Ritualist as a Class? Or Elite Spec?

[Teratus.2859]

@Lily.1935 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:I highly doubt Anet will add any new professions again, it would unbalance everything until they added 3 new classes total which would also need to have 2 elite specs each and add another 3 classes to make elite specs for in future.. it's just not worth the hastle tbh.

Ritualist would be better off being reworked into an elite spec for the Revenant imo.. perhaps a condi spec based around minions.Stationary minions based on the old Ritualist Spirits.New weapon Sceptor and new legend could be Legendary Enigma (Razah unless it's still alive) or Legendary Master (Togo).Would work very well in combination with Legendary Demon Stance, specially if spirits lingured for a short time after legends were swapped.

Healing skill: Rejuvenation, Summon a passive spirit that heals upto 10 allies within earshot by a small amount every second, Sacrifice to heal the Revenant and purge conditions around the spirit.

Utility:Agony, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks enemies in range around it and inflicts bleed and slow, sacrifice to inflict fear and torment.Pain, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks enemies from afar, sacrifice to inflict damage and burn.Summon Spirits, Pull all spirits to your location inflicting 2 stacks of bleed and torment around you for each spirit pulled and dazing enemies within range.

Elite: Union, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks foes and steals life from them, This spirit also bonds with the Revenant and takes 20% of the revenants incoming damage away and that damage is applied to the spirit instead, Sacrifice to pull downed allies to the spirits location and heal them by a small amount.

I think something like this could work really well for the Revenant

Adding a new profession wouldn't necessarily unbalance the game. IT can, but not for the reasons you think. Eventually I feel that we'll hit a critical mass of elite specs and adding new professions would be the best way forward. Ritualist is a prime candidate for that.

Well it would add more balance problems, more classes = more balance issues that's just a natural side effect of it.But it would significantly increase the development time, Anet already has to make 9 new elite specs per expansion, adding another 3 to that per expansion would add to the development time.Plus each new class they add would need to have 2 elite specs right from the beginning so there's no way they could just add ritualist without adding another 2 classes with it to round it out and give all 3 of them 2-3 elite specs at the same time.It's way too much work for no legititmate payoff, if we didn't have the elite spec system then it wouldn't be as much of a problem to add more classes.Elite Specs are pretty much the substitute for new classes while also being a way to enhance the 9 we already have, it's better this way if you ask me.And the only reason we got Revenant in the end was to balance out the classes, 3 light, 3 medium and 3 heavy.

As for Ritualist being a revenant elite spec... Absolutely not. What you've suggested sounds nothing like a ritualist. Sounds like a necromancer. Ritualist's abilities and themes are quite vast and there is plenty of room for them to make a profession out of it. I'm working on a fan made concept of what a Ritualist profession might look like, although i'm not designing elite specs even though I do have some unique Ideas that could work with its theme and design. It might be worth them looking into making new professions in the future. At the moment, we don't needed. But once we have 3 to 4 elite specs I feel that is the time they should probably consider it.

Actually it's more like an offensive variant of Spirit Ranger rather than a Necromancer.I can see why you'd relate it to Necro though, I did say Minions and some of the skill examples do sound similar to what a Necro can do, Ranger can do some of those things too though like pull the downed.Sure there's more than enough elements of the Ritualist to say it could be made into it's own class but I am more than convinced that Gw2 will never see another new class added again for the reasons I mentioned above.Elite Specs are the only way forward imo and Revenants and Ritualists have a significant amount in common as well, so if any class will gain Ritualist profession traits it should be the Revenant.

Ritualists don't apply bleeding. Never did. They strike the soul more frequently than the body. They sort of had a mini theme in GW1 of Mesmer corrupts the mind, Necromancer corrupts the body and Ritualist corrupts the soul.

The skills were just examples of how the spec could play in Gw2, conditions are easily changed around to fit a better theme although lets face it, conditions in Gw2 are a joke compared to the condition system in Gw1.You could only bleed things that had a circulartory system in gw1.. you could only poision organic creatures.. you couldn't burn fire and elements actually had super effective damage against each other.Gw2 did away with most of that to make condition damage a viable playstyle to power damage.. A change that works sure but I vastly prefer the more realistic way Gw1 handled those effects.

Revenant is way too martial to fit their theme as well. The ritualistic dancers who wear cloth and bones being turned into something that wears plate and wields a giant hammer just doesn't sit well with me. My inner GW1 player would weep.

Anet already did that when they merged the Monk and Paragon together to make the Guardian class.Likewise Necromancers in Gw1 wore a lot of spiked metal armor as well and there are very few metal armors in gw2 for light wearers, for the most part Necros in Gw2 just wear cloth or robes like an Elementalist would, which also completely kills their Gw1 gothic style.Their Reaper shroud is also the closest thing we have to Dervish scythe play.. so it's not like Gw2 hasn't already taken a lot of Gw1 concepts and changed them significantly to fit them into Gw2.A Ritualist themed spec for Revenant is not that unlikely if you ask me.. specially when you take into account that Revenant in many ways is a successor or evolution of the Ritualist much like the Guardian is for the Monk and Paragon.

Plus with the Ritualist constume recently added you could easily get your Revenant Ritualist elite spec and wear the outfit if you really wanted to look like an old school ritualist.Gw1 and Gw2 are very different games and no class in Gw2 can honestly say it sticks extremely close to it's kin in Gw1.In Gw1 Necros didn't run around with daggers and greatswords.. Warriors didn't run around with rifles.. Mesmers didn't run around with pistols or swords.Each class got changed, updated and evolved to fit into Gw2 and in many ways became it's own new thing.

Read over your idea again. Its REALLY REALLY necromancer. I mean, a lot of the skills sound like death shroud attached to Minions. Revenant has a specific flow of gameplay. Which is why I say its Martial. Its flow is extremely different from Engineer and necromancer which play the most like how the Ritualist would play. Beyond just that, the argument of the guardian is a poor one. No one thinks of the guardian as the monk. Some think of it as the paragon reborn, but in spite of its magical similarities to the monk, it isn't a monk. It will also never gain a monk elite spec and people really don't want it to. Guardian acts extremely different from Monk and their core philosophies are so different they had to become different professions.

I guess you misunderstood then because the way I listed the spirits working were far more in common with Ranger spirits like I said.In my example skills they wouldn't move like minions hence the need for Summon spirits which would act like a condi spike, pulling spirits to you and sacrificing them would be the play there similar to how Ranger spirits work but with a different merged pull mechanic rather than the individual teleports Ranger spirits have, their sacrifice ability and stationary placement is kind of a mix of Scourge shades and minions but would play similarly to how Ranger Spirits worked before the recent changes.

Playstyle depends on the build.. Necromancer can easily play martial and so can Engineer.. Reaper and Scrapper are both built around that in the frey sort of fighting I've a godtank minion master I use all the time so I know from experience how up close and personal you can get with a Necro and remain a one man army while being practically unkillable.Each class can play various ways so there's no reason why a Revenant couldn't adopt a support caster role even partly one.Sceptor would be my weapon of choice as I said and that would compliment the Mace fine for a condi setup even if the offhands were limited to Axe and Sword.3 Sceptor skills based around channeling lightning magic would be fine to give a Rit feel.

As for Guard I do think of them as part Monk because I only ever played Smite based monk in Gw1 never healer etc so I can definitely pick up on the mix of Monk and Paragon in Guardian.It's definitely there but sure I don't see Guardian getting a Monk spec nor do I see Monk ever being added to the game.

The Core Philosophies of Ritualist and revenant are also extremely different. They don't even have the vaguest sense of a philosophical connection. Their link to each other is extremely thin at best, only that they both use some form of mist magic. Which is thin because necromancer, thief, assassin and you could argue that dervish also uses mist magic if we're to assume the gods are mist beings. And the way the mist magic functions in game works more like the GW1 assassin than it does the ritualist. The Assassin's shadow magic with their teleports was described as them phasing out of the normal time space of Tyria into the mists to reform at another location. Which is exactly what the Revenant does with its teleports in practice. But, the Revenant has a better mastery over it in they can create much longer rips in this space time than the assassin. However its still effectively the same type of spell. There is also the fact that communing with spirits was not considered magic and didn't follow the same rules of magic in gw1. Canonically, ritualist spirits didn't follow the laws of magic. Revenant's magic is just that. Magic. It still has to follow those laws. And although Ritualists do use magic, I'm not arguing that, they didn't always. Revenant's magic is also considered a new type of magic in the canon.

The Revenant takes a lot from the legend it's channeling hence why it's abilities change so drastically, and channeling those legends is very similar to the way ritualists commune with spirits, that's why both professions use blindfolds to help focus their abilities.In a way revenant has the potentioal to be a sort of all in one class.. Channeling Shiro for example gives the Revenant skills that make in many ways a sort of Assassin variant.I see no reason why channeling Master Togo or Razah wouldn't do the same thing for Ritualist, or Channeling Mhenlo wouldn't do the same for Monk.Granted the Revenant cannot truly replicate those professions completely but with the associated traits, weapons and legend they can relate enough to fill some of their roles to an extent.The Revenant takes it's power from the legend after all so it's only natural that channeling an Assassin like Shiro would give the Revenant Assassin qualities.. and it does.

You know what does act similar to the ritualist in practice and philosophy? Necromancer. They both commune with spirits of the dead. Not just legends like the Revenant. Both reanimate the dead. revenant can't do that without aid from a legend. Both seek a connection with death and they tend towards power through death or the understanding of it. Both seek to rule over the dead.

I wouldn't say Necromancer communes with the dead, sure some do in the story I guess but our player character doesn't use Necromancy to summon spirits or talk with them, they just enslave corpses to make minions although mechanically they don't even do that in Gw2.. they just make them.That's a bit of a messy area though in all honesty there's a lot of wierd conflicts around the player class Necromancer in Gw2.. why can we make shades which are supposed to be underworld creatures?Why can we not exploit corpses or need them like old Necros used to?Why can we not summon skeletons or wraiths but others can when we're clearly more powerful?I'd put a lot of that down to just time constraints, mechanics or overlooking deails back when the class was first made, I doubt Anet thought reusing the shade model for a minion would raise questions.. or that many people would look deeply into Necromancer as a class and question why they would need to seek out other Necromancers for things like summoning ghosts if they should have the same abilities.Why can Marjory summon bone walls but I can't it's not fair!! lolI find it easier to just dissassociate a lot of NPC Necros with the actual class to avoid those kinds of conflicts.

Ritualists do commune with the dead and summon spirits through binding rituals but they don't reanimate the dead, it's always been noted even in Gw1 that Ritualist Spirts are very similar to Ranger Spirits as well not Necromancy.Necros on the other hand reanimate and enslave the body as a sort of mindless husk.. a literal zombie for all intents and purposes.

Revenant doesn't seek this. It wants the new magic in order to augment itself into a better fighter. Revenant doesn't wear bones to better commune with the dead. They don't preform rituals to conjure the dead. They don't preform dances to entice the dead. These are all traits the necromancer and the ritualist absolutely do.

Revenants like I said before take on the power of the legend they channel, whatever that legends power is the Revenant will use to it's advantage.There's no reason why they couldn't channel a Ritualist and use Ritualist abilities similarly to how they take on Assassin characteristics when they channel Shiro.It's all power to them and that's the only thing they truly seek, power.I'd actually like to see a main story Revenant villain at some point who has access to a bunch of completely different legends to what we can use, would be interesting.

There is also the Cultural significant of the ritualist among the Canthan people as priests. They're still very much in practice in cantha much like the dervish is still active in Elona. So, ritualists still exist. But when ritualist enemies end up in the game you're likely to find them pretty immobile of not outright afraid to engage in melee combat and pepper the field with short lasting spirits that will probably inflict torment and burning. Maybe even heal their allies or apply aegis or barrier.

There's definitely a cultural significance to Cantha but we can't go there yet and while I have faith we will there is the chance we wont.. and even if we do there's still no way Ritualist or any other profession will be made into a new playable class.The best you can hope for to get any kind of Ritualist playstyle in Gw2 is through an Elite Spec.. of that I'd put money on.Ritualist could easily be made into a Elite Spec for Revenant and they could easily name it something other than Ritualist to preseve the old class.End of the day it's the abilities and playstyle that matters not the name, Guardian proves that.

[Lily.1935]

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:I highly doubt Anet will add any new professions again, it would unbalance everything until they added 3 new classes total which would also need to have 2 elite specs each and add another 3 classes to make elite specs for in future.. it's just not worth the hastle tbh.

Ritualist would be better off being reworked into an elite spec for the Revenant imo.. perhaps a condi spec based around minions.Stationary minions based on the old Ritualist Spirits.New weapon Sceptor and new legend could be Legendary Enigma (Razah unless it's still alive) or Legendary Master (Togo).Would work very well in combination with Legendary Demon Stance, specially if spirits lingured for a short time after legends were swapped.

Healing skill: Rejuvenation, Summon a passive spirit that heals upto 10 allies within earshot by a small amount every second, Sacrifice to heal the Revenant and purge conditions around the spirit.

Utility:Agony, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks enemies in range around it and inflicts bleed and slow, sacrifice to inflict fear and torment.Pain, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks enemies from afar, sacrifice to inflict damage and burn.Summon Spirits, Pull all spirits to your location inflicting 2 stacks of bleed and torment around you for each spirit pulled and dazing enemies within range.

Elite: Union, Summon aggressive spirit that attacks foes and steals life from them, This spirit also bonds with the Revenant and takes 20% of the revenants incoming damage away and that damage is applied to the spirit instead, Sacrifice to pull downed allies to the spirits location and heal them by a small amount.

I think something like this could work really well for the Revenant

Adding a new profession wouldn't necessarily unbalance the game. IT can, but not for the reasons you think. Eventually I feel that we'll hit a critical mass of elite specs and adding new professions would be the best way forward. Ritualist is a prime candidate for that.

Well it would add more balance problems, more classes = more balance issues that's just a natural side effect of it.But it would significantly increase the development time, Anet already has to make 9 new elite specs per expansion, adding another 3 to that per expansion would add to the development time.Plus each new class they add would need to have 2 elite specs right from the beginning so there's no way they could just add ritualist without adding another 2 classes with it to round it out and give all 3 of them 2-3 elite specs at the same time.It's way too much work for no legititmate payoff, if we didn't have the elite spec system then it wouldn't be as much of a problem to add more classes.Elite Specs are pretty much the substitute for new classes while also being a way to enhance the 9 we already have, it's better this way if you ask me.And the only reason we got Revenant in the end was to balance out the classes, 3 light, 3 medium and 3 heavy.

As for Ritualist being a revenant elite spec... Absolutely not. What you've suggested sounds nothing like a ritualist. Sounds like a necromancer. Ritualist's abilities and themes are quite vast and there is plenty of room for them to make a profession out of it. I'm working on a fan made concept of what a Ritualist profession might look like, although i'm not designing elite specs even though I do have some unique Ideas that could work with its theme and design. It might be worth them looking into making new professions in the future. At the moment, we don't needed. But once we have 3 to 4 elite specs I feel that is the time they should probably consider it.

Actually it's more like an offensive variant of Spirit Ranger rather than a Necromancer.I can see why you'd relate it to Necro though, I did say Minions and some of the skill examples do sound similar to what a Necro can do, Ranger can do some of those things too though like pull the downed.Sure there's more than enough elements of the Ritualist to say it could be made into it's own class but I am more than convinced that Gw2 will never see another new class added again for the reasons I mentioned above.Elite Specs are the only way forward imo and Revenants and Ritualists have a significant amount in common as well, so if any class will gain Ritualist profession traits it should be the Revenant.

Ritualists don't apply bleeding. Never did. They strike the soul more frequently than the body. They sort of had a mini theme in GW1 of Mesmer corrupts the mind, Necromancer corrupts the body and Ritualist corrupts the soul.

The skills were just examples of how the spec could play in Gw2, conditions are easily changed around to fit a better theme although lets face it, conditions in Gw2 are a joke compared to the condition system in Gw1.You could only bleed things that had a circulartory system in gw1.. you could only poision organic creatures.. you couldn't burn fire and elements actually had super effective damage against each other.Gw2 did away with most of that to make condition damage a viable playstyle to power damage.. A change that works sure but I vastly prefer the more realistic way Gw1 handled those effects.

Revenant is way too martial to fit their theme as well. The ritualistic dancers who wear cloth and bones being turned into something that wears plate and wields a giant hammer just doesn't sit well with me. My inner GW1 player would weep.

Anet already did that when they merged the Monk and Paragon together to make the Guardian class.Likewise Necromancers in Gw1 wore a lot of spiked metal armor as well and there are very few metal armors in gw2 for light wearers, for the most part Necros in Gw2 just wear cloth or robes like an Elementalist would, which also completely kills their Gw1 gothic style.Their Reaper shroud is also the closest thing we have to Dervish scythe play.. so it's not like Gw2 hasn't already taken a lot of Gw1 concepts and changed them significantly to fit them into Gw2.A Ritualist themed spec for Revenant is not that unlikely if you ask me.. specially when you take into account that Revenant in many ways is a successor or evolution of the Ritualist much like the Guardian is for the Monk and Paragon.

Plus with the Ritualist constume recently added you could easily get your Revenant Ritualist elite spec and wear the outfit if you really wanted to look like an old school ritualist.Gw1 and Gw2 are very different games and no class in Gw2 can honestly say it sticks extremely close to it's kin in Gw1.In Gw1 Necros didn't run around with daggers and greatswords.. Warriors didn't run around with rifles.. Mesmers didn't run around with pistols or swords.Each class got changed, updated and evolved to fit into Gw2 and in many ways became it's own new thing.

Read over your idea again. Its REALLY REALLY necromancer. I mean, a lot of the skills sound like death shroud attached to Minions. Revenant has a specific flow of gameplay. Which is why I say its Martial. Its flow is extremely different from Engineer and necromancer which play the most like how the Ritualist would play. Beyond just that, the argument of the guardian is a poor one. No one thinks of the guardian as the monk. Some think of it as the paragon reborn, but in spite of its magical similarities to the monk, it isn't a monk. It will also never gain a monk elite spec and people really don't want it to. Guardian acts extremely different from Monk and their core philosophies are so different they had to become different professions.

I guess you misunderstood then because the way I listed the spirits working were far more in common with Ranger spirits like I said.In my example skills they wouldn't move like minions hence the need for Summon spirits which would act like a condi spike, pulling spirits to you and sacrificing them would be the play there similar to how Ranger spirits work but with a different merged pull mechanic rather than the individual teleports Ranger spirits have, their sacrifice ability and stationary placement is kind of a mix of Scourge shades and minions but would play similarly to how Ranger Spirits worked before the recent changes.

Playstyle depends on the build.. Necromancer can easily play martial and so can Engineer.. Reaper and Scrapper are both built around that in the frey sort of fighting I've a godtank minion master I use all the time so I know from experience how up close and personal you can get with a Necro and remain a one man army while being practically unkillable.Each class can play various ways so there's no reason why a Revenant couldn't adopt a support caster role even partly one.Sceptor would be my weapon of choice as I said and that would compliment the Mace fine for a condi setup even if the offhands were limited to Axe and Sword.3 Sceptor skills based around channeling lightning magic would be fine to give a Rit feel.

As for Guard I do think of them as part Monk because I only ever played Smite based monk in Gw1 never healer etc so I can definitely pick up on the mix of Monk and Paragon in Guardian.It's definitely there but sure I don't see Guardian getting a Monk spec nor do I see Monk ever being added to the game.

The Core Philosophies of Ritualist and revenant are also extremely different. They don't even have the vaguest sense of a philosophical connection. Their link to each other is extremely thin at best, only that they both use some form of mist magic. Which is thin because necromancer, thief, assassin and you could argue that dervish also uses mist magic if we're to assume the gods are mist beings. And the way the mist magic functions in game works more like the GW1 assassin than it does the ritualist. The Assassin's shadow magic with their teleports was described as them phasing out of the normal time space of Tyria into the mists to reform at another location. Which is exactly what the Revenant does with its teleports in practice. But, the Revenant has a better mastery over it in they can create much longer rips in this space time than the assassin. However its still effectively the same type of spell. There is also the fact that communing with spirits was not considered magic and didn't follow the same rules of magic in gw1. Canonically, ritualist spirits didn't follow the laws of magic. Revenant's magic is just that. Magic. It still has to follow those laws. And although Ritualists do use magic, I'm not arguing that, they didn't always. Revenant's magic is also considered a new type of magic in the canon.

The Revenant takes a lot from the legend it's channeling hence why it's abilities change so drastically, and channeling those legends is very similar to the way ritualists commune with spirits, that's why both professions use blindfolds to help focus their abilities.In a way revenant has the potentioal to be a sort of all in one class.. Channeling Shiro for example gives the Revenant skills that make in many ways a sort of Assassin variant.I see no reason why channeling Master Togo or Razah wouldn't do the same thing for Ritualist, or Channeling Mhenlo wouldn't do the same for Monk.Granted the Revenant cannot truly replicate those professions completely but with the associated traits, weapons and legend they can relate enough to fill some of their roles to an extent.The Revenant takes it's power from the legend after all so it's only natural that channeling an Assassin like Shiro would give the Revenant Assassin qualities.. and it does.

You know what does act similar to the ritualist in practice and philosophy? Necromancer. They both commune with spirits of the dead. Not just legends like the Revenant. Both reanimate the dead. revenant can't do that without aid from a legend. Both seek a connection with death and they tend towards power through death or the understanding of it. Both seek to rule over the dead.

I wouldn't say Necromancer communes with the dead, sure some do in the story I guess but our player character doesn't use Necromancy to summon spirits or talk with them, they just enslave corpses to make minions although mechanically they don't even do that in Gw2.. they just make them.That's a bit of a messy area though in all honesty there's a lot of wierd conflicts around the player class Necromancer in Gw2.. why can we make shades which are supposed to be underworld creatures?Why can we not exploit corpses or need them like old Necros used to?Why can we not summon skeletons or wraiths but others can when we're clearly more powerful?I'd put a lot of that down to just time constraints, mechanics or overlooking deails back when the class was first made, I doubt Anet thought reusing the shade model for a minion would raise questions.. or that many people would look deeply into Necromancer as a class and question why they would need to seek out other Necromancers for things like summoning ghosts if they should have the same abilities.Why can Marjory summon bone walls but I can't it's not fair!! lolI find it easier to just dissassociate a lot of NPC Necros with the actual class to avoid those kinds of conflicts.

Ritualists do commune with the dead and summon spirits through binding rituals but they don't reanimate the dead, it's always been noted even in Gw1 that Ritualist Spirts are very similar to Ranger Spirits as well not Necromancy.Necros on the other hand reanimate and enslave the body as a sort of mindless husk.. a literal zombie for all intents and purposes.

Revenant doesn't seek this. It wants the new magic in order to augment itself into a better fighter. Revenant doesn't wear bones to better commune with the dead. They don't preform rituals to conjure the dead. They don't preform dances to entice the dead. These are all traits the necromancer and the ritualist absolutely do.

Revenants like I said before take on the power of the legend they channel, whatever that legends power is the Revenant will use to it's advantage.There's no reason why they couldn't channel a Ritualist and use Ritualist abilities similarly to how they take on Assassin characteristics when they channel Shiro.It's all power to them and that's the only thing they truly seek, power.I'd actually like to see a main story Revenant villain at some point who has access to a bunch of completely different legends to what we can use, would be interesting.

There is also the Cultural significant of the ritualist among the Canthan people as priests. They're still very much in practice in cantha much like the dervish is still active in Elona. So, ritualists still exist. But when ritualist enemies end up in the game you're likely to find them pretty immobile of not outright afraid to engage in melee combat and pepper the field with short lasting spirits that will probably inflict torment and burning. Maybe even heal their allies or apply aegis or barrier.

There's definitely a cultural significance to Cantha but we can't go there yet and while I have faith we will there is the chance we wont.. and even if we do there's still no way Ritualist or any other profession will be made into a new playable class.The best you can hope for to get any kind of Ritualist playstyle in Gw2 is through an Elite Spec.. of that I'd put money on.Ritualist could easily be made into a Elite Spec for Revenant and they could easily name it something other than Ritualist to preseve the old class.End of the day it's the abilities and playstyle that matters not the name, Guardian proves that.

Necromancer absolutely does commune with the dead. It's in their name. Necro, meaning death and mancy which is communication or to view or speak with. As it is described as scrying. Necromancy is literally communication with the dead. To argue otherwise is a lost argument. It's not even like they don't do that in game. Hell, The scourge's lore is exactly that. They fairy souls away from joko and use shade, which are spirits, as their primary means of attack and defense. Their weapon from the collection is called "guide to the lost". A very clear reference to the fairies for the dead in mythology. Those who aid the lost souls. To say the necromancer doesn't commune with spirits is completely ignoring the lore of both games, the real world history of necromancy and ignores in game traits and abilities.

And the most ritualist like play style we've got right now in GW2 belongs to......... Scourge. Scourge is a hybrid of ritualist and curses necromancer from gw1. They have the supporting elements of ritualist and the damaging debuff elements of curses necromancer.

And as someone who played and used all classes in gw1 extensively, the guardian plays nothing like the monk. Not even a smiting monk which is where they are most similar, but in that regard the herald is more similar to the smiting monk mechanically. But in terms of healing, druid is most like the monk, but only in celestial avatar form and only healing prayers monk. Nothing is really similar to a protection monk. Guard has a little bit through aegis. But its probably for the best protection monk never returns. It would break the game in half.

I think the best thing we can hope for for Ritualist is it's own profession. I used to be in favor of ritualist as an elite spec as my original post suggests, but I'm not anymore. I feel it creates too much conflict with the player base. And people who didn't play ritualist or only played SoS on ritualist have no clue how they actually played so they ask for a rev spec which would be the absolute worst decision that could be made for it as an elite spec. It would function so poorly with their existing mechanics much like Ventari tablet does currently only worse since the set up will be that much longer. Ritualists are slow. Their play style is slow they are deliberate methodical healers and supporters. To force an elite spec based on ritualist to be offensive would be the biggest mistake anet has done since the sloppy inclusion of the Revenant class which was the biggest mistake since the inclusion of the death shroud as the necromancer mechanic.

We will hit a critical mass of elite specs. They'll be struggling once they reach 4. So we have a few years. GW2 could survive long enough to reach that point. WoW has surpassed that point. And Ritualist is a prime candidate to include something unique after that point. It'll become easier to just add new skills and classes in the future of this game.

It's also not like Revenant doesn't have room to grow without ritualist. They have the most potential growth out of any class. We don't need to try and force them into a role they are not built for and can't possibly replicate to the desire of the fans. Let the ritualist be the ritualist and let the revenant be the revenant. They don't need to be the same thing. And they shouldn't be.

[DonArkanio.6419]

First of all, great work. These kinds of post make me want to play the game and try different classes (necromancer on this case).I understand that you basically suggest giving necromancer a Ritualist specialization. And I'm all for it!Just because other classes have mechanics that are ritualist-themed, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a full Spec adding this stuff. Because in the end, what is a Revenant if not the mix of everything we already had in game? It surely provides a lot of fresh gameplay but it's mostly because it's a full new class.I think that a literal literal specialization for Necromancer called Ritualist would be very welcomed by the playerbase. People (including me) seem to like ties to the original Guild Wars and would appreciate having even more connection.

I think that ANet's class design was their Arrow in the knee. They spread the GW1 mechanics of all classes across all classes in GW2. This closed a lot of ways of future design - take for example Berserker's Utility Skills which are nearly identical to Core Warrior utilities. Revenant struggles to find its identity and Guardians have a mix of everything actually. Summons, teleports, mantras, buffs, AoE, shouts, single target bursts, etc.This doesn't help the idea of any future new classes or Elite Specs.

Overall, I think it's simply a great idea. You gave pros and cons, and there's not much left to argue about. Either implement it or not.

[Teratus.2859]

@"Lily.1935" said:Necromancer absolutely does commune with the dead. It's in their name. Necro, meaning death and mancy which is communication or to view or speak with. As it is described as scrying. Necromancy is literally communication with the dead. To argue otherwise is a lost argument. It's not even like they don't do that in game. Hell, The scourge's lore is exactly that. They fairy souls away from joko and use shade, which are spirits, as their primary means of attack and defense. Their weapon from the collection is called "guide to the lost". A very clear reference to the fairies for the dead in mythology. Those who aid the lost souls. To say the necromancer doesn't commune with spirits is completely ignoring the lore of both games, the real world history of necromancy and ignores in game traits and abilities.

Fair points but the Scourge is an elite spec not part of the core Necromancer so while the name suggests as much the core Necromancer really doesn't have anything relating to communing with the dead, at least not the usable class despite NPC Necromancers seeming to have those abilities in both games.When characters adopt an elite spec they tend to take that spec as a new identity, Being a Scourge makes you a Scourge and the Necromancer title tends to fall off even though you retain access to the bulk of it's core profession mechanics, reason enough for each elite spec to have it's own class description.When you look at the core Necromancer, it's skills, traits etc there are no real references to communing with the spirits of the dead at all, plenty about consuming souls and stealing life which is less Necromancer and more Vampire tbh.

And the most ritualist like play style we've got right now in GW2 belongs to......... Scourge. Scourge is a hybrid of ritualist and curses necromancer from gw1. They have the supporting elements of ritualist and the damaging debuff elements of curses necromancer.

Sure from a mechanical/playstyle perspective I'll agree with that.

And as someone who played and used all classes in gw1 extensively, the guardian plays nothing like the monk. Not even a smiting monk which is where they are most similar, but in that regard the herald is more similar to the smiting monk mechanically. But in terms of healing, druid is most like the monk, but only in celestial avatar form and only healing prayers monk. Nothing is really similar to a protection monk. Guard has a little bit through aegis. But its probably for the best protection monk never returns. It would break the game in half.

Well to be fair no class in Gw2 really plays like it's Gw1 variant.. the games are really too different to compare playstyles so closely.There are similarities here and there and elements that have been reworked but that's about the best we can use to make the connection.In Gw2 any boonspamming protection bunker style build is some sort of basic variant of a protection monk playstyle.. more or less anyway.Protect monk as it was in Gw1 is just something that cannot translate over to Gw2 very well with the way Gw2 handles combat, healing and boons etc thanks to the abandonment of the holy trinity concept, This is likely the reason the Monk was straight up scrapped and it's elements infused into the Guardian and later the Druid.

I think the best thing we can hope for for Ritualist is it's own profession. I used to be in favor of ritualist as an elite spec as my original post suggests, but I'm not anymore. I feel it creates too much conflict with the player base. And people who didn't play ritualist or only played SoS on ritualist have no clue how they actually played so they ask for a rev spec which would be the absolute worst decision that could be made for it as an elite spec. It would function so poorly with their existing mechanics much like Ventari tablet does currently only worse since the set up will be that much longer. Ritualists are slow. Their play style is slow they are deliberate methodical healers and supporters. To force an elite spec based on ritualist to be offensive would be the biggest mistake anet has done since the sloppy inclusion of the Revenant class which was the biggest mistake since the inclusion of the death shroud as the necromancer mechanic.

I seriously doubt there will ever be new classes added to Gw2 for the reasons i've stated before, it's just too much work for no justifyable payoff, specially when Ritualistic elements can be applied to already existing classes through elite specializations.. as you said earlier they kinda did that with the Scourge.I hope you're not taking anything i'm saying as hostility or conflictive, I've been seeing this conversation from the perspective of a polite disagreement not an argument or anything.I think a Ritualist spirit based spec for Revenant wouldn't be a terrible idea, I could see it working quite well but you could brush that off as bias if you wish.I like minion play myself which is why Necromancer is one of my preferred classes and until the recent spirit changes on Ranger (which I strongly dislike) I ran a Glass LB Spirit Ranger main for the better part of 4 years.I like that each class in Gw2 is capable of, or at least has the potential to fill any role and play any style so I am a big advocate of other classes getting some form of minion playstyles.I think people grossly undervalue how effective NPC summons are in Gw2, Revenant could benefit from the playstyle greatly imo considering it's extremely squishy imo for a heavy class and it already has enough of a lore based connection to adopt a variat of the Ritualist spirit playstyle.

What do you have against Deathshroud btw? Personally it's one of my favorite mechanics, so much so in fact that it's removal is one of the biggest reasons I don't like playing Scourge at all and prefer Reaper even on conditions Necro.

We will hit a critical mass of elite specs. They'll be struggling once they reach 4. So we have a few years. GW2 could survive long enough to reach that point. WoW has surpassed that point. And Ritualist is a prime candidate to include something unique after that point. It'll become easier to just add new skills and classes in the future of this game.

I doubt it'll be easier.. I can only imagine the uproar people would have if a new class got added with 3-4 new elite specs and their class got nothing new, not to mention the uproar people would have if a new class got added with no elite specs at all and it's core profession was able to rival elite specs or not able to at all.Frankly I don't see any way new classes can be added at this point without a lot of people being annoyed by it and the developer workload being unnecessarily burdoned by it.I think there's plenty of potential to go past 4 specs but I don't think Elite specs need to be the be all and end all of class advancement.I'm sure there are other ways Anet could enhance each profession without adding more Elite Specs but instead adding something new instead.

It's also not like Revenant doesn't have room to grow without ritualist. They have the most potential growth out of any class. We don't need to try and force them into a role they are not built for and can't possibly replicate to the desire of the fans. Let the ritualist be the ritualist and let the revenant be the revenant. They don't need to be the same thing. And they shouldn't be.

Sure Rev has plenty of room to grow without Ritualist, that doesn't mean they can't adopt more elements of them though.Isn't the point of an Elite spec to give a class a way to adopt new playstyles and enhance old ones?I think the spirit/minion playstyle would work well for Revenant as it doesn't really have anything like it at the moment, I'd personally love to be able to play a Revenant that way too ^^

[Lily.1935]

@DonArkanio.6419 said:First of all, great work. These kinds of post make me want to play the game and try different classes (necromancer on this case).I understand that you basically suggest giving necromancer a Ritualist specialization. And I'm all for it!Just because other classes have mechanics that are ritualist-themed, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a full Spec adding this stuff. Because in the end, what is a Revenant if not the mix of everything we already had in game? It surely provides a lot of fresh gameplay but it's mostly because it's a full new class.I think that a literal literal specialization for Necromancer called Ritualist would be very welcomed by the playerbase. People (including me) seem to like ties to the original Guild Wars and would appreciate having even more connection.

I think that ANet's class design was their Arrow in the knee. They spread the GW1 mechanics of all classes across all classes in GW2. This closed a lot of ways of future design - take for example Berserker's Utility Skills which are nearly identical to Core Warrior utilities. Revenant struggles to find its identity and Guardians have a mix of everything actually. Summons, teleports, mantras, buffs, AoE, shouts, single target bursts, etc.This doesn't help the idea of any future new classes or Elite Specs.

Overall, I think it's simply a great idea. You gave pros and cons, and there's not much left to argue about. Either implement it or not.

I actually kinda was hoping this thread would stay dead. Not because I'm wrong on the points, I'm not. I know more about the necromancer and ritualist lore, inspiration and design than WP does by a long shot. But because I'm working on a new project of making a unique ritualist profession as a proof of concept for itself. Mostly for fun. And I really didn't need the rehash of people who haven't spent months researching the ritualist to make a compelling profession tell me that the revenant can fill in all of the ins and outs of ritualist when I know for certain it absolutely can't.

Fighting against WP's accidental misinformation campaign is frustrating since I don't have his popular sway.

[Thornwolf.9721]

Mace/shield for necro

F2 -5 are spirit summons that can't be killed, and do various effects both beneficial to allies and harmful to enemies.

Utilities are ashes ~ Summon the ashes to swirl around the caster and do damage/buff

Role Tank

Brings necromancer a more blue/seafoam color for its skills.

[DonArkanio.6419]

@Lily.1935 said:

@"DonArkanio.6419" said:First of all, great work. These kinds of post make me want to play the game and try different classes (necromancer on this case).I understand that you basically suggest giving necromancer a Ritualist specialization. And I'm all for it!Just because other classes have mechanics that are ritualist-themed, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a full Spec adding this stuff. Because in the end, what is a Revenant if not the mix of everything we already had in game? It surely provides a lot of fresh gameplay but it's mostly because it's a full new class.I think that a literal literal specialization for Necromancer called Ritualist would be very welcomed by the playerbase. People (including me) seem to like ties to the original Guild Wars and would appreciate having even more connection.

I think that ANet's class design was their Arrow in the knee. They spread the GW1 mechanics of all classes across all classes in GW2. This closed a lot of ways of future design - take for example Berserker's Utility Skills which are nearly identical to Core Warrior utilities. Revenant struggles to find its identity and Guardians have a mix of everything actually. Summons, teleports, mantras, buffs, AoE, shouts, single target bursts, etc.This doesn't help the idea of any future new classes or Elite Specs.

Overall, I think it's simply a great idea. You gave pros and cons, and there's not much left to argue about. Either implement it or not.

I actually kinda was hoping this thread would stay dead. Not because I'm wrong on the points, I'm not. I know more about the necromancer and ritualist lore, inspiration and design than WP does by a long shot. But because I'm working on a new project of making a unique ritualist profession as a proof of concept for itself. Mostly for fun. And I really didn't need the rehash of people who haven't spent months researching the ritualist to make a compelling profession tell me that the revenant can fill in all of the ins and outs of ritualist when I know for certain it absolutely can't.

Fighting against WP's accidental misinformation campaign is frustrating since I don't have his popular sway.

Sounds fair to me. I see what you're saying. And if you are working on a Ritualist related project, I'll be waiting for it as I really want to see this proof that might prove people wrong. Lots of people say that hey, Renegade is a Ritualist and Necromancer already uses most of its stuff. But I always think - is that really all there is? I guess the answer is no. I don't know much about the GW1 mechanical sides of professions but I am pretty sure that a new class which is a unique support from the very beginning would be a fresh surprise.I just think peeps are close-minded to the ideas of any new classes: "Because we already have all 3x3 armor tiers..."I'm looking forward to seeing what you can come up with to show others that there's still a lot of potential in classes.

[Lily.1935]

@DonArkanio.6419 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@DonArkanio.6419 said:First of all, great work. These kinds of post make me want to play the game and try different classes (necromancer on this case).I understand that you basically suggest giving necromancer a Ritualist specialization. And I'm all for it!Just because other classes have mechanics that are ritualist-themed, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a full Spec adding this stuff. Because in the end, what is a Revenant if not the mix of everything we already had in game? It surely provides a lot of fresh gameplay but it's mostly because it's a full new class.I think that a literal literal specialization for Necromancer called Ritualist would be very welcomed by the playerbase. People (including me) seem to like ties to the original Guild Wars and would appreciate having even more connection.

I think that ANet's class design was their Arrow in the knee. They spread the GW1 mechanics of all classes across all classes in GW2. This closed a lot of ways of future design - take for example Berserker's Utility Skills which are nearly identical to Core Warrior utilities. Revenant struggles to find its identity and Guardians have a mix of everything actually. Summons, teleports, mantras, buffs, AoE, shouts, single target bursts, etc.This doesn't help the idea of any future new classes or Elite Specs.

Overall, I think it's simply a great idea. You gave pros and cons, and there's not much left to argue about. Either implement it or not.

I actually kinda was hoping this thread would stay dead. Not because I'm wrong on the points, I'm not. I know more about the necromancer and ritualist lore, inspiration and design than WP does by a long shot. But because I'm working on a new project of making a unique ritualist profession as a proof of concept for itself. Mostly for fun. And I really didn't need the rehash of people who haven't spent months researching the ritualist to make a compelling profession tell me that the revenant can fill in all of the ins and outs of ritualist when I know for certain it absolutely can't.

Fighting against WP's accidental misinformation campaign is frustrating since I don't have his popular sway.

Sounds fair to me. I see what you're saying. And if you are working on a Ritualist related project, I'll be waiting for it as I really want to see this proof that might prove people wrong. Lots of people say that hey, Renegade is a Ritualist and Necromancer already uses most of its stuff. But I always think - is that really all there is? I guess the answer is no. I don't know much about the GW1 mechanical sides of professions but I am pretty sure that a new class which is a unique support from the very beginning would be a fresh surprise.I just think peeps are close-minded to the ideas of any new classes: "Because we already have all 3x3 armor tiers..."I'm looking forward to seeing what you can come up with to show others that there's still a lot of potential in classes.

Well I've already posted the proof of this, of the real world inspiration for the Ritualist, how that relates to necromancy, how the Devs worked in the first game to distance the two professions. How that was eroded in GW2 and the barriers between the two professions are nearly non existent, how both professions preform rituals, which isn't unique to even the necromancer, the Ranger does nature rituals. But Revenant has no evidence in cannon of using rituals as a part of their profession's identity. To be fair to the revenant, he did preform a ritual when he was a warrior. So it isn't an uncommon practice. But preforming rituals as a part of a profession is something only a couple professions actually do, and revenant is currently omitted from that.

As for its design, it coming along. I'm not designing the elite specs. I do have ideas how they could work, but I wanted to design a solid core spec to start.

[Dadnir.5038]

Well, Renegade (revenant elite spec) is already a spirit ritualist, was it really necessary to necro'd this thread and argue about whether it should be a necro e-spec or a revenant e-spec when renegade already fill the highly thought out "spirit ritualist" spot?

The necromancer don't need in any way an e-spec that would either make him a copy of the renegade or a copy of the mesmer. Which mean that there is some room for an ash carrying spec (a kit spec), a spiritual lightning spec and a spirit weapon spec. All of those are not going to appeal to the people that want a "ritualist" while only the ash carrying stuff will be able to somewhat fit the necromancer heavily restricted design. Yet a "kit" for a profession that can already swap weapon and transform feel totally unlikely as well.

[Lily.1935]

@"Dadnir.5038" said:Well, Renegade (revenant elite spec) is already a spirit ritualist, was it really necessary to necro'd this thread and argue about whether it should be a necro e-spec or a revenant e-spec when renegade already fill the highly thought out "spirit ritualist" spot?

The necromancer don't need in any way an e-spec that would either make him a copy of the renegade or a copy of the mesmer. Which mean that there is some room for an ash carrying spec (a kit spec), a spiritual lightning spec and a spirit weapon spec. All of those are not going to appeal to the people that want a "ritualist" while only the ash carrying stuff will be able to somewhat fit the necromancer heavily restricted design. Yet a "kit" for a profession that can already swap weapon and transform feel totally unlikely as well.

Renegade doesn't play like ritualist even in spirit. Scourge has more similarities. Renegade is honestly a fairly clumsily designed spec.

[Dadnir.5038]

@Lily.1935 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:Well, Renegade (revenant elite spec) is already a spirit ritualist, was it really necessary to necro'd this thread and argue about whether it should be a necro e-spec or a revenant e-spec when renegade already fill the highly thought out "spirit ritualist" spot?

The necromancer don't need in any way an e-spec that would either make him a copy of the renegade or a copy of the mesmer. Which mean that there is some room for an ash carrying spec (a kit spec), a spiritual lightning spec and a spirit weapon spec. All of those are not going to appeal to the people that want a "ritualist" while only the ash carrying stuff will be able to somewhat fit the necromancer heavily restricted design. Yet a "kit" for a profession that can already swap weapon and transform feel totally unlikely as well.

Renegade doesn't play like ritualist even in spirit. Scourge has more similarities. Renegade is honestly a fairly clumsily designed spec.

And GW1 was a vastly different game than GW2. Renegade with kalla as it's legend is just like a spirit ritualist that transitionned from GW1 to GW2. And I garantee you that GW1's ritualist would be as clumsy as renegade in GW2's environment. GW1's gameplay is more fitting for static things like spirit, GW2 isn't forgiving for such things and this is why it feel clumsy.

Like I said, we are already full of "spirit" specs, there is no need to add more. Especially since we know that it either perform poorly or overperform and is then soon nerfed to uselessness.

NB.: scourge do not have any similarities with spirit, you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed. The closer to gw1's spirit ritualist would be the engineer (turrets), followed by ranger (nature spirits), mesmer (illusions) and renegade (kalla's legend). And there is objectively no need for more professions on this list.

[Lily.1935]

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:Well, Renegade (revenant elite spec) is already a spirit ritualist, was it really necessary to necro'd this thread and argue about whether it should be a necro e-spec or a revenant e-spec when renegade already fill the highly thought out "spirit ritualist" spot?

The necromancer don't need in any way an e-spec that would either make him a copy of the renegade or a copy of the mesmer. Which mean that there is some room for an ash carrying spec (a kit spec), a spiritual lightning spec and a spirit weapon spec. All of those are not going to appeal to the people that want a "ritualist" while only the ash carrying stuff will be able to somewhat fit the necromancer heavily restricted design. Yet a "kit" for a profession that can already swap weapon and transform feel totally unlikely as well.

Renegade doesn't play like ritualist even in spirit. Scourge has more similarities. Renegade is honestly a fairly clumsily designed spec.

And GW1 was a vastly different game than GW2. Renegade with kalla as it's legend is just like a spirit ritualist that transitionned from GW1 to GW2. And I garantee you that GW1's ritualist would be as clumsy as renegade in GW2's environment. GW1's gameplay is more fitting for static things like spirit, GW2 isn't forgiving for such things and this is why it feel clumsy.

Like I said, we are already full of "spirit" specs, there is no need to add more. Especially since we know that it either perform poorly or overperform and is then soon nerfed to uselessness.

NB.: scourge do not have any similarities with spirit, you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed. The closer to gw1's spirit ritualist would be the engineer (turrets), followed by ranger (nature spirits), mesmer (illusions) and renegade (kalla's legend). And there is objectively no need for more professions on this list.

This sort of statement drives me nuts because it is so blind to the way games are designed and how they function. And I keep having to argue against this fallacious talking point over and over again. Just because two games are different doesn't mean they many elements of their design and desired personal effect on individuals will be completely or even mostly different. Consider that Anet uses a custom table top RPG to design their raid encounters, or at least they have in the past. If your belief was correct anet wouldn't use this method to design their content. It wouldn't be possible to do. Especially considering that table top games are far far more different from Guild wars 2 than Guild wars 1 is. It just wouldn't work. Yet it does.

Game developers use card games and table top games when learning mechanics and how they should function because these games mechanics are on their sleeves and not under the hood.

Guild wars 1 is a much simpler game than GW2. This is obviously a fact. Its design is much more visible for the gamer than GW2 is. But as we dive into this, GW1 and GW2 are far more similar than different. They both hold the archetype of basic RPG elements and their classes fill very similar roles all be in slightly different ways. But the underlying philosophy and feel of these classes are quite similar if not evoking the same desires of the players. Where the games are similar are far more numerous than their differences so it's easier to list the differences than their similarities. For example, gw2 is a much more mobile game. The player has stronger and much more access to movement and placement than gw1. Gw1 is much more resource dependent than gw2. Gw1 and gw2's buffs and debuffs systems are honestly not different enough from each other to say that they're drastically different. Gw2 is simplified in comparison. Their armor system is different but does not have a big enough impact on gameplay to be that notable, gw2's system being more complex and deeper but ultimately they do the same thing in different ways.

So how is scourge similar to Ritualist? Well I said it was like a hybrid of ritualist and gw1 curses necromancer. But that second part I'll explain a bit later as the curses necromancer didn't do a lot of what the scourge does, but ritualist does. First what did the ritualist do? How did it function in practice? What was the roles it played and how did it achieve them?

To put that question as simply as possible the ritualist had a few different roles in the group and used different tactics that are not obvious to players who didn't play ritualist in gw1.

• SoS: The signet of spirits build or spirit spammer was a build that had decent damage output. Its role in group play wasn't a primary damage dealer to the contrary of popular belief but rather it acted as a way to protect its allies through body blocking. While allies could move through the spirits enemies couldn't. This tactic worked wonders as the AI would become inactive for a moment as they get stopped by the spirits, looking at their target while they take damage and your back line can prepare their heavy assault. With its moderate damage this made the SoS a stronge build in end game content were enemies had much more deadly tactics. This strategy did not work in pvp however since signet of spirits didn't create 3 spirits like it did in pve. But even with that, ritualist, rangers and minion master necros would use their spirits and minions to create choke points to bottleneck the opponents into unfavorable positions for your team. Because of the high cast time of spirits and minions this wasn't always viable.
• protective spirits: A very passive build that required the ritualist to avoid combat and maintain their defensive spirits through ritual lord and soul twisting, this ritualist didn't use their spirits as body blockers but rather used their defensive abilities to refuse the overall party damage to something more manageable for either the ritualist itself or the party healer. They spend most of their time maintaining spirit up time and their energy as this was a very energy intensive build.
• Restoration Healer: This build was less common to see than the other two and when you did see it it was more likely that a necromancer would be running restoration magic because of their superior energy management and because of how high the healing output the ritualist skills naturally had. However it was still seen on ritualist, more in pvp. Its function was based on its ability to prepare its urns, spirits and weapon spells to modify its healing output and reduce damage for allies at a quick pace, although slower than a monk would achieve. Its advantage over monk was that it took less investment in it's own attributes to achieve a similar output while more investment in it's set up. These builds is also known for how effective and quick they are at resurrecting dead allies. Since death pact signet, flesh of my flesh and resurrection are all some of the quickest methods of bringing allies back in the game.

There are plenty more builds I could highlight but these 3 are the ones I want to highlight since these are the ones the scourge captures extremely well. Similar to the SoS, the dps build on scourge isn't that impressive. Its effective, and its damage isn't something to underestimate. But the primary reason the dps scourge is so good outside of raids is because of this field control. Like the SoS it creates choke points for your foes and can quickly overwhelm them with damage that is difficult to reduce or avoid. These shades make it difficult for foes to close in on you and your allies. And this isn't something to be discounted. While body blocking doesn't work in gw2, crowd control is achieved more through conditions and stuns which the scourge isn't short on. Their manifest sand shade causes crippling, they have a fear and their torch has a knock down. Because of the more active nature of the game this is more how crowd control works and the scourge through its shades achieve the same goal in a very similar way to the SoS. Pressure through damage and control your foes into choke points. While the protective spirits build and restoration healer fit the same role as the healing scourge. Probably the best downed state resurrected builds in the game and its goal is very similar to the protective spirits builds on rit. Its idea is to maintain damage mitigation while it maintains its resources. Its healing isn't really as impressive as the resto healer but it does have that revive thing going and I'd argue it's much stronger. One key difference is that the healer scourge doesn't necessarily want to be so far from the group. Although it requires that it must maintain its shades although not in the same way as rit did with its spirits. Their goals and how they achieve them are similar enough that it evokes those same feelings in practice. I played a lot of protective spirits builds in gw1, if being one of my favorite builds because of how much it did for the group.

As for how scourge is similar to the curses necromancer, the curses necromancer used alot of dot damage and aoe dps curses to achieve its goals. It had a lot of aoe that punished foes sticking close together with long lasting duration and heavy hitting hexes. The scourge is an AoE depuffer and very good at stripping boons much like the curse necro which was superb at stripping enchantments and blocking healing.

Hopefully you can see why I draw these comparisons. They evoke similar play feel and their in game philosophy in practice achieves the same goal through their different mechanics which require a slightly different approach. For me, playing the healing scourge evokes my nostalgia for my favorite Ritualist build and really makes me wish anet would release custom skill animations that turn sand shades into turquoise spirits with new Ghastly animations. But that's a topic for another time.

Saying they're completely different is both incorrect and short sighted. I acknowledge their differences but can't ignore where they're similar. Scourge is similar to the spirit of what much of the ritualist was trying to achieve. And it does it in areas I feel the engineer fails and the Revenant fails. Although I will cap this off with an admission that Ventari tablet does have design similarities of resto healer... just to show I'm not bias. Specifically resto healer on ritualist not necro.

[InsaneQR.7412]

@"Lily.1935"You can look into the "what future e-specs do you want threat" you will see that I actually wanted 2 ritu like specs theme wise. Bur none uses spirits.

[Dadnir.5038]

@Lily.1935 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:And GW1 was a vastly different game than GW2. Renegade with kalla as it's legend is just like a spirit ritualist that transitionned from GW1 to GW2. And I garantee you that GW1's ritualist would be as clumsy as renegade in GW2's environment. GW1's gameplay is more fitting for static things like spirit, GW2 isn't forgiving for such things and this is why it feel clumsy.

Like I said, we are already full of "spirit" specs, there is no need to add more. Especially since we know that it either perform poorly or overperform and is then soon nerfed to uselessness.

NB.: scourge do not have any similarities with spirit, you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed. The closer to gw1's spirit ritualist would be the engineer (turrets), followed by ranger (nature spirits), mesmer (illusions) and renegade (kalla's legend). And there is objectively no need for more professions on this list.

This sort of statement drives me nuts because it is so blind to the way games are designed and how they function. And I keep having to argue against this fallacious talking point over and over again. Just because two games are different doesn't mean they many elements of their design and desired personal effect on individuals will be completely or even mostly different. Consider that Anet uses a custom table top RPG to design their raid encounters, or at least they have in the past. If your belief was correct anet wouldn't use this method to design their content. It wouldn't be possible to do. Especially considering that table top games are far far more different from Guild wars 2 than Guild wars 1 is. It just wouldn't work. Yet it does.

Game developers use card games and table top games when learning mechanics and how they should function because these games mechanics are on their sleeves and not under the hood.

Guild wars 1 is a much simpler game than GW2. This is obviously a fact. Its design is much more visible for the gamer than GW2 is. But as we dive into this, GW1 and GW2 are far more similar than different. They both hold the archetype of basic RPG elements and their classes fill very similar roles all be in slightly different ways. But the underlying philosophy and feel of these classes are quite similar if not evoking the same desires of the players. Where the games are similar are far more numerous than their differences so it's easier to list the differences than their similarities. For example, gw2 is a much more mobile game. The player has stronger and much more access to movement and placement than gw1. Gw1 is much more resource dependent than gw2. Gw1 and gw2's buffs and debuffs systems are honestly not different enough from each other to say that they're drastically different. Gw2 is simplified in comparison. Their armor system is different but does not have a big enough impact on gameplay to be that notable, gw2's system being more complex and deeper but ultimately they do the same thing in different ways.

So how is scourge similar to Ritualist? Well I said it was like a hybrid of ritualist and gw1 curses necromancer. But that second part I'll explain a bit later as the curses necromancer didn't do a lot of what the scourge does, but ritualist does. First what did the ritualist do? How did it function in practice? What was the roles it played and how did it achieve them?

To put that question as simply as possible the ritualist had a few different roles in the group and used different tactics that are not obvious to players who didn't play ritualist in gw1.

• SoS: The signet of spirits build or spirit spammer was a build that had decent damage output. Its role in group play wasn't a primary damage dealer to the contrary of popular belief but rather it acted as a way to protect its allies through body blocking. While allies could move through the spirits enemies couldn't. This tactic worked wonders as the AI would become inactive for a moment as they get stopped by the spirits, looking at their target while they take damage and your back line can prepare their heavy assault. With its moderate damage this made the SoS a stronge build in end game content were enemies had much more deadly tactics. This strategy did not work in pvp however since signet of spirits didn't create 3 spirits like it did in pve. But even with that, ritualist, rangers and minion master necros would use their spirits and minions to create choke points to bottleneck the opponents into unfavorable positions for your team. Because of the high cast time of spirits and minions this wasn't always viable.
• protective spirits: A very passive build that required the ritualist to avoid combat and maintain their defensive spirits through ritual lord and soul twisting, this ritualist didn't use their spirits as body blockers but rather used their defensive abilities to refuse the overall party damage to something more manageable for either the ritualist itself or the party healer. They spend most of their time maintaining spirit up time and their energy as this was a very energy intensive build.
• Restoration Healer: This build was less common to see than the other two and when you did see it it was more likely that a necromancer would be running restoration magic because of their superior energy management and because of how high the healing output the ritualist skills naturally had. However it was still seen on ritualist, more in pvp. Its function was based on its ability to prepare its urns, spirits and weapon spells to modify its healing output and reduce damage for allies at a quick pace, although slower than a monk would achieve. Its advantage over monk was that it took less investment in it's own attributes to achieve a similar output while more investment in it's set up. These builds is also known for how effective and quick they are at resurrecting dead allies. Since death pact signet, flesh of my flesh and resurrection are all some of the quickest methods of bringing allies back in the game.

There are plenty more builds I could highlight but these 3 are the ones I want to highlight since these are the ones the scourge captures extremely well. Similar to the SoS, the dps build on scourge isn't that impressive. Its effective, and its damage isn't something to underestimate. But the primary reason the dps scourge is so good outside of raids is because of this field control. Like the SoS it creates choke points for your foes and can quickly overwhelm them with damage that is difficult to reduce or avoid. These shades make it difficult for foes to close in on you and your allies. And this isn't something to be discounted. While body blocking doesn't work in gw2, crowd control is achieved more through conditions and stuns which the scourge isn't short on. Their manifest sand shade causes crippling, they have a fear and their torch has a knock down. Because of the more active nature of the game this is more how crowd control works and the scourge through its shades achieve the same goal in a very similar way to the SoS. Pressure through damage and control your foes into choke points. While the protective spirits build and restoration healer fit the same role as the healing scourge. Probably the best downed state resurrected builds in the game and its goal is very similar to the protective spirits builds on rit. Its idea is to maintain damage mitigation while it maintains its resources. Its healing isn't really as impressive as the resto healer but it does have that revive thing going and I'd argue it's much stronger. One key difference is that the healer scourge doesn't necessarily want to be so far from the group. Although it requires that it must maintain its shades although not in the same way as rit did with its spirits. Their goals and how they achieve them are similar enough that it evokes those same feelings in practice. I played a lot of protective spirits builds in gw1, if being one of my favorite builds because of how much it did for the group.

As for how scourge is similar to the curses necromancer, the curses necromancer used alot of dot damage and aoe dps curses to achieve its goals. It had a lot of aoe that punished foes sticking close together with long lasting duration and heavy hitting hexes. The scourge is an AoE depuffer and very good at stripping boons much like the curse necro which was superb at stripping enchantments and blocking healing.

Hopefully you can see why I draw these comparisons. They evoke similar play feel and their in game philosophy in practice achieves the same goal through their different mechanics which require a slightly different approach. For me, playing the healing scourge evokes my nostalgia for my favorite Ritualist build and really makes me wish anet would release custom skill animations that turn sand shades into turquoise spirits with new Ghastly animations. But that's a topic for another time.

Saying they're completely different is both incorrect and short sighted. I acknowledge their differences but can't ignore where they're similar. Scourge is similar to the spirit of what much of the ritualist was trying to achieve. And it does it in areas I feel the engineer fails and the Revenant fails. Although I will cap this off with an admission that Ventari tablet does have design similarities of resto healer... just to show I'm not bias. Specifically resto healer on ritualist not necro.

Well, I disagree with you, the way you picture the scourge make it closer to an elementalist that would use wards or a wellmancer in gw1 than a spirit ritualist. I'm sorry but this is the truth, body blocking isn't something that the scourge does, like you said, the scourge create areas where you don't wanna go which is a lot closer to a wellmancer in gw1 or an ward elementalist (especially tenai's heat and ward against foes take care of the offensive/cc aspect while ward against harm could be said to be the barrier aspect).

However you put it, shade do not body block anybody. They debuff and damage foes stupid enough to cross them which is something that any area of effect can do. Like I said:

you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed.You can't escape these simple facts by saying that they have a similar effect as a body blocking spirit when it's obviously not the case. They do have similar effects to wards or wells but no similarity with spirits. You desperately lack a "body" to be able to say that they are close to spirits, meanwhile renegade kalla's skill do have this "body".

[Lily.1935]

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:And GW1 was a vastly different game than GW2. Renegade with kalla as it's legend is just like a spirit ritualist that transitionned from GW1 to GW2. And I garantee you that GW1's ritualist would be as clumsy as renegade in GW2's environment. GW1's gameplay is more fitting for static things like spirit, GW2 isn't forgiving for such things and this is why it feel clumsy.

Like I said, we are already full of "spirit" specs, there is no need to add more. Especially since we know that it either perform poorly or overperform and is then soon nerfed to uselessness.

NB.: scourge do not have any similarities with spirit, you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed. The closer to gw1's spirit ritualist would be the engineer (turrets), followed by ranger (nature spirits), mesmer (illusions) and renegade (kalla's legend). And there is objectively no need for more professions on this list.

This sort of statement drives me nuts because it is so blind to the way games are designed and how they function. And I keep having to argue against this fallacious talking point over and over again. Just because two games are different doesn't mean they many elements of their design and desired personal effect on individuals will be completely or even mostly different. Consider that Anet uses a custom table top RPG to design their raid encounters, or at least they have in the past. If your belief was correct anet wouldn't use this method to design their content. It wouldn't be possible to do. Especially considering that table top games are far far more different from Guild wars 2 than Guild wars 1 is. It just wouldn't work. Yet it does.

Game developers use card games and table top games when learning mechanics and how they should function because these games mechanics are on their sleeves and not under the hood.

Guild wars 1 is a much simpler game than GW2. This is obviously a fact. Its design is much more visible for the gamer than GW2 is. But as we dive into this, GW1 and GW2 are far more similar than different. They both hold the archetype of basic RPG elements and their classes fill very similar roles all be in slightly different ways. But the underlying philosophy and feel of these classes are quite similar if not evoking the same desires of the players. Where the games are similar are far more numerous than their differences so it's easier to list the differences than their similarities. For example, gw2 is a much more mobile game. The player has stronger and much more access to movement and placement than gw1. Gw1 is much more resource dependent than gw2. Gw1 and gw2's buffs and debuffs systems are honestly not different enough from each other to say that they're drastically different. Gw2 is simplified in comparison. Their armor system is different but does not have a big enough impact on gameplay to be that notable, gw2's system being more complex and deeper but ultimately they do the same thing in different ways.

So how is scourge similar to Ritualist? Well I said it was like a hybrid of ritualist and gw1 curses necromancer. But that second part I'll explain a bit later as the curses necromancer didn't do a lot of what the scourge does, but ritualist does. First what did the ritualist do? How did it function in practice? What was the roles it played and how did it achieve them?

To put that question as simply as possible the ritualist had a few different roles in the group and used different tactics that are not obvious to players who didn't play ritualist in gw1.

• SoS: The signet of spirits build or spirit spammer was a build that had decent damage output. Its role in group play wasn't a primary damage dealer to the contrary of popular belief but rather it acted as a way to protect its allies through body blocking. While allies could move through the spirits enemies couldn't. This tactic worked wonders as the AI would become inactive for a moment as they get stopped by the spirits, looking at their target while they take damage and your back line can prepare their heavy assault. With its moderate damage this made the SoS a stronge build in end game content were enemies had much more deadly tactics. This strategy did not work in pvp however since signet of spirits didn't create 3 spirits like it did in pve. But even with that, ritualist, rangers and minion master necros would use their spirits and minions to create choke points to bottleneck the opponents into unfavorable positions for your team. Because of the high cast time of spirits and minions this wasn't always viable.
• protective spirits: A very passive build that required the ritualist to avoid combat and maintain their defensive spirits through ritual lord and soul twisting, this ritualist didn't use their spirits as body blockers but rather used their defensive abilities to refuse the overall party damage to something more manageable for either the ritualist itself or the party healer. They spend most of their time maintaining spirit up time and their energy as this was a very energy intensive build.
• Restoration Healer: This build was less common to see than the other two and when you did see it it was more likely that a necromancer would be running restoration magic because of their superior energy management and because of how high the healing output the ritualist skills naturally had. However it was still seen on ritualist, more in pvp. Its function was based on its ability to prepare its urns, spirits and weapon spells to modify its healing output and reduce damage for allies at a quick pace, although slower than a monk would achieve. Its advantage over monk was that it took less investment in it's own attributes to achieve a similar output while more investment in it's set up. These builds is also known for how effective and quick they are at resurrecting dead allies. Since death pact signet, flesh of my flesh and resurrection are all some of the quickest methods of bringing allies back in the game.

There are plenty more builds I could highlight but these 3 are the ones I want to highlight since these are the ones the scourge captures extremely well. Similar to the SoS, the dps build on scourge isn't that impressive. Its effective, and its damage isn't something to underestimate. But the primary reason the dps scourge is so good outside of raids is because of this field control. Like the SoS it creates choke points for your foes and can quickly overwhelm them with damage that is difficult to reduce or avoid. These shades make it difficult for foes to close in on you and your allies. And this isn't something to be discounted. While body blocking doesn't work in gw2, crowd control is achieved more through conditions and stuns which the scourge isn't short on. Their manifest sand shade causes crippling, they have a fear and their torch has a knock down. Because of the more active nature of the game this is more how crowd control works and the scourge through its shades achieve the same goal in a very similar way to the SoS. Pressure through damage and control your foes into choke points. While the protective spirits build and restoration healer fit the same role as the healing scourge. Probably the best downed state resurrected builds in the game and its goal is very similar to the protective spirits builds on rit. Its idea is to maintain damage mitigation while it maintains its resources. Its healing isn't really as impressive as the resto healer but it does have that revive thing going and I'd argue it's much stronger. One key difference is that the healer scourge doesn't necessarily want to be so far from the group. Although it requires that it must maintain its shades although not in the same way as rit did with its spirits. Their goals and how they achieve them are similar enough that it evokes those same feelings in practice. I played a lot of protective spirits builds in gw1, if being one of my favorite builds because of how much it did for the group.

As for how scourge is similar to the curses necromancer, the curses necromancer used alot of dot damage and aoe dps curses to achieve its goals. It had a lot of aoe that punished foes sticking close together with long lasting duration and heavy hitting hexes. The scourge is an AoE depuffer and very good at stripping boons much like the curse necro which was superb at stripping enchantments and blocking healing.

Hopefully you can see why I draw these comparisons. They evoke similar play feel and their in game philosophy in practice achieves the same goal through their different mechanics which require a slightly different approach. For me, playing the healing scourge evokes my nostalgia for my favorite Ritualist build and really makes me wish anet would release custom skill animations that turn sand shades into turquoise spirits with new Ghastly animations. But that's a topic for another time.

Saying they're completely different is both incorrect and short sighted. I acknowledge their differences but can't ignore where they're similar. Scourge is similar to the spirit of what much of the ritualist was trying to achieve. And it does it in areas I feel the engineer fails and the Revenant fails. Although I will cap this off with an admission that Ventari tablet does have design similarities of resto healer... just to show I'm not bias. Specifically resto healer on ritualist not necro.

Well, I disagree with you, the way you picture the scourge make it closer to an elementalist that would use wards or a wellmancer in gw1 than a spirit ritualist. I'm sorry but this is the truth, body blocking isn't something that the scourge does, like you said, the scourge create areas where you don't wanna go which is a lot closer to a wellmancer in gw1 or an ward elementalist (especially

tenai's heat

and

ward against foes

take care of the offensive/cc aspect while

ward against harm

could be said to be the barrier aspect).

However you put it, shade do not body block anybody. They debuff and damage foes stupid enough to cross them which is something that any area of effect can do. Like I said:

you don't spawn shades at your feets, all shades do the same thing, shades don't display their effects in a periodical and extremly previsible patern and, above all, shades cannot be killed.

You can't escape these simple facts by saying that they have a similar effect as a body blocking spirit when it's obviously not the case. They do have similar effects to

wards

or

wells

but no similarity with

spirits

. You desperately lack a "body" to be able to say that they are close to

spirits

, meanwhile renegade kalla's skill do have this "body".

You're too narrow focused. And wards? Interesting idea, but extremely wrong. Wards best comparison in gw2 would be thinks like shield of absorption, the new gyro design, that sort of thing. Things that protect around the caster more so than away from them like both spirits and shades do.

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

[Crab Fear.1624]

It's pretty clear that the thief will get the ritualist spec. This way we can summon some spirits to +1 for when no living allies are around.

[LucianTheAngelic.7054]

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

[Lily.1935]

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

6k hours in the game. And I played extensively with ritualist, necromancer, mesmer and Dervish. What I mean by that is EVA is a short duration summon that comes out and does its thing. Similar to how the Renegade summons work.

Now here's a better question. How is keeping in melee and using the Kalla war and to buff your personal dps output similar to using the ritualist spirits to body block foes and sticking as far from the fight as possible and only occasionally replacing spirits as needed similar? If your criteria is summoning than spirit ranger is similar and necromancer minion master is similar.

Have you guys even played gw1? Like seriously. You keep posting at me how its different but can't even see the difference in two completely different strategies in the games. And in all this you still fail to see any builds past the SoS. If you actually did play it it's even less forgettable because you probably called the build SS both annoying the Necromancer players and old school ritualist players who knew the difference between SS and SoS. You want to get petty, I'll get petty with you.

[LucianTheAngelic.7054]

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

6k hours in the game. And I played extensively with ritualist, necromancer, mesmer and Dervish. What I mean by that is EVA is a short duration summon that comes out and does its thing. Similar to how the Renegade summons work.

Now here's a better question. How is keeping in melee and using the Kalla war and to buff your personal dps output similar to using the ritualist spirits to body block foes and sticking as far from the fight as possible and only occasionally replacing spirits as needed similar? If your criteria is summoning than spirit ranger is similar and necromancer minion master is similar.

Have you guys even played gw1? Like seriously. You keep posting at me how its different but can't even see the difference in two completely different strategies in the games. And in all this you still fail to see any builds past the SoS. If you actually did play it it's even less forgettable because you probably called the build SS both annoying the Necromancer players and old school ritualist players who knew the difference between SS and SoS. You want to get petty, I'll get petty with you.

Shortbow is 900 range and for most solo content Renegade certainly functions extremely well at range dropping DPS spirits near enemies and support spirits near yourself. No need to go mace/axe in open world a lot of the time. The only time you're stacking in melee is if a) you want to or b) it's group content, at which point you're also stacking in melee as a scourge, so the comparison is irrelevant. Also you say you played a ton of Rit and Derv, so you should be aware of the skill Spirit's Strength, which I used extensively back in GW1, which allowed Rit to do things like pick up a Scythe and do massive amounts of melee damage with it. Ritualist is certainly not bound to a 100% ranged playstyle and never has been. Also Urn drop effects require you to get in melee range in a lot of cases.

As for duration, sure, Sand Shades definitely have longer duration (in PvE only mind you, otherwise they're equal to the length of supportive Kalla spirits), but mechanically they're really different. I laid that out in my last post so I don't feel like laying it out again, but Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

[Lily.1935]

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

6k hours in the game. And I played extensively with ritualist, necromancer, mesmer and Dervish. What I mean by that is EVA is a short duration summon that comes out and does its thing. Similar to how the Renegade summons work.

Now here's a better question. How is keeping in melee and using the Kalla war and to buff your personal dps output similar to using the ritualist spirits to body block foes and sticking as far from the fight as possible and only occasionally replacing spirits as needed similar? If your criteria is summoning than spirit ranger is similar and necromancer minion master is similar.

Have you guys even played gw1? Like seriously. You keep posting at me how its different but can't even see the difference in two completely different strategies in the games. And in all this you still fail to see any builds past the SoS. If you actually did play it it's even less forgettable because you probably called the build SS both annoying the Necromancer players and old school ritualist players who knew the difference between SS and SoS. You want to get petty, I'll get petty with you.

Shortbow is 900 range and for most solo content Renegade certainly functions extremely well at range dropping DPS spirits near enemies and support spirits near yourself. No need to go mace/axe in open world a lot of the time. The only time you're stacking in melee is if a) you want to or b) it's group content, at which point you're also stacking in melee as a scourge, so the comparison is irrelevant. Also you say you played a ton of Rit and Derv, so you should be aware of the skill Spirit's Strength, which I used extensively back in GW1, which allowed Rit to do things like pick up a Scythe and do massive amounts of melee damage with it. Ritualist is certainly not bound to a 100% ranged playstyle and never has been. Also Urn drop effects require you to get in melee range in a lot of cases.

As for duration, sure, Sand Shades definitely have longer duration (in PvE only mind you, otherwise they're equal to the length of supportive Kalla spirits), but mechanically they're really different. I laid that out in my last post so I don't feel like laying it out again, but Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

You've actually never played Ritualist... Maybe you've dabbled in SoS, but You've defiantly never experimented with the other builds of the class and you certainly never farmed on Ritualist.

Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

This is... Wrong... Like, omg, its super wrong. Spirit spammer Is a fairly passive build. And the Scythe build you are talking about doesn't tend to run spirits at all. There is no real parallel to the ghostly strength build from GW1, but it was kinda a fringe build outside of PvP and even in PvP Ritualist wasn't likely to be the one going into melee, but rather acting as a support. The spirit spammer didn't favor melee. And Short bow doesn't act like any of the ranged options that the ritualist had. If a ritualist did attack at range, their skills were slow and would add pressure. The SoS would maintain its spirits as one would die. Their goal wasn't a high DPS, because their DPS wasn't really that high, they were better at field control and dealing hard to prevent consistent damage. You actually didn't have a whole lot of control over your spirits. The spirits that did attack, which a lot didn't, they would attack passively but they had the nice bonus of swapping targets to yours if you chose a new target. This was nice but it doesn't fit your narrative. the SoS was a low maintenance build but it still required a lot more maintenance than the Kalla warband. Also, don't fuse 2 builds together like that again. Its unbecoming.

Now lets get into the high maintenance builds. My personal favorite ritualist builds. The Protective spirit builds. or Prot spirits.https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Soul_Twisting_Prothttps://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Ritual_Lord_Prot

I can easily tell you right now, You've never heard of this. Because you wouldn't make the claims you did if you actually played this build. These were SPIRIT BUILDS! Caps for emphasis, and its been a very important aspect of the ritualist's Identity. The build requires you keep a watchful eye on your spirits and maintain your energy while the spirits slowly kill themselves to the damage they are preventing from your foes. You recharge them almost instantly with Ritual Lord and Soul Twisting but the maintenance is an important game seldom left to players to use. I personally loved using it since I was good at these builds and I could watch my allies do their thing while I provided a wall of protection. You don't drop them and forget.

How is this similar to the Scourge? Well, as you said scourge requires a lot of maintenance. Prot spirits is one of the most maintenance heavy builds in GW1. Its not the most maintenance heavy, that would be Minion master, but it certainly is up there. But that's a fairly minor similarity in my opinion. Where it is really similar is how you maintain both energy and the defensive buffs both provide. Their goals are exactly the same. Reduce damage and make it manageable for a healer to clean up the little damage your allies are taking. In GW2's case because builds tend to be more versatile and fill more roles the scourge often takes that role acting as a hybrid of this old style of build along with its similarities to the exceptionally powerful resurrection ability of the Ritualist.

But lets go even further, beyond just this build because Both of the Ritualist and necromancer are summoner type classes. This was true in GW1 and its true for necromancer in GW2. The entire Spawning power attribute was entirely geared toward summoning. Something the necromancer absolutely does, especially the Scourge, and the Revenant doesn't do hardly at all. And don't say shades aren't summons. They're summons... If I have to argue with this don't bother because I won't deal with that level of dishonesty.

To see what I mean you have:https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Boon_of_Creationhttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Explosive_Growthhttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ritual_Lordhttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit_Channelinghttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit%27s_Gift

These all care about spirits or summoning in some way. The only thing that the Renegade has summoning or maintaining synergy is....

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/All_for_One

Lets compare that with scourge. Shall we?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Manifest_Sand_Shadehttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sand_Sagehttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Desert_Empowermenthttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sadistic_Searinghttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blood_as_Sand

And if you want to go further than that, the Ritualist could modify the damage output of Spirits further through hexes. More like A hex. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Painful_Bond But the parallel to hexes are conditions. Admittedly the next part is a stretch, but I'll add it regardless since I want to include everything. Necromancer naturally modifies the Shades with its traits outside of just scourge much like the Ritualist modifies its spirits and their summoning. We have:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unyielding_Blasthttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dhuumfire

I could fudge it a bit and say that things like death perception have this modifying nature too, but that's not really all that fair and its a bit of cheating so I wont. And I've been more than fair to the hodge podge hybrid of every single profession in existence that the Revenant is. I've experimented With all of these skills btw. I've used almost all the ritualist skills back in GW1. I've used more skills on rit than Mesmer. Necromancer is comparative, but Necromancer and Ritualist in GW1 actually play fairly different until you start playing Spirit spammer with Painful bond and Mark of pain necro, then they're not super different if the team is built to abuse those hexes. They're different enough, but Profession identity was something anet was concerned with when moving to GW2. But that's a completely different topic and we wont get into the design struggles of GW1.

Also the argument that "WELL THE SCOURGE PLACES ITS SHADES AND THE RITUALIST SPIRITS WERE SUMMONED AT LOCATION!" is an incredibly dishonest position. Kalla's warband isn't summoned at location either. They have a 600 range. So... You guys going to admit fault for that blatant dishonesty? Of course not, you guys can't admit when you're wrong. Why would you do that? I've been more than fair to the Revenant. I have admitted points where it has some similarities to the ritualist, but you guys haven't even conceded an inch even against insurmountable evidence.

But hey! Lets look at where the Revenant is similar to other professions aside from Ritualist, Shall we?

• Dervish: Dervish modifies its skills and abilities based on the God avatar they are currently using. If they're not using an avatar they're form of attack is drastically different. The impact to their build is comparable to the legend swapping. So much so that in GW2 when the dervish was translated over from GW1 as bosses, That dervish boss dramatically changes up its play style much like the intention of the revenant's legend system.
• Assassin: Both Revenant and assassin use quick movement allowing them to quickly blink into combat and retreat if needed, stacking their chain attacks to move in and out. Assassin was also one of 2 professions know for using upkeep skills in GW1. Although Thief is far more similar to the assassin it would be dishonest to suggest that the Revenant shares no similarities with the assassin.
• Monk: The similarities between these two professions are admittedly minor, however the monk used upkeep skills quite frequently and it was often the game plan of their farming builds. The Revenant differs from these builds with pushing upkeep skills as more of an active part of their combat role. Although this is really where the similarities end since I feel just having the ability to heal isn't enough so we'll move on.
• Paragon: The paragon was known for buffing allies defense and offense. Unlike the methods of the Necromancer which debuffed and the ritualist which selectively buffed allies, the paragon used party wide buffs as long as it was within range. This is fairly comparable to the way Herald functions in GW2. These builds play a very similar role, although the Paragon had fallen out of favor due to other professions preforming its roles better through more consistent methods, the intention was still there.
• Necromancer: The Revenant has even taken elements of the Necromancer from guild wars one. While the necromancer used things like tainted flesh, one of the old intentions in the design of revenant with Mallyx was to turn the revenant into a walking plague. This was a failed build idea back in GW1 that the necromancer had and was desired among the necromancer community who were nostalgic for this sort of build whom always wanted to make it work(such as myself) but could never achieve it. This build of the revenant has since been dropped but still has a remnant of it under corruption.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, But to put it bluntly, Revenant has always been a hybrid profession. Its the blue mage or Red mage of GW2. ANd honestly, I like it like that. Yes it has some similarities to Ritualist and I've admitted that with Ventari. I'm not ignoring that. But a vast vast majority of the class comes from so many different directions, it truly is a Frankenstein's monster of the GW series. It takes bits and pieces from all over the place. This isn't to say other professions don't do that, they absolutely do. Reaper for example takes a bit from GW1 warrior and Dervish, Druit takes a lot from GW1 monk, Mesmer takes design elements from GW1 assassin, I could honestly continue. But the point is that Revenant does it far more and seems to be a celebration of the Guild wars series as a whole. And it can't take on the identity of a Ritualist because it just isn't a ritualist. Its too different even on its most similar elite spec. Revenant really was always meant to be the Shonen Rival.

You want to agree to disagree? Fine! We can end it here. I've been working on what a Ritualist profession might look like and I don't want to spend all this extra time arguing about one of the most disappointing professions in the GW franchise that I love. Its depressing. I love the Revenant. It fills my Dervishy, red mage, blue mage love but the profession is so shallow. And arguing about it just keeps reminding me of what the revenant COULD be but isn't.

[VocalThought.9835]

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

6k hours in the game. And I played extensively with ritualist, necromancer, mesmer and Dervish. What I mean by that is EVA is a short duration summon that comes out and does its thing. Similar to how the Renegade summons work.

Now here's a better question. How is keeping in melee and using the Kalla war and to buff your personal dps output similar to using the ritualist spirits to body block foes and sticking as far from the fight as possible and only occasionally replacing spirits as needed similar? If your criteria is summoning than spirit ranger is similar and necromancer minion master is similar.

Have you guys even played gw1? Like seriously. You keep posting at me how its different but can't even see the difference in two completely different strategies in the games. And in all this you still fail to see any builds past the SoS. If you actually did play it it's even less forgettable because you probably called the build SS both annoying the Necromancer players and old school ritualist players who knew the difference between SS and SoS. You want to get petty, I'll get petty with you.

Shortbow is 900 range and for most solo content Renegade certainly functions extremely well at range dropping DPS spirits near enemies and support spirits near yourself. No need to go mace/axe in open world a lot of the time. The only time you're stacking in melee is if a) you want to or b) it's group content, at which point you're also stacking in melee as a scourge, so the comparison is irrelevant. Also you say you played a ton of Rit and Derv, so you should be aware of the skill Spirit's Strength, which I used extensively back in GW1, which allowed Rit to do things like pick up a Scythe and do massive amounts of melee damage with it. Ritualist is certainly not bound to a 100% ranged playstyle and never has been. Also Urn drop effects require you to get in melee range in a lot of cases.

As for duration, sure, Sand Shades definitely have longer duration (in PvE only mind you, otherwise they're equal to the length of supportive Kalla spirits), but mechanically they're really different. I laid that out in my last post so I don't feel like laying it out again, but Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

You've actually never played Ritualist... Maybe you've dabbled in SoS, but You've defiantly never experimented with the other builds of the class and you certainly never farmed on Ritualist.

Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

This is... Wrong... Like, omg, its super wrong. Spirit spammer Is a fairly passive build. And the Scythe build you are talking about doesn't tend to run spirits at all. There is no real parallel to the ghostly strength build from GW1, but it was kinda a fringe build outside of PvP and even in PvP Ritualist wasn't likely to be the one going into melee, but rather acting as a support. The spirit spammer didn't favor melee. And Short bow doesn't act like any of the ranged options that the ritualist had. If a ritualist did attack at range, their skills were slow and would add pressure. The SoS would maintain its spirits as one would die. Their goal wasn't a high DPS, because their DPS wasn't really that high, they were better at field control and dealing hard to prevent consistent damage. You actually didn't have a whole lot of control over your spirits. The spirits that did attack, which a lot didn't, they would attack passively but they had the nice bonus of swapping targets to yours if you chose a new target. This was nice but it doesn't fit your narrative. the SoS was a low maintenance build but it still required a lot more maintenance than the Kalla warband. Also, don't fuse 2 builds together like that again. Its unbecoming.

Now lets get into the high maintenance builds. My personal favorite ritualist builds. The Protective spirit builds. or Prot spirits.

https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Soul_Twisting_Prot

https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Ritual_Lord_Prot

I can easily tell you right now, You've never heard of this. Because you wouldn't make the claims you did if you actually played this build. These were SPIRIT BUILDS! Caps for emphasis, and its been a very important aspect of the ritualist's Identity. The build requires you keep a watchful eye on your spirits and maintain your energy while the spirits slowly kill themselves to the damage they are preventing from your foes. You recharge them almost instantly with Ritual Lord and Soul Twisting but the maintenance is an important game seldom left to players to use. I personally loved using it since I was good at these builds and I could watch my allies do their thing while I provided a wall of protection. You don't drop them and forget.

How is this similar to the Scourge? Well, as you said scourge requires a lot of maintenance. Prot spirits is one of the most maintenance heavy builds in GW1. Its not the most maintenance heavy, that would be Minion master, but it certainly is up there. But that's a fairly minor similarity in my opinion. Where it is really similar is how you maintain both energy and the defensive buffs both provide. Their goals are exactly the same. Reduce damage and make it manageable for a healer to clean up the little damage your allies are taking. In GW2's case because builds tend to be more versatile and fill more roles the scourge often takes that role acting as a hybrid of this old style of build along with its similarities to the exceptionally powerful resurrection ability of the Ritualist.

But lets go even further, beyond just this build because Both of the Ritualist and necromancer are summoner type classes. This was true in GW1 and its true for necromancer in GW2. The entire Spawning power attribute was entirely geared toward summoning. Something the necromancer absolutely does, especially the Scourge, and the Revenant doesn't do hardly at all. And don't say shades aren't summons. They're summons... If I have to argue with this don't bother because I won't deal with that level of dishonesty.

To see what I mean you have:

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Boon_of_Creation

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Explosive_Growth

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ritual_Lord

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit_Channeling

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit%27s_Gift

These all care about spirits or summoning in some way. The only thing that the Renegade has summoning or maintaining synergy is....

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/All_for_One

Lets compare that with scourge. Shall we?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Manifest_Sand_Shade

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sand_Sage

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Desert_Empowerment

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sadistic_Searing

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blood_as_Sand

And if you want to go further than that, the Ritualist could modify the damage output of Spirits further through hexes. More like A hex.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Painful_Bond

But the parallel to hexes are conditions. Admittedly the next part is a stretch, but I'll add it regardless since I want to include everything. Necromancer naturally modifies the Shades with its traits outside of just scourge much like the Ritualist modifies its spirits and their summoning. We have:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unyielding_Blast

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dhuumfire

I could fudge it a bit and say that things like death perception have this modifying nature too, but that's not really all that fair and its a bit of cheating so I wont. And I've been more than fair to the hodge podge hybrid of every single profession in existence that the Revenant is. I've experimented With all of these skills btw. I've used almost all the ritualist skills back in GW1. I've used more skills on rit than Mesmer. Necromancer is comparative, but Necromancer and Ritualist in GW1 actually play fairly different until you start playing Spirit spammer with Painful bond and Mark of pain necro, then they're not super different if the team is built to abuse those hexes. They're different enough, but Profession identity was something anet was concerned with when moving to GW2. But that's a completely different topic and we wont get into the design struggles of GW1.

Also the argument that "WELL THE SCOURGE PLACES ITS SHADES AND THE RITUALIST SPIRITS WERE SUMMONED AT LOCATION!" is an incredibly dishonest position. Kalla's warband isn't summoned at location either. They have a 600 range. So... You guys going to admit fault for that blatant dishonesty? Of course not, you guys can't admit when you're wrong. Why would you do that? I've been more than fair to the Revenant. I have admitted points where it has some similarities to the ritualist, but you guys haven't even conceded an inch even against insurmountable evidence.

But hey! Lets look at where the Revenant is similar to other professions aside from Ritualist, Shall we?

• Dervish: Dervish modifies its skills and abilities based on the God avatar they are currently using. If they're not using an avatar they're form of attack is drastically different. The impact to their build is comparable to the legend swapping. So much so that in GW2 when the dervish was translated over from GW1 as bosses, That dervish boss dramatically changes up its play style much like the intention of the revenant's legend system.
• Assassin: Both Revenant and assassin use quick movement allowing them to quickly blink into combat and retreat if needed, stacking their chain attacks to move in and out. Assassin was also one of 2 professions know for using upkeep skills in GW1. Although Thief is far more similar to the assassin it would be dishonest to suggest that the Revenant shares no similarities with the assassin.
• Monk: The similarities between these two professions are admittedly minor, however the monk used upkeep skills quite frequently and it was often the game plan of their farming builds. The Revenant differs from these builds with pushing upkeep skills as more of an active part of their combat role. Although this is really where the similarities end since I feel just having the ability to heal isn't enough so we'll move on.
• Paragon: The paragon was known for buffing allies defense and offense. Unlike the methods of the Necromancer which debuffed and the ritualist which selectively buffed allies, the paragon used party wide buffs as long as it was within range. This is fairly comparable to the way Herald functions in GW2. These builds play a very similar role, although the Paragon had fallen out of favor due to other professions preforming its roles better through more consistent methods, the intention was still there.
• Necromancer: The Revenant has even taken elements of the Necromancer from guild wars one. While the necromancer used things like tainted flesh, one of the old intentions in the design of revenant with Mallyx was to turn the revenant into a walking plague. This was a failed build idea back in GW1 that the necromancer had and was desired among the necromancer community who were nostalgic for this sort of build whom always wanted to make it work(such as myself) but could never achieve it. This build of the revenant has since been dropped but still has a remnant of it under corruption.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, But to put it bluntly, Revenant has always been a hybrid profession. Its the blue mage or Red mage of GW2. ANd honestly, I like it like that. Yes it has some similarities to Ritualist and I've admitted that with Ventari. I'm not ignoring that. But a vast vast majority of the class comes from so many different directions, it truly is a Frankenstein's monster of the GW series. It takes bits and pieces from all over the place. This isn't to say other professions don't do that, they absolutely do. Reaper for example takes a bit from GW1 warrior and Dervish, Druit takes a lot from GW1 monk, Mesmer takes design elements from GW1 assassin, I could honestly continue. But the point is that Revenant does it far more and seems to be a celebration of the Guild wars series as a whole. And it can't take on the identity of a Ritualist because it just isn't a ritualist. Its too different even on its most similar elite spec. Revenant really was always meant to be the Shonen Rival.

You want to agree to disagree? Fine! We can end it here. I've been working on what a Ritualist profession might look like and I don't want to spend all this extra time arguing about one of the most disappointing professions in the GW franchise that I love. Its depressing. I love the Revenant. It fills my Dervishy, red mage, blue mage love but the profession is so shallow. And arguing about it just keeps reminding me of what the revenant COULD be but isn't.

Yeah I think the argument is dead. All people are doing is just sharing their opinions as if it's factual about what profession is like what. All anyone can do is look at the previous skills of GW1 and see what skills from the Ritualist class was put into the other classes and add up which classes have more of the ritualist skills, and even that might not be good, because some skills may share the same name, but not show the same imagery. I think all in all, GW2 did a great job rounding out the professional class and the core and elite specialization, enough that people could make what ever fantasy theme character they want, and with maybe more elite specializations to come the closer they would be with filling what ever void is missing.

I think adding a Elite spec at this point would be easier than adding another profession, which was why A-Net created elite specs. I think it was a great way to create the feel of a secondary class and to establish the different class archetypes in the fantasy genre. IMO I feel they could add more themes like: Brawler, Field Commander, Shaman, Warden, Psionic, Dancer, Demon Hunter, Witch Hunter, Treasure Hunter, Detective, Delver, Inquisitor, Technomancer, Mech Pilot, Mystical Summoner, Shadow Mage, Demon Lord, Dreamwalker, Dragon Knight, Dark Knight, Enchanter, or Bard.

[Lily.1935]

@VocalThought.9835 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

Also, Kalla's skills act nothing like spirits. They act more like the Ebon Vangard assassin skill.

Blish did you play GW1?! They act more like Rit Spirits than Scourge Shades lmao. They have an AoE, they do their thing in that AoE, they can take damage (Scourge shades can't), they only do ONE action (no Rit spirit is able to do multiple things the way Scourge shades do), they have a bigger radius than default Sand Shades . The literally only thing that differentiates them from Rit spirits is that they can get CCed. That's it. That's the only thing. They don't run around at your target the way Ebon Vanguard Assassin does. They're not even close to that skill at all......

6k hours in the game. And I played extensively with ritualist, necromancer, mesmer and Dervish. What I mean by that is EVA is a short duration summon that comes out and does its thing. Similar to how the Renegade summons work.

Now here's a better question. How is keeping in melee and using the Kalla war and to buff your personal dps output similar to using the ritualist spirits to body block foes and sticking as far from the fight as possible and only occasionally replacing spirits as needed similar? If your criteria is summoning than spirit ranger is similar and necromancer minion master is similar.

Have you guys even played gw1? Like seriously. You keep posting at me how its different but can't even see the difference in two completely different strategies in the games. And in all this you still fail to see any builds past the SoS. If you actually did play it it's even less forgettable because you probably called the build SS both annoying the Necromancer players and old school ritualist players who knew the difference between SS and SoS. You want to get petty, I'll get petty with you.

Shortbow is 900 range and for most solo content Renegade certainly functions extremely well at range dropping DPS spirits near enemies and support spirits near yourself. No need to go mace/axe in open world a lot of the time. The only time you're stacking in melee is if a) you want to or b) it's group content, at which point you're also stacking in melee as a scourge, so the comparison is irrelevant. Also you say you played a ton of Rit and Derv, so you should be aware of the skill Spirit's Strength, which I used extensively back in GW1, which allowed Rit to do things like pick up a Scythe and do massive amounts of melee damage with it. Ritualist is certainly not bound to a 100% ranged playstyle and never has been. Also Urn drop effects require you to get in melee range in a lot of cases.

As for duration, sure, Sand Shades definitely have longer duration (in PvE only mind you, otherwise they're equal to the length of supportive Kalla spirits), but mechanically they're really different. I laid that out in my last post so I don't feel like laying it out again, but Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

You've actually never played Ritualist... Maybe you've dabbled in SoS, but You've defiantly never experimented with the other builds of the class and you certainly never farmed on Ritualist.

Sand Shades require micromanagement that neither Kalla's Warband nor Rit Spirits have; they don't do anything on their own unless you tell them to do something.

This is... Wrong... Like, omg, its super wrong. Spirit spammer Is a fairly passive build. And the Scythe build you are talking about doesn't tend to run spirits at all. There is no real parallel to the ghostly strength build from GW1, but it was kinda a fringe build outside of PvP and even in PvP Ritualist wasn't likely to be the one going into melee, but rather acting as a support. The spirit spammer didn't favor melee. And Short bow doesn't act like any of the ranged options that the ritualist had. If a ritualist did attack at range, their skills were slow and would add pressure. The SoS would maintain its spirits as one would die. Their goal wasn't a high DPS, because their DPS wasn't really that high, they were better at field control and dealing hard to prevent consistent damage. You actually didn't have a whole lot of control over your spirits. The spirits that did attack, which a lot didn't, they would attack passively but they had the nice bonus of swapping targets to yours if you chose a new target. This was nice but it doesn't fit your narrative. the SoS was a low maintenance build but it still required a lot more maintenance than the Kalla warband. Also, don't fuse 2 builds together like that again. Its unbecoming.

Now lets get into the high maintenance builds. My personal favorite ritualist builds. The Protective spirit builds. or Prot spirits.

https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Soul_Twisting_Prot

https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/Build:Rt/any_Ritual_Lord_Prot

I can easily tell you right now, You've never heard of this. Because you wouldn't make the claims you did if you actually played this build. These were SPIRIT BUILDS! Caps for emphasis, and its been a very important aspect of the ritualist's Identity. The build requires you keep a watchful eye on your spirits and maintain your energy while the spirits slowly kill themselves to the damage they are preventing from your foes. You recharge them almost instantly with Ritual Lord and Soul Twisting but the maintenance is an important game seldom left to players to use. I personally loved using it since I was good at these builds and I could watch my allies do their thing while I provided a wall of protection. You don't drop them and forget.

How is this similar to the Scourge? Well, as you said scourge requires a lot of maintenance. Prot spirits is one of the most maintenance heavy builds in GW1. Its not the most maintenance heavy, that would be Minion master, but it certainly is up there. But that's a fairly minor similarity in my opinion. Where it is really similar is how you maintain both energy and the defensive buffs both provide. Their goals are exactly the same. Reduce damage and make it manageable for a healer to clean up the little damage your allies are taking. In GW2's case because builds tend to be more versatile and fill more roles the scourge often takes that role acting as a hybrid of this old style of build along with its similarities to the exceptionally powerful resurrection ability of the Ritualist.

But lets go even further, beyond just this build because Both of the Ritualist and necromancer are summoner type classes. This was true in GW1 and its true for necromancer in GW2. The entire Spawning power attribute was entirely geared toward summoning. Something the necromancer absolutely does, especially the Scourge, and the Revenant doesn't do hardly at all. And don't say shades aren't summons. They're summons... If I have to argue with this don't bother because I won't deal with that level of dishonesty.

To see what I mean you have:

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Boon_of_Creation

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Explosive_Growth

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ritual_Lord

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit_Channeling

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spirit%27s_Gift

These all care about spirits or summoning in some way. The only thing that the Renegade has summoning or maintaining synergy is....

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/All_for_One

Lets compare that with scourge. Shall we?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Manifest_Sand_Shade

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sand_Sage

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Desert_Empowerment

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sadistic_Searing

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blood_as_Sand

And if you want to go further than that, the Ritualist could modify the damage output of Spirits further through hexes. More like A hex.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Painful_Bond

But the parallel to hexes are conditions. Admittedly the next part is a stretch, but I'll add it regardless since I want to include everything. Necromancer naturally modifies the Shades with its traits outside of just scourge much like the Ritualist modifies its spirits and their summoning. We have:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unyielding_Blast

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dhuumfire

I could fudge it a bit and say that things like death perception have this modifying nature too, but that's not really all that fair and its a bit of cheating so I wont. And I've been more than fair to the hodge podge hybrid of every single profession in existence that the Revenant is. I've experimented With all of these skills btw. I've used almost all the ritualist skills back in GW1. I've used more skills on rit than Mesmer. Necromancer is comparative, but Necromancer and Ritualist in GW1 actually play fairly different until you start playing Spirit spammer with Painful bond and Mark of pain necro, then they're not super different if the team is built to abuse those hexes. They're different enough, but Profession identity was something anet was concerned with when moving to GW2. But that's a completely different topic and we wont get into the design struggles of GW1.

Also the argument that "WELL THE SCOURGE PLACES ITS SHADES AND THE RITUALIST SPIRITS WERE SUMMONED AT LOCATION!" is an incredibly dishonest position. Kalla's warband isn't summoned at location either. They have a 600 range. So... You guys going to admit fault for that blatant dishonesty? Of course not, you guys can't admit when you're wrong. Why would you do that? I've been more than fair to the Revenant. I have admitted points where it has some similarities to the ritualist, but you guys haven't even conceded an inch even against insurmountable evidence.

But hey! Lets look at where the Revenant is similar to other professions aside from Ritualist, Shall we?

• Dervish: Dervish modifies its skills and abilities based on the God avatar they are currently using. If they're not using an avatar they're form of attack is drastically different. The impact to their build is comparable to the legend swapping. So much so that in GW2 when the dervish was translated over from GW1 as bosses, That dervish boss dramatically changes up its play style much like the intention of the revenant's legend system.
• Assassin: Both Revenant and assassin use quick movement allowing them to quickly blink into combat and retreat if needed, stacking their chain attacks to move in and out. Assassin was also one of 2 professions know for using upkeep skills in GW1. Although Thief is far more similar to the assassin it would be dishonest to suggest that the Revenant shares no similarities with the assassin.
• Monk: The similarities between these two professions are admittedly minor, however the monk used upkeep skills quite frequently and it was often the game plan of their farming builds. The Revenant differs from these builds with pushing upkeep skills as more of an active part of their combat role. Although this is really where the similarities end since I feel just having the ability to heal isn't enough so we'll move on.
• Paragon: The paragon was known for buffing allies defense and offense. Unlike the methods of the Necromancer which debuffed and the ritualist which selectively buffed allies, the paragon used party wide buffs as long as it was within range. This is fairly comparable to the way Herald functions in GW2. These builds play a very similar role, although the Paragon had fallen out of favor due to other professions preforming its roles better through more consistent methods, the intention was still there.
• Necromancer: The Revenant has even taken elements of the Necromancer from guild wars one. While the necromancer used things like tainted flesh, one of the old intentions in the design of revenant with Mallyx was to turn the revenant into a walking plague. This was a failed build idea back in GW1 that the necromancer had and was desired among the necromancer community who were nostalgic for this sort of build whom always wanted to make it work(such as myself) but could never achieve it. This build of the revenant has since been dropped but still has a remnant of it under corruption.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, But to put it bluntly, Revenant has always been a hybrid profession. Its the blue mage or Red mage of GW2. ANd honestly, I like it like that. Yes it has some similarities to Ritualist and I've admitted that with Ventari. I'm not ignoring that. But a vast vast majority of the class comes from so many different directions, it truly is a Frankenstein's monster of the GW series. It takes bits and pieces from all over the place. This isn't to say other professions don't do that, they absolutely do. Reaper for example takes a bit from GW1 warrior and Dervish, Druit takes a lot from GW1 monk, Mesmer takes design elements from GW1 assassin, I could honestly continue. But the point is that Revenant does it far more and seems to be a celebration of the Guild wars series as a whole. And it can't take on the identity of a Ritualist because it just isn't a ritualist. Its too different even on its most similar elite spec. Revenant really was always meant to be the Shonen Rival.

You want to agree to disagree? Fine! We can end it here. I've been working on what a Ritualist profession might look like and I don't want to spend all this extra time arguing about one of the most disappointing professions in the GW franchise that I love. Its depressing. I love the Revenant. It fills my Dervishy, red mage, blue mage love but the profession is so shallow. And arguing about it just keeps reminding me of what the revenant COULD be but isn't.

Yeah I think the argument is dead. All people are doing is just sharing their opinions as if it's factual about what profession is like what. All anyone can do is look at the previous skills of GW1 and see what skills from the Ritualist class was put into the other classes and add up which classes have more of the ritualist skills, and even that might not be good, because some skills may share the same name, but not show the same imagery. I think all in all, GW2 did a great job rounding out the professional class and the core and elite specialization, enough that people could make what ever fantasy theme character they want, and with maybe more elite specializations to come the closer they would be with filling what ever void is missing.

I think adding a Elite spec at this point would be easier than adding another profession, which was why A-Net created elite specs. I think it was a great way to create the feel of a secondary class and to establish the different class archetypes in the fantasy genre. IMO I feel they could add more themes like: Brawler, Field Commander, Shaman, Warden, Psionic, Dancer, Demon Hunter, Witch Hunter, Treasure Hunter, Detective, Delver, Inquisitor, Technomancer, Mech Pilot, Mystical Summoner, Shadow Mage, Demon Lord, Dreamwalker, Dragon Knight, Dark Knight, Enchanter, or Bard.

Some classes are much more limited when it comes to elite design space than others. I feel Revenant has a fairly limitless design space except for when we talk about summoning which i feel they are one if not the worst profession for summoning. They could be okay as a sorta "flash summoner" which I'll make up the term now as a summoner who conjures creatures for a very short duration to do a burst. There is also the option of something like a stand user like In Jojo's Bizarre adventure. Which could be cool if they could conjure the spirit of the legend as their unique mechanic.

Beyond that I feel elementalist is actually quite limited in its potential design space for elite specs. Someone might disagree with me and that's good if they do. Because that means there's more that could be done. However with the way ele was designed is in direct contrast to what the elite specs are meant to do. If the ele was limited to 2 elements at a time I wouldn't feel this way. I'd feel they have lots of potential design space.

So I feel we will hit a critical mass. Or arena net will just want to do a new profession and stop making elite specs. They've changed direction before. This isn't to say they wont add new traits and skills. Because I think they will. I don't think these things absolutely need to be tied to elite specs though.