Ritualist is still not enough

Another league, another baited ritualist. I played Wyvern and devour priority targeting rares in combat had great synergy lol. I think all ascendencies need massive buffs, so thats the direction of this.

Ritualist’s fantasy is centered on monster modifiers, but in practice the payoff is a 5 minute buffs that don’t justify the setup or friction. The Blood Boil changes are good, but not affecting uniques severely limits its impact and it just being slow dot dmg after the fact is not great. Right now, ascendancy power is effectively gated behind rarity cullers and the third ring, when it should lean directly into monster mods. Simply removing RP and just give a 5 minute Headhunter is probably unrealistic, but Ritualist needs more consistent power. A strong option would be a 2-pointer behind Ritual Sacrifice that lets them either choose a type of buff to roll for or a pool of related mods like below to give them the whole suite of basic effects. Or could be like the Smith of Kitava where we can pick our Ritual Sacrifice buffs to get or it's redesigned to get the buffs of pick 8 mods to add to your character.

Cold - Cold Trail, Frost Ball (monster buff effect), and Cold Nova (essence aoe effect)
Fire - Fire Trail, Fire Ball (monster buff effect), Fire Wall
Lightning - Lightning Trail, Lightning Ball (monster buff effect), Spark
Ferocity - Haste Aura + Immunity to action speed slow (please bro, anything, 3 points?)
Turtle - 20% Def, 10% life as es, 20% all res, Light Stun Immunity
Quill - 2 Additional Projectiles, 40% increased projectile speed

I agree that ritualist is in desperate need of an identity rework, for right now its literally just "This ascendancy gives you a 3rd ring slot and ring effectiveness" the best ascendancy for lategame* and rarity bot because of it being a pure stat stick - Pretty boring identity imo.

It was nice that they buffed ritual scrifice but imo they should rework it to be like a budget headhunter without any bs animation, i'd say let it just steal buffs for 20-30 seconds on kill like the old headhunter (20s before buff to 60), or making it work like replica headhunter (20% chance to gain the moddifiers for 60s) would be better than the current version too, but i'd rather have consistency for less time than a chance to get a buff for longer

Having to do an animation on a corpse is so janky, breaks the whole flow of combate even tho now the duration is longer i find it hard to belive that people actually use it outside of the one you can do on yourself.

In Poe ninja at level 80+ 99% have the Mystic Attunement passive, meaning they have the 3 rings and more bonuses from rings/amulets.

Only 16% have ritual sacrifice, of these 15% have headhunters so lets count those out because they use it only on themselves, meaning only 13,6% of players have "ritual sacrifice specd", of those i imagine most of them probably only us the self buff too but there's no way to tell.

The charmm stuff for right now feels very gimmicky too, maybe one day when the charm system becomes more robbust it will be better but for right now its pretty underwhelming (level 80+ there's only 1 player withe the charm stuff specd and he's just level 87).


Very similar to your suggestions iv'e thought about some of my own

I think the ascendancy should have soemthign to do with azmeri spirits, feels very thematic. Could maybe be something like a rotating buff between being posessed by the various spirits like every 30s the buff changes tho i think most players wouldnt really like that because of the inconsitency of "good buff on tuesdays".

Or have it so you're posessed 100% of the time by a spirit which you choose, maybe they could tune the numbers to make it more balanced/not clear cut.
examples
Serpent - Allways poison on hit and all damage contributes to poison magnitude - could be cool so its not just pathfinder that has poison synergy.
Cat - increased crit/evasion/attack and cast speed - generic good, kinda boring but this ascendancy needs the buffs
Bear - Increased max Hp/ toughness/ stun or armor break - generic defensive
maybe even some more out there ones relating to chaos damage or bleed

These should also be tuned depending on if the passive they end up on is a 2 pointer or a 4 pointer.

No it's not about HH belt , if you re going Ritualist you should equip Ingeunity Belt and spec Sacrifice. If you are wearing/passing to HH belt you should not play Ritualist at all. However animation of stabbing does not affect any skill speed or atk speed neither. May be if they let some skill speed / cast speed gems on it...

I think Ritualist is actually in a great place. Hear me out. It's great for super-casuals or SSF, where you have budget constraints. It easily lets you max your res and/or increase gear item rarity. The trade off is that it tapers off at high end. It's also pretty agnostic to builds, so you can play melee, range, caster, summoners, whatever. And the fact that it can function well in so many different roles, is a great sign. It's very akin to the old Raider ascendancy in PoE1, which I liked a lot.

TLDR, it's a beloved class for those who like it, especially in SSF and even in a non-aura-bot role, so I don't think it needs to change.

You pick an ascendancy class to max your resistances? First time I hear something like this

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VolkiRosso#4831 wrote:

No it's not about HH belt , if you re going Ritualist you should equip Ingeunity Belt and spec Sacrifice. If you are wearing/passing to HH belt you should not play Ritualist at all. However animation of stabbing does not affect any skill speed or atk speed neither. May be if they let some skill speed / cast speed gems on it...

Headhunter >>>>> Ingenuity is not even close, ingenuity belt only works on your 2 normal rings it doesnt work on the one you get from the ascendancy. It works the same as every other class, thats why everyone in endgame that can afford HH uses HH

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ac429#4687 wrote:

I think Ritualist is actually in a great place. Hear me out. It's great for super-casuals or SSF, where you have budget constraints. It easily lets you max your res and/or increase gear item rarity. The trade off is that it tapers off at high end. It's also pretty agnostic to builds, so you can play melee, range, caster, summoners, whatever. And the fact that it can function well in so many different roles, is a great sign. It's very akin to the old Raider ascendancy in PoE1, which I liked a lot.

TLDR, it's a beloved class for those who like it, especially in SSF and even in a non-aura-bot role, so I don't think it needs to change.

As a proud x3 league ritualist bait taker here, I'm going to have to disagree heavily. For casuals who aren't really power gaming or do it as a fun gimmick may just die to shroudwalker or weirdly get effected or sadly not received the expected effects of the buffs. Part of me thinks there just no way we get these kinds of changes, but the 4-20 types of the same monster modifier make HH/Ritualist kind of annoying, especially considering the rarity of additional projectiles and the overwhelming amount of shroudwalker affixes.

I'd love to see ritualist taken apart to give them a Smith of Kitava type of tree or just more of the "give/take" nodes like the 3rd ring node has. Imagine -50% *ele* Res for those 3-5 *ele* monster effects that are effectively not very useful, but with all of them you can design characters for Twisters as a reliable ground effect or scale into those mechanics with supports.

I love the vision, but hate what ritualist became. When 50% of ritualists are just magic find cullers, something's gotta give. Free HH is too much imo, even if it was shorter. But adding some points you can take for more consistency would go a far way.