Are you ever going to kill Spirit Spam ?

I been gone all summer and I came back to find that the game is deader than ever......

Ursan and Shadowform killed it for the majority , but there are still some people around......

Seriously isn't it time to say enough is enough......

There is no one out playing in mission zones anymore....

The only place you can hope to get a group is in the daily Z-mission area......

...........and you can't play there either because there are always 7 million sos rits waiting to play for you......

Can't we just have gameplay back for a little while........?

Please ?

I'm afraid thats just how this game seems to play out, SoS got a lil nerf a while back. If Rit's got a major nerf people would come up with a new replacement anyway eg. Ursan -> Perma -> SoS It'll go on and on.

It is a little offputting though, even in the zmiss areas, the vast majority wanting SoS or Monks, I think what they are doing with GW2 is going to remedy that annoyance

There always seems to be a mindnessly strong build out there that people would rather run as opposed to organising and trusting each other.

Hey I ain't complaining tho, SoS heroway is making Vanquishing EoTN easy!

Ursan got killed: no one out playing in mission zones, still everyone farming dungeons and endgame.

Shadow Form got killed: no one out playing in mission zones, still everyone farming dungeons and endgame.

SoS gets killed: ....

The game is old. Most people rush their chars to endgame to farm there. And when only a few new people trickle in every day, there are just no people wanting to do these missions. This has got nothing to do with the FOTM farming setup.

Solution: go hero/henchies, or get a nice guild. Or quit the game

It's not THAT OP in comparison to things like Ursan and SF. Destroying SoS would make rits pretty weaksauce, where as the nerf of ursan and SF didn't actually hurt their respective classes (especially with Ursan...).

It's pretty obvious that Spirit spamming is a bit overpowered. They dont have to be destroyed but it wouldnt hurt to make it a bit less OP.

Since you can basically only have 1 SoS per group and rits have other options ST/SoGM/DwG/Resto...I'm not really seeing the issue. Plus the Sf "nerf" wasn't really a nerf...it made the skill better for 95% of the areas where it is abused.

If heroes and henchmen didn't exist I would never ever have touched this game. Being dependent on other people to progress would have been awful.

O.o the SF nerf wasnt a nerf? i dont see any assasins soloing the UW anymore unless im missing something maybe aaxte still cant hit you i dont know.

SoS bugs me i have the elite on all of my characters and i only use it on my rit i do this because should it be fair all classes can go DROP SPIRITS RUN! i like my spirits but really being able to roll through all areas without even trying thats really a gambreaking skill, at least with ursan and shadow form youd have to be careful with SoS just summon spirits then do summon spirits close to the group and run and thats all you have to do

The game is 5 years old and what I would call in a mature state. If people are using SoS and it keeps people playing until GW2 is released, so be it.

Shadow form nerfed haha... seriously go in doomlore , you find easily perma sins running any dungeon. Kath sc + SoO sc are run with 8 shadow form sins too. UW and FoW use shadow form sin as tank... Ursan was nothing compared to it.

Its far too late to worry about super powerful builds spoiling the game and to be honest I would be more than a little annoyed if they were removed.

When the players began exploiting the weakness of the game using Ursan and later Shadowform it should have been corrected within 24 hours not many months.
There are players in the game that achieved what they did be it cash items or titles etc because of such builds.
Its only fair that players coming along later get the same or similar advantage.

This game has a bad reputation as regards players so its no surprise that 5 years on many prefer to play an online game without involving other humans.

I expect GW2 to be a great improvement but as for this one let the power builds stay and let everyone complete the game however they like, its not as if removing all these builds would suddenly flood the game areas with loads of players wanting to form parties.

My suggestion would be to put the casting times back on the spirits...it lowers the spamability (more or less) while still letting the rits have a decent use for spirits.
I honestly don't see the reasoning behing making all the cast times 3/4 second when leaving them at 2 seconds would have still worked just fine

They still solo plains.....they solo fow...they play key roles in every SC (which most have gotten faster) It's very easy to see.....go to ToA or Vlox Falls and see for yourself if SF got nerfed.

Everyone has complaints about the game, but for this type of complaint, the best course would be an email to Regina or Martin, or a member of the live team.

Ursan and Shadowform were extremely overpowered skills. One cannot expect them to have been kept, since one required extensive grind to get to max and the other required you to be an Assassin. Both are far too restrictive. In addition, Guild Wars was never about having a required build to do something, and both skills created that very situation. You couldn't play the way you wanted and be effective.

Now, rits have a couple options available to them (SoS, DwG, Rit MM bomber, Rit Lord spirit spammer, to name a few) Other classes have a few viable builds, and those that don't are being balanced. Yes, the balancing is taking a long time, but that's to be expected with 1,200+ skills.

They shortened the casting times for spirit skills because it took too long to set up spirits. By the time a rit had finished, the party had killed the mob and were moving on. So rits were not especially desired in PvE party setups.

Here is a link to the Developer Notes on that June 2009 change.
http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/de...l_balances.php

Thats the part I don't get...they never thought of pre-casting?
Instead of making players learn how to play smart, they dumbed it down. I mean, sure in a PuG the warrior will run off and attack everything in sight which ruins pre-casting for everyone...but thats an issue that teams should address and fix in advance. The devs shouldn't have to dumb down skills just so rits (or any profession for that matter) can play nice with PuGs

This. Circle it, underline it, highlight it, make it into a blinking neon sign.

This isn't an issue about PuGs. This was an issue about any group not seeing any advantage to bringing a rit along. And a rit using H/H was out performed by his heroes and henchman. The ritualist was not an attractive class and the developers decided to fix that. In this same update (June 2009) they also improved Spawning Power to give main rits an advantage over secondary rits.

They revisited the improved ritualist in February 2010 as while much more useful, the profession was still not dealing effective damage in Hard Mode or Endgame areas. http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/de...#ritualist_pve
Those updates made the ritualist effective and desirable and thus very popular. I don't see any difference from the popularity of mesmers or assassins.

I'm sorry, what? How exactly are the rits keeping you from playing? It's a single player that needs to be part of a team to work, and the mechanics of the build forbid there to be more than one (two, if you can manage to make one of them swap their builds to communing spirits, good luck with that) character running the build in your team.

Yeah, because PUGs are really going to wait 10-20 seconds before every battle for you to drop 3-5 spirits. Oh wait, we already did this experiment when spirits took that long to cast, nobody waited. Spirit spamming is already boring, making you sit there for a few seconds per spirit was even worse.