as it is. I wasn't sure how well the pets would keep the elite pack's focus. They are doing a great job. I've swapped in more damage oriented gear since my initial post but also raised health another 10k to 94k now. I took out almost all my life on hit gear in favor of more dps and just generally am aiming for more damage now. Survivability is extremely high and my damage is rising with each piece I'm adding in. At this point with a 5 stack Soul Harvest I'm around 31k damage now so packs are starting to drop fairly quickly.
I had thought to use Templar for more passive regen but honestly don't need it so I'm just using Enchantress for Armor buff plus attack speed and the fact that I have her geared for about 6k damage as well. We both just sit back and plunk away from range while the pets hold things away in melee.
D3Progress: http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/emberos-1608/Emberos/51824579
EDIT
Also Dune Dervishes whirlwind is not effected by the damage cap.
I'm thinking perhaps we need to consolodate this into a single thread - the stuff that our pets are taking absurd amounts of damage from.
EDIT: Hurdle 1 through. Rakanoth definitely did more incoming then they regen'd but it was workable. Took him a good bit to kill the first 3 (well first 2). I resummoned and then was wiser about using Spirit Walk Healing Journey on cooldown for some additional pet heal (14% is a fairly hefty heal at my hp). He killed one more of the dogs but still had 2 up when he went down. Gargantuan was never really in any danger that I saw.
EDIT 2: Hammer mobs guarding the Hell Rifts seem to have been missed on cap hit. They pretty much one shot Gargantuan and dogs on both summons. Just kited away and killed them anyway but yeah, broken Actually appears to be all mallet lords that have the issue.
EDIT 3: Elite Oppressor pack killed both Garg and Dog pack once. Resummoned and they lived through the rest. Fire breath sustained from oppressor is the culprit. Second oppressor pack, timed Healing Journey to breath and it worked well to keep them up.
EDIT 4: Izual down no problems -- didn't expect any. Morlu Incinerator packs annoying -- more for my survivability than my pets though. Just a chaotic fight ( especially with when the first pack was Illusionist and the second was Horde )
EDIT 5: Diablo was fine phase 1. Phase 2/3 sketchy because of the fire pools. Pets just wouldn't live through them and you have to run quite a distance before they pull out of them. Also WD Shadow Clone dots killed them as well at least once. Definitely not faceroll -- had to kite buy time resummon, etc but still one shot.
Going back to Act III now as it's more profitable place to be -- just wanted to see if the spec and gear would stand-up to all of Act IV or not -- confirmed. If I can find time, may put out a quick vid of the setup -- definitely going to be a good solid setup for 1.0.4 unless they back off or adjust the changes.
D3Progress: http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/emberos-1608/Emberos/51824579
The worst thing for my pets I've noticed is those damn kamakazi imps in Act 2/3. If I run into one of those ALL of my pets die So much for force armor. Despite that, I enjoy them though.
Secondly, for those of you that are curious, leeching beasts does not have synergy with thorns. i have play tested it with 7.5k thorns and there was no evident life return from the thorns however... i did find out that thorns damage is not mitigated but applied as straight damage to the attacker (no reductions from mob armor/res).
A question i have however is if ZD/gargs armor calculation is constantly updated or just calculated on the intial cast, one would assume and from experience that the 100% armor howl, followed by a cast would mean that my summons would have the 100% armor bonus for the entirety of their life span. I could be entirely wrong but I have been switching in a +80 res +armor shield for summon and howl, prior to summoning them before switching back to my weapon.
I did notice that certain mobs are demolishing my pets in 1-2 shots, though, my example is the unique Sand Golem that pops up when you pull ZK's head.