Wandering Spirits suggestions, using the current tree (mostly)

[lonnieep84]

I’d like to give my thoughts for making WS useful again! These are all assuming current mana costs and cooldown, adjusting either/both would require me to change some of these numbers. Including ALL of these changes would likely unbalance the skill. One of the biggest issues (to me) is that you’re SUPER point starved in the skill, shoe-horning folks into only using it for one thing, and none of the “one things” are worth the space it takes on the skill bar.

1. Drained Will: the most you can drop the resistance on a boss is 40% due to the 20 stack cap, the investment of 30%/point isn’t worth the return. Make it 100% with 1 or 2 points max.

2. Sins of the Forgotten: I guess Damned doesn’t even lower resists anymore. The only real purpose of this node is an extra tap of damage and triggering other effects depending on “damned” to proc, nobody’s worried about a mob’s health regen. Change to 1 point, 100% chance.

3)Entire top left of the tree starting from Terrifying Presence: You don’t want enemies running away from your WS, without some sort of clever interaction with a unique or something… This whole part of the tree is a waste of points unless you’re only using WS to make enemies run away from you (which is a waste of a skill you could be killing or buffing with, fear doesn’t even work on bosses).

4. Thin Veil: 7%/point is too low now that all of the spirits disappear IMMEDIATELY when reaching its strongest moment, make it 2 points for 25-30% each.

5. Locus Mortis: Just wanted to say I like this one!

6. Lingering Souls: 3 points for 2 extra seconds feels wasteful, especially without a change to Thin Veil. Could altogether remove this node with the Thin Veil change, or remove Thin Veil and make this one a much easier investment (like 20/40/60%).

7. Tethered Existence: Getting damage out of your spirits is already RNG, they don’t seem attracted to enemies at all. Get rid of the movement penalty.

8. Spectral Putrescence: 30% was fair when we were populating the screen with tons of spirits, now it’s booty. Considering it’s only one stack of poison AND stops them from moving, just make it 100% chance so it’s reliable for a poison build that won’t even care about all the necrotic stuff.

9. Soul of Filth: Going with #8, change this so with 2-4 points it can reach 2 poison stacks.

10. Spectral Scorn: If the above changes for the poison nodes are made, leave it alone. If not, or if they’re implemented in a much smaller-than-proposed degree, at least make it 2 points and +20/40% range.

11. From Medium through Song of the last Chantry: This is a cool idea, not gonna touch this, but you should be able to move the “centerpoint” of the channel while channeling.

That’s all I got, I left out the ones that I thought were fine or close enough.

[Shrukn]

The Lich needs to be reworked now, the class itself has become a manifestation of its own archetype - an undead rotting corpse

The problem with actually balancing anything is you actually need to counter balance or you didnt balance anything, you just removed it.

Wandering Spirits is actually the last thing needing to be redone because it was only used a replacement as almost nothing fit properly

-Marrow Shards
-Harvest
-Hungering Souls (SELF CAST - non Reaper autoprocs)
-Infernal Shade

All need massive reworks, the reason why is Wandering/Transplant were almost shoehorned into every lich build but the main problem is when WS was nerfed - people didnt think ‘I will use the newly buffed Marrow Shards…’ because there wasnt one

ive tried to make Marrow Shards, Infernal Shade, Hunger Souls builds to work,

Marrow is ‘ok’, Infernal Shade does almost no damage, Hungering costs too much mana. So you retreated back to AoD/WS…

Wandering Spirits needs to be the ‘ultimate’ Lich skill which IMO actually replicates/echoes your spells for you instead of some autocast

[Llama8]

Damned never did reduce necrotic resist, it’s always been damage and a ho regen reduction (which is pointless).

This is good feedback though.

[lonnieep84]

I thought it used to reduce all resistancGONBFEWS:JFBN

That’s Mark of Death or whatever. Realized it mid-type. Derp.

[Tree]

I love to see what other people are suggesting in terms of skill reworks, because yes, I feel that Acolyte runs into the same “newb” traps as Primalist, where there’s a lot of skills and nodes out there, but none of them actually feel like they’re putting in work for end-game goals.

There’s the bog-standard stuff that actually works, then there’s this giant chasm where there’s no creativity because no matter what you try to do, the numbers turn out to be far, far less than any of the bog-standard stuff.

I’d love to hear what it would take for skills like WS, Infernal Shade, Hungering Souls and such to be viable in the end-game, even if they’re just meant to be good debuffs for your “other skills” to do damage (which I believe was the point of the DoT stacking Spirit Plague buffs was to have other skills use that huge damage boost, if I’m reading it correctly)