... I think it was strong but the only way it'll ever work is with an incredibly weak build already.
-I had more "call lightforge talisman" than I had "brandish" in my logs - and that's including brandish from detect invis, aura, shield, passdoor, haste, etc. Getting the good talismans is incredibly hard. It once took me 50+ calls to get a single crushing hand talisman (there are I think 14 talismans now?). Most of them are terrible. Also managing them is a pain (they all have exact same keywords so the best I did was having crushing hands in my inventory, and wrath in my bags). I spent probably a third of my life sleeping and spamming "call lightforge talisman" - it's boring as hell.
-I had camp to regen lots of high-int mana, and max wisdom/charisma to make the spells stronger.
-Also one of the role contest gifts was spirit allies, so I could make higher level talismans.
-It's pretty easy to stop them from working too. Rangers have no real inherent protection from lagging maneuvers and deal with blindness pretty badly.
They really only became scary in group situations where I could brandish while someone else is taking the front and I'm not going to be lagged out. Most group fights or even cabal fights in general take place outside of the woods so you're already at a large disadvantage. In the woods, most rangers love spamming bearcharge as well which is death for most other classes.... the only one that has a chance to lag is the crushing hand talisman which is at best (a level 47 talisman, most are 40) a 50% chance it lags. Wrath spam is not much scarier than a fully decked paladin spamming the same thing (or light of heaven or brimstone for AoE).
Will we see it again? Probably but I can think of much stronger combinations that I never got access to (silent tower has a 3x chain lightning talisman that's very easily obtained.. not to mention the fear/power word pain talismans in the Inferno). An insect-calling Outlander with access to ST could be a nightmare. Also if you want to slap yourself in the face and play an animist fortress ranger...go for it, you're already at a pretty huge disadvantage in my book compared to paladins, invokers, transmuters, STSF warriors, etc.
The one nice thing is I was scary as hell for undead which is exactly how it should be. Spamming turn undead every round killed a lot of necro armies and made their whole army flee.... not to mention, turn undead level 57 on a mummy/wight/lich is awesome (again, most aren't level 57). With that said, Jermet still beat my ass around a ton.
So anyways, yeah it's nice... but nothing OP as people cried about. Most people just panicked and didn't think about how to fight against it - just like the idiots who sit in reverberating blast or pillar/nova/wrath spam. Those who know how to play figured ways around it. Liantae, Xeneth, Jeede, Tsal-flame, Jermet etc all beat the shit out of my character.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/01/2015 08:45PM by torak.