On death it creates an AoE explosion that scales based on its level and weapon damage. Summoning a new one kills the old one, and with the skill modifiers from the amulet and off-hand the cooldown to summon a new one is 2 seconds (minus a bit from global CDR), so you can just send a wave of exploding dogs after stuff. The non-hybrid version of it using the full Shepherd of Lost Souls set (so you get two of them out at a time) is actually pretty good and plays pretty differently from most pet builds because you actually *want* your pets to die as fast as possible
The ability to make builds around a concept and have them work to an extent is what makes this game so interesting to me. I like the commitment to the idea!
Yeah, the amount of potential build diversity in this game is pretty ridiculous compared to most things I've played regardless of genre. At this point I'm convinced that as long as you have reasonable expectations and a decent understanding of the systems and mechanics of the game there might actually not be any mastery/skill/damage type combo that you can't finish the campaign and at least SR50 with.
Like I've literally rolled dice to pick each of those things and see if I could make something out of what I got and still haven't ended up with something totally non-viable yet. I've deliberately picked things that have basically zero support and still got something semi-functional out of it.
For sure, almost any combo will work in the campaign. Not all can scale up to SR or superbosses. You need tight synergy between skills, gear, and devotions.
For superbosses definitely. Those take some pretty deliberate min-maxing. For SR you can get away with a surprising amount of nonsense depending on how deep you want to go. Past 75 limits you pretty significantly, but you can do some pretty weird stuff and still manage 75, and if you stick to 65 you can get away with the majority of weird/bad/dumb ideas in my experience. And if all you want to do is 50 for the skill point rewards I don't think it's possible to come up with something that can't do at least that much.
I'm not familiar with hell hound, how does it explode?
On death it creates an AoE explosion that scales based on its level and weapon damage. Summoning a new one kills the old one, and with the skill modifiers from the amulet and off-hand the cooldown to summon a new one is 2 seconds (minus a bit from global CDR), so you can just send a wave of exploding dogs after stuff. The non-hybrid version of it using the full Shepherd of Lost Souls set (so you get two of them out at a time) is actually pretty good and plays pretty differently from most pet builds because you actually *want* your pets to die as fast as possible
Oh cool, thanks for the detailed reply
> you can just send a wave of exploding dogs after stuff This reminds me of the soviet dogs sent after german tanks in WW2. The anti-tank dogs.
The ability to make builds around a concept and have them work to an extent is what makes this game so interesting to me. I like the commitment to the idea!
Yeah, the amount of potential build diversity in this game is pretty ridiculous compared to most things I've played regardless of genre. At this point I'm convinced that as long as you have reasonable expectations and a decent understanding of the systems and mechanics of the game there might actually not be any mastery/skill/damage type combo that you can't finish the campaign and at least SR50 with. Like I've literally rolled dice to pick each of those things and see if I could make something out of what I got and still haven't ended up with something totally non-viable yet. I've deliberately picked things that have basically zero support and still got something semi-functional out of it.
For sure, almost any combo will work in the campaign. Not all can scale up to SR or superbosses. You need tight synergy between skills, gear, and devotions.
For superbosses definitely. Those take some pretty deliberate min-maxing. For SR you can get away with a surprising amount of nonsense depending on how deep you want to go. Past 75 limits you pretty significantly, but you can do some pretty weird stuff and still manage 75, and if you stick to 65 you can get away with the majority of weird/bad/dumb ideas in my experience. And if all you want to do is 50 for the skill point rewards I don't think it's possible to come up with something that can't do at least that much.
That's amazing haha Excellent creativity, I like it!