The Spirit Realm

Well I bought all three levels of Ancestral Guard and its duration is 2 ticks not 3 as lucy indicates. It was cast while in Guild Hall so it was stuck at 12 seconds.

Its 5k max, don't see why it needs to wear off so fast, they should up it to at least 6 ticks or something.

5k max is retarded

Should be imo...

Rank 1- 5k max 12 seconds - Recast 15
Rank 2- 10k man 12 seconds - Recast 12
Rank 3- 15k max 18 seconds - Recast 8

With the help of several others, Giac and I developed a proposal back in April for . This link is to the proposal as submitted to SOE at that time; but it is in the middle of a long and rancorous thread where a number of people insisted that what we proposed was waaaay overpowered, and if anything we should get something like the druid rune spell.

Now we have indeed gotten something like the druid rune spell, and it has turned out to be waaaay inadequate.

A summary of Defense of the Arcane Spirits is currently being polled for inclusion as "Survivability AA" on these boards .

That makes me sad i havent bought expansion yet, but thats the only aa that seemed useful bar Grabid, andonly for the Hot ;x

If mitigation don't stack that means when you have panoply of vie that you could pop the AA and it would bounce right off the buff rendering the aa useless or stripping a buff that almost lasts an hour for one that lasts 2 tics. Yeah, thats about as F#$@ed up as a football bat. Honestly this AA should be close to what the bard AA , shield of notes, does. For the "woohoo my AA sucked up some of the mele damage but the 4 chaos claw procs tore my ass up" scenario. I mean seriously, does anyone else find it sad that bards are saying " yeah don't even waste the AA on the 3rd level of shield notes because the second level is good enough" but shamans are saying the 3rd level of ours is crap and rightly so. /boggle

It is rather obvious that this AA is way too weak and fails to adress the main issues that were raised and discussed by Macnair, me and the rest of the team.
All of the aspects of the Defense of the Arcane Spirits, in the form we suggested and presented here, are and were there for a reason. Cutting down the damage is already painful to watch, but reducing the duration to anything below the suggested 4 ticks, makes it simply inadequate and isn't adressing the issues Shamans face.

Another humorous thing I noticed is the implementation of a defensive slow proc buff(not sure if I am up to date still). I feedbacked this idea a few hundred times for months, because it seemed to be a rather simple and adequate feature for our class. Of course my proposal for it was a 75% slow, 5 tick duration which included a damage absorbption and was an activable AA.
Back then I tried to adress the multiple resists Shamans would get on their initial slow and which forced them chain it till it would stuck, so they could go back to healing. Of course we often would get summoned and beaten to a pulp in the process.
The way I looked at it was, that if you were overaggroing and getting hit by mobs due to slow resists, you didn't have to keep casting a high aggro spell under attack, but simply wait for the mob to slow itself(by making the defensive proc go off), which would then give you 5 ticks of time to get your slow on, if needed, without dying or continually generating aggro.

I guess if you ask for 5 bucks in EQ, you only get 2, so if you really only need 5 bucks, ask for 20 instead.

For the record, a 1.5k rune generally doesn't last an entire combat round in dangerous content these days. In general, if I hit my 1500pt Rune in RSS (or now in, say, Ruins of Illsalin) it's gone practically before the spell gems finish lighting back up from the instacast.

Trust me. You're better off with this. As long as you can take 5k or so worth of damage yourself, you'll have absorbed way more damage than the 1500 pt rune, and your chances of channeling will not be appreciably different. I still think Ancestral guard needs to absorb more damage, and bumping it to three tics might not hurt (Though it says 3 in Lucy, which is odd). Also, I'm not entirely convinced that 2 tics is 6.1-12 seconds and not 12.1 to 18 - is an enchanter 1 tic PBAoE mez with a 12 second recast. With Mez Mastery, which adds one tic to the duration (two tics now) you can reliably chain-cast this mez, and it will land before it wears off most of the time. That indicates that it is lasting at least 13.5 seconds most of the time, with a two tic duration.

If Ancestral Guard is only lasting 6-12 seconds, then it is bugged and you should get that looked at.