Skill Point Help (Ritualist)

[witterquick72]

I've been reading the posts in these forums and they've really been a huge help to me in learning how to make my characters a little more playable. This is my first post, though. I was wondering about skill points for my melee Ritualist. Here's the layout now:

Dream Mastery - 32/32
ToC - 7 (9 with item)
Lucid Dream - 1/8
Premonition - 6/6
Temporal Flux - 6/6
Summon Nightmare 12/16
Hypnotic Gaze - 1/8
Psionic Touch - 1/12
Phantom Strike - 1/12
Dream Stealer - 8/8
Distort Reality - 1/12
Temporal Rift - 5/12

Nature Mastery - 16/32
Heart of Oak - 1/12

I originally was going up the wolf tree for some help out, which is why my nature mastery is so high. I'm in Act IV right now and the wolves were pretty useless as they died quickly. I'm not having too much trouble with melee. I just rush in with PS and then if necessary hit Distort Reality. My main question is whether I should take points out of Nightmare to bring him down to 5/12 and then move those extra 7 points into something like Lucid Dream to max it out. What do you think? Thanks!

[Infares]

Sounds like a fair alternative. You can respec again in early epic and go more pet-centric until you can regain the points necessary to have a good attack.

To make wolves work in normal act IV you really need:


Call of the Wild 18/16 minimum
Survival Instinct 15/16 after gear
Trance of Convalescence as high as possible
Heart of Oak as high as possible
Master Mind as high as possible

With all this, yes your wolves can survive, but you have to pay a great deal to have that, including 16 nature and 32 dream mastery, and that's all you have. Otherwise you're stuck going without the pets (Probably not easy as a mage type, much more doable as melee).

[Masquerouge]

Sounds like a fair alternative. You can respec again in early epic and go more pet-centric until you can regain the points necessary to have a good attack.

To make wolves work in normal act IV you really need:


Call of the Wild 18/16 minimum
Survival Instinct 15/16 after gear
Trance of Convalescence as high as possible
Heart of Oak as high as possible
Master Mind as high as possible

With all this, yes your wolves can survive, but you have to pay a great deal to have that, including 16 nature and 32 dream mastery, and that's all you have. Otherwise you're stuck going without the pets (Probably not easy as a mage type, much more doable as melee).

The other alternative, which works really well for a caster ritualist, is to use as many +to all skills items as possible (and barring that, as many +to Nature skills items as possible) AND getting rings of enslavement.
This however requires heavy twinking, meaning that this is not a good idea for your first character. But if you have a bunch of +skills items waiting around, then you will not have trouble AT ALL in act 4.

I'm just pointing that out because it is perfectly possible to have a pet-centric mage/caster ritualist kick an insane amount of *** in act 4 :)