This is just a couple of tricks I used as a BM hunter. Cleared layer 3 at 204ilvl with 32k health so far with no problems.
General Tips
Do not use the Animal Companion talent. It reduces the health of your main pet thereby reducing all healing. If there is one easy thing you can take away from this tome. I’d suggest this.
Always check every broker for a Fleeting Frenzy Potion and buy it first. This should be saved for the last boss.
You can heal yourself by casting mend pet. The leech will heal you about 1% per second even if your pet is at full health. This is a great way to stay topped off between pulls.
Elites don’t start showing up until later layers. By layer 3 you’ll start encountering them on floor 1 and by floor 17 you often have groups of two. If you are having problems fighting more then one elite set your pet to passive and frost trap the far one. You will want the enemy to close at least half the distance before sending your pet in though or you might break the frost trap.
By late layer two most of the traps will one shot you. Often doing 60k+ in damage. Turtle and cheetah works to mitigate the damage on everything but the flame jets. This strategy does not work once you get to layer three however.
Frostbite Wand - This makes the earlier levels fly by, cutting your run time in half. It also opens up some burst builds instead of relying on survivability. This is a must pick if it comes up. It can be combined with Disemboweler’s Hook so that you only have to do 40% of a targets health in damage to kill them.
Soulsteel Pinion - Allows for amazing burst and time for both mend pet and leech to heal your pet back to full.
Fogged Crystal - A 30% uptime on your pet taking no damage. Alternate this with Intimidate, a trap build, exhilaration and interrupts and your pet should have no problems surviving. Amplifying Mirror - Massive damage increase. Piercing Scope - Another stacking damage increase.
Collect the pool and do 25% more damage. This is great as it doesn’t waste a gcd on a spell that doesn’t do damage and stacks with everything else. The buff doesn’t stack with itself though so leave the second pool alone until your first buff wears off.
Builds
Survivability
Secret Spices - This is an amazing power to increase your pets health. It does need around 6-8 levels to reach its maximum potential though so if you get it in the later 1/4 of your run it might be best to avoid it.
Obleron Endurance - Stacking this and the item above can get you to nearly 250k health. This ensures your pet is not one shot on pater levels.
Bloodgorged Leech - This can stack up to three times giving your pet a 15% leech based on max health instead of damage. Combined with the above this can keep your pet alive through bosses that will normally one shot players.
Euphoria Emblem - Nothing to go out of your way for but it is useful unlike many of our defensive options. The reduced cd can allow you to get a second Exhilaration in to heal your pet to full.
Soulshape immunity to revive pet.
Traps
If your already using the Embers legendary this is a great way to increase your over all damage and survivability without doing anything different.
Soulforge Embers - The damage seems to scale based on the level you pick it up on, with higher floors dealing more damage.
Bursting Tar - Increase trap radius by 100% which can cover entire rooms.
Sigil of Skoldus - Increase your damage when a trap is down by 25%.
Sticky Tar - Ensures that targets can’t move in your tar trap.
Peltsman’s Grit - Targets effected by the trap deal less damage.
Elemental Damage
There are several diffrent combinations. From limited testing if you pick up one part of the combo it will usually give you the choice for the second part later on (although in one case I had the second part which couldn’t proc drop.)
Lens of Elchaver and Scroll of Elchaver - The first part is amazing on its own and should be picked whenever possible. The second part is nice but not really necessary.
Finger of Frozen Fury and Frostchipper - Each time it procs it reduces the targets health by 5%. This is great when fighting elites.
Wild Sprits
A fun little combo that I’m often forced into anyway as the cd reduction is common enough to show up nearly every level. If your going to take that you might as well make it more effective.
Use Hunters mark on the boss, Pop your Fleeting Frenzy Potion, hero, misdirect to your pet, put down Wild Spirits, intimidate and then go into your normal rotation.
This drops the boss to 50% health increases your damage by 110% and your pet by 220% , increases crit to 100% and deals 100% more crit damage, crits proc 30K+ arcane damage (which will also crit and double) and when the boss hits 10% health it dies.
Anyway I hope this helps people out. I’ll add anything else people have found useful and maybe format it to be an easier read but for now I really need to sleep.
Nice write up. I’ll probably resign myself to running Twisting Corridors as BM since MM gets near zero benefit from the myriad of pet-related powers we get, and this will be helpful.
Thanks I did it because looking at the icy veins article on what powers were listed in what tier I disagreed with a lot of it. And I spent most of the night not raiding playing around with powers I don’t normally take.
I do wish there was a way to check if the 100% armor power (and other like it) is shared with your pet as that would be great. Otherwise its useless.
I mean, I hadn’t made it that far yet. I enjoy Torghast, but I can only do so many runs per day, and just doing layer 1 of TC, while the shere amount of damage I could do was so absurd I was laughing myself silly, it still took forever.
And I do mean it was absurd. On floor 16, I threw HM on an elite + binding shot, with the powers associated with both of those, and when I cast Wild Spirits, it died instantly. I don’t even know how it died because I didn’t cast anything else. As soon as the circle formed, it was just dead.
Great write up. I love the intimidate anima. Only thing I do different in the rotation, is I hit BS twice, then Lust+BW+AotW, then BS one more time to get my stacks to 3 before intimidating. With all that power, I don’t know that it makes a difference, but I want my Clefthoof fast
I did find out the hard way (in normal Torghast 8), that Turtle doesn’t stop the flame jets… I guess the fire comes up under the shell??.. Luckily it didn’t kill me, but dropped my health substantially. I had started to not even stop on traps… just turtle and keep on running… now I have to think again. There’s a soulshape anima that would work similar against the physical ones as well.
Also… I’m currently running SFE, but holding on to about 5K soul ash. I’d be interested to see how the BM legendaries stack up against it in Torghast with all those added buffs. Intimidate + Rylak would be 120% crit damage, and if you had some of the other BW animas piled on, I wonder if it would perform better?
I’ll check when I’m free, that’s a good question. Believe you should be able to test that against target dummies I presume and use the temporary armor potions. If those help reduce the damage your pet takes from the tanking dummies, then presumably the armor anima would also help your pet since stats are shared to pet.
In this scenario you’d want to to run Dire Beast as your 2nd talent rather than Animal Companion. Animal Companion has a hidden debuff that reduces your pet damage by 35%. Assuming you’re running clefthoof or another ferocity pet, this ends up reducing the healing your pet receives via leech. Your pet will be tankier if you don’t use animal companion at all.
Dire beast will also increase you haste by 5% whenever you summon it, so it still has a nice little bonus.
For thoes that don’t want to read that crap… take whatever talents you want, just make sure you take every power that gives you HP. If you get you pet over 120k nothing going to kill it
Animal Handling is a classic damage vs survivability choice. It doesn’t reduce the health of the pet directly but it reduces the damage of the main pet which also reduces its passive leech. In a pet tank situation like Torghast, better pet healing and survivability is more important than a slight DPS increase.
Yes. Pet health is based on your own (take off a piece of gear and watch your pet’s HP drop accordingly.) All personal health increases will affect your pet as well.
Good luck soloing 7+ as BM, all I got to say about that. Up to 6 was just fun. 7 turns that fun into a chore early, and then a death sentence later. I won’t say it’s impossible, cause i feel with the right luck you can probably complete it. But that probably means there is one build that can manage it.
I must have had an Anomaly had a 3 pack of elites on floor 13 and an empowered Tower Warden patting with 5% de buff to haste.
I was able to deal with 2 of the Elites 1 melee 2 caster by frost trapping 1 caster then blowing all my cooldowns once I pulled the other 2 back happy we got trank shot back and kept intimidation. lots of DPS Anima traits sadly not much for defensive’s I only had 1 giving me 40k HP
That empowered Warden had 700k hp and would hit for 60+K ripped my AC Clefthoof then ripped me even though I was Turtle’d
Will have to try the other methods suggested.
The empowered jump is a ton of fun. You can kite without the need for dropping tar traps.
You can fish for the first power of the run. Just click the power see what it is and if you don’t like it you can leave and join que again. I normally fish for the killing rats increases health by 2% up to 50%. Getting it first guarantees that it will be maxed out by the end of the run.
If you haven’t gotten a good start on at least two builds by level 6 its a good idea to consider resetting instead of continuing on hoping that something drops.
You can face the same boss multiple times in a single run. I had to fight Synod twice once on level 12 and again on 18.
Each environment has a debuff.
Increase health of enemies by 21%
Enemies do more physical damage to you
You take x fire damage every y seconds.
I’m wondering what ones people like the most. I hate the fire one unless you get the decrease fire damage by 60% or more. The melee one make bosses more dangerous to our pets but I think its probably the best. The increase health is just brutal on floor 18. I faced a 10 million+ health Synod.
Things that I need to check.
Does the disengage decreases damage power effect your pet or just you? This would open up an entire new line of combos with reduction of disengage cd, dropping traps for disengage, increasing movement speed and of course damage mitigation.
Does the armor increase power effect the pet or just you?
I’m not sure if the damage of powers scales per level regardless of when you pick them up or if powers do more damage if you pick them up later on.
Powers I would like to see added/altered
Power to reduce pet rez time or even make it instant cast.
Power to apply your pets armor mitigation to spells (casters seem to be the biggest problem for the pet.)
All defensive powers being shared with the pet.
Reduce the drop rate of powers that don’t effect either survivability or damage.
Add mawrats to boss fights. If you are going to force us to take so many powers related to them then they should be available for all areas.**
Increase the drop rate of max health powers or increase the amount of health they give. For BM these are mandatory for all but a single build (and is required there as well once you are past layer 5 or so.)
Overall changes that I think need to happen
Casters should cast less spells when solo vs a group. It seems many of the casters are expected to have every cast interrupted and this is impossible solo.
Rewards. I don’t really care what it is. The equivalent in gold to what a farmer could farm in the same time period, Rep tokens for old reputations (saving souls from that rep,) old pets, mounts and/or transmog. I just want a reason to keep playing after I clear layer 8.
It happens quite a bit on higher layers. On layer one I didn’t have it happen but several other people have told me that they have had double elite pulls on multiple levels. I guess thats the nature of rng though.
This is confirmed to work for both you and your pet.
Been meaning to run some simple tests with alchemy potions at one of the dummies, will update tonight. If the pet inherits your armor bonus, then this should work with the anima powers as well.
This adds some nice additional combos. particularly dropping traps increasing dps by 25% and decreasing damage taken by 25% and disengage decreasing damage taken by another 40%. Reduce the cd enough and you should be able to have a 100% uptime on a 65% damage reduction which would help with pets taking so much damage.
Mon is the last day of my sub so I’ll spend some time testing it and see how it does.
At soulforges you can use ravenous anima cell (the one you buy at the vendor) to turn any fire mage into that power that reduces fire damage by 60% so you always get this power by buying the RAC to the vendor.
Just an update, and I could be wrong here so please don’t take this as gospel. I ran a few tests on the dungeoneer’s tanking dummy in ardenweald. A couple runs without making use of Potion of Hardened Shadows, a few with. Each “pull” on the dummy timed for about one minute which was there to give me a baseline expected damage of about 1.9K dps (with about a +/- of 100 give or take).
If the potions worked, I would reasonably expect the tests with the potions to have significantly lower DPS against my pet on the dummy since the armor buff lasts for 25 seconds (nearly half the time of each test I was doing on the dummies). We know that potions can add to pet stats based on potions like the stamina potion (which will not only increase your max health, but your pets max health as well).
Unfortunately, I did not see any change in the damage values my pet was taking with the potion against the dummy. J don’t believe armor from the hunter translates to armor for the pet. Which makes me curious how pet armor is actually calculated now.
If anyone knows of any other methods I could test or has reliable information that could further confirm / disprove this, I’d greatly appreciate it!
