I've been saying a lot lately that this game needs more mechanics that give a player more powerful tools in outnumbered PvP situations which are relatively less powerful in 1v1 to allow more skillful play and soft counter mechanics rather than hard counters.

For the Templar, I believe Cleansing Ritual should be that tool. The current base morph is as follows:

Exalt in the sacred light of the Aedra, cleansing up to two harmful effects from yourself immediately and healing you and nearby allies for X every 2 seconds for 12 seconds. (+ Purify Synergy)

An interesting idea would be to instead remove 1 effect plus 50% of all other harmful effects immediately.

Ritual of Retribution would keep the same additional effects as current.

Extended Ritual would continue to be longer in duration but instead of cleansing additional effects immediately, it would cleanse 1 additional effect every 2 seconds while in the circle.

In outnumbered situations when you have a ton of debuffs on you including 7 poison procs, some snares, Poison Injection, Flame Reach, Burning, Major Defile, etc, you would remove a lot of debuffs and gain survivability from using this skill. In 1v1, you would no longer have such an easy time completely shutting down DOT builds and would actually have to play skillfully rather than just Cleanse > DPS until the DOT build is dead. You would also have to be smart about using it and careful not to spam, which would add a layer of skill to the ability that does not exist currently.

Now in addition to the above, a change to Sacred Ground is needed. Instead of snaring enemies, it should reduce the efficacy snares by 50% and reduce the duration of snares and immobilizes by 50% for the Templar while standing in his circles. There are way too many free snares on abilities already and the radius of Ritual is huge - does not need an offensive snare. The above suggestion is more appropriate for the Restoring Light skill line.

Of course the Templar class needs various other skill and passive adjustments (as do the other classes) and this change should not be viewed in a vacuum.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler @Wrobel @ZOS_RichLambert