[Autumn]

Ghost as a class is simply put, very solid, after forming some opinions from members of the community, a few people though most of the skills were solid, except for the staple of Ghost itself, ether invitation.

Ether invitation, a staple desperation attack for ghosts, to be used in the most dire of situations due to the nature of it's scaling, and was abused in the past by just stacking HP to deal very large chunks of damage, reliably, thus a cap was added, and wasn't really changed much since then.

Now, Ether Invitation's damage isn't so good compared to everything else now, and while a simple cap increase could be introduced, I don't think this would be healthy due to past issues with HP stacking, so I was going over a few things and thought up something to make this skill staple again amongst ghost as a whole.

Ether Invitation:
remains as a basic attack
keeps claret call as a requirement to use, it also places unmarkable when used.
missing flat missing HP damage is removed entirely.
damage cap is removed, and it's damage is increased by critical hits once again.
Now uses your regular basic attack damage, and that damage is increased by 1% for every 1% of your missing HP. (200% of your basic attack damage at 1% HP, this can be increased by your critical damage as well)

I think this to be fair mostly because it doesn't give a tank ghost 'more EIs' and gives frail ghosts a reason to take this skill.

[Sawrock]

I like this suggestion, it has my approval!

[Rendar]

I like this as a whole in and of itself. However I see a few issues arising from allowing it to critical hit and add that boosted damage. In general, that probably won't be much of an issue. However with VA's this experience becomes very tricky, and with certain things like the new Vorpal, it becomes even more finnicky.

That 200% can become easily an extra 200%+ with a critical from a VA... throw in the fact that a vorpal now ignores every defensive measure we have to defend against it.. I'd like to see a few test runs with this to see how it plays out.

I'll be fine with having it cap at 75% extra damage on your basic attack... but there is another complication I can see with this.

Complication 1:
How will this work with destiny duelist? As of right now, anything that gives a huge % bonus to damage is usually halved if you aren't main-classing what causes it. However you can easily do Sword + Spear and not only get tons of extra stats, but you can use the Staff of Eyes and get a rather nice 12% extra damage bonus. Ontop of this, if Kensei is main, you can Absolute Death for another 25%. You can see where I'm going with this more than likely.

Answer to Complication 1:
Maybe make it so that Ether Invitation has a 50% HP cap for the bonus damage? It still makes it utterly terrifying, but certain things won't be utterly obliterating people due to damage percent stacking (that really should just get removed from the game but eh).

[Egil]

+1 as long as EI is made 5M and has a higher FP cost. Otherwise, add a damage cap of some sort.

[Snake]

I agree with everything listed in this OP, good one Spooks. +1, I'd love to see Ether Invitation have some use again.

In my opinion on this new system, Ether Invitation doesn't even need a cap anymore, as the '% damage reduction' can pretty much effectively mitigate any sorts of damage that are higher than 200, with or without armor in the middle of the math. (Saying out of personal experience when I saw what happened to the Excel weapons and guns during the beta, rest in chaturanga, they will never be forgotten)

Even if one's to boost the damage to 420% and do a sweaty 1000 brute crit damage? Nope, you might do 500-600, and that's without counting the other sorts of physical damage reduction, which are pleeenty. (Never forget that there's a Monk skill that fully denies damage)

One big and funky example of how damage reduction acts? See a Matador with 300 Rage Energy retaliate a max stack Vampire for 25 dark damage. Yo-ho, that was just beautiful.

Anyway, I'd love to see this going for a while, just to see what may happen. We will never get results by just making up a billion hypothesis without seeing it in action.

[Autumn]

I'd say make it only usable at 50% or less HP, as well as the whole main class suggestion, where you only get the full damage boost if ghost is main class, otherwise it's 50% max.

[Exxy]

Ghost suffered a fairly decent hit when GR came about (it lost some of the crit it had from FF -and- Diminishing Returns psuedo-nerfing Rising Game ultimately making Kensei more viable for this type of antic; albeit Ghost is still viable despite this).

Although I can't see this reason enough to remove the cap and completely alter one of the skills that remain half-decent for the class, I would support the possibility of being able to crit with it -or- for it to ignore a portion of Defense (I.E. Rank*2 Defence ignored). No other change being supported via me as of this post. Unless you can convince me otherwise.

EDIT: Ghost already has Wraithguard being Main-Preffered (along with the Main-Only skills coming from its Base being hard to pass up), are we really throwing more Main-Preferreds onto this class???

[Snake]

Hey, it could have a bigger 'cooldown' (5 rounds) on Unmarkable 'and' only usable at 50% or less HP. I don't see any other reason to not have it working like that.

Like I said once before, Ether Invitation should be a skill with high risks, high rewards. Without Claret Call, Ghost alone becomes 'useless' offensively, and loses one ability that could save them from sure death (Last Chance). And I just don't agree with Derg because to achieve whatever 'insane' damage, you'd have to do a giant setup, which is pretty situational in combat.

[Kameron8]

I'm not entirely certain Ether Invitation needs a power boost that large. Rising game became far better with the Great Reckoning if you don't soft cap the stats ahead of time, Wraithguard is still one of the better DRs in the game, and Death Gaze, Sanguine Star, Fitting Form, and Ghostwind all kick ass. I don't want to add 'can one shot kill people who aren't tanks' to the list here.

Because the cap applies before the reductions, crit builds on average do more damage with a normal attack than Ether Invitation. On that end, if the cap was moved to check post-reduction, it could still chomp down on people who are proving difficult to kill. For example, if a Ghost used Ether Invitation at 100/600 HP, the attack would do 500 damage. After the hypothetical target's defenses, let's assume that damage turns out to be 270 damage. The damage dealt exceeds the cap, so it is lowered to 250.

There are a few issues with simply doubling damage on EI at low health, namely how nice it plays with what already exists in the game. Do you really want to be crit by an excel weapon with 2x damage? On the flip side, what difference does it make if your 40 damage critical on the 1.2k HP wall of cement trucks takes 80 instead?

The skill likely needs normalization in its scaling. Pre-Great reckoning it had this by default because static caps play nice with static defense reduction, even if tanks were still better off against it. That's my two cents on how to change it.

[Lolzytripd]

the problem with EI is that it behaves stupidly currently

It caps it damage at 250 before vs defense and armor