Buff to Spawning Power

Originally Posted by kazi_saki

Someone should just create a spawning power buff thread and sticky it. That way, all the suggestions can be compiled and people can just add on to it without cluttering. They can place it either in riverside or here.

Originally Posted by kazi_saki

Someone should just create a spawning power buff thread and sticky it. That way, all the suggestions can be compiled and people can just add on to it without cluttering. They can place it either in riverside or here.

Originally Posted by Lourens

There are many ritualist spirits that lose health while doing something [shelter][displacement] etc

Originally Posted by draxynnic

Counterarguments:
How many Warrior builds get no benefit from Strength? Back when the Tactics/Strength balance was different to what it is now, there was a tendency for Strength to only have a handful of points after the weapon attribute, Tactics, and any secondary profession attributes got their share, but it is very hard to make a Warrior build that gains no benefit at all from it. Even if you DO dump Strength entirely, Warriors have another primary attribute, one that requires no point investment at all: +20 armour with an extra +20 versus physical. And lets not forget how many Strength-based skills are seen as vital in today's Warrior builds.

How many Monk builds gain no benefit at all from Divine Favour? You could probably put one together, but I don't think it would be popular. Nor, with the possible exception of the Mesmer/Monk signet spammer, would I expect to see some other profession play to their secondary in order to combine Monk smiting skills with a 'more appropriate' primary attribute in any serious play.

Few Dervish builds fail to gain a benefit from Mysticism. Few Paragon builds fail to gain a benefit from Leadership. Few Assassin builds fail to gain a benefit from Critical Strikes. Those that do can certainly be played as a weaponswap from another class, but in each case, the actual choice of weapon is kinda incidental to each class. And are you really suggesting that Soul Reaping doesn't provide any benefit at all to a character not using Soul Reaping skills?

In short, none of the other professions are at risk of being pushed out of their role due to the situations where their primary attribute doesn't help.

Compare to the Ritualist, where in the current meta, the primary attribute almost NEVER helps. Spawning Power in its current form does nothing to break the paradigm that a spirit that comes under direct attack - or even that simply falls afoul of some AoE - is going to go down in seconds, and with pretty much all of the spirits that take damage on their effect triggering nerfed into oblivion, you don't see SP coming into play there either. In fact, except in the case of spirit spamming for specific (generally solo) quests, spirit use nowadays tends to be restricted to cheap tokens that will trigger conditional benefits of other skills. The popular weapon spells are those that only have a limited number of triggers - Splinter, Vengeful, Remedy - meaning that the weapon has often discharged before the full duration expires in the first place. Heals and Channeling zaps, of course, gain no direct benefit.

In short, while in all your examples the primary attributes still provide a benefit to pretty much any build you'd expect to see using that profession, Spawning Power provides nothing significant to the majority of current Ritualist builds.

The end result? Most people who are stubborn enough to continue playing Ritualists are dumping Spawning Power entirely to focus on Restoration and Channeling. Others use those builds on primary Necromancers and primary Elementalists to reap the rewards of energy-providing primary attributes on a profession whose skills were designed to be usable without them. With Spawning Power doing absolutely nothing, if they're only using one Ritualist attribute they have no incentive not to apart from the loss of the rune (whoop-de-doo), and even if they're using both Channeling and Restoration, running three attributes is not much harder than, say, running Channeling, Restoration and Spawning Power.

So, for the tl;dr version: The reason why Spawning Power needs fixing more than any other primary attribute is not because of the number of individual skills that don't benefit from Spawning Power... it's because it's the only primary attribute which provides no benefit to the majority of complete builds used by its profession. Even Mesmers get at least a token benefit from Fast Casting, but the typical Ritualist in the current state of the game gains nothing from Spawning Power, and conventional wisdom states that pretty much every primary Ritualist would be better off as a Necromancer primary with Soul Reaping. This is why Spawning Power needs to be improved.

Originally Posted by DoomFrost

Would this be a nice general effect?

For each rank of Spawning Power you have, creatures you create (or animate) have 4% more Health, weapon Spells you cast last 2% longer, and ritualist spells and binding rituals you cast heal you and adjacent ally spirits for 4 health.

So at 8 spawning power you and adjacent spirits would get healed for 32, at 12 - 48, and so on.

Originally Posted by Vehemence

How about not buffing spawning power but just create a new useful primary attribute. Maybe energy management attribute like most other classes.

Originally Posted by spirit of defeat

Not a bad idea. But which spirits need healing? mostly the protection spirits. And it won't help them much. unless you start spamming [[Renewing Surge] which doesn't combine with the protection spirit's

Originally Posted by DoomFrost

It's not really supposed to keep a spirit up indefinitely, just enough. Obviously Anet would have to fool around with it to find a balanced number.

From my thoughts when I said "adjacent ally spirits" that means two or more rits could heal the same ally spirit with whatever they had in spawning power. So I really took that into consideration when I was playing around with the number and thought 4 to be the best all around.

Even then though if you had 4 ritts at 15 spawning power, all four of them could heal a spirit for 240 health. And that's just by using one skill. Even 192 at 12 spawning power.

Originally Posted by Vehemence

How about not buffing spawning power but just create a new useful primary attribute. Maybe energy management attribute like most other classes.

Originally Posted by spirit of defeat

Rit's don't have energy probelms. so if SP is related to energy it will cause many nerf's.

Originally Posted by Dr.Jones

Yea but its one of the main reasons people go N/rt instead of Rt/n.

Originally Posted by Dr.Jones

Yea but its one of the main reasons people go N/rt instead of Rt/n.

Originally Posted by Nightow

Maybe they just can't balance a hybrid (healer/buffer) / summoner class.

Originally Posted by Hanging Man

thats what I'm thinking. Its tough to make a balanced profession when other classes can do it better than the class that's supposed to.

Originally Posted by street peddler

well if nothing happens in the april update i guess we can just consider it a lost cause.

Originally Posted by Nightow

Well, I can't say that the dev's aren't aware of the situation now...

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User_...g_power_lovein

But linsey's response leaves me less than hopeful.

Originally Posted by Dr.Jones

well if you look at that topic she is right to be wary of it. i mean its walls and walls of text.

Originally Posted by Sweet Mystery

Well your one of the miniscule masses Infamous16 that may think a wholescale revamp to add 1% armor pen to spawning power is worth it.

I'd prefer Anets attention focused where it is and where it's needed, not on some minor un-needed change to SP.

If Anet look at I am sure they will look long and hard...

Originally Posted by Lourens

Ritualist are summoners they summon spirits and healing is just something they can do to I mean Paragons and Dervishes can Heal to but are they good at it? NO... so just leave the rit healing alone and focus on the supportive spirits weapons spells offensive spirits they all benefit greatly from spawning power as they should be, I mean restoration is like inspiration for mesmers you use them next to your main attribute (domination,communing,illusion,channeling) And I mean a N/Rt can never be a better healer then a Monk but a Rt/Mo with some hex removal can there are lots of good secondaries for ritualists that makes them shine

Originally Posted by draxynnic

Actually, the ritualist was intended to act as a possible substitute for the Monk, both for healing and protection. I expect part of the inspiration for making the class came from the observation that 8-person groups almost invariably had two Monks in them, so when they went to eight professions they made one a Monk substitute.

Anyway, that's their intended role. Summoning spirits happens to be part of how they do it. They can use their powers offensively as well, of course, but so can a Monk with a little bit of Smiting (although, to be fair, the Rit is a little more offensively-oriented in general). This is part of the reason why Ritualist heals have been progressively buffed since Ritualists were introduced - they were initially 'priced' similar to Monk heals, but then ANet realised they were hurting due to lack of DF and improved the base skills to compensate instead of looking at the effect of the Ritualist primary... and this is why N/Rts are so powerful today. (And for the record, a Rit can sub in for a Monk in many areas and do the job. Human Monks tend to be preferred for a number of reasons that I'm not going to go into, but a Ritualist CAN do the job. And as for N/Rts, we all know of the power of Sabway...)

While going slightly off-topic, the healing of the Paragon and Dervish does seem to geared towards 'assisting' the primary healers rather than acting as one... but the imbagon certainly seems to perform well occupying one of the backline slots, and I have heard of specialised Dervishes doing a credible job of relieving pressure.

Originally Posted by Nightow

I've heard about how Rits were orig. supposed to backline with monks but if i recall correctly, people started to complain of very long PvP matches. When Anet saw this, they took the protection aspect of the rit out of favor. (outside of WoW) back when this first happened, some of us understood anet's reasoning and (begrudgingly) accepted loosing that aspect of the profession.

Originally Posted by street peddler

nobody agrees with the stupid armor penetration thing. this thread is just being used as discussion for different spawning power ideas.

and yes spawning power does need a change.

Originally Posted by draxynnic

Pretty much. To compensate, however, they have made huge buffs to the direct healing available to the Ritualist - on release, the typical Ritualist healing spell was roughly on par with a Monk healing spell without DF, and now they make some Monks jealous even with DF in the mix. As has already been observed multiple times, though, the opportunity for a backline role this represents has been taken by Ritualist secondaries - the healing N/Rt in Sabway being the most obvious example.

Originally Posted by draxynnic

Regarding the ritlord, from memory the main problem with that in PvP was that due to the long range of spirits, a ritlord could often find some out-of-the-way part of the map that was still within range of the fighting location and drop spirits in relative safety. A variant of that concern may be part of the reason we haven't seen a PvE split of the skills involved (apart from Ritual Lord itself) - the SY! Paragon or Warrior still actually has to be in the fighting, after all, while the ritlord can, in theory, stay back and drop spirits in safety (unless found be a patrol the group neglected to clear...).

Originally Posted by Nightow

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the buffs to the resto heals occur after the buff to many healing prayer skills such as WoH? I always thought that the buff to resto was so that their numbers could compare to the post-buffed healing prayer skills and not to the lack of worthy prot skills.

Originally Posted by draxynnic

I think there have been a few waves. First Ritlord got nerfed, then Ritualist direct healing effects were buffed to help them keep up with primary Monks better, then we had the general healing buffs.

(To demonstrate how much things have changed - I don't have a reference, but I vaguely remember that Spirit Light used to cost 10 energy while only healing about 80-100ish health (at typical ranges for Restoration). Mend Body and Soul originally healed for about half what it does now, from memory.)

Originally Posted by draxynnic

I think it's something that ANet has toyed with. One of the issues with Soul Reaping is that its effectiveness is more dependant on the environment than the player. You can get more out of Mysticism by using more enchantments, Critical Strikes by using more crit-enhancing skills, and so on, with each of these having their trade-offs but generally equally effective regardless of where you are (unless facing hard counters). Soul Reaping, however, is something that is incredibly powerful when you have a minion swarm along and it's triggering at the maximum rate, but weaker in, say, a PvP match where each death is significant.

A further consideration is that minion master builds actually do typically need that energy to function - a SR nerf would need to happen alongside reductions of costs of necromancer spells in general and minion spells in particular.

Originally Posted by draxynnic

That could do it. One possible concern is that it could make long-lived, long-recharge spirits less valuable by increasing the chance that the fighting will move out of range before the spirit is ready to be replaced, but this can be compensated for, especially with skills like Summon Spirits available.

Originally Posted by draxynnic

Personally, I'd like to see Spawning Power give a buff to the healing of Ritualist healing spells, and a to the damage of Ritualist damaging skills. That way, they could nerf secondary Rits and buff primary Rits simultaneously.