Ritualist ascendancy really needs some love outside of its +1 ring aspect.

Having finally sunken my teeth into playing a ritualist, I am utterly baffled with how underwhelming everything aside from those 2 notables with +1 ring and ring/amulet bonus --- sure those are insanely powerful, but my god, does the rest of the notables have to be this uninspired?


Ritual sacrifice SOUNDS like a cool idea, until you realize how absurdly weak it is. You're not going to get players in mapping to constantly stop to use a 5 seconds animation, where they have to find a rare on top of the hundreds of piles of corpses and then grab its buffs for 30~ seconds, I find myself pretty much never using it now when I am farming endgame maps, because its simply not worth my time even IF the prospect of those buffs sounds cool, its just too annoying.


The charm tree, almost feels like a placeholder. The +1 charm slot feels like it was designed around the older versions of the game, where charm slots were harder to fill, now I pretty much never run around without 3 already, meaning this slot is entirely wasted.


And then you have the next part of it, which is just gaining more charm charges, which, I cannot imagine any builds really wanting, nevermind a whole ascendancy building around? Maybe if charms were more interactive.


Bloodboil and unreserved life recovery rate increase are probably fine in some very specific builds, but they feel incredibly niche and hard to imagine having any real impact, when compared to so many other ascendancies.


This is sadly just another case of ascendancies in PoE2, in many cases completely lacking identity, compared to how heavily PoE1 ascendancies give a strong identity with very impactful and build defining notables.



I feel too many classes suffer from similar issues as Ritualist above, where you have 1-2 cool notables, but the rest just feels like they are filler that in many cases I don't even think are worth ascending for.


In ritualist case, I could honestly see someone not bothering ascending after they got their +1 ring and bonus notables, because the rest feels like such a minor difference, that it won't matter to the character.



Suggestions:


Ritual sacrifice - if you want to stick with the similar theme, make it only a self-use skill like you currently do where you can sacrifice life to activate, perhaps reserve this life to make it more fair, and then gain a buff where you you for the next minute have a chance to obtain 1-x amount of modifiers from rares you kill - perhaps this scales with levels of the skill etc. Just something that doesn't require you to constantly interrupt the flow of your gameplay to stab the ground while looking for where the corpse is.



Charm tree: If you want to lean into the charm aspect, then go crazy with it, like something along the lines of, for every charm slot you have above the max amount, you gain certain bonuses. That would make both items with charmslots as well as passive skill tree notables with charmslots more worthwhile looking into actually getting, while currently, I imagine your playrate of those notables is extremely low.


Or actually significantly make this tree buff charms beyond just ... having them more reliably as an ascendancy notable.




Final thoughts: I think thematically the ritualist is insanely cool. But I think outside of the ring and amulet bonus aspect, there is really 0 reason to play the ascendancy, which is a bit of a shame. Hope to see it and other ascendancies get some love to regain some identity.

It's not just Ritualist.

Every single Ascendancy in this game is utter dog shit. They are so boting, lame, unfun, and bland that I don't even want to play the game.

Meanwhile PoE1 has such badass ascendancy that it's hard to pick just one, they almost all feel super powerful, rewarding, and interesting to play around.

GGG Needs to completely scrap and redesign them all from the ground up.

Also the skill tree.