The new professions as secondaries: How effective?

How effective do you think the assassin and ritualist will be as secondaries?

My take
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I foresee they will be rather mediocre as secondaries, because of assassins' critical strikes attribute and ritualists' spawning power attribute.

The increased critical hit percentage and 2 energy gain on hit for assassins will be a big deal. This means if you are a caster, assassin skills only will help you hex or escape. The whole dagger line is ineffective as a caster. Therefore there might be many dagger wielding w/a and a/w's...

If you are a ritualist secondary, you lose out on the primary attribute that gives you 4% additional health to all animated things including binding rituals, minions and spirits. This means they would not last as long while under attack. At best, ritualist secondary will have mediocre usage of spirits, like a necromancer secondaries' poor usage of minions.
You also lose boon of creation which heals and gives you energy when you animate, and healing with spirit killing.

Therefore, I think that the most common use of ritualist will be for resing like monks are used for secondaries now just for ressing. Asssassin secondary dagger users will probably only exist on high armored characters, like warriors, rangers, or necromancers with tormentor's/necrotic sets.

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What's your thoughts?

I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of ranger/ritualist spirit spammers, using Oath Shot and heavy Expertise. Sure, the spirits go down faster, but if you can drop a new one every 20 seconds, is that such a problem? Ritualists can use Ritual Lord in place of Oath Shot, but the energy from Boon is no match for 16 Expertise when you're using those 25e spirits, not even with the extra arrow of energy regen. It seems to me that primary ritualists who want to spirit-spam will need to take mesmer secondary and invest in Inspiration to get their interrupt protection (R/Rt's can use Whirling Defense) and a few energy management skills, which leaves less room for the spirits.

Assassin secondaries that use daggers will likely be even less effective than warrior secondaries using melee weapons, except perhaps for R/A's. (Again with the Expertise!) I think that Deadly Arts and Shadow Arts show some potential for non-melee primaries, though.

ran/ass may loose out on the critical strike bonus, but 90% (give or take) of the assassin skills can be made cheaper with expertise

But you can't critical as much with assassin secondary...nor can you use the runes

Assassin should be about as common a secondary as warrior. They'll probably see a boost of usage from A/W and W/A combinations but that's about the extent of it.

My initial impression is that the first ritualist is better built as a R/Rt with Oath Shot and Whirling Defense. The spirit guy looks like he's going to need both energy and recharge support to even start being effective and the ritualist has neither in non-elite form. We'll see what sorts of energy and/or recharge options the other professions bring in the expansion, those have a potentially huge impact on how characters will be built.

Peace,
-CxE

Enseign has spoken, and as usual is correct.