User:Raine Valen/Mass Balance/Ritualist

Index

The Ritualist.

A living conduit to the Spirit world, the Ritualist spawns powerful Spirit allies that inflict harm on foes, and can channel restorative magic that heals and protects injured companions.

— in-game description

Since the release of Factions, Ritualists had been plagued with balance issues. From their ability to create fortresses of spirits to their ability to make NPCs impossible to kill in split gameplay, they'd always had something inherently wrong with the way they operated. In this update, we've made many sweeping changes with the goal of eradicating the imbalance that had been prevalent withing this class.

Equipment

Working with Ritualist equipment was different than working with the equipment for many other classes for one major reason: Item Spells. Because of the passive benefits of many item spells, the Ritualist's base equipment became less prevalent than the skills applied on top of it. For example, it wasn't uncommon for Ritualists to have full-time 100 base armor between Protective Was Kaolai and Herald's Insignias. By the same token, the powerful effects of many item spells often caused ritualists to forgo the benefits of their weapons altogether, making it difficult to balance skills with equipment in mind.

Attributes

The only Ritualist attribute that granted a passive bonus was Spawning Power, and it hadn't really proven to be noteworthy in the past. By powering up attribute bonuses, we hoped to better-balance some of the attributes overall.

Skills

One of the issues with Ritualists has been that their skills do way too many more things than one character should be able to do. One of our first steps was to rethink the purpose of the Ritualist: we asked ourselves, "What role should this class fill?" Their previous ability to create passive fortresses with spirits had proven bad for play, but they'd been proven to be worse than the other professions at emulation. With this update, we aimed to give the Ritualist a new, unique purpose.

Related Mechanics

Weapon Spells

The irremovable, unstackable nature of weapon spells had always made them a delicate balance. By working with the mechanic itself, we found that the skills were far easier to keep properly balanced.

Spirits

Because many Ritualist skills dealt with spirits, we felt that some changes to the way spirits behave were in order with the changes to the class itself.

Spirit Effects

Characterized by enormous AoE and fragile hosts, the way that spirit effects themselves worked made a couple of skills difficult to balance. In tweaking the way they worked, we've worked to make spirits better-balanced.