Spawning Power + Other primaries Discussion

Can you people stop saying the Sin wasn't suppose to exist? They are one of the most popular classes in GW, which means that it was a success and was meant to be in GW.
I truly love the Sin class and hope GW2 will have a similar concept of the Sin, just make their skills more balance-able (even though I do not believe there are any troublesome balancing issues with Shadow Steps as many here say so).
I still would like the 1-2-3-4-5 SWIFT style of combat from the Sin, but but not instakill style. It does not have to be 1-2-3-4-5 style, but I would still want to see a swift/deadly/cunning style Assassin/ninja-like class whose primary combat style of play is similar to that of Ninja Gaiden.

A lot of people dont think Spawning Power is useful anymore. Actually, its probably what makes Ritualists so special. Everyone can run basic Splinter Volley, Spammer builds, but running a build with Spawning power as the main, now thats a thing of beauty.

Spawning, yes, can use a bit of a buff, make it a little more worth while, but in its current state, it can actually bring out the true essence of ritualists. Now, you may ask, what are you talking about? I say, spawning power can be very powerful, when you think about how to use it. Thats the thing with rits, they are like rubic cubes, take some thought into how it works, how to use what combinations of turns to solve the puzzle, but once you understand it, you can breeze through them. Spawning power is an underused and powerful SUPPORT attribute, and can only be brought to its full potential in some situations. Sadly, these situations are not the current way of doing things in Guild Wars, so this is where people see Spawning Power as weak.

Hope my 2 cents aids to this discussion

and just as a note, i (as a rit main) do run Spawning Power builds on an almost daily basis, it just happens to be how i do things with my guild.

Shields up and Watch yourself were far better balanced prior to their nerfings then imbagon is now. I were one of the minority at the time when WY was nerfed and I complained as strongly against it for PVE as I could, just to get flamed into oblivion by the elitist PVPers telling me to learn to play the game and adjust to skill changes.

That was prior to PVE and PVP skill seperation when they nerfed WY to affect up to a whopping 3 next attacks.

Imbagon is a PVE skill build that can only be used on the human player. WY and Shields Up could be used on heroes, and they were hardly Imbalanced in PVE, comeon we have so much shit that is 10x more imbalanced then tactics used to be in PVE now. Tactics was nerfed for PVP, and Anet made an epic asshat job out of trying to rebalance it for both PVP and PVE.

If monks with tactics skills are Imba in PVP (tbh, they really arent, shield of deflection hybrid healer is 10x more powerful), then go ahead and seperate the tactics line with a simple PVE and PVP split, but make it at least some what usable again.

As for FC fix - your mesmer spells recharge 1% faster for each rank of FC (on top of the current effect). That would seem like a good fix, but then Anet would go and increase the recharge on mesmer skills a few months later so it would be pointless in the long run.

And necromancers and soul reaping wasnt so imbalanced untill Anet added ritualists to the game. The simple fix at the time was to not make spirits and summons count for SR energy gain, but Anets skill balance team of monkeys couldnt pick up the idea of this simple fix.

And spawning is just pointless for any build other then spirits strength, and maybe for the wanderlust and Preservation spirit builds, but preservation is pointless because as a lot of people dont realise, it has a rubbish gimped range compared to other non elite spirits and hardly ever covers your whole party. Think of it as a stationary heal area affecting one random ally in the area every few seconds, beyond pointless.

One fix would be for spawning to add armor and regeneration points to summons as well - +1 armor per rank +1 health regeneration for every 4 ranks which would make spirit spamming a little more sustainable for rits, and buff spawning skills to benefit summons and spirits a lot more.

This is my honest opinion on the topic, feel to agree or disagree to any of it.

Personally, I like the idea of having Fast Casting affect recharges as well. Even if ANet does turn around and increase recharge times to compensate, it still provides a benefit to being a Mesmer primary in PvE over being, say, a Necromancer or Elementalist poaching the more desirable Mesmer skills with their much greater energy stores. (Oh, looky! Is that a tap of the nerf-stick on Cry of Pain used by no-attribute-investment Mesmer secondaries? Clearly an unintended side effect. What a shame...)

It would also help in keeping at least some forms of Mesmer energy management viable - the recharge can be set so that it works well for Mesmers, but isn't overpowering in the hands of, say, a Monk.

The Ritualist probably has it worse off than the Mesmer because Fast Casting does actually benefit almost everything the Mesmer does, even if only in a small fashion, while a lot of the Ritualist skills aren't really affected by Spawning Power (any direct healing skill, direct damage skill, hex, enchantment, and even the more popular weapon spells tend to only take effect a limited number of times, thus marginalising Spawning Power). Personally, my favoured solution is to have Spawning Power give an appropriate boost to all Ritualist skills. This would need to be compensated for by reducing the base power of these skills, but a light nerf to /Rts (especially N/Rts, but experiments have shown that E/Rts and even Me/Rts also perform decently) probably wouldn't be a bad thing.

Another sneaky solution, going along bhavv's line of thinking, is to eliminate the health bonus entirely (wait for it...). This is replaced by setting the level of any creature created by the Ritualist equal to the Ritualist's spawning power attribute... if this results in a higher level than the skill used would normally create. However, this may make Rt/Ns more effective in minion mastering (not necassarily a bad thing, as they still have other costs and limitations compared to Necro primaries) while making them less effective in using PvE skills that summon allies such as EVAS and the Asura summons.

gogo perma SF mesmer!

Well, at least it's practical. If you think about it, fast casting does very little for mesmers. There really isn't much of a difference in interrupting a 2 second cast or a 1.3 second cast. And that's at 10 fast casting, which is a pretty significant investment. The elementalist's primary helps to alleviate their sometimes-prohibitive energy costs. The mesmer's primary is a minor convenience at best. And I won't even get started on the skill lines of the two professions.

A) Already possible, I believe.

B) Solvable by making the recharge improvement affect Mesmer spells and signets only. (It'd be more elegant if it was across-the-board, but Elementalist skills getting adjusted to weaken Me/Es in PvP suggest that ANet may not want to risk them overshadowing elementalists there again.)

You know, if you take away the dagger chains of the assassin, then you have a warrior with 10 less armor and few ways to defend himself.

I'm not sure why people dislike the instant kill thing, either. It can be annoying, but its hardly used in GvG or HA, and normally when it is a simple D-Shot or Diversion can make the entire build useless.

However, I do believe that they should be nerfed, albeit slightly, somehow to keep the pressure but not the holycrapwtfpwned of it.
Although, with a good monk then the spike is basically screwed over anyways.
Palm strike, the current Meta sin, is the only exception to this, and is a spike build that recharges way too quick.

My idea for spawning power can basically be the same as boon of creation. Get rid of that skill, and give a certain amount of health and energy whenever a spirit or other creature is made, and possibly when a spirit dies.
Like, at 12 spawning power you get 5 energy and are healed for 30 health whenever you create a spirit or minion, and are healed for another 30 or so when (only a spirit) dies.
So basically, the opposite of a necro. Get energy and a small amount of health for making something, while the necro gets the energy when something dies.

Although I wouldn't really care either way If I got some new spirits to tinker around with.

i know its not a primary attribute, but changing pets abit could be good
mainly, charm animal (if pet is dead, you res pet with 10...30% health and you loose all energy. maybe reset all your skills too

and change pve so partywide stuff, (heal party, stand your ground etc) also effect pets. maybe 50% effect, that would be quite fun i think, some ranger shouts could be buffed to include allied pets

haha, you're kidding right? More like...

God tier: Monk (if you can play one right) and Paragon (imbagon>PvE; its the only thing that deserves God title)
Good tier: Elementalist, Dervish, Warrior, Assassin, Ranger
Lowest tier: Ritualist, Mesmer

Keep in mind this is for pve only.

FC nukers and water snares saying HI

Well, I really do like my Ritualist also in PvE but may main complaint is the slowness of the casting. Spirits take 3-5 seconds each and that is just annoying. I really think 2-3 seconds would be enough. In fact, I would be happy if spawning power lowered the casting time of spirits.
Especially since they are susceptible to burning there is no need to keep casting them such a lengthy affair.
Of course in PvE there are PvE skills and then you can run things like this:

[Essence Strike][Spirit Burn][Clamor of Souls][Spirit Rift][Agony][Bloodsong][Vampirism][Summon Spirits]

With Summon Spirits you can cast them before going into combat and this build really does deall plenty of damage in PvE this way. I do have sunspear maxed for vampirism and kurzick rank 9 atm. Clamor of Souls is different now since the last skill update, so don't go by what it seems to show here, which is still the old version, it is now a ranged atttack which can hit multiple targets with energy gain.

More on a general note, I feel that there is a problem with some primary attributes because it makes some classes better at running other classes. The best examples for this are the necro/rit healer and the ranger/necro toucher.
Just the fact that that is possible is a major fault to me. A rit healer should be better at restoration than a necro etc. The trend generally is exactly that. Why are there Mesmer/Ele's? Because they can cast AoE spells faster. I can't accept that that is the point of primary attributes.
They should serve to make the primary class be better at their own class. That should be the focus for it. The secondary class shouldn't be the mainstay of skills used in the skill bar. To me that is a sign of failure of the dual class system.
Expertise should never give an energy discount on necro skills for that toucher build...it's epic fail.
Or perhaps a split idea where one effect works on the primary only and another on both classes. Example would be the fast casting idea that it casts spells faster for both mesmer and secondary but that an added faster recharge of spells would only work for actual mesmer spells. Just as an idea.

Beyond that I think that some problems have occurred due to somewhat poor design of a class. I think a lot of problems could've been avoided if the Paragon had been designed differently as far as attributes are concerned. The fact that the primary doesn't reflect either the weapon or a shield of the profession was poor design in my view. It makes it so that a paragon has to invest into 3 attributes in a lot of cases. A paragon uses a shield and spear traditionally and so it's spear mastery, command or motivation and leadership. The last one being the energy management for the class.
They did the same more or less with the Dervish, but the Derv has no shield so doesn't have that problem.
And with the nerfing of the Paragon, well recharge times and effect of skills have been limited to a point where it's just tricky to get anything but either an overpowered gimmick build or a crap build. Not much in between really.

Well, I can only hope that GW2 has a better attribute system because I don't know how they're going to fix a lot of these issues in GW1 anymore.

thing about spawning power is that it has mediocre skills AND a mediocre effect. nobody compains about strength because the skills are good, and nobody really complains about fast casting (even though the entire attribute is defeated by a weapon mod).

but who cares about SP. it allows you to heavily invest in 2 attributes. nothing serious is going to be done about it either because Rits are the designated flag runners in GVG and i doubt anet wants to screw with that balance right now. just leave it alone honestly, if you want to buff the attibute then buff the skills so theyre realistically useable.

Spawning power... Would be nice if it reduced the energy cost and cast time of summoning skills. Or perhaps make other skills more effective when you control X number of spirits. Like add 5% increased damage or healing per spirit under your control. That might be interesting.

Fast casting... Mesmer primary only helps cast long-cast spells more quickly... yay... Pretty pointless in PvE. The point is that FC helps people cast Diversion or water hexes faster in PvP, but the loss of the synergy with spells associated primary isnt worth it in PvE. Eles can cast massive AeE damage pretty much infinately (double attunement), and Necros never run energy into massive energy issues with massive AoE as well. Mesmers have very little AoE (VoR, with 20 second recharge lawl). FC woud be MORE useful if it made spells cost less (like experise for spell casting) AND reduced rechage durations for spells cast. At 10 FC, a 40% reduction in spell cost and 40% decrease in cool-downtime would be awesome. Also, Empathy and Backfire need AoE PvE versions, and EVERYONE would take Mesmers in pugs.

Ohhhh i like that idea of Spawning Power being the opposite of Soul Reaping. Give energy when something is created vs death...that could make things interesting.

Yeah but obviously not everyone GvG's so why not buff it just for PvE?

Interesting idea, but it largely still has the same problems SP does currently - only useful (or at best, only more useful than SR) for specific builds. In fact, it may even be worse than SR all the time if SR continues to work for your own spirits.

Largely agreed - pets eating 1/4 of your bar at minimum is a strong deterrant. Personally, I'd argue for removing the current function of Charm Animal entirely, and make it so that bringing any skill that specifically requires your pet will cause your pet to appear, and can be used to charm a pet if you're currently petless.

Personally, I don't see 'running the secondary' being better than primaries as a problem for niche builds. If casting speed is more important for a build than the benefits of ES, than it's entirely reasonable for a Me/E to be superior than an E primary... up to a point. Touch rangers are borderline cases... but I don't really think we're going to see a bunch of necromancer primary touchers crop up if the ability to make touch rangers is removed, do you?

It's the N/Rt that makes it silly - because in that case it's not so much that the N/Rt is occupying a niche, but that it works for such a wide spread of potential Ritualist builds that it's the Ritualist primaries that get forced into niches.

To summarise... for most Elementalist and Necromancer builds, you're still going to use an Elementalist or Necromancer primary despite the presence of Me/Es, touch rangers or orders dervishes. For most Ritualist builds... if you're looking for power and you have complete freedom of equipment, you'll use the N/Rt. This is the problem.

Visions of Regret effectively is the area-of-effect Backfire. And I've maintained almost since release that SS should have been a Mesmer skill.

Totally agreed. Likewise dervishes seem to make better secondaries in most cases, A/D Crit scythe for example. For GW2 I hope that there will be distinct disadvantages in using secondary profession skills (moreso than the max 12 spec, no primary attribute we currently have in GW) so that all primaries will have equal chance of success.

As long as it doesn't go too far - we don't want to make it prohibitively disadvantaged, just enough to make sure that a primary profession doesn't get outcompeted by characters running it as a secondary.