Increasing Gains for Offensive Spirits at Higher Attributes

With the modification of Ritual Lord, it's possible to get your Ritualist attributes up to 18-20 (not including consumables).

However, while this is useful for defensive spirits, on offensive spirits it fails hard. SoGM improves them more than it does, SoS's three spirits make up for the lower attributes, hell, even Wanderlust has more practical application (speaking of which, does Wanderlust need to be an elite spirit in PvE? I get it in PvP where smaller numbers are dealt with, but seems like in PvE it's not all that powerful).

Anyways, point being, Ritual Lord would be a lot more useful for offensive spirit builds if offensive spirits' damage (and duration) increased by significantly higher amounts in attributes past 16. Or even starting at attributes past 12, just to further discourage X/Rt spirit builds in player groups.

Also, by the way, it'd be nice if some of those Ritualist enemies in Factions and EotN got their builds refined into proper spirit spam builds to better take advantage of the sheer power of spirits, increasing the overall challenge and giving Mesmers a greater purpose in player groups due to Spiritual Pain.

For that matter, increase use of Spiritual Pain amongst mesmer enemies that use domination to help tamper the extreme power of spirit spam builds and emphasize the use of positioning (to avoid your party getting wrecked, as is sometimes the case with spirit spammers in Ooze Pit).

Anyways, enough rambling, there's my suggestion(s).


Note that I recognize the Ritualist is quite powerful already. What I'm aiming at is twofold; first of all to widen the scope of their options (NOT to make them stronger, since ideally the adjustments would merely make Ritual Lord equivalent to SoGM in offensive gain) and secondly to increase the difficulty in facing Ritualist enemies.

Weapon attributes have diminished returns above 12, while damage from spirit attacks already increases steadily, even above 12 points. Making this gap larger, for an already strong profession and line of builds, seems ... inappropriate.

Secondly, GW thrives on mixing primary and secondary classes and limiting those options - when they aren't overpowered - goes against the spirit of the game.

Signet of Ghostly Might is the preferred choice for a offensive communing spirit spammer, Signet of Spirits is the preferred choice for a offensive Channeling spirit spammer, Ritual Lord is the preferred choice for a human defensive spirit spammer.
That's already a lot of diversity, how would a change that makes Ritual Lord the preferred choice for all three be beneficial?

I'm going to have to agree with everything you said.

Except that SoGM already produces higher damage from each spirit than the +4 attribute points of RL do. So it's not making the Ritualist stronger, merely bringing one of their options up to match another.

Furthermore, it strengthens the already-high-attribute Ritualist enemies in HM PvE.

this is it exactly, the three different attribute spirit skills were already pretty settled imo, but now ritual lord is an elite that's most logically to go hand-in-hand with restoration spirits.

I think you've pretty much answered your own question. Ritual Lord isn't intended to be used by offensive spirit spammers but by defensive ones.

When did the mentality that everything in PvE has to be good arise?

You have to make choices for your build, that is a core aspect of RPG's. as was said, SoGM is good for offensive spirits, Ritual Lord for defensive spirits. Making RL as good with offensive spirits as SoGM so you could more comfortable have them all would be a case of having your cake and eat it too.

And thats it , making things "even" for all those elite skills is not balancing .... on the contrary , is unbalance them. Everyone has its purposes , none should work at same level of each other when doing X thing .... thats the point of having diff skills.

/notsigned.

Actually, SoS is an example of increasing gains at higher attribute levels, because the benefits of each additional rank go to all 3 spirits. In fact, this is the main reason why ritualists are better spirit spammers than other classes, despite their primary attribute not being so good.

/notsigned