bedir than
Full Moon Storyteller
Healing Spirit
That's my point. If you up the time it becomes an actual cost. If it took 2 or 3 hours to mage armor the whole party it would lose some luster, wouldn't it? That applies generally to ritual spam, and it's a easy way to prevent a bunch of abuse if you decide to make more spells into rituals. i'm comparing that to the non-ritual spell slot cost.
2 or 3 hours to mage armor on the whole party. Not 2 or 3 hours to cast mage armor period. The suggestion being that upping the ritual duration to half an hour or whatever would keep it reasonable for one person while making it awkward for a group. Scaling ritual duration could be a great gate and it doesn't have to be super complicated.
In your points system, I’d say that a feat that only gives Mage Armor as a ritual would be completely terrible compared to most feats. Light armor gives 1 less AC and that feat gives a +1 to a stat!
Another way to look at it is viewing it as a feat that gives +1 AC while wearing light armor. That’s the direct equivalent.
Now, separately from that, there is the issue of the value of strength builds. I personally don’t think there needs to be any incentivisation to build for strength, beyond heavy armor and big weapons and barbarian rage damage bonuses requiring Strength. Those are things people want to play, and they are perfectly viable. They are in fact quite strong (pun intended). However, for those who feel that strength should dominate, or should be just as robust a choice in classes with no preference otherwise, I don’t think this is a good space to accomplish that.
Mage Armor either is or isn’t effectively always on regardless of ritual status, for most characters who’d consider taking it. It isn’t going to change the percentage of Dex vs Str builds.
Instead, I’d suggest some special weapons that require certain Str scores to wield without disadvantage, or perhaps give extra range on bows and thrown weapons for strength modifier, or even consider increasing movement speed by 5ft per strength mod when you dash or something.
The problem with Strength in 5e is that many of the things that rely on it are boring things that get handwaved, or that groups prioritize getting magic items to be able to ignore, etc. How often does carry, lift, drag, push, etc weights come up? How many groups actual run jumping correctly?