Diablo 4's hardest bosses have a new threat and, surprisingly, it's not a barbarian with a giant hammer. It's the free robot spider pet that everyone thought was useless before Blizzard dropped an emergency patch to help level it up. Now it's crushing endgame bosses for billions of damage, and tomorrow it's going to do even more.
Before season 3 launched, Blizzard said the Seneschal companion scales one-to-one with your character's stats and can't die. But when the Season of the Construct began, the Governing and Tuning Stones that give it skills took forever to level up. Players wrote the little guy off as scrap metal until Blizzard pumped the drop rates for the stones significantly. Now with max-level skills, players are finding ways to scale its damage up high enough to farm bosses for you.
Diablo 4 streamer Rob2628 built a robot capable of hitting damage numbers in the billions as if it were a barbarian in season 1. To do this, he and other community members had to test which skills and stats transfer over to the Seneschal. Some Legendary powers, like one that boosts your damage while you have a barrier, don't carry over. But a few others do, and Rob shared a spreadsheet with everyone's findings so far.
Barbarians and sorcerers are particularly good at buffing their pet's stats through skills that seem to scale its bleed and fire damage. The Firefly Governing Stone, which sends out exploding bugs, is currently one of the robot's best attacks because they can repeatedly pass through enemies dealing huge chunks of damage that scale with your character's attack power and critical strike damage.
Right now, those fireflies are the reason the Seneschal can kill Echo of Duriel, a level 100 boss, in around three minutes as demonstrated by a user on the Maxroll Discord server and highlighted by Diablo streamer Wudijo. And it takes about just as long to kill Echo of Lilith.
Rob suspects every class will have some way of empowering their pet, but each one will need extensive testing. It might be even easier after tomorrow's patch which buffs almost every single one of its skills. Firefly will do 10% more damage and several other skills will be 30% more potent, hopefully giving other classes something to work with.
The Season of the Construct finally feels like the Season of the Construct that Blizzard originally promised. Systems game designer Sean White stressed in an interview with PC Gamer before launch that the pet would be extremely strong. That didn't seem to be true until people sunk enough time into it to figure out how strong each of its attacks can get. It still has a hard time keeping up with you in a dungeon and struggles to clear packs of enemies, but soloing a boss that some classes can't even do is pretty impressive. If this thing isn't one-shotting bosses in a few days, I'll be shocked.
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