User:Malokai92/comments

Soul Twisting
There's a few skills you could pick in Spawning Power, you do have points invested in it already to use Soul Twisting. Does that mean you should? It is "fire-and-forget" for hero for around a minute and only costs 5 energy. This is cheap and inexpensive skill to put on the bar. The Ritualist can easily maintain this in any situation and doesn't care if it get stripped. It's also useless. Explosive Growth provides a lackluster 60 armor-respecting damage in nearby range, except that the nearby range is PBAoE as you summon spirits at your current position. This would imply that to deal damage, A. your Soul Twisting Ritualist is close enough to the front line that the enemies can attack him and B. his spirits are close enough to be attack by enemies. For the first point, your ST Rit is squishy as fuck. His build requires rune suicide to run effectively, for which the spirits he summons will cover will be synergistic to. He is going to die very rapidly if he comes under pressure and his spirits aren't up. For the second point, your Ritualist is in the backline because he's squishy as fuck and his spirits are squishy as fuck. Spirits are good for meatwalls (spiritwall) because they have low health and around 80 armor. Aggro prioritize targets with low health. Shelter will have roughly 400 health, lower than any hero or player will have, which makes them a tempting targets for enemies. You do not want the Ritualist in the frontline getting attacked, summoning spirits that will get attacked. That's an excellent way to gimp your ST Ritualist or get him killed. So if you want your ST Rit on the backline summoning spirits out of range of enemies, Explosive Growth is completely useless.
 * Explosive Growth

This acts as a corollary to Explosive Growth. It's in Spawning Power, it's "fire-and-forget" and lasts around a minute. Does that mean you should? Spirit's Gift provides AoE healing and condition removal. That's fantastic. It serves as an efficient way to counter pressure, especially if your party gets hit by Searing Flames or Disease. This does imply your Ritualist is constantly casting spirits, which is a problem when the hero is constantly recasting your protective spirits. In such a case, the skill meets optimal usage, where it gets triggered when your party comes under pressure. These are situations where your entire party gets hit by Rodogort's Invocation, Energy Surge, or Shockwave and your spirits drop instantly. While your Ritualist recasts spirits, he will provide recover against AoE spikes. Because of this same behavior, it's actually of very little use elsewhere. You do not want your spirits constantly dropping to reap the benefits of Spirit's Gift and in most situations, Spirit's Gift will trigger when you don't need pressure relief. Energy is not in surplus when it comes to an ST Ritualist. Boon of Creation is used specifically to manage energy and returns its own cost; Spirit's Gift costs the same amount and acts as an energy drain. An ST Ritualist is pooling all its resources into spamming Soul Twisting and keeping spirits up, it can hardly manage to maintain both. This causes Spirit's Gift to compete with Boon of Creation when energy gets low. That can severely gimp your bar when the hero prioritizes using Soul Twisting and spirits before casting any enchantments. This is true with any skill that puts pressure on the hero's energy. The other issue is with enchantment removal, which causes the hero to pool more resources into maintaining enchantments and quickly draining energy, causing the hero to overcast. Therefore, use Spirit's Gift if you anticipate moderate pressure and party spikes or can provide sufficient energy management, such as Signet of Creation and Blood is Power. Do not use it if you cannot compensate the extra cost either by not recovering quickly, constant enchantment removal, and/or not compensating if the hero runs out of energy quickly.
 * Spirit's Gift

Overcasting is a term I like to use when the hero casts a defensive spirit without Soul Twisting up. This is very bad and you want to avoid it at all costs. This happens in a few ways. The common case is spirits dieing shortly after being cast, where Soul Twisting is recharging. The hero will continue to cast spirits with Soul Twisting up. This can happen with any number of spirits. This indicates that your party is taking too many hits. This either means your party doesn't have enough defense, you just got hit by a massive party spike, or a party member is getting trained by melee. The other common case is you bring too many spirits. Soul Twisting only provides up to 3 charges, hence you should only bring up to 3 spirits. Many times players will bring the 3 defensive spirits and then offensive spirits. The hero will then use up Soul Twisting of the first 3 spirits and start overcasting the rest. The rest can end up being Shelter or Displacement, which is very bad. The final case refers to the usage of Boon of Creation. When the hero has little or no energy, he will first try to recast Soul Twisting and then a roughly equal chance to cast a spirit or Boon of Creation as they all cost 10 energy. If you have Pain or Bloodsong, it's even worse. This will cause the hero to utilize energy in non-optimal play. The same goes if Boon of Creation gets stripped.
 * Overcasting

In a balanced team, you bring interrupts and shutdown such as Panic and Cry of Frustration to prevent party spikes. Shelter can be triggered constantly with hard-hitting skills such as Invoke Lightning. Displacement prevents melee from triggering Shelter. Union can get triggered quite rapidly, either from party spikes, melee training, or simply the casters wanding your group. Sometimes it's a good idea to drop Union so that although you're taking slightly more damage, the hero can keep up Shelter and Displacement much more reliably. Displacement can also be triggered rapidly from melee training and caster wanding. You can avoid this by bringing melee hate; Ineptitude Mesmer and Panic will Blind or interrupt attacks and prevent triggers, while Shared Burden or Shadow of Fear will lower the rate at which Displacement is triggered. This goes the same for Union. Armor of Unfeeling is a fantastic skill, it lets spirits last much longer, typically long enough for it to recharge for the next batch. Pre-casting it with spirits before battle is an excellent way to prevent the hero from overcasting. Signet of Creation or Leech Signet can provide additional energy management to compensate if boon of Creation is removed. The best way to prevent overcasting is to kill groups faster. That means using spike setups and bringing more offense in your setup. You can afford to bring more offense, an ST Ritualist provides defense against every possible threat in the game.

Shadow of Fear
Shadow of Fear was one of the core skills in the Spiteful Spirit Necro as part of Sabway.

Panic
Mistrust will trigger immediately, preventing the cast from ever starting, Panic will not be able to interrupt/prevent this. Cry of Frustration is backup for Panic. The only time a hero will use Cry of Frustration is if an enemy is able to cast. If enemies are constantly interrupted by Panic, this will never happen. That's where redundancy is good thing, not bad. Remember that an enemy has to finish using a skill to trigger Panic, so the hero always has that opportunity to use CoF. It's pretty much impossible for CoF to miss if that's what you're thinking. Heroes have a 1/4 second window between casting CoF and Panic triggering for it to miss and they tend to hit the first thing an enemy starts casting. Since Panic interrupts the entire group, the hero gets a chance to use CoF after every trigger when enemies try casting again. If an enemy with Panic uses like 1/2 second skill, heroes do not try interrupting it often.
 * Usage

Wandering Eye, Clumsiness, and Signet of Clumsiness are generally for anti-melee. Keep in mind they will trigger on regular attacks as well. Enemies will auto-attack (almost) immediately after being interrupted, which actually works out for you if you are using Panic. You don't have to worry about Wandering Eye or Clumsiness not triggering. Also keep in mind that Panic and CoF do not work well against melee, since melee tend to not spam skills often. In HM, heroes rarely use CoF to interrupt attacks because attack skills take 3/4 second or less to use. There's multiple reasons for this, but mostly because melee AI sucks and you have melee hate to prevent them from building adrenaline in the first place.

Panic can be offensive and defensive because it prevents enemies from attacking you and prevents them from defending from your attacks such as healing. You will find that because you have 2-3 copies of Mistrust, CoF and Power Drain with Arcane Conundrum, Shared Burden, and antimelee from Illusion Mesmer, that you are getting the same effect from Panic, forcing enemies to autoattack to trigger high damage illusion magic while interrupting key skills. In that case, you don't need the redundancy Panic provides for shutting down enemies.