Wisdom line- usefulness of Ritual?

[Razgriz]

I have a level 15 Mystic with 19 AA. I'm currently speccing towards combat, with 4/4/8/2 in AGI at the moment. My original plan was to go straight for Chieftain and then move on to Combat, but I'm very interested in the first WIS line ability, Ritual. I have two questions about it. First, the inital increase is 20%. Does it give a linear return rate, ending at 160%, or does it simply start at 20% and then increase by, say, 2% per rank? Second, does it effect wards? The text specifies "health replenishment", and while I know some of our AA text is totally off (Aura of Warding, anyone?) I'd like to find out for sure. I can imagine how powerful this ability would be if you could cast the group ward once a minute for 260% strength. I wouldn't think it was worth 8 AA though for, say, a 135% ward. I'd test this myself, but I don't want to spend the 10g for a respec, and simply can't afford to be spending 1p on a follow-up respec.

[Bobbette]

It doesn't affect wards.  It does affect your heals.  The uppage is not linear, at 8 points it's about a 36% boost to a heal (single target small, single target large, group heal). Interesting to note, it also works with mana replenishment spells ... so manastones, the cannabalize hat from vaults, etc. I had ritual for a long time as I was leveling my shaman.  It was really useful as the only healer in a group since our straight heals are rather weak.  Once my shaman hit 70 and I started using her for zones that typically require 2 healers, the usefulness of ritual decreased (why bump my heal when a druid is heal-over-time'ing underneath my wards).  But during my shaman's formative levels, ritual was a HUGE help ... especially before I got some of the extra healing tricks like torpor, oberon, the healing 'pet', etc.

[Finora]

<p>At 70 I found ritual pretty darn useless, even when I was solo healing (I end up using wards only the vast majority of the time). I took it because I wrongly thought that it would increase my wards as well. =(</p><p>I imagine that in those levels between our level 26 ward and the level 40 ward ritual would be huge though.</p><p>Especially in the late 30s. I remember those levels being really difficult to keep the tank healed (that was ages ago though before they fixed ward mitigation as well hehe). </p>