Pet build with melee support using the Champion (Nature / Warfare) class.
Introduction
All credit goes to chris.ferrantegerard!
Remus, Sire of the Capitoline Wolf
Mastery: Champion (Nature / Warfare)
Build: Pets with melee support
This build is for those who want to have pets play a big role but also get their own hands dirty. Wolves offer good permanent pets that synergize excellently with you and your other skills. Ancestral horn is a boss killer. You have excellent survivability (cleared legendary with 0 deaths) and can join your wolves in the fray.
Pros:
- Good pets with synergize
- Good, spammable LMB in Onslaught
- Strong buffs and debuffs
- Excellent survivability with big potential health pool and damage mitigation
Cons:
- Nothing honestly major. Some bosses (ex. Typhon) have cone aoes that can shred minions really fast but with max ancestral horn you will have a lot of minions making it harder for them to all die.
- No big upfront damage aoe, wrath can sometimes be a little clunky to target (but has terrific debuff)
- You may just not like pets, but I assume you are if you’re reading this guide.
Nature Mastery
Call of the Wild
The main pet workhorse of the build. Summon limit increased to two at 7/16 and three at 18/16.
They will dish out physical damage; wrath and battle standard synergy will help their DPS. Call of the Wild has a number of synergy skills. Maul will add some more damage but other skills take priority. Survival Instinct is useful for making a wounded wolf extra tanky preventing them from getting burned down too fast. Strength of the Pack will synergize with you and your ancestral warriors, buffing damage and speed.
Regrowth
Useful heal for topping up your wolves’ health between, and during, fights (not to mention your own). Put further points into regrowth when you find your heals can’t keep pace anymore. Accelerated growth is worth investing at least a few points into. The faster regrowth cools down, the mo[/b]re you can spam it. This can be very helpful when you’re fighting a boss that can damage multiple of your wolves at once and you need to spread around a few heals. With so many pets out, Dissemination can help spread around some heals. It’s not as important as other skills so one point backed by +skill items is usually fine.
Heart of Oak
Gives a speed buff on the first point, maxxed out it gives a huge boost to health for you and your pets. It doesn’t matter as much for the pets as their health pools get huge buffs elsewhere but this can help give you an enormous health pool. Tranquility of Water will give a chance to get discount energy cost. Mana use isn’t a big issue as you can just use pots. A single point buffed with skill items should be fine. Permanence of Stone will give you and your pets elemental buffs. Maxxed out you’ll get +31% elemental resistance, not a huge amount but it will allow you to concentrate on other stats on your gear instead.
Plague
Cast on a monster and it will spread to nearby targets. Can be a little clunky to target sometimes and does okay damage but is primarily used for it’s synergy skills which both apply fantastic debuffs that will synergize great with your pets. Fatigue reduces dmg dealth, speed and chance of health reduction. Susceptibility reduces resistances for physical, elemental and poison. Max out both synergies and put spare points when you have them into the base skill.
Sylvan Nymph
Nymph is the second pet in the nature tree. Ranged attacker with bow. Unlock her when you have spare points but I’d concentrate on buffing wolves and ancestral horn first and getting utility skills.
Refresh
Refresh cuts cooldowns. Worth dropping considerable points into the skill so that you can cut Ancestral Horn’s long cooldown a bit, cast two wolves in quick sequence and refresh battle standard and war horn. Shorter cooldown on Ancestral Horn means you can it more often in normal fights rather than trying to save the cooldown for just bosses. In tough boss fights where two wolves die quickly, you can wolf, refresh, wolf again to get two wolves back out immediately.
Briar Ward
Briar Ward creates a protective shield of plants around you. With Sanctuary you’ll get a big chunk of damage absorption. Stinging Nettle does some retaliation damage and should be skipped.
This is more useful for squishy casters and builds that need to stay in place as they need the protection more and Sanctuary only applies in the small area where the Briar Ward is. I suppose you could drop it down at a boss’ feet to mitigate damage through you should have good dodge and mitigation already.
Warfare Mastery
Weapon Training
Boosts your offensive ability and attack speed. Nice passive to have, max it out
Onslaught
Your main LMB attack. Onslaught has stacks. When you use the ability you gain stacks. Stacks decay fairly quickly over time when you are not attacking. The more points you have in the skill, the more stacks you can get. The more stacks you have up, the more you get buffed. Obviously you want to max it out.
The Ignore Pain synergy buffs your physical and pierce resist. At 10/6 you’ll gain +20% to both. You’ll only have the buff when you have at least one Onslaught stack on. The physical resist is more useful as it’s harder to get than pierce resist. If you need points for something else, this is something you can pass on as it isn’t really a huge buff overall. Just drop a single point here and buff with +skill items and max out the more useful synergies.
Hamstring reduces defensive ability, armour and speed while Ardour increases movement speed and attack speed while you have at least one stack of Onslaught active. Max out both of these synergies.
Battle Rage
Drop a single point into Battle Rage to unlock the chance of getting a big boost to offensive ability. If you want you can drop a single point into the Crushing Blow synergy but don’t put anything into Counter Attack.
Dual Wield
Dual wield is a rather useful ability in Warfare that lets you attack with two weapons at once. It’s very powerful but requires serious investment to become good. I skipped this chain in favour of going one hand and shield instead. With heart of oak you’ll have a good health pool to help eat incoming damage, I primary went shield because I used ring / amulet for pet buffs or +skill and wanted to use a shield to buff my resistances. The spare points were dropped into nymph for an additional support pet.
Dodge Attacks
Increases your chance to dodge melee attacks. Worth dropping a couple of points into at least and can be maxxed if you feel like it.
War Horn
One point wonder ability. Applies a short stun to all enemies within range. Useful when you’re fighting a big group to give you time to clear some first before you get mobbed (pets can only hold so many), keep ranged enemies form running away or to interrupt annoying enemies (ex: casters or big damage dealers). Further points into the skill will increase the radius of the spell and the maximum stun length, however, the min stun length is always 1.5 seconds so it can be fairly inconsistent. Whether you want to invest more in the skill is up to you but a single point is effective and you can buff with +skill items.
The Doom Horn synergy skill is more valuable to put points into imo as it will debuff enemies’ health and armour in addition to the base skill’s stun. I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory through. Drop a single point into the skill and buff a little with +skill items or max it out depending on how you like the skill.
Battle Standard
One of the best skills in Warfare, Battle Standard will give both you and your wolves / ancestral warriors huge buffs within its range. With one point, you’ll get +1 skills, half-energy costs, a bit of damage absorption and some offensive ability and extra damage. Maxxed out, you’ll get excellent damage absorption and even more offence.
The Triumph synergy skill should be maxxed out as well and will debuff nearby enemies’ physical damage, physical resistance and stun resistance. This will let your pets soak up damage and shred mobs to pieces and your stun from war horn will be resisted less.
Battle Standard has a cooldown of 60s and only lasts 36s when it’s maxxed. Refresh can help trim its cooldown. If you can get some recharge reduction then you’ll be able to cast refresh more often letting you summon standard more often and make you more mobile. As it’s stationary, you may need to lure enemies towards it to get full advantage. Pets can be group moved (v is default keybinding) to the standard’s location. There’s a noticeable difference between it being out or not.
War Wind
War Wind is an another charge attack. It has a 360% degree arc but does terrible damage unless you drop tons of points into it. The base skill hits four targets at the beginning through and the Lacerate synergy skill will let you hit additional targets and add a bleed. I’d rather use the points elsewhere.
Ancestral Horn
Pretty effective with only a single point. Summon a trio of spectral minions to help fight for you. It has a long cooldown so will mostly be used for boss fights. The skill synergizes well with Battle Standard. Additional points will make the minions better and increase the number of spectral minions summoned.
Of course, as this is a pet build you’re going to want to max it out instead. You’ll summon five warriors when it’s maxxed. With three wolves and a dryad you’ll have a whopping nine pets you tearing things up, especially if battle standard i up and you’ve wrath going.
Stats
Health: With heart of oak, you’ll get more benefit for every point you drop in health than other builds. A big health pool can give you some leeway when you start taking large damage spikes.
Mana: Honestly, you can just buy mana potions. There’s no real reason to put points into mana.
Strength: Primary stat so you can equip good warrior armour and do physical damage. End game strength gear requires ~650 or so.
Intellect: Not required.
Dexterity: Your secondary stat. You need enough to equip your gear at a min and enough so you can hit things and avoid getting crit and you may want to use legendary stonebinder’s cuff’s. ~435 or so should be fine.
Equipment
As you’ll be in the thick of things you’ll need to keep your resists up. As you’ll likely be using your accessories to buff you pets / skills you’ll need to get hefty bonuses from your other slots if you can. You can get away without resists in early normal but you’ll want to start building them by act 3 and definitely by act 4. By Epic you’ll want ~40% to all resists, legendary ~50% (bleed damage is fairly uncommon but try to keep it at least positive) at a min if possible.
Generally you’ll want lots of +skill items. You should have +4 skill at a min. Extra will allow you to spread points around more and allow you to get great advantage from skills even if you only drop a single point into them. I had a huge amount of +skill in epic but swapped some out for more resistances when I hit legendary; still finished with +5 warfare / +8 nature. Really helped spread points around into everything I wanted.
Recharge reduction will help with reducing refresh cooldown letting you refresh more often which will help with cooldowns on wolves, Battle Standard and Ancestral Horn. Bonuses to health will be magnified by Heart of Oak so this is good to pickup as well. Defensive ability will help keep you from crits.
Artifact: Druidic Wreath at lvl 25 for +nature buff. If you need to buff other stats in legendary, swap in a different artifcat
Rings / Amulet: Generally, equip accessories with pet buffs and drop your favourite relic/charm into them. You can also use a +2 nature mastery (lvl 25+) or +2 skills (lvl 50+) amulet if you’re missing +skill. If you’re short in legendary you can try swapping out a pet buff accessory for more resists.
Weapon: The best weapon you can get. A good green with a charm / relic, something with + skill or resists, etc.
Shield: Should have decent resists to make up for accessories. I used a Deimos, decent resists and +skill items.
Other slots: Whatever covers your resists firstly, then has other benefits you need.
Leveling
At level two, drop one point into Nature Mastery and pick up Regrowth and Call of the Wild. Drop points into Call of the Wild until you max it out. Your wolves will easily tear through the early content. Put points in Nature mastery till level four and drop a point into Heart Of Oak and Maul.
At level eight, pickup Warfare as your secondary mastery and unlock Weapon Training and Onslaught. Drop a point into Onslaught each level and use the others on mastery points. Unlock Battle Rage for OA buff, War Horn for CC and Battle Standard for group buff.
Now you can work up Warfare to Triumph and Ancestral Horn or go up Nature for Wrath + synergy, further wolf buffs and Refresh. Long term you’ll max out both sides but it’s up to you which you want to build up first.
Pet Basics
Pets have a stance. They can be set to Aggressive, Normal or Defensive. Aggressive is the best stance; it will target anything nearby. Other stances the pets won’t really start attacking until you attack and you want the pets to be getting aggro first. When you first summon that pet type it is set to Normal by default.
Right click on the pet icon you want to change. Then select ‘Set to Aggressive’. You can also disband the pet from the same window.
You can select all your pets at once with v (default keybinding). Target an empty space and the pets will move there. Target an enemy and the pets will focus fire that enemy. This is most useful for ordering your pets out of big aoe attacks (ie: Typhon’s meteors) or killing spawners (ie: the pillars that spawn infinite undead)
Items that buff pets will specifically say ‘Bonus to all pets’.
Pets that fall behind you will automatically teleport near you if you get too far. Don’t way about leaving them behind if they chase something.
Atlantis
So I don’t have Atlantis yet so this build does not include points spent on Atlantis mastery points (40 instead of 32) or level 40 skills. If you want to reach level 40 mastery points for the extra stats and skills you’ll need to find points from elsewhere in the build to free up.
Lasting Legacy I believe increases Ancestral Horn summon time which should be useful. Longer summon time will help keep them active in long fights (most boss fights will go down quickly). Maybe you can free up points from nymph.
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