Party Spirits?!

My group of friends enjoy playing ritualists together. But whenever a new Spirit of Pain is cast, it kills the previous Pain (or any other like spirits). I think this "feature" is ridiculous. Pain is the basic offensive Communing skill.

There isn't a party pool for Necromancer minions, why should there be one for Ritualists? Ritualists can't move their spirits (lest Draw Spirit) whereas Necromancers' minions move freely. Spirits should be based off of the individual player and not the party.

That would pretty much make a group of ritualists unbeatable.

You could get like 3 Pains up per Ritualist, and so 24 for a team of 8 Ritualists. If everyone also gets up a Bloodsong and Shadowsong, there would be a crazy DPS from all those Spirits combined. I forgot the numbers...but at least 50 DPS from all the Spirits of ONE Ritualist, so 400 DPS from the whole team.

You can only have 1 of each spirit type up at a time per party.

nrvllrgrs wants there to be 1 of each spirit per player.

Would ranger spirits be included?

Probably be a little overpowered.

You can have as many spirits up of the same type as you are capable of making (barring recharge times), as long as they are not within each other's range. Therefore, you could potentially create 3 Pain spirits, possibly 4 with Ritual Lord and Serpent's Quickness running, just as long as they are out of range with one another.

Allowing a party-wide spirit crossover is simply overpowering, hands down. Especially in PvE with an MM or two in the bunch. A 5-man team with 3 rits and 2 mm's would be unstoppable.

I really don't think a group of ritualists would be unstoppable. I just find it extremely frustrating to play with as group of ritualists and a good portion of my skills are void.

No other professional skills are limited by the party. Necromancers are limited by the number of corpses, which still could allow a 8-person party of Minion Masters. A 8-person party of Rangers all could have pets, essentially doubling their effective damage. The number of Ritualists spirits should be (and arguable is) limited by the their casting cost, casting time, and recharge time.

Again, one can argue that Necromancer Minion Master ability have roughly the same casting cost, and casting and reecharge times. However, again the number of minions is not limited across the party; it is limited by corpses and the casters Death Magic. If the number of Ritulist spirits was limited by a casters ability (Spawning perhaps), that would allow for multiple spirits of the same type, assuming they are cast by different casters, and still maintain a sense of balance.

If this were granted, it would go right back to the Spirit Spamming days--and I think we all remember how awful that was.

heh, just imagine 8 different favorable winds... that would really suck against a group of spikers, but i personally think compared to ritualists, minions arn't over powered because a warrior/necro with that one aura can easily shut a MM down, well nuff said it's a bad idea

8 x rits, 8 destruction spirits :X.

this is what made spirit-spam popular in tombs before, basically. just leave it alone, its fine.

Does anyone remember the Faction PvP preview? Where you could use Anguished Was Lingwah+Glyph of Renewal to spam tons of Pain spirits.

I don't think it would be too over-powered. Spirits are pretty dumb anyways (in fact I would prefer better AI than this but...) if each Rit could have just 1 of each type, it wouldn't be so bad.

The global effects could be made to not stack.

Recuperation:
Whether you have 1 or 5 you still only get a max of +3 regen. That sort of thing.

Shelter/Union/Displacement etc.:
All 5 Shelter spirits lose hp when they prevent someone taking more than 10% damage. Similar deal for the rest of them.

The Attack dudes:
This is the main point here. The fact is spirits are already stupid. If you have 1 target, sure, that dude is as dead as a door-nail with an army of spirits (not much different to a minion army). If you have more than 1 target then the jury is out on it. They are quite vulnerable since they can't move anywhere. An AOE from an ele would do the job pretty quick.
To balance it out a bit, perhaps all the attacking spirits should have less hp than they do now, making them even easier to drop. Or maybe even (the Rits are gonna' hate this but) within range, when one Spirit of Pain takes damage, they all do.

How would that do for balance?

I can see the problem with area effect sprits, but i don't see why 3 ritualists cannot each cast pain, etc as minion masters do.

I agree with this. If there are three ritualist in a ritualist group why shouldn't they all be able to cast a pain spirit and have them all live. As long as spirits like recuperation and preservation and union, non-offensive spirits don't stack on each other than I can't see a problem to having the offensive spirits, which are easily avoidable and easily killed(AoE has a job now), of letting each ritualist have one in that area. Ritualist I would have to say is the least popular class of all, and they are hardly used in PvP, except for rit lord defense spirit spammers. I agree with what he is saying.

Exactly what I was thinking.