Please help improve my Spirit-way

Hi, I built these builds just to overwhelm mobs and roll through any pve area. The pets are just to add number's and fill a slot. Am hoping that somebody can find something to swap pets for and generally improve for more elite area's The questions that immediately spring to my mind are "How many rits?" and "Is having every spirit in the book actually a good idea?"

You've got almost all spirits cast under either ST or Summon spirits, presumably so that you'll never have to wait for cooldowns, which is fair enough if that's important to you. And you seem to have every spirit known to man, including several that don't exactly set the world on fire. That means you've got a lot of duplicate ST and energy management, and several ST rits who haven't got anything good in their last 2-3 slots.

I think you should do some culling of the weak skills and compress the bars, bring it down to 3 or 4 rits and find something more useful for the secondary professions. Also group your spirits functionally to allow tactical flagging -- offensive spirits together on a hero who'll be flagged forward, protective on another who'll be flagged back, and so on.

The player channelling rit should use Spirit Siphon for energy (it's very powerful), lose the heal (leave healing to the professionals), lose the pet. That frees two slots for e.g. Painful Bond (best used on a player) and Ancestor's Rage or Splinter Weapon. Or, since you've got Summon Spirits which no hero can bring, make the most of it by running a standard spirit spammer.

Make a prot rit with ST, Shelter, Union, Displacement who can go in the backline.

Now for the biggie... You've gone to all that trouble with ST to avoid waiting for spirits, then added Wanderlust which has a long cooldown. It's a decent elite, but ISTM you have to decide whether you really want it. If you keep it then stop using ST except on the protter, and merge your 5 rits into 2 spirit spammers plus a protter. If you lose Wanderlust+Earthbind, decide which other spirits you really need and put them on one or two ST rits.

Here are a couple of possible ways to do it:


Once you've settled your spirits, fill in the gaps with more rit skills or skills from a secondary profession.

A compromise approach would be to put Wanderlust and other slow offensive communing spirits on the player, who can use Spirit Siphon intelligently to power them and Summon Spirits to get around their cooldowns. Then ensure that the spirits on heroes all either cast under ST or have a 30 second maximum cooldown. In practice, 30 seconds rarely holds you up but 45 can be a bother. That would mean a little attribute dilution in some places, but nothing awful. This alternative gets you Wanderlust and without the vast majority of the waiting.


{edit} I ran the first three bars of that last setup on a vanquish of Mt Quinkai, in front of a bomber + some Eles + Monk. It was OK, rather solid for a team with one heal/prot hybrid, and adequate but not great damage output. It's possible to keep Wanderlust's health replenished using Summon Spirits until it expires, and putting Earthbind under ST keeps that going. The player bar gets pretty busy keeping the spirits up and managing energy, it feels like one is earning one's living.

Whilst it's quite amusing watching knockdown animations on Yetis who are normally immune to it, it must be said that knocking down one at a time ain't that extraordinary. Blinding them with a non-elite would do much the same job.

In the bigger picture, i.e. having 3-5 rits instead of the usual 2, I think a horde of spirits isn't going to shine unless you fight single foes. Team builds like Spiritway transcend this by cherry picking only the really good spirits, but as you start to use every spirit you can cram on the results suffer compared to AoE.