This guide focuses on the Ritualist Ascendancy for the Huntress, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.
Ritualist Overview
Ritualists make sacrifices in pursuit of power. Whether it be her Life, the Life of a formidable foe, or her resources, it’s all in the name of power.
Ritualists get access to the unique skill Ritual Sacrifice, which allows them to sacrifice the corpse of a Rare monster, or with further investment, their own life, to gain Monster Modifiers for themselves.
Ritualists can also sacrifice one of three different resources to gain access to a third Ring Slot with Unfurled Finger. Which sacrifice we make is our choice, but the power is ours to take.
Unfurled Finger
Unfurled Finger grants a Ritualist access to a third Ring Slot.
While this may not seem like a lot, Rings are often a huge source of damage and other valuable Affixes a build needs. This comes at a price, with the Ritualist also having to give up 15% All Elemental Resistances, 25% Reduced Spirit, or 30% reduced Maximum Mana.
Of the three options, Elemental Resistance is by far the easiest downside to mitigate with how easy it can be to get resistances on gear. Spirit and Mana however run into the an issue, being that sources that increase either stat are few and far between.
This likely means that outside of any niche synergies with reducing the other stats, Elemental Resistance is likely to be the option chosen for this coveted Ring Slot.
Mystic Attunement
Mystic Attunement increases the Affixes found on our Rings and amulets by 25%.
If a third Ring Slot wasn’t enough power, we can invest further and increase the power of all of our Rings and Amulets. Between this effect and the Ingenuity Unique Belt, we’re able to more than double the strength of our Rings, resulting in us effectively having 6 Rings worth of stats.
This effect, however, also includes Amulets, which Ingenuity does not. This has the most impact on the Defences Prefixes like % Evasion or Energy Shield now reaching a maximum of 62%. Sadly, 25% is just short of the 33% threshold to bump a +3 to All Skills up to a +4.
Wildwood Persistence
Wildwood Persistence grants 5% Life Recovery Rate per 5% missing Life.
On the surface, this may not seem like much, but Life Recovery Rate is a very scarce bonus in both the Passive Tree and on Unique Items. It currently only exists on a single Notable on the entire passive Tree.
The interesting thing with the generic Life Recovery Rate is a stat that affects everything; Regeneration, Leech, Recoup, Flasks, all of it. Of note this is the only way to get any kind of multiplicative boost to both Life Regeneration and Recoup.
It’s hard to say exactly how much of an impact this can have, all things considered. However, it may find use in some unique setup built around these methods of recovery.
Intricate Sigils
Intricate Sigils grants an additional Charm Slot while granting a multiplicative bonus to Charm Charges Gained.
Charms generally aren’t powerful enough to warrant getting a bonus like this. However, with Unique Charms being added, this may help them provide more value. It really comes down to how powerful these Unique Charms are, or how powerful ones that come in the future may be.
That said, it may still have use to allow Charms to more frequently mitigate the common ailments a build might suffer from like Stun and Freeze for an Energy Shield build. It could have some interesting potential if the added Charm Slot can exceed the cap of 3 Charm Slots, but nothing indicates this would be the case.
Mind Phylacteries
Mind Phylacteries allows us to trigger a Charm with insufficient charges at the cost of 25% of our Maximum Mana per activation.
This is an incredibly steep cost that would only make sense with Golden Charms at best, assuming they get fixed. Unique Charms may also be worth using this effect on too, but hard to determine prior to knowing their effects.
At the very least, Mana Recovery is fairly easy to solve, so long as this isn’t being triggered too often. Otherwise, it’d require a lot of investment with Mana on Kill Jewels to be able to keep our Mana stable.
As the Whispers Ask
As the Whispers Ask grants the Ritual Sacrifice Skill, which allows for the Sacrifice of a Rare enemy to steal one of its modifiers for a duration.
This functions like a more active version of the Behead Support Gem, allowing us to gain a random modifier from a Rare enemy without it being tied to Strike Skills. The Headhunter Unique Belt also provides a similar, but more powerful version of this effect that steals all of the monster’s modifiers instead.
It should go without saying that this skill can be very useful and powerful if it grabs the right Monster Modifier. At the very least, most Modifiers it can take are beneficial, and we get control of when it triggers.
As the Whispers Demand
As the Whispers Demand enables the Ritual Sacrifice Skill to be used at the cost of 20% of our Maximum Life, with a limit of one Modifier at a time from this effect.
This is a very interesting option to consider. As we said previously, there are many powerful Monster Modifiers, and this can grant us any of them at random. Despite this element of Luck, it’s more important to note that it’s not restricted to the modifiers on monsters found in the zone.
There are some more obvious flops in the overall pool of Modifiers possible, but there are plenty of incredibly strong options. Several modifiers boost damage, grant AoE damage in some way, increase Projectile Count and so many other highly beneficial effects.
Corrupted Lifeforce
Corrupted Lifeforce enables the unique Blood Boil skill, which applies Blood Boils to enemies within our Presence, or roughly 6m around our character. These boils explode when the enemy dies and apply Corrupted Blood to enemies hit by the AoE.
While interesting, this skill is going to be held back the most by Presence Range. Currently, the only way to increase that range is with a modifier found exclusively on Sceptres.
That flaw aside, this feels like it would fit well into a Melee build that’s scaling exclusively Physical Damage. The only real issue is that Corrupted Blood lacks any real scaling outside of its stacking effect, as, despite its similarities, it doesn’t benefit from any Bleed-related effects or bonuses.
However, if more support for Corrupted Blood is added through Support Gems or Uniques, then it has potential as a nice bonus for some Melee Builds.
