Ghost and Dark Ghost are TERRIBLE things

It's a Lord of Light event which means a lot of grinding on very easy dungeons. So I decided to get some free levelling of characters I got recently. I put together Senjitsu Eddie, Oni Mongol, the new Shogun Prince musashi guy, and Red Derby Demon, and set them going on LoLX.

Some amount of time later, I checked it and saw this:
One of the newborns of light was ghosted with a stack of bleeds that went off the top of the screen and Senjitsu was attacking him over and over again, never stopping. I watched it for a while, then disabled autoplay and finished it on manual. LoLX usually takes < 30 seconds. This one had been running for over 7 minutes.

Ghost is a terrible thing. Having a "Buff" that kills you is all sorts of a bad idea.
But Dark Ghost is an even worse thing. Having a "debuf" that makes it so that your opponents can NOT be killed is ... <sighs>

I never, ever, want any of my people to be Ghosted. My teams have multiple ways to revive, some as buffs, some as skills, etc. It is a very rare situation where the Ghost buff makes my life in any way better.

And I never, ever, EVER, want to Dark Ghost my opponents. My teams are made up of literal gods and demons. They do ridiculous amounts of damage to my opponents. At least, they do so long as I never let an Oni Mongol or a Lamia Reaper Boss or a Number of the Beast Eddie play. At its very best, casting Dark Ghost only slows me down. At its worst, it halts me in my tracks and stops the battle from ever completing.

Have a great new character who permastuns the enemy? If they're dark ghosted, you'll never, ever, be able to kill them.
Have a great new character who gets extra turns repeatedly? If the enemy is dark ghosted, you'll never, ever, be able to kill them.

These skills are completely broken. But they shouldn't be fixed. The should be disabled and removed from the game entirely.

I have two main grievances with Ghost:

1. It is a real pain in the ass to have it inflicted on you by an enemy; at least with Dark Ghost you can remove it if you have a cleanse silver effects skill or effect, but the only way to be 'immune' to having Ghost cast on you by an enemy is to somehow cast perfect corruption/block beneficial effects on yourself. If Ghosted by an enemy (e.g. if you kill a character that has the Soul talismans) your only hope is to extend beneficial effects on your team until the end of the battle and hope the enemy don't have a permadeath skill. Also, on the topic of Soul talismans I often see Ghost cast on 2 or even 3 of my team if I kill someone wearing it in Gauntlet; not the single enemy as described in the compendium...

2. Soul Protect takes precedent over other revive skills; if a character dies with both a revive status and a soul protect status, it will Ghost rather than reviving. I get that one has to trigger first but I would much rather have the revive trigger first. This is one reason I avoid using characters that cast soul protect on all allies as part of their passive as it basically makes any other revive useless.

In terms of dark ghost extending enemy life it can be useful is utilised alongside permadeath or perfect death, but its rarely useful as a skill on its own unless you have no way of damaging said enemy and casting a guaranteed slow death is the only way to kill it...

I used to use Pilgrim with very poor talisman in Arena just for the laugh of ghosting the enemy. I saw it's good use but it's a pain if you also disable the opponents' ability to take a move: stun, shock, sleep, freeze. The opponent gets their turn, they are unable to move so the counter for the Ghost just does not count down?!?!? Or worse: the character you are using ghosts the opponent again and the turn-count for the ghost is reset to the higher value?!?!
I feel Ghost & Dark Ghost should work differently and should:
- Take the smallest value of number of turns remaining if there are multiple Ghost/Dark Ghost stacked.
- Decrement event if the char is unable to move.

Ghosting the opponent and disabling them should be a turn-ticking termination. Not a preservative.

Ghost: why kill an enemy outright when you can just keep them on the edge of death forever?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Ghost and Dark Ghost suck (and spend a decent amount of time bugged). I want to see them go the way of the angry birds and get slingshotted far away from this app never to be seen again.

I think that Dark Ghost and Ghost could be made better, but currently the dev team has taken advantage of how shitty they are by actively adding the effects to new characters. Visions of Edorado, for example, inflicts Ghost on a a random enemy for 2 turns when he kills a different one with his fury. Brave Talismans actively prevent Ghost, a beneficial effect, from being applied to your team.

Ghost is essentially an unstoppable death once it hits one of your characters. A character with ghost can be killed in 3 main ways:
1. The timer on the effect runs out, and the character dies. This is what the effect is meant to do, give your character a last hurrah on the edge of death.
2. Permadeath is applied, causing Ghost to be removed and the character to die. This somewhat manageable, as you can always give a character immunity to permadeath or perfect death with the right allies or talismans.
3. Ghost can be removed, which counts as death for your character. This is where it truly becomes unstoppable; if you face a character who removes beneficial effects, your character will die upon having ghost removed. This is why characters such as Life and Power Eddie are a death sentence if you use ghost, because they can remove it without even spending power.

Dark Ghost, on the other hand, is an actively worse effect than regular Ghost. Unlike regular Ghost, you can only die in two ways when afflicted with it.
1. Timer runs out. Same as regular Ghost, when the timer runs out, the character dies.
2. Permadeath is applied. Again, same as regular Ghost.

Dark Ghost does not kill when the effect is removed though, making it a less effective debut than it's golden counterpart. Now, this wouldn't be awful if it weren't for how Ghost as an effect works Unlike Doom, Apparition, or any other effect similar to Ghost, the duration only goes down when you take an action. So, if your character is stunned, Ghost won't decrease in duration. Other players in this thread have noted this, and it really hurts new characters when they play around these effects.

One of the bigger backlashes of this year was NotB Eddie getting reworked. His ability, Possess, was given a condition where it granted Dark Ghost to enemies for 6 turns. NotB Eddie used to be one of the best Eddies in the game for farming, and now he's much less so. Sure, he can still farm perfectly fine if he doesn't use Possess, but that's not the point. Dark Ghost should not punish the player for using it.

If I were to make any changes to Dark Ghost and Ghost, I would make it something like this.

Dark Ghost:
- Like Doom, Dark Ghost ticks down even while stunned. This would prevent the absurdly long farming times some people report with Dark Ghost being afflicted.
- Applying Dark Ghost more than once instantly kills an enemy. This sort of occurs with Doom sometimes, where if multiple instances are stacked, one of them might trigger and kill the enemy.

Ghost:
- When Ghost is applied to a character, the character becomes immune to Permadeath effects as a whole.
- Ghost cannot be removed as an effect, preventing enemies from applying it and then removing it for an easy kill.

That's at least my idea besides from straight up removing the effects.

It’s more annoying when my team has ghost and can’t clear it, but I don’t think the effect it needs rework. There may be more characters like magus lol and oni magus warrior that can make ghost interesting, or more permadeath.

Just had a Gauntlet round where I took out an Assassin Corrupt Rescuer wearing Soul talismans and she then cast ghost on three of my team for 2 turns while she got ghost for 3 turns plus perfect immunity - that's the sort of thing that drives me nuts with this being a so-called 'positive effect'. If an enemy casts it on you, it should be Dark Ghost so you can then remove it if you have the skills.

Yeah, the fact that they're using a golden buff as an attack goes a long way toward explaining just how broken the ghosts are. While I was playing gauntlet yesterday I also had some random natural 3 star character Golden Ghost 3 of my 4 team members. That guy shouldn't have been able to clip the fingernails of the characters I was attacking with, much less almost wipe my team...