ritualist skill changes...

so they were so overpowered you could kill them before they could touch you? huh interesting.

I think the teams I got were easy. At numerous points there was nothing BUT Rit Spike in the HoH.

Do you want a cookie? Life has a 20s recharge and loses effectiveness if you kill it earlier, Kaolai has a 20s recharge and Feast of Souls kills all your spirits, ie Life and Recup AND I DONT WANT TO KILL THEM!

Think what your suggesting... because what you did was RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing stupid, none of those 3 skills are even remotely suitable to replacing a monks heal party/LoD, and there is no way in hell your average pug is gonna drop there healer monk for Rit builds that are so incredibly reliant on spirits for Hard Mode/Elite Areas/Endgame.

Great... and they succeeded by giving it exhaustion... turning it from an overpowered spiking skill to a useless pile of shit. Izzy is a moron, he's obviously running out of ideas if he's had to stoop this low to nerf Rit Spike, just stick 'causes exhaustion' onto most of the rits useful damage dealing skills. What exactly do you expect Rits to do now... just use Wielder's Strike once every 30 seconds to avoid exhaustion and instead just annoy the team with massive healing? Because people really loved that sort of play with Signet of Mystic Wrath.

<3 anet no more rit spike

gd job izzy

Do you even read the recharge times on the skills you posted. It takes 20 sec for life to die normally and cause its heal. Killing it earlier just reduces the amount it heals and you have to wait the same for recharge. There is 20 sec on those ashes also none of those are even close to comparable to lod/heal party. Im not saying life is bad just in this situation its not good enough.

In the deep i find you are forced to change to a attuned/heal party rit if you can get a spot and are basically a gimped monk and waste of party slot because no rit skills can heal group effectively, where you need to stand in one room or a long distance away and have to spam party heals to heal the other groups.

Energy management is also a useless thing to have in any of these areas because there is always a bip necromancer.

I used to find the best and most unique part of being a rit was the weapon spells but these have just seen nerf after nerf. I used to love resilient weapon but then the armor nerf came so it became useless. Warding duration lowered. Splinter weapon can no longer be precast on whole group and so on.

With shelter preventing 1 aoe dmg spike is nice but why should it do only that look at the cost and recharge and how good it is in normal mode. Why should it turn into a crappy skill in hardmode when other classes skills dont. The same with displacement especially if you have a mm in the group which is usually the case its total trash. If this was balanced aegis would last for 2-3 sec in hardmode instead of its normal duration but it doesnt. Union is the only thing that actually stays alive for a little while and that alone isnt significant enough to make having a defense spiritspammer worth taking into mid+ hardmode areas.

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Recuperation , nearest to heal party/lod

main problem i had with spirits when i used them was quickly moving out of range, the horrible cast times (why do necro's get bloodstain insig and rits dont get a ghostly insig?), attacky ones are expensive for a imobile paperbag armoured bone fiend

I never said they were any better or worse than Light of Deliverance...Each party heal can be used in different circumstances. That reply was in relation to:
well...clearly that statement is incorrect? I assume you would grant me the fact that protective was Kaolai is in fact a partywide heal? Please read who and what I'm quoting and responding to next time.

You don't need to kill both Life and Recuperation at the same time. You *could* put them a reasonable distance apart...

I know you're angry about the "Rit Nerf" but there's no need to take it out on me.


@ Sazgo, Please accept my most heartfelt apologies...I did not realise your entire post was relating to Hard Mode/high-end elite areas only.

The addition of exhaustion to the previously high energy spirits doesn't bother me too much. If anything, it actually makes them viable for a build, as long as you only pick one of them. Otherwise Dissonance, Disenchantment, and Anguish saw very little play as attack spirits (at 25e) when you had Pain, Bloodsong, Vampirism, Shadowsong, and Wanderlust to use.

What is more annoying to me is the addition of exhaustion to Wanderlust. Wanderlust was not overpowered for an elite skill. In fact, it now appears equal to or even somewhat underpowered compared to, say, Dissonance. Both have useful disruptive secondary effects (KD vs interrupt), both cost the same to cast, both cause exhaustion, both have the same casting time, wanderlust has a longer recharge but longer duration to match. The biggest difference, Dissonance causes damage while Wanderlust doesn't. How can you justify Wanderlust being an elite?

I can live with most of the exhaustion nerfs, however, Wanderlust just got nuked into oblivion. Leave exhaustion on the other spirits but take it away from Wanderlust. Its supposed to be an elite.

Fair enough, my apologies.

yeah... and next week you'll be bitching about something else that has become popular and want it nerfed... repeat ad nauseum until every old skill in the game is useless. except for the ones you play, of course. if some skill the nerfherders played actually got nerfed, oh man, there would be hell to pay. but other than that just keep on nerfing.... I mean, if it ain't broke you gotta break it right? thats the motto for keeping balance?

still love how they promote diversity by limiting options and telling you how to play. that one is rich.

The thing that shocks me the most was the nerfing of the ONLY communing elite skill that's still used (Wanderlust).

fine ANET, nerf wanderlust, but give players some options...

This seems like a pretty good idea at it's basic level: "Since Rits are now the only other class besides Eles to have exhaustion on their primary class skills, make them the only other class that has a way to deal with exhaustion via their currently under-used primary attribute, just like Eles."

However, I think +1 pip for each 4 levels of spawning power is a bit too much. If you make it too high you're going to see Rits who spam exhaustion heavy skills like they weren't even causing it. If you have a 12 SP Rit, they're losing exhaustion as fast as they're gaining MP (in other words the exhaustion has almost no effect if they are below max MP). Even as low as 8 SP, the effect of exhaustion is fairly mild.

There are some fairly strong skills in the Ele skill lines that have been made highly spamable with the only real down side being their exhaustion (Obsidian Flame and Mind Burn come to mind), but which I can see a Rt/E running well enough with high SP to match. Of course this is just from a moment's thinking about it, a build centered on this hypothetical SP+Exhaustion Spam could end up as crap, YMMV, etc. Just something to consider.

So, maybe make it something a bit lower but keep the basic idea. A bonus of somewhere between .2 and .15 pips per rank in SP sounds about right. Make them really sink some points into SP if they want to run an Exhaustion-heavy build.

As much as I hated people spirit spamming I really don't think exhaustion is the answer but I guess we will have to wait and see. Exhaustion is a bit much since they don't get energy storage to work with and yes I'll use it as a comparison because everytime we go through skill changes every other class except for eles get hits hardest. I am sure there is a better solution other then exhaustion.

Well, we hardly see all that many nukers these days. Adding exhaustion to rits just puts them one step closer to nukers.......Yet another class to be all but forgotten I guess... ahh I miss the good ol days when nukers where everywhere....

This isn't even a bad update, it's beyond that. To take a whole class and seriously mangle a whole set of skills with exhaustion just so pvp players can find balance is just plain stupid.

PVP is perfectly balanced at all times, everyone is allowed to use whatever build they like, including exactly the same build as everyone else. I can choose to employ a wooden spoon and beat my enemy to death with that, if he opts for a nuke and kills me within seconds there is nothing to stop me from going down the nuke option next time. I can see a flaw in my argument here though; the pvp experience becomes flat because everyone is using the same strategy. The solution, nerf the problematic build and to hell with the pve fallout. Gee thanks.

At this point some people are going to tell me to stop whining and just move on, explore new builds, find new ways to use the ritualist. I say to them that this is flawed thinking. I'm being limited with what I can use, my range of options is being squeezed and, quite simply, the fun of being the ritualist to me has been ruined.

Also, don't force me to buy Gwen in order to repair something that should not have been broken in the first place. Let me buy Gwen because you make great games not because you are employing underhanded business tactics, it won't wash with me.

I feel Guildwars has lost it's sense of aesthetics. The necro is a good example; now soul reaping is activated every five seconds as opposed to everytime something dies. Inconsistent with the original ideas and artificial. Not good for your game. It reminds me of Star Wars; in the original films the force was a mystical concept. In the crappy prequels we have it explained as science; something to do with cell components in the human body.

Rather than exhaustion why not create something like this: When a spirit dies it consumes some of the casters energy as it returns to the mists from whence it came. More in soul reaping reduces this cost. Like an anti-necro, if you really even need a solution.

Of course the real answer, which is sacrilegious to the team at Arenanet, would be to simply divorce pvp and pve. It would solve all this skill balancing crap. Have the same skills but let each camp tweak them to their heart's content. PVP and PVE are not compatible, you can't please both camps and I'm sensing that the PVP camp takes priority. My question is simple; why alienate pve, even if it is your minority customer base? When there is a simple solution to pleasing both camps.

I loved Guildwars, I spent almost all of my spare time, since discovering it last year, playing it. At it's best it was an awesome game but my faith in it has been shaken. It reminds me of Red Alert 2 / Yuri's Revenge - a superb game, C&C 3 (the sequel) - to my mind, a very average game.

Success always brings about it's own downfall (The successor to Nightfall per chance?)

The bad things in life are with us always, the good things always come to an end. And so it seems with Guildwars. Never mind, hundreds of games out there other than GW.

A cancer in PvP? Who cares? PvP died a long time ago.

edit: nevermind. anything I say will just get bitched about anyway. but suffice to say, I agree with the quoted post.

Personally, I think Wanderlust causing exhaustion now is completely wrong, it takes a lot damamge when it effects, and doesn't give only, only knockdown. I also feel, as I stated in another thread, that PvE people should not suffer because of builds used in one part of PvP.

also very true. PvP has basically become a dead fetus draining away the strength of the mother that is guild wars. and instead of removing the death, anet would rather have the mother die as well.

And heres where your train of thought left the station and crashed into a lake....

Anet ruined the ritualist a long time ago with the nerf to communing, so I rarely have played my ritualist since, so the recent nerf doesn't bother me too much, I do however feel sorry for anyone that uses their ritualist on a regular basis, because after this stupid nerf, there is simply not much use for a ritualist anymore... The Exaustion idea is totally dumb on a class that has such a low energy pool.

What I don't like about the exhaustion is that is forces me into builds I generally don't like because they simply don't work as well. Instead of generating creativity they have ruined it by forcing players to avoid builds that have 2 or more of these skills listed.

Fact is the Ritualist does not have the extra energy to deal with prolonged use of exhaustion that an Elementalist has. This will force Rit Spike to go Ele /Rit. This does not solve the issue just changes the primary a little.

I've liked GW for as long as I've played it, which isn't quite as long as many of you here, but it still struck me as a great game. When I came across the Ritualist, I fell completely in love. Completely. Now I'm not a PvPer, haven't gone that route yet, but .... now I don't see my rit ever being the PvEer that she was. I HATE the changes. My primary character is worthless now. Thats all I have the heart to say.

Thank you, ArenaNet, for reminding me that all good things truly do come to an end.