I know that sometimes my sycophants drop off, and other times it takes an abnormally long time to summon any at all. It's the main reason why I only summon a fetish army when I need to, instead of doing it as soon as I can.
The density fixes that are coming will help me out greatly. It can be a major pain to summon sycophants when you're only running into a couple monsters 15 seconds apart for an entire rift level. I don't even know why it was an issue to begin with. Sparse monster population doesn't vary grifts in any way that isn't infuriating. If density is up, my sycophants stay up. If not, my dogs and piranhado provide enough protection.
I was lucky enough to get a Sun Keeper to drop. The +elite damage helps a ton.
I was lucky enough to get the 3rd piece of Zuni to drop, with decent rolls on it. So for now I have the fetish up all the time. And yeah the grifts that have long empty hallways between small groups are annoying.
With having fetish up all the the time, I was T5ing with no issues.
I have 3 Sun Keepers in the bank, but even with the highest level green gem, they are still 35% or greater below the current weapon. And the 3 SKs are 28-30% bonus. So they aren't quite worth trading up for.
And yeah when I broke the dogs out from using Tall Mans Finger to give me more bodies, that was working, until I got the rest of my current setup in place. Running with just the Single dog wasn't cutting it in T4 when the mob density was higher. Low mob density then was actually appreciated.