The State of the Ritualist

wouldn't work. The problem is that would only affect the ritulists abilities.
Spawning ideally is fine. The problem is that guild wars. despite being team based has very little summon spell besides the necromancers. so +64% to hp doesn't really help much. However something like +64% to dmg and Hp of summoned creatures(including pets ) would be great and help rits find a class specialty of their own. The only thing that all rits really do right now is have 75% of their elites be energy management.

and of course stationary offense. Pets aren't summoned creatures. It wouldn't make sense with the class itself.

And yeah...there's not that many E-management elites. A lot of those elites are pretty damn useless though (spirit channeling, wtf? all you need is attuned!).

the reason rits don't have too much versitility is that there skills all have little backgruond requirements like near a spirit, under the effects of item of weapon spell. spirit requirements are bad because monk dont have to stop every 30-45 seconds and make the party vulnerable. 3 seconds in a battle is a long time. also spirits have a huge energy cost at times, making them take you out of busness once every half a minute. item spells are jsut as bad. taking away 15 energy is rediculous. unfortuantly thats how it works and having 0 energy for 3-4 seconds can be pretty bad in a heated fight.

Rits can be very good with other rits because of how their prerequisites for spells become a given. all rits teams are great in the dfense department. and pretty good at pressure, although lacking at spikes. rits are unfortuantly designed to suck if not near spirits. so that means they can't move well and are easily counterable. I've managed to handle myself well as a Rit healer in the past. You'll want to be acting as backup for a monk rather than on your own, yes, but if you're alert you can drop the spirits (although I'd admit to having a strong preference for 3s rituals - 5s is just too long unless you can preprepare) during the relatively quiet times during a battle when the monk can handle things on their own, setting yourself up to be able to provide full support when things get hairy. And don't forget that when things do get hairy, those spirits (unless their something like Union which dies in fairly short order - in which case, it's probably died keeping things from getting hairy quickly) will still be there doing what they can to relieve the pressure when things get hairy.

While some spirits can be expensive, using Halcyon's/Radiant and an offhand can get you around 50 energy, leaving you enough to drop a Recuperation and have enough left to keep going as long as you have decent energy management. The trick is not to be too obsessed with dropping spirits - when in healing mode, I normally use Recuperation as the primary spirit, and something cheap and quick like Life or Pain to get the conditional effects. (I don't particularly care what the secondary spirit actually does in a build like this - the important thing is that I can stand next to it and throw my healing around.)

That said, the true power of the Ritualist can come from when you can lure the enemy into a pack of spirits - just like the trapping ranger can be used offensively, but when they're truly powerful is when you can lure the enemy onto a pile of traps. It's something I've considered to be a shame for a while that in the same chapter as they introduced a class that requires a certain degree of patience for it's true power to shine, they also introduced a mission reward structure that stressed rushing.

Another thing that's important for ritualists to do in PUGs is talk to each other. The number of times one of my characters with a ritualist component has rocked up to a PUG, asked about the other ritualist's spirits, and received no response... only to find out that, sure enough, the other ritualist is carrying the same spirits I am... (Okay, when it's Union or something like that that expires quickly, that can be useful. When it's something that generally lasts until it's killed or until the skill has recharged anyway like Pain, however... not so useful.)

.......... Im Really Dissapointed In U Guys Rit Are The Best Class For Me!!!!!!! I Can Pwn Any Prof But Have A Little Trouble With Mes So I Dont Think U Guys Have A Right To Say To Avoid Them And Stuff Like That Its Just Not Right Any profession can potentially "Pwn" any other profession. Do you have a point?

My big dismay is in fact with the skill Spiritual Pain, which is overpowered without its spirit killing powers - with this in play in most GvGs it is completely hopeless to even think of bringing spirits of any kind; you just make it possible to AoE spam your group if you get in range of one. This is a pretty big misconception from my experience. Everyone always bring that up, but we used spirits in GvG against good teams with Mesmers with SP and the thing is this just doesn't happen.

Yes, in theory they could AOE nuke your team, for around 70 damage a hit every 1.5s or so, nothing that scary considering you can just move from the spirit (it's just a Nearby AOE, and nothing prevents you from moving. Anybody getting hit more than 1-2 times better be galed or he's stupid). You rarely have more than 1-2 person in Nearby AOE of a spirit, and you should never have 2 Spirits Nearby one another if you notice you're facing SP (basically if the other team has a Mesmer!) or you're asking for it.

Now, look at it from the Mesmer's perspective. It takes 30-50E to kill a spirit depending on its level/spawning power. How much damage/disruption can a Dom Mesmer do to your team with 30-50E? How much will they do if they use it to nuke a spirit (and maybe do SOME AoE damage)? They don't have infinite energy from Motivation Paragon anymore, and most Dom Mesmers are actually really tight on their energy and mostly use tactical casting to handle emanagement with something like PDrain or GoLE as only emanagement (sometimes Drain Enchant too, but that's like 5E every 30s).

Basically, Spiritual Pain on spirits is a huge energy waste for Mesmers and if they're doing it your monks should be really happy cause if that 30E would be used to use ESurge-EBurn-Diversion on them, they'd have much more trouble than having to maybe cast 1-2 5E spells if the AOE isn't just cleared by a Heal Party from an E/Mo. And the funny thing is that many Mesmers actually DO use SP on spirits. And most of the time it honestly don't hurt us at all. And they don't seem to realize that they're destroying their energy in the process. If anything, the fact that SP kills spirits is just a bait for bad Mesmers to drain their energy for nothing and ends up helping you. As for the fact that it actually kills your spirits, any spell that actually DOESN'T ignore armor is usually much more energy efficient and faster at it so it's a non-issue. Spirits can be killed, there's no way around it and it's what balances them, so it's all about positioning and countering the counters. Their recharge is usually pretty good now anyway so if they spend their time killing spirits it's a lot of time they won't be killing your team.


I like your runner build overall, i always liked the Vengeful/Remedy combo, but just a question. Don't you think you'd be better off with Wielder's Remedy or MB&S than Resilient Weapon? I know how good Resilient is, but it also prevents you to use any of your other weapon spells on the target. Seems like Wielder's Remedy even with only 4 Spawning would be more useful in general. It's basically a 5/1/10 enchant that would make Vengeful/Remedy remove a condition every time they're used for 15s. Gives the Rt really efficient condition control. Another option would be Wielder's Strike but it's a little more tricky to time depending on the situation if you rely on Vengeful/Remedy for weapon spell. But it's a pretty nice nuke and when someone isn't targetting you it's a good way to make use of your weapon spells to add to your nuking power. Dunno, just suggestions.