I found the Fire Warlock's "Circle of Fire" ritual didn't work properly for me, so I asked around on the main steam forum. Only response I got claimed it was a bug in the base game.

Has this ritual ever worked for you? Maybe it should just be mothballed until a vanilla update fixes it?

I can't even remember the last time I used that ritual, but if it is indeed broken then yeah it will just get removed for now.

The para-elemental rituals are consistent and STRONG. Comparing lv. 2 Warlocks, the melee para summons comfortably outperform the pure greater summons. The ranged options, both ethereal with elemental bows, are stronger still.

Paraelementals, especially Mist and smoke elementals, are versatile, attrition-resistant, and come in big numbers. It is quite easy to fill 4 ranks of the buggers and that army is STRONG. And the new conflux warlock is a convenient and consistent path to access those rituals.

It may be that the warlock's "greater summons" are not a great comparison because some of the results there might actually be UNDERtuned. But I still think it would be good to shave down the paraelemental summon dice, especially for the ethereal ranged options.

Probably worth taking a look at para-elemental rituals cost to summons value, but I think I lean towards the pure elemental summons kind of being all over the place in terms of quality and purpose where the para=elementals are a consistent quality. One small but very impactful change made to the para-elementals was changing their weapons so that the secondary elemental damage only occurs if the initial weapon damage was a success. Prior to this I think they were very overpowered with attacks that trivialized shields and cover with unblockable secondary damage.

As for pure elemental summons, they currently are kind of a smattering of random units, where I'd like to see "greater summons" and "champions" have more distinct roles.

I'm currently looking at buffing and removing the pure elemental warriors from the summons pool and having them be a mercenary recruitment costing gold + gems unlocked and boosted by the various elemental champions. Leaving the "greater summons" to be exclusively spirits and elemental beasts.

Giants I'm also looking to do something similar, where Titans will enable giant merc recruitments costing gold and gems instead of simply summoning them in large numbers, while also giving each titan a few rituals from their respective element.

Good points! I recommend adding an Iron cost instead of pure gold to the warriors/giants where it makes sense. Currently the class lacks a unique iron sink, which is super noticeable given their affinity for mines.