Project: Refining the Ritualist Design 2

Your concept of balance correlates very weakly with reality, if it correlates at all. Who in this thread are you speaking to, exactly? But more importantly, how can anyone accept this statement without some justification? If something doesn't seem right, nothing is more useful than clearly stating why that is, and nothing is less useful than refusing to do so at all. Please try again for the sake of the discussion.

But just to reiterate the point of this thread, the idea is to change spirits so they can be viable without being sharply on either end of the overpowered/underpowered spectrum, and this is hoped to be achieved by altering them to require skill for proper use. Is this not a noble goal to undertake? Fail or not as we may, at least we're trying.

I assume you are referring specifically to spirit spam as it is now, being one-sided, long range, passive effects? I guess you could say we're trying to take the "spam" out of "spirit spam", while also making them less horribly rigid. Certainly we can do something to achieve this end? So far it seems that by reducing spirit's range, making them unmaintainable, and dropping their duration/casting/recharge, we can at least begin to approach this desired balance. I'd like to hear if you think this is a vain attempt or not, if there is something specific that we're overlooking and we should change our perspective on the task. To be blunt I do think that you're wasting your time to a large extent, for several different reasons.

Spirits do not lend themselves to being active effects, at all. A best case scenario for them as 'active' effects would be a comparison to Ward or Aegis, neither of which are terribly active defenses. But they balance differently from those skills, because of the spirit itself. The spirit provides a built in countermeasure for a spirit, that it can be chopped down. But as you lower the natural duration of a spirit, or lower recharges, that countermeasure becomes less and less relevant. You eventually hit a situation where you simply have a passive defense that happens to pop a meaningless spirit up on the screen, as a mechanical artifact. That doesn't make any sense to me; you can reinvent what the spirit means, but the spirit really needs to still be central to the mechanic.

Communing as a line is broken beyond repair. A passive skill or two on a character usually doesn't cause any balance problems; similarly, a character that runs a defensive spirit as part of a larger strategy isn't undesirable. Communing unfortunately offers very little besides making spirits; at the same time, its spirits are extremely attribute point and resource hungry. Hence it's virtually impossible to design a character that only wants 1-2 defensive Communing spirits; once you've invested in one, it almost becomes a given that you're going to invest in all of them.

If a heavy spirit character is viable, it is too good. Spirit spamming is easily the most mindless mechanic in Guild Wars. If that sort of strategy is ever competitive at anything more than the most casual levels of play, you have a problem. Games need to reward effort and player skill, spirits largely do not do that.


All that said, I don't think it's a complete waste of time to look at spirit mechanics. I'd suggest brainstorming along the following lines:

How else can we make use of the spirit mechanic? Is there anything besides being an effect anchor or health reserve? You can continue to lower the AoEs on these skills, say to In The Area, as well as lowering their potency to compensate for the necessary duration, but is there anything better?

How can you lower the attribute burden on spirits? Right now Communing spirits are the most attribute demanding skills in the game, in competition only with minions for that distinction. How do you change that so that these spirits are useful at low spec instead of requiring you to pump up multiple attributes to make them attractive?

How do you discourage loading a bar up with spirits? If you already have 1-2 passive defensive skills, why doesn't a character want to take even more?

As far as I can tell those are the central problems with the spirit mechanic; getting around those problems is the only way they can become a net positive addition to the game instead of a detriment.

All that said, I don't think it's a complete waste of time to look at spirit mechanics. I'd suggest brainstorming along the following lines:

How else can we make use of the spirit mechanic? Is there anything besides being an effect anchor or health reserve? You can continue to lower the AoEs on these skills, say to In The Area, as well as lowering their potency to compensate for the necessary duration, but is there anything better?

How can you lower the attribute burden on spirits? Right now Communing spirits are the most attribute demanding skills in the game, in competition only with minions for that distinction. How do you change that so that these spirits are useful at low spec instead of requiring you to pump up multiple attributes to make them attractive?

How do you discourage loading a bar up with spirits? If you already have 1-2 passive defensive skills, why doesn't a character want to take even more?

As far as I can tell those are the central problems with the spirit mechanic; getting around those problems is the only way they can become a net positive addition to the game instead of a detriment. Some of the things that I think make spirit spamming so enticing:

The primary attribute Spawning Power, before one of the recent updates, only affected spirits (and minions, but thats a big thing really), it did not affect their other two unique skill types at all, which pretty much meant that the emphasis was on spirits, or at least, thats what it seemed like.

Boon of Creation-A spawning power skill that gains you minor health and energy for one spirit, but you start using multiple spirits, you get a very effective emanagement skill, but if you only have one or two spirits, due to recharge of the spirits, you would only trigger this once or twice for each spirit, making this really only useful for spirit spamming. This is also one of the few non-elite emanagement for rits.

Spirit Siphon-Another skill that is only useful if spirits spamming, due to the fact it has a fast recharge, but very minor gain, and can pretty much be used once after creation and once before death (if your lucky) of a spirit so it makes the skill somewhat useful, but again, only for spirit spamming.

Communing in general-This is where a majority of your spirits are, meaning you didnt have to spec into multiple lines for a spirit spammer, but also, if you chose this line, left you with not much else, other than to spirit spam. Many of these spirits also had little synergy with other skills in other lines if only one or two spirits were used. Many spirits had synergy with each other though (shelter, union, displacement/attacking spirits).

Spells with conditions requiring spirits-Quite a few of rit spells require spirits to go from sup-par skill to very nice skill, but in PvP and in some cases, PvE, this is a very exploitable vulnerability if you are the only rit or the only one with spirits, as once your spirit was gone, so was your effectiveness (and many decent spirits kill themselves with their effect), but if you spammed spirits, you still were somewhat effective, though you lost your skills that required the spirits mostly, but you also didnt rely on spirits living.

Ritual Lord-This skill only affects rituals, and is an elite, so if your gonna use an elite for rituals, you better have plenty of rituals to put that elite to good use (problem with this is compounded by the communing line).

Lack of way to keep spirits alive-Not only does this lead to passive play (since you cant really try and heal them and all, and their are very few skills that can heal, but are limited use skills) but also makes spamming more enticing so you can keep yourself effective to your group as much as possible.

All skills that require the destruction of spirit(s)-These all require spirit(s) to be destroyed to have an effect, low and behold, they are almost all in the spawning power att, since most spirits have a useful effect to the party, and due to the long recharge on most spirits, most of these skills seem very counter-productive, unless you are running a multitude of spirits, even then they aren't that enticing, but still, you get the idea.

At this point in time, the ritualist would need to be almost redone in order for spirits to ever to be unique, requiring thought, and still be useful, imo.

Currently spirits are the only gripe I have about ritualists, the rest of their skills are cool, and pretty good (give or take a few skills of course, but every profession has it underused or bad skills).

I would like to change the subject of the thread and just make this a poll:

Who thinks that the Communing line should be changed, fixed or whatever you want to call it?, If Anet made a mistake in implementing Spirits like Shelter and Displacement to promote passive play and no skill in Spirit Spamming, should Anet simply remove Communing from the game? Should the uniqueness of the Ritualist come from Weapon Spells and Item Spells only, and forget about Binding Rituals?

Is there anything wrong with Communing, and the defensive spirits?

If there is, then what would be the point in having a Primary Attribute that affects Spirits Health? Should Spawning Power also be changed? The Communing skill tree does need a closer look, but it does not need removed in my view (nor will Anet remove it). Spirits are too passive, however, and encourage turtling tactics in pvp. In addition, spirits are too immobile and weak for pve. The damage they do is nice for both areas but their mechanics are rather unwieldy. They are simply too attribute and time intensive.

The defensive spirits are inherently flawed in their mechanics. As they are now, they are either too strong or worthless.

Although I do enjoy spirit bombing on occasion and am guilty of spirit spamming in pvp in the past, I would prefer the defensive spirits converted into either item or weapon spells and all other spirits converted to a familiar-like summon that can receive weapon spells. Spirit familiars would be capped at 1 per ritualist. I would also prefer any other sound, well developed active solution instead of the current depreciative passive spirit play.

However, I am not certain how energy intensive such a change would be for the programmers. I assume spirits are a separate class object and changes in that class would influence all objects that extend that class.

Any significant change to the communing tree would require spawning power to be reworked as well. The two trees depend upon each other.

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I rarely use spirits anymore when I play. I prefer to run the other skill trees. Spirits only enter my bar to achieve the skill conditions.

I would like to change the subject of the thread and just make this a poll:

Who thinks that the Communing line should be changed, fixed or whatever you want to call it?, If Anet made a mistake in implementing Spirits like Shelter and Displacement to promote passive play and no skill in Spirit Spamming, should Anet simply remove Communing from the game? Should the uniqueness of the Ritualist come from Weapon Spells and Item Spells only, and forget about Binding Rituals?

Is there anything wrong with Communing, and the defensive spirits?

If there is, then what would be the point in having a Primary Attribute that affects Spirits Health? Should Spawning Power also be changed? Communing has a three big problems:

1) Requires you to spec very heavily in both communing and spawning power, leading to one dimensional builds. You either spam all the spirits or you don't bother. I don't really see an easy way to fix this without completely changing things.

2) The active spells in the communing line are generally crap too. Fixing this might help the line a bit. Dulled weapon and binding chains anyone?

3) Spirits are passive and generally require zero skill. This could be tweaked by lowering the health of spirits, but raising the effectiveness of spirit support skills, like signet of binding or spirit boon strike - instead of catching the spike on a player, you catch it on the spirit.

As for spawning power as a primary attribute, it really sucks. The only time it's ever worth speccing in for the effect is if you're spamming spirits, which is lame. The 2% extra time on weapon spells is a complete joke. Yay, if I waste half my attribute points, my weapon of warding will last 1-2 seconds longer. Big friggin whoop. The skills in spawning power are mediocre at best, and are rarely a reason to spec in it anyway.

A last ditch way to balance defensive spirits would be to have them affect both teams, same as a ranger spirit, and get rid of the health loss aspect entirely. Thus, they become more tactical skills that you avoid using unless you want to screw your offense.