Curse

Alleji · Dec 19, 2006, 08:00 PM // 20:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terra Xin

The only air elementalist that I've lost to was probrably one who used Lightning Shock - and that one only got the better of me because I couldn't even stand up to retaliate. Then again, I just had to sneak in a couple of castings of Mend Body and Soul, and I'd be fine. Other than that.... nope, can't think of a single 1 on 1 match that ive lost to an elementalist.

Because 1v1 matches are obviously the best indication of how good a certain bar is?

I can use an ele with afterburners for 140 energy and just keep spamming gale/lightning strike/mind shock and you simply won't do anything the entire fight. Doesn't mean that this ele build is actually useful anywhere.

Redfeather1975 · Dec 20, 2006, 12:45 AM // 00:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

I don't know what's happening but it seems Rit's are everywhere I look now

. In HA they swarm the place. I even saw a match between Necro Raiders [NR] and Mundane Fabulous Guards [MfG] where there were multiple rit's on both sides.

NR was running 4 (yes 4!) rit's. They were using Glaive, giving it to their Frenzied axe warrior to spike. Very interesting to watch. MfG played an interesting game with Weapon of Remedy. A good one if you ask me. Anyways it seems Rit's aren't as dead as people seem to think.

Make sure you check out the match.

I haven't had much time to watch matches, but I think I should now. Azure and another person said that when the ladder was frozen there seemed to be rits in all kinds of places.

unmatchedfury · Dec 20, 2006, 01:36 AM // 01:36

The fact that your dog could play a SR ele doesn't take away from the fact that the rit would still lose.

Redfeather1975 · Dec 20, 2006, 03:14 AM // 03:14

I can't help but feel when anyone says 1 profession 1on1 will beat another that they don't know all the skills for each profession!
Seriously, Anet makes skills for every profession to make builds to go against the other professions.

Kais Unduli · Dec 20, 2006, 05:12 AM // 05:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carth`

1 melee 1 ranged

One and the same in my eyes, but to the purists yes, Paragons are ranged. With 80 armor.

And all this 1 on 1 talk is nonsense. Beating a few people in a scrimmage does not mean one profession is better than the other. Give it a rest, please.

Terra Xin · Dec 20, 2006, 07:38 AM // 07:38

Fine. But theres no justification to say that the elementalist is better than a rit. None. Prove me wrong anyway you like.

frojack · Dec 20, 2006, 12:45 PM // 12:45

This is getting old but...

There is a way to justify saying an Ele is 'better' at spell-spiking than a Rit. How? They are less conditional, can front-load damage far better (energy), and have a much easier time of achieving knockdown. They can also use armour and speed buffs to make themselves more durable and effective at killing.

Rit's can out-damage Elementalists, by a minute margin (Searing Flames aside) while in the proximity of a spirit (in fact one Mend Body would remove the burning of SF anyways). However when not, the opposite is true. While creating a spirit, the Rit could be half-dead already by the end. Even after creation, the spirit is comically easy to destroy. Then what? Back to square one again. Elementalists are just better at kill with spells than Ritualists. In the most basic of terms, simply because they find it easier. All of which is irrelevant simply because it's a 'team-game'.

If you can quantify all the variables and possibilities of a match between say 4 Ritualists and 4 Elementalists you'd probably find that it would all come down to each team's overall build and how easy it would be for it to go either way. That's just with 4...

Goldleader · Dec 26, 2006, 10:24 PM // 22:24

I beat NF with my ritualist, and overall I am very disappointed with the new skills we rits picked up with NF.

I'm a resto rit, and the restoration line of skills were practically ignored with the NF. I don't like a single skill (including elites) in NF. Weapon of Remedy is nothing more than vengeful weapon + the removal of 1 condition. Talk about weak for an elite. In addition, resotration only picked up 3 regular skills with NightFall. Where's the love A-Net?

Channeling did a couple of interesting additions. Gaze of Fury is one of them...but it seems like the skill belongs under Communing, not channeling.

Communing picked up anguish which is fun for certain situations, but not a whole lot else.

Pain, Vengeful Weapon, Recuperation, Mend Body and Soul, Preservation and Painful Bond are all great skills that make the rit work. It's just too bad none of the NightFall skills made my list of "terrific skills." Perhaps when A-Net makes a rebalance in a few months, we rits will see some of these NightFall skills become amazing.

Saphon the Patient · Dec 26, 2006, 11:59 PM // 23:59

Personally, I quite like certain of the new Elites and have been trying to find builds to make good use of them. Particularly Xinrae's Weapon and Caretaker's Charge. I do however agree that the ritualist has seen a relatively poor set of skills to add to its collection by comparison to other classes.

Dahnel · Dec 27, 2006, 02:36 AM // 02:36

After much testing i'v come to the conclusion about the Nightfall Ritualist skills. We got screwed. Big Time.

The other classes got Metagame changing stuff when it comes to pvp and some extreamly nice things for pve, it seems Anet kind took a look at the Ritualist when they had about 5 mins left until release and said "Eh...throw a couple of those underpowered skill ideas in there, and lets call it a day".

After play testing, the skills i can bear are:

Wielders Zeal
Wielders Remedy
Ghostmirror light (even though its nothing amazing)

Xinraes is *OK* in HA (usually run it in my Rit spike build for altar situations), As is warmongers Weapon (great for interupting Claim Resource)

Terra Xin · Dec 27, 2006, 02:51 AM // 02:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dahnel

After much testing i'v come to the conclusion about the Nightfall Ritualist skills. We got screwed. Big Time.

The other classes got Metagame changing stuff when it comes to pvp and some extreamly nice things for pve, it seems Anet kind took a look at the Ritualist when they had about 5 mins left until release and said "Eh...throw a couple of those underpowered skill ideas in there, and lets call it a day".

After play testing, the skills i can bear are:

Wielders Zeal
Wielders Remedy
Ghostmirror light (even though its nothing amazing)

Xinraes is *OK* in HA (usually run it in my Rit spike build for altar situations), As is warmongers Weapon (great for interupting Claim Resource)

I wouldn't consider Wielder's Zeal an excellent spell for the ritualist.

Weapon of Remedy
Weapon of Fury
Spirit's Strength

Those three I would say are very useful for the rit.

Riceboi · Dec 27, 2006, 04:34 AM // 04:34

RITUALIST POWER!! WE WILL NEVER DIE!!

YOU WILL WORSHIP US!!

Epinephrine · Dec 27, 2006, 05:34 AM // 05:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

There is a way to justify saying an Ele is 'better' at spell-spiking than a Rit. How? They are less conditional, can front-load damage far better (energy), and have a much easier time of achieving knockdown.

Nothing says frontloaded like having 6 spirits set up when someone arrives.

I get what you are saying, but rits excel at things eles simply can't do, and vice versa.

As for the NF skills for rits, not that many great ones, true, but I have a longer list than that;

Weapon of Remedy (Vengeful by itself = ok, with this you can spam reversals and deal with conditions)
Renewing Memories (cheap weapon spells on a non-elite? Awesome. 3 energy for 5 cost skills is a bargain, 7 energy for a 10 cost is almost what the elite Wielder's Zeal gets)
Wielder's Strike (great damage, iffy recharge, but honestly, doing 126 damage with a 1 second casting time is nice for 5 energy)
Wielder's Remedy (paired with renewing memories and weapon of remedy/vengeful weapon you are able to remove conditions at a rate of about 1 per second with healing that reverses damage at 3 energy a cast... it's pretty powerful.)
Warmonger's weapon - interrupts on non-attackers are so much better than the wailing weapon.

A few others make for interesting niche builds and such, or as splash skills, but those are the principals.

Among the crappiest? Vocal Was Sogolon. Wow, a cross class skill, handy if you are a /W or a /P. Except that the vast majority of paragon skills don't beneift much, since they trigger on the next time someone does something, and if they haven't used a skill in 10 seconds the extension probably isn't going to help - so it's most useful for Shields Up or other shouts, which hardly makes sense - no warrior is going to wander around with ashes instead of a weapon, and few ritualists are going to invest that highly in tactics for a shout or two - especially since to benefit from the skill you give up your shield (and if I have tactics, I want a shield typically!) and the ability to gain adrenaline (bye any adrenaline based shouts with this handy little skill. What a piece of crap).

frojack · Dec 27, 2006, 11:34 AM // 11:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terra Xin

I wouldn't consider Wielder's Zeal an excellent spell for the ritualist.

Weapon of Remedy
Weapon of Fury
Spirit's Strength

Those three I would say are very useful for the rit.

QFT (although I still feel Weapon of Fury is junk for full-time Ritualists)...

@Epinephrine:
I hear ya' about spirits. Come on, you must have read my posts about offensive spirits. I get it very well indeed. What I was referring to was 'killing with spells' not just killing in general.
I've been playing with Rt/P and have found some really great builds (I'll post em up later...). The thing that makes Vocal even more annoying is that increasing the length of some shouts and chants isn't always desired (can gimp Echo's), but more than that; How the hell do I build adrenaline while holding something? Getting hit? Great idea that is...

Edit: Glaive was also a good elite addition I think. Caretaker's could use some work, etc...

Patccmoi · Dec 29, 2006, 09:53 AM // 09:53

Caretaker's is an elite that i considered garbage at first glance (sort of a jack of all trade master of none skill) but it ends up being one of the skills i use the most on Rts now and i think it's an awesome addition.

The thing with this is that Channeling and Restoration Rt spells are REALLY energy efficient as a whole. Most are 5E for great effects, with things like Soothing Memories also giving you back energy, and channeling nukes doing over 100 damage costing only 5E, etc. Caretaker's Charge is weak emanagement if you want to run something like Heal Party or 25E spirits. If you compare it to something like EProdigy you're gonna think 'omg, that's aweful'. But in the end, Caretaker's provide just enough energy to use your Rt spells at will. And it's additional damage, which is nice for an emanagement. AND self-healing.

The stats on this skill makes it seem really worse than it is. I thought it was garbage till i played with it. Now, whenever i make a pure Channeling or Channeling/Resto build i'm seriously considering it for elite, because it's gonna allow me to spam. And the main advantage over something like Attuned was Songkai is that it's in Channeling, not Spawning. You can go 12 Channeling-12 Resto (and runes) and just ignore Spawning altogether if you're not using anything else.

We use a Caretaker's Charge flag runner in GvG and it's really good against ganks.

I actually think Rt got quite a bit of good skills in NF. My list:

Warmonger's Weapon (why aren't more people mentioning that? Not that useful on yourself, but throw that on a warrior or assassin and he's gonna make casters feel dazed).
Caretaker's Charge
Weapon of Fury
Spirit's Strength
Sight beyond Sight (that's awesome for Spirit Strength war and actually one of the few Rt skills you see used by /Rt, since even for a warrior it can be kept up 50% of the time with 0 investment)
Weapon of Remedy (This is basically a Vamp Touch for 5E that removes a condition. It's just great)
Renewing Memories (perfect combination with Weapon of Remedy/Vengeful)
Wielder's Remedy (perfect combination again with WoR/Vengeful, but useful with just Vengeful too and works great even with just ~5 spawning)
Anguish (little high on the energy cost, but another 3s cast spirit that can do pretty good damage is nice. Not saying it's awesome, but i use it often)
Gaze of Fury (that's one i use all the time. You can even use it to destroy a spirit out of range by casting it on an enemy that is in cast range of a spirit, allowing you to take down ranger rituals without overextending at all)

List of skills i consider -ok-

Xinrae's Weapon (mostly in PvE. Has potential in PvP, but kinda niche skill if you know what to expect)
Ghostmirror light (I'm not really a fan of those 'you heal other ally, if X you heal yourself too' skills. But another 3s recharge is pretty nice for Resto Rt)
Destructive was Glaive (AOE is awesome, recharge isn't bad, but running in there isn't always that good. Still, not a bad elite)
Wielder's Strike (recharge is too big imo. But damage and ecost are great)
Signet of Binding (really useful on Union and Shelter)
Recovery (it's actually a really good condition duration reduction to everyone, but i dunno, can't really justify taking it most of the time. Maybe it should be a fix 50% condition reduction with lower duration so you could run it with lower Resto but need to cast more often)
Offering of Spirit (it's not great, but at high Channeling it's actually good emanagement if you don't want to invest in another line)
Wielder's Zeal (not too sure in what build i would use that. Only time i find myself spamming weapon is with Vengeful, and if i go Vengeful and look for an elite i'll go for Remedy...)

List of skills i consider badly lacking:

Empowerement (what is the joke with that? Put it 10-15s recharge and 2s cast then it has a use...)
Death Pact Signet (is that a joke? Make something about the condition so that it's not THAT retarded. Like, for 30s if target die you die, i dunno)
Spirit's Gift (MAYBE for Rt/N MM, but really it's just kinda stupid. You can't really try to plant spirit near allies efficiently...)
Reclaim Essence (only good with a MM ally that doesn't care if you eat his minions all the time... has potential for huge energy gain but kinda bad without fast recharge spirits)

really niche skill :

Vocal was Sogolon. You can make something great with Command Shout on Rt/P with it (nearly permanent Godspeed, permanent Stand your Ground!, 15s duration 'Never Surrender', etc.) but that's about it. It was really nice when Incoming last 6s at 12 Command for 9s duration. Now you can reach 6s, which is nice but not sure it's worth the elite.

Honestly i think Rt got pretty great stuff overall. I rarely run a Rt without using some NF skills in their bar anymore.

AuraofMana · Dec 30, 2006, 08:27 PM // 20:27

I don't play a Rit and I can tell you that Rit does his/her job well is unstoppable.
I tried to play Rit once and failed miserably (I hate supporting chars -.-), but the long casting time of spirits and the DEPENDENCY on spirits really catches a lot of the new players as a complicated, useless class.
And as you probably know, most people don't use their brains.

unmatchedfury · Dec 30, 2006, 09:38 PM // 21:38

rits do have a lot of great skills. Its just that in a up close fight there close to useless because they can't get their spirits up due to interrupts. Rits need spirits and items and weapon spells to fill in the conditional requirements for most of their spells. The problem is that all off these excepting weapon spells are easily interrupted shutting the rit down for 30 seconds with one interrupt. ON a monk if something gets diverted you can do without. If your items spell gets diverted your screwed too about 50-66% efficiency.

there isn't really any reason to have a rit. Although he can fill in for any class in PVE he can't the kind of efficiency that eles get, that monks get, that paragons get. And I don't think he realy should . Because he's only got one attributte devoted to being a sub for each one of those classes. If that one attribute could deliver the same efficiency it be imbalanced. But since he's designed to be a jack-of-all-trades, he inevitable falls into the category of "sucks at everything"

channeling rits IF all conditions are met can keep up with and eles DPS. however they can't kite very well haven’t any easy to implement self healing escape buffs or anything besides dmg. An ele can do with 3-4 spells what a rit has to do with 7. the rits has about 3 skills devoted to meeting the spirit/item/support to make item and spirit stay up 100% ,requirements. Those extra 3 skills on an ele allow t he ele to be a flag runner, warder, and quite alot of things because it doesn't have to meet pre requirements of spells. it can just use them. also they've one KD spell which isn't target able or ranged.
It's only real excelling use is when you've already equipped it ( once again a glorious 2 sec INTERRUPT ME! cast time) and spirits are regrettably easy to remove, shutting down rits for 20-45 seconds.

same thing with restoration. A rit can't remove hexes, and the only way it can remove conditions is to spam weapon spells. which is energy efficient at all because it takes (yet again) a pre-requisite enchant or spirit to remove conditions. The whole problem with rits is that as a versatile class they aren't very versatile. They have to spend half their build just meeting the conditions to actually make the skill be worth it. What’s worse they can't effectively preprot like monks. Monks can cast 2-3 prot enchants on a player at a time. Rits are stuck with one at a time. Most of which have LONGER cool downs that monk prot spells. Some of them really are good even by them selves. resilient weapon is excellent against condition degen pressure.( and only because is has the second lowest cool down of weapons) but since they can't stack you've got to have one only or waste a skill slot on a skill you can't use 80% of the time. the other thing that is frustrating is that monks can cast big heals such as ZB B-light, gift of health, infuse, not to mention various enchants that will nuke heal when triggered. The rit? he's got one. he has to be near a spirit to use it and it cant be followed up until 3/4 a second later which is often too late in a GvG or even RA.

So the rits inability to pre prot, spike heal, remove hexes, needing 2 slots to remove conditions, and having to rely purely on 5 mana 1 second heals to heal with (which isn't very energy efficient in the long run unless you've got AwS) makes the rit totally crippled compared toa monk. The onyl thing the rit can do better is heal party, although if he does go for feast of souls he won't be able to do much else.

I would really like it if spirits weren’t so damn easy to interrupt. their the only class in the game that has to constantly cast resurrection length spells of 5 seconds that a blind monkey could interrupt and yet they’ve no dependable way to stop interrupts.

If that wasn't bad enough Anet brilliantly decides to put spiritual pain in the game with huge aoe radius and 100 dps against spirit and everything in the vicinity. (still trying to figure that one out)

the rits have a lot of potential. I like using them but as much as I like them I have to admit their not as good as the classes they try to play. They've too many inefficacies, a huge weakness to interrupts, and item and weapon spells cancel each other out.

One thing that rits do well is spamming Offensive spirits. RA, TA, and HA use spirit spammers quite a bit. Some of them such as wanderlust and shadow song are almost imbalanced. And if they we’re aim-able would be.
They can, if set up before the other team can get there form a very powerful immobile offense. Unfortunately all the team has to do to beat them is bring along an interrupt ranger with a long bow. Simply interrupt as you try to put up spirits. And let your spirits die off.

They would be excellent if they’ve weren’t so wonderfully bugged. Anyone who’s used them knows if the spirits have a target outside their range. They will ignore an enemy that walks right through them as long as he isn’t attacking. Also sometimes when you die the will unexplainably stop attacking. They generally have a lot of problems retargeting. And they don’t attack lowest health but rather lowest armor. If a warrior is at 10% health and a monk comes in they’ll switch to the monk.(this doesn’t make much sense as spirits attacks ignore armor) Making spirits aim-able would be nice. Although it’d make any spirit with effects on attack much stronger.

Patccmoi · Dec 30, 2006, 10:29 PM // 22:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by unmatchedfury

snip

I think you ignore the synergy part of Rts. Many Rts build are hard to use alone because of all the req but are very efficient in a team build along with other Rts. We use that often in GvG and it works extremely well. 2+ Rts together can easily meet all the spirit/weapon requisite and that usually makes them really efficient. While a Channeling Rt as sole Rt will have trouble doing much, you can easily have one along with a Communing Rt giving him the weapon spell and spirit req and all you need to do from there on is nuke AND you have room for utility. We often use 1 Channeling/Resto hybrid with 1 Channeling/Communing hybrid and both together provide very good focused nuking + spirits pressure + utility (Warmonger, WoQ, Gaze of Fury, MB&S for heal and condition removal...).

One of the strength of Rts is actually their ability to be hybrid. It gives them very good strength as part of gank teams for example or for counter gank. Remedy/Vengeful Rts are becoming popular there, and in GvG our current runner is a Rt/E with a mix of Channeling/Resto that can both heal and damage decently. He can't replace a monk or an ele on his own, but in skirmishes you rarely need as much healing power as a monk can provide or as much nuking power as an ele, but you need some of both and Rts do that much more efficiently than an E/Mo.

For offensive pressure, offensive spirits are honestly great, especially since Paragon (Crippling Anthem + Anthem of Flame + spirits and a bunch of melee is ridiculous. Some people are running it on obs, NUKE walked over every guild on obs in less than 5-10 min yesterday with it). Yes, they take a while to activate, but honestly the interrupt problem is really not frequent even in teams with rangers. I played offensive spirit often in GvG and spirits get off much more often than not with good positioning. And SP isn't the end of spirits either cause Mesmers don't have infinite energy for it. Oh, and for interrupts you have Song of Concentration on Paragon (or /P) that can help a lot. But one skill i would like to see buffed to handle that is Armor of Unfeeling. It would be really nice if it made it so you need 2 interrupts to be interrupted (like some bosses) or 50% chances to resist interrupts. Atm this skill is pretty garbage but a buff like this would allow it to fill some required utility on Rts and it seems like it'd fit with the skill name too.

For resto, i don't see how you can say their 5E spells aren't energy efficient. Spirit Light is as energy efficient as Gift of Health which is the basis of most monk builds these days. MB&S is incredible as a base heal (and it's .75s cast) AND it can remove conditions, you don't absolutely need the enchant for that. Spirit Transfer is a good spike heal (and you just need a spirit in cast range for this one which isn't bad), and GwT is the best self-spike heal in the game. Yes, you need spirits for most, i'm conscious of that, but if you have more than 1 Rt that's usually easily accomplished. I agree that some cast time on Resto could be lowered to allow for more reactive healing though. Something like Holy Haste in Spawning Power could've been interesting. I wonder why ANet didn't notice that if Heal Monk need help, Resto Rt need it too cause it's very similar to heal monks in terms of cast/recharge.

I agree that offensive spirits AI need some help, but it's bearable atm. But an improvement would be very nice indeed.

And Rt/W with spirit strength are very usable in competitive play in a build designed to support them. It's what we're working on currently and the pressure they can apply is really amazing and it's hard to shutdown with blind immunity and good constant cover enchants.

Rts are viable options to many of the core classes, but you have to adapt the builds for them. You can't take out an Ele and put a Rt there or take out a Monk and put a Rt there. But i don't see why you should either.

LifeInfusion · Dec 30, 2006, 10:31 PM // 22:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terra Xin

Fine. But theres no justification to say that the elementalist is better than a rit. None. Prove me wrong anyway you like.

Channeling vs. Air magic
20% armor penetration (100% of the time) begs to differ.

EDIT: also, Blind and weakness cannot be applied by Rits without blowing up spirits.

Spirits rock but Spiritual Pain laid down the hurt. Weapon spells rock but you cannot stack them. Wards stack.

Redfeather1975 · Dec 31, 2006, 12:28 AM // 00:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by LifeInfusion

Channeling vs. Air magic
20% armor penetration (100% of the time) begs to differ.

EDIT: also, Blind and weakness cannot be applied by Rits without blowing up spirits.

Spirits rock but Spiritual Pain laid down the hurt. Weapon spells rock but you cannot stack them. Wards stack.

I mean no insult by this, but aren't there many more facets to the game than highest damage, highest healing, highest armour, fastest condition spreading. This is a profession that can create a wide variety of builds to adapt to the ebb and flow of PVP battles and the variety of battles in a PVE zone.
A ritualist is very capable of creating a build that can quickly switch to decent sustained healing, dps as the flow of battle requires. And with good anticipation can do an above average job of spike healing, dps with experience.
Ritualists can't be the best in any one thing, but a well played ritualist is easily very good at stabilizing group dps, healing when it is needed. I still don't understand why a PVE PUG would want 2 monks instead of a monk and ritualist, when they know full well that the 2nd monk is going to be a bump on the log 90% of the time.

Maybe it's because many ritualist players try to specialize in only 1 area, rather than playing the regulator role I believe was 1 of the main roles Anet originally intended.

To everyone out there who hasn't tried, it is a good idea to make a resto/channeling rit sometime. There are many skills that allow the ritualist to make a build that can focus on 1 or the other or both in a heartbeat while being very energy efficient overall. It will help to fill whatever role the group needs help with most during the course of battle. It's almost like a dance. Sadly a dance, that if done well, the group will not pause to give notice.