Ritual Effects and Visual Clarity

While the main issue of rituals spawning on restricted areas has been already brought up dozens of times over here and it is a big issue, I think we also need to address the other elephant in the room: Visibility.

TL;DR - Arena size should either increase as you offer more blood to the altar to accomodate enemy density or it needs to "Merge" enemies into stronger ones once an "enemy cap" is reached to maintain clarity. As well as getting rid of annoying effects that limit visibility for the sake of it when they could be pretty much ritual-wide effects and would serve the same purpose regardless.

Due to the space constraints and mobs not being able to clump together as much as they could in PoE1 (For obvious reasons) Visibility becomes nearly null once you have enough enemies on the ritual (Tends to happen to me at around 3, though sometimes I manage to pull enough into the circle to make it an issue on 2.)

Arena size is part of the issue, and this has been brought up before but more from the perspective of "Mobility" and "Not Getting swarmed as much" but not from a visual clarity standpoint. When you cannot see what enemies are a main threat and what are rabble, because there are 100+ enemies clumped into a roughly 10-12 meters radius circle (Am aware that's an exageration of actual numbers but I digress) it becomes pretty much impossible to pick out priority targets to eliminate first/stay away from/keep an eye out. Being overwhelmed with bodies is not the problem, that is fine as it is just part of what ritual has always stood up for and usually is solved with better wave clear. The issue arises when this clumping happens and the arena cannot sustain the number of bodies output into it, so there's two ways I can think of to approach this issue:

- Maintain arena size, and instead of spawning enemies the way it currently is handled, have them have a cap of "bodies" and merge the "power" of said enemies into other bodies to increase the threat level. I believe we all can agree that being in a small arena with 100 white mobs that will literally mob you down is as dangerous as being surrounded by 6 Elites with 4+ mods each. In fact, I'd argue the second one is harder. The limit doesn't need to be small, it can be something on the upwards of 40 enemy bodies, but having stronger more difficult and rewarding enemies that you have to kite/prioritize in a constrained space without dying would still give challenge without taking away from the "Getting swarmed" mentality that is the basis for Ritual.

- Increase Arena size proportionally to the total power of enemies that have been offered to the ritual before hand. The arena grows as it gets more and more blood offered to it. Simple, yet effective. This allows for ridiculous numbers of monsters while still allowing for a general sense of "open space" as the more you will get mobbed down, the more space you will have to "Try and not get overwhelmed." Plus, on the side, this would also increase the number of monsters that get offered up "freshly" as the ritual altars become larger.

The second, and I believe more frustrating part about Visibility on Rituals, comes from the Ritual effects, specially the debilitating clouds one. When you have already a cluttered and fairly busy environment to get your bearings in, throwing a smoke bomb, sometimes LITERALLY, in your face in the midst of that doesn't help, it just hurts. While I understand that effects are there to make the mechanic not be "Just a grindfest" it is counterintuitive to use effects that hinder the core element of gameplay that PoE2 was founded on "More meaningful gameplay moment to moment." There is such a thing as a limit on how much you can put into a screen that a brain can properly process without being overwhelmed in seconds, sometimes even fractions of seconds. This is a bit harder to solve without any of the previous arena issues for visibility being touched at all, though there is an actual (though fairly heavy handed) solution to the issue:

- Getting rid of Visually cluttering Ritual effects in favour of Empowering enemies/Depowering players as a whole. Debilitating clouds are the main culprit, yes, but realistically, any effect that adds more visual clutter to the already saturated environment that ritual is just makes the mechanic seem like a death trap with no benefit, rather than a challenge to overcome for loot. Clouds could be covering the entire arena, and applying its debilitating effect and the solution to the issue would still revolve around careful positioning, risk management and objective priority selection of prime targets for removal. Ritual, as a whole, is already a mechanic that is challenging as you are throwing the player into an arena in a game where mobility is king, you don't need to also put a blindfold over their eyes and spin them around 10 times before you let them go. Punch them in the gut, throw them in the arena, have them deal with the gut punch pain as well as getting out of it alive to tell the tale.

Anyway, just my two cents on Ritual.