Blaster Pets

[StompyOne]

They seem to fall oddly into the blaster sets.  A lot of effort and focus to keep up/keep track of/keep summoned, along with quite a few slots and underwhelming results for all of that. Gun Drone being the exception.

 

As an experiment I made an elect/devices/mace blaster. Took the volt sentinel, gun drone, and the spiderlings. The idea being to drop a couple Trip Mines, Fold Space onto the mines and let the pets take care of stragglers. It's a LOT of slots, and setup and I just wasn't impressed with the results. I ended up mostly just killing the stragglers myself.  

 

Likewise, I took them street sweeping and into a few +1/x5 missions. They ended up scattered and (again except for gun drone) mostly useless.

 

They seem like they could be a lot of fun thematically. I'm not trying to make a pseudo-MM. I don't want that. But I am trying to justify taking them as powers and slotting them up on a Blaster.  I feel like I would have been better served to grab an extra AoE and forget the rest of it. Am I missing the "correct" way to use them, or are they just underwhelming compared to the traditional Blaster powers?

[Forager]

Dang... I literally just respecced into spiderlings for the first time. Say it ain't so!

[tidge]

On 6/1/2025 at 3:08 PM, StompyOne said:

As an experiment I made an elect/devices/mace blaster. Took the volt sentinel, gun drone, and the spiderlings. The idea being to drop a couple Trip Mines, Fold Space onto the mines and let the pets take care of stragglers. It's a LOT of slots, and setup and I just wasn't impressed with the results. I ended up mostly just killing the stragglers myself. 

 

Congratulations, you've discovered the weaknesses in the attempt to leverage this sort of strategy. It isn't even just the two things you've identified!

1. Fold Space requires an investment in two other powers from the Teleport pool. Combat Teleport is awesome, everything else is a lemon hoping you'll invest in a lemonade stand.
2. 'Recharge Intensive pets' are things I rarely dedicate more than 4 slots of Expedient reinforcement for. They do need accuracy slotting. They tend not to have enough attacks to leverage %Buildup or other damaging %procs. The control-oriented pets can benefit from some other slotting tricks, but they are a mixed bag.
3. Long recharge powers require recharge clotting, and a power like Fold Space requires Accuracy. This is a LOT of slots for "one stupid trick."

I don't know what would be a better use of slots and powers would be for your build, but I'm sure I could pick an Epic I like more (like Fire Mastery) where I can build towards the debuff and self-rez.

[StompyOne]

Yeah, the part that I'm trying to figure out is that it all just feels very non-blaster-ish.  Like the only way for them to be useful is to adapt your gameplay around them - at which point, you should probably play a pet class.  I guess I was wondering if there was a better way to incorporate them in to Blaster Life.   Gun Drone (which is a T9, and shouldn't suck) being the useful exception.

 

They don't path well, and the effects seem really sub-par for the investment.  Obviously, the gimmicky Fold Space idea is also impractical and wasteful build-wise.  Even on that same build, I just started stealthing in and dropping mines/AoEs.  The pets rolled up eventually and scuffed the paint on some targets while I killed them.

 

@Forager the spiders were fun to watch, but I wasn't impressed - at least not against anything you really want them for.  You have to slot the heck out of them for accuracy just to make sure they hit and even at +100% accy/damage they were anemic.  Aside from being a level below you, they don't get the level shift for Incarnates.  So fighting L54 content, they're basically trying to fight +5s to their level - which never ends well for a sad little minion.  I didn't try the Summon Adept from Mu Mastery, but I suspect it might be an improvement against the harder targets, but probably less useful for random world content (Anniv Event, Rikti Invasions, etc) than the spiders.

 

Overall, the AT combo is still powerful and fun.  But for all the standard reasons, not the pets.  🙂  I'm sure it will be leaner and meaner and even more fun once I re-allocate the 25%-ish of my build that went into the effort.