Feedback on the Ritualist Ascendancy - Underwhelming and Underpicked?

Hello everyone, this is my first time posting feedback here, and while I likely won't engage in lengthy discussions with other players who may reply to this thread, I'm curious about the opinion of the "few" other players who chose the Ritualist ascendancy.

I was incredibly excited about the idea of playing the Ritualist due to its archetype and the potential combination for a bleed build using skills like Rake and exploding monsters in blood bubbles with Herald of Blood.

However, after starting to play and choosing the ascendancy on the first day of the league, I noticed that the community almost entirely (within my perception) was playing Amazon, focusing on Lightning Spear builds.

As the days passed, this became even more evident! You can check YouTube, Mobalytics, and Twitch streamers, or ask close friends... I'd say that 95% of this "bubble" of players who chose the Huntress are playing Amazon, specifically with the Lightning Spear build, even before the numerous buffs that Lightning skills received...

Doesn't this say something, GGG? A new ascendancy that is rarely chosen and rarely talked about? Look here on this forum, even when it's mentioned, it's usually to bring up its MAJOR problems - two of which have already been resolved: Rare mob corpses not exploding for us to use the Ritual Sacrifice skill and the interaction between Herald of Blood and Bloodboil... But what about the Ritualist's other problems? A passive tree that basically gives you, as its "strong" points, one extra ring slot and a 25% buff to rings and amulet, however, with a debuff of your choice... Great... if the game rewards you with good rings and a good amulet, right? Besides that, what else do we have? Ritual Sacrifice, despite the 25% reduction in skill execution time, still lasts WAY TOO SHORT and isn't advantageous at all.

Compare this Ritualist passive tree with the Amazon's passive tree, and the difference is staggering!!! How strong the Amazon can be in various build archetypes (including those focused on bleed), while the Ritualist lags behind, far behind.

And look, I have been loving the game since the early access launch day, I've spent a good amount of money on cosmetics, and I have almost a thousand hours played after creating several characters. In this league, despite the criticisms regarding the campaign, which I also agree with, I've been having fun too, and overall, most of the time I enjoyed playing the Huntress... My frustration only truly began when I realized I made the wrong ascendancy choice. A choice that you don't allow us to change... I reached the endgame with the Ritualist and now I don't have gear strong enough to survive or kill mobs without significant effort. I want to change the gear I have, but even in the early endgame, currencies are scarce for the time I spend on maps. I want to buy something on the trade, but I don't have the currency... In short, my character is stuck...

Please GGG, review the Ritualist's passives, reconsider how the class scales both in the campaign and the endgame, and how the different builds function for it.

In the meantime, I've created another character, a Warrior (my second in the game and first in this league), because the campaign is repetitive and tiring, so creating another character at least adds some variety. I wouldn't enjoy playing by creating another Huntress at all...

+1 from a Ritualist player.

I've mentioned elsewhere the Herald of Blood issue, and how I think Blood Boil could be improved (tl:dr, let the boils apply to friendlies), but I think there's other opportunities for improvement here.

If we look at the theme of the Ascendancy, its one of forbidden/taboo wilderness magic, right? So why not lean into that?

Some general spitballing:

-Make the little passives between Intricate Sigils and Mind Phylacteries give significant boosts to Intelligence, to allow a Ritualist to more readily dip into Occult skills/spells.

-Intricate Sigils gives Spirit equal to the max charges on all equipped charms.

-Mind Phylacteries gives a damage boost to Occult spells (or Chaos damage in general) tied to Charm Effectiveness when Charms are active.

-Or maybe make it so that the Ritualist gets a stacking boost to Physical Damage (or Chaos Resist, if they wanted to go defensive), tied to Charm Effectiveness, whenever a Charm is active. Multiple Charms active, multiple bonuses.

-Maybe the Ritual Sacrifice and As Whispers Demand could be reworked into something similar to Tame Beast - where using it on an elite changes the skill into a toggle-able buff with that modifier until the base Sacrifice is used again.

I feel like there's a lot of really cool potential here - the devs just need to give the gimmicks more juice so they can compete with what the Amazon can offer.

Ritulist does feel very underwhelming.

The nodes outside the jewlery nodes are not great at all. Charm nodes 'might' be good down the line, but charms are absolutely terrible right now.

Blood boil is redundant doesn't do much and fills the exact same space herald of blood does

Ritual sacrifice is way too slow and doesnt last long enough.

As the whispers could be better and cooler: For example, you can stack X modifiers (more than 1), but that life is unrecoverable or reserved for Y seconds or the duration of the mood.

Im playing bleed. If i just went amazon and capped crit hella ez, even my bleed build would be better.

Bleed skills are clunky as well

THere is probably a spell caster build hidden in here somewhere down the line, might be interesting to have a notable for that.

I feel like im just wasting my time vs playing amazon.

Fully agree with everything you said except the drawback nodes to getting the extra ring slot which seem fine to me (i dont even realize the reduced mana tbh and resists are easily fixable with the extra ring).

Never have i been more stuck in an unfun loop playing poe1/2 than playing bleed ritualist.

Although I actually wanted to go with the Ritualist before launch...I ultimately decided to go with the Amazon, due to sheer disgust from finding out that the good nodes were locked behind a straight up character nerf (i.e. you're asked to spend one point on a node that's a pure nerf with no upside, in and of itself).

More spitballing:

-Replace the Sacrifice and Whispers line of skills with a reviving minion modeled after the lesion-covered undead wolves Count Geonor summons during his fight. The plague wolf can be afflicted by your blood boils. The next skill node (where As the Whispers Demand is now) would allow you to perform a ritual sacrifice over the corpse of a dead rare monster in order to give your plague wolf one of its modifiers permanently (or maybe a scaling number of mods) - until the next use of the ritual overwrites the existing mod.