I was absent-mindedly wondering why the game doesn't have any neat natural disasters when I remembered that Zulg said animists were one skill or spell short of being good. So, here it is:

Level 50 spell: Call Natural Disaster

An animist who has mastered their craft knows that while everything in nature has a spirit and should be revered, the destructive force of nature can be a dangerous beast. Calling upon the surrounding spirits in their terrain when the conditions are right acts as a catalyst to form a natural disaster that will affect the whole area.

The idea would be that the terrain the ranger is standing in in a given area would be transformed, so to speak. Each terrain would have something different happen. Also, certain conditions have to be met.

Plains - A tornado forms, grounding flying opponents, making movement difficult and causing some damage. Weather has to be lightning.
Mountains - A giant snowstorm dumps snow in the area making movement difficult and causing cold damage. Weather has to be snowing
Caves - An underground earthquake causing occasional rocks to fall.
Water - Maelstroms form and suck people underwater.

You get the idea. Another stipulation is that the animist cannot leave the area and there's a big timer on using it again.

What you all think? Or am I way off base?

1) Animists are not invokers.
2) How does wreaking havoc in the wilds via landscape-wrecking disasters fit into naturey ranger animist theme?
3) At least one of the suggestion was overpowered (suck someone without seaweed underwater = instakill)

Furthermore this doesn't fix the basic problem with animists, which really amounts to them being crappy bards.

They either need something better than cloud of wasps to seal kills, or the utility spells would have to be even better than what you already listed.

Honestly I'd rather not see another skill like grenade, which is what you listed here. Grenade on poisoners is an excellent skill with good damage and a ton of utility that poisoners otherwise lack... were it at level 30 instead of 42. It also makes weapon nick partly redundant (due to it's expense and grenade being more efficient the majority of the time even taking into account the reduced success rate. Grenade is an opener, weapon nick is two rounds of your thumb where the sun don't shine with a nice risk of bash, flurry, or two nasty spells with no offense to convince your opponent otherwise.)

If this form were a modified version of Scion portals, including cursing the entire area similar to how The Hunt does to a single individual or how the Battlerager Village works, this would be a god-like ability to go animist for alone, in addition to all these affects, even taking into account overlapping with insects. Give it a 24 hour period and a 180 hour cooldown or whatever the equivalent cooldown is for the orcish chieftan's horde and you'd be set.

Otherwise I wouldn't set a skill or spell that high and force people to grind the class for no reason. There's a reason shifter final minor focus forms aren't at 50 anymore.

Wasps is pretty jacked. It's just not reliable. Sometimes you get lucky and it goes crazy on someone...other times not so much.

Edit: I say this from the perspective of the wasps recipient, not the caster.

I tended to use it as a finisher on outlanders for the immolate degen rather than the freeze + slow. People were usually going to flee by that point and it only worked half the time.

To do what it was intended to do the neuro style lag needs to last longer than dirt kick. Even 1 hours is good, not 0.

Having been on both ends of it... wasps are pretty powerful, but its unreliability is what balances it.

I'm usually pretty happy when someone tries to cast wasps on me in the midst of a fight (as long as I have decent saves)-- because not landing it means I'll get some free rounds on the dude.

I've read over a bunch of my logs of my last ranger, and realized that I initially fell in love with the spell and overused it in PK-- but, 9/10 times there was a better option. I cringed at all those 'c cloud's missing ugh. Against strong opponents (Kostyan, Djabree, etc) several serpent strikes was generally more effective than trying to land those wasps. You live you learn.