Counter Spirits

It seems odd to me that such powerful global effects as Spirits are confined to one Profession. Other professions should have access to similar effects.

As a tentative example of such an ability for a Mesmer:

Seal of Forbiddance
10 Energy, 5 sec casting time, 30 sec recharge
Create a level x Seal. Within its range Spirits take y additional energy and z additional seconds to summon.

Think of a Seal as being something like a Spirit with a different graphic. I don't specify values x,y,z because I'm not sure what levels they would need to be set at to work appropriately. Inclusion of such a skill could provide a balance against Nature's Renewal without completely hosing it as a power.

Other variations for the other professions could be devised as well. Elemental Seals that increase the powers of their respective elements for Elementalists. Death Spirits that effect the properties of Minions for Necromancers. And so forth.

There have been been many posts about Spirit spamming and ways to balance it. I think the best way to balance skills that affect the entire playfield is to include similar skills that counter their effects, or provide compensatory effects of their own, thus opening up new areas of strategy, rather than just slapping a nerf down.

I don't think that this idea is anything new, but I wonder if perhaps A-net is unwilling to balance the current powers directly because they are intending to balance them later by the addition of more powers?

I never thought I'd be saying this, but we need Unnatural Signet back.

I wasn't around when that was in play. What did it do?

What is Unnatural Signet, Weezer? Is it something like what the OP is talking about? Did it purge spirits or something?

Can't remember exactly. At the time it was made, it was absolutely laughable, and was one of those skills put in a build if you were trying to make the worst possible build, ever. It was a mesmer skill: I think it removed all Natural Rituals on the field, but had a huge recharge time, and disabled all your skills for like 25 seconds. Obviously a joke, but at this point, I'd take it any day.

I also like to know.

At the end of the day Rangers are primarily support class in battle, which is why they have them. Maybe in the next expansion they make a direct counter for them, till then have to deal with it.

Found it...

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...natural+signet

absolutely horrible. I guess it wouldn't be as useful as I remembered... maybe if they buffed it so it removed them all.

I dont know the exact specs of the skill, but it makes a very brief mention of it in the Prima guide, the quote being: "In addition, Mesmser are the only class that can counter a nature ritual (with Unnatural Signet)." Like I said, very brief.

46 second recharge time? Disables all skills? *pales visibly* There there, little Mesmer....mother won't make you use such a nasty skill.

Before Natural Rituals made spirits, they were just skills that could only be removed through Unnatural Signet. They didn't affect just a small radius, but the entire map. On one of the updates, A.Net decided to make them into Spirits that you could kill, and then dispose of Unnatural Signet. Unfortunatly, now you can spam them like hell. I guess you could back then too, but I never saw it. They also used to cause the ranger who cast them a 5% death penalty. At the time, I thought it was great when they took that off. In hindsight, it should have been left on to prevent spam (although they'd probably still do it, seeing as their skill bar exists of nothing but rituals and Oath Shot.

i dont think bringing back Unnatural Signet will do anything. it still is a really bad skill no matter how badly u need to get rid of a ritual. if they are going to do anything about spirit spamming, i think they should make NR an elite skill and take out oath shot or something

It does seem odd that spirts can only be counted by spirts. Then again is it really that hard to take ranger seccondary and bring a counter spirt like energising winds or edge of extinction? Also spirts have a 5 seccond cast time. It's easy to get an intuerput on them.
Spirts are powerful but they do effect everybody.

Unnatural Signet HAD to be crappy, because the nature rituals used to be one-time use skills. Removing something that could never be re-used had to have severe counterindictions.

Right now, since spamming them is the real issue, just reborn Unnatural Signet (Unnatural Totem or some such spirit-like destroyable entity, with a repelling connotation, such as a ward.)like Nature's Renewal-

Removes existing spirits in range and causes future spirits to take 2x as long to cast.

Nature's Renewal is supposed to be the counter to mass spammed enchantments, so I don't see how people could complain about the counter to mass spammed spirits.

Of course, Nature's Renewal also hurts a large variety of skills greatly, and receives quite a bit of attention because of that. Still, Nature Rituals are a pretty small branch of skills covered by only one profession, whereas Enchantments and Hexes are shared by all casters and make up a good portion of their skills.

Bleh, buffs and debuffs are always a mess.