Guild Wars 2

With the coming of Heart of Thorn and all class changes seemingly waiting until then, I found this the best place to put this. I talked about this ages ago and I saw it come up again in the Range Forum.

Ranger Spirits SUCK. The easiest thing to compare them to is to banners as thats basically what they are. Except our banners die to anything unlike real banners. But this is a fair because they can attack enemies … oh wait … nope.

I won’t make this long as this seems a very EASY and COMMON SENSE fix for these things;

1) Make Spirits immune to damage like banners.
2) Preferably remove the Master trait to have them move and tie them the spirits already.
3) In compensation, if need be, tweak (weaken) the passives/actives to make up for these changes. Also like banners, tweak uptime (3/4s of the time up with only maybe one or two activated skills per use of the spirit).

These are great POTENTIAL group utility skills we have that we don’t use. We use Frost Spirit in PvE and we hide it somewhere safe. Warrior banner just gets planted wherever.

Will it make them almost too similar? Maybe but this already exists with shouts and such things through the classes.

It’s been 2 years now with the spirits as is and it doesn’t work.

I don’t miss spirit ranger meta, it’s boring and i dont like having kindergarten… thats necro thing.. even 1 pet is to much for a true ranger… if anet wanted a ranger as it is real.. rangers never fought by side with their pets… they did just bring or track the enemy but never fight them… so yeah… no ty.. removing spirits from game would be my biggest wish, and replacing them with something more interesting.

I was also thinking about spirits, but more about the quality of life stuff. Like I hate having to resummon them so often, they should be permanent via a trait or something if a druid wants to.

Like a lot of other utilities in the game (engineer’s grenades for example), spirits need traits to be effective. And a spirit ranger can still be very effective. It’s a very easy build, appropriate for a beginner, and I recommend it to every ranger who’s new to pvp. However, it means the build has a very low skill ceiling, that’s why we don’t expect it to be good in the highest levels of play. It’s still very good in team fights.

Alex.9268:

I was also thinking about spirits, but more about the quality of life stuff. Like I hate having to resummon them so often, they should be permanent via a trait or something if a druid wants to.

No ty, i don’t want specialization to work with something that already work kind of OK without it.

I could see the Druid specialization having a strong focus with Spirits, given the lore surrounding the Druids.

Some people make points to sPvP which I get. Their lack of health isn’t that big of an issue there.

But for PVE and Dungeons? Those things die to ANYTHING in one hit. Doesn’t even matter if you invest in their life. And guess what? Out of all our utility skills THOSE are the ones that affect the group the most.

They are BANNERS for rangers. It’s what they are and do. As BANNERS, they should NOT have HP pools. Nerf them a bit in use to make up for this if need be but as is, they do not work and are unfair in our use of them compared to what warriors have to go through (or don’t have to)

Loxsus.3841:

Some people make points to sPvP which I get. Their lack of health isn’t that big of an issue there.

But for PVE and Dungeons? Those things die to ANYTHING in one hit. Doesn’t even matter if you invest in their life. And guess what? Out of all our utility skills THOSE are the ones that affect the group the most.

They are BANNERS for rangers. It’s what they are and do. As BANNERS, they should NOT have HP pools. Nerf them a bit in use to make up for this if need be but as is, they do not work and are unfair in our use of them compared to what warriors have to go through (or don’t have to)

Except that they are not banners. If you have trouble keeping them alive then untrait spirits unbound when you’re about to attack bosses, place them somewhere safe => profit. They have like 25 seconds cooldown. What’s the big deal? and their buffs are good for what they are. Except maybe on storm spirit. It should do more than just giving swiftness. Making spirits immune to dmg would make them even worse than when spirit rangers were reigning the meta.

Stop raging and take a clever play. My ranger runs spirits all the time in dungeon. And he could almost always keep up the buffs except the usual 10secs downtime between recast.

The problem is that ALL summons (spirits, minions, spirit weapons, clones, turrents) in all game modes die within seconds since all the overlapping AoE overkill. So now, if you make them invulnerable to AoE like in almost every other MMO, you make them sheer indestructible since most attacks are inherently AoE in GW2. It’s a design flaw and I hope they will address this somehow in HoT.

DavyMcB.1603:

Loxsus.3841:

Some people make points to sPvP which I get. Their lack of health isn’t that big of an issue there.

But for PVE and Dungeons? Those things die to ANYTHING in one hit. Doesn’t even matter if you invest in their life. And guess what? Out of all our utility skills THOSE are the ones that affect the group the most.

They are BANNERS for rangers. It’s what they are and do. As BANNERS, they should NOT have HP pools. Nerf them a bit in use to make up for this if need be but as is, they do not work and are unfair in our use of them compared to what warriors have to go through (or don’t have to)

Except that they are not banners. If you have trouble keeping them alive then untrait spirits unbound when you’re about to attack bosses, place them somewhere safe => profit. They have like 25 seconds cooldown. What’s the big deal? and their buffs are good for what they are. Except maybe on storm spirit. It should do more than just giving swiftness. Making spirits immune to dmg would make them even worse than when spirit rangers were reigning the meta.

Stop raging and take a clever play. My ranger runs spirits all the time in dungeon. And he could almost always keep up the buffs except the usual 10secs downtime between recast.

Aside from their activated abilities, how are they any different from banners? How is frost spirit that different from the power or precision banners? Their activates aren’t really used in dungeons, just the passive and if you don’t KNOW the dungeon and your spirit dies? Well tough. But a warrior can throw down a banner and you’re done.

And as the above stated, yes, all minions of every variety die too easy to all the stupid AOE. Mesmer phantasms suck in this regard in too many fights.

Personally, I just love being following by spirits. It feels so magical. I’d love to see some buffs or reworking of spirits, and I’d also find it enjoyable if Druid or other Spec could alter spirits in some manner.

But don’t listen to me xD
I’m just in it for the magic!

I’d probably consider it if spirits stayed out without having to be re-summoned on a cool-down timer. Otherwise, no one with any common sense bothers with spirits anymore . . . unless they just love them like Tyler does.

No offense.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I’d probably consider it if spirits stayed out without having to be re-summoned on a cool-down timer. Otherwise, no one with any common sense bothers with spirits anymore . . . unless they just love them like Tyler does.

No offense.

:D

“Spirit pets are better than their fleshy counterparts because they can float above the ground, move through objects, and otherwise sidestep a whole bunch of pathing problems with relative ease. Treating some of them as spells also means that we can leverage our tech to add them to the game at a very low cost.”

I will take this for $100, Anet!

I ran spirit only a handful of times and it’s just like any typical AI build, you let them buff you up either from boons or damage (in this case, little of both). Problem for me isn’t that spirit’s die so easily it’s that it’s another passive build that just doesn’t bring anything exciting to the fight. Even though they have actives, the only time I see them used is for blind stomping or when they die due to a trait proc.

I think ranger spirits should provide their own unique aura vs some occasional effect like a boon or condition, like they did in gw1. Things like reduce movement speed of enemies nearby and plant the guy in a safe corner, or increase the range of projectiles, or boon duration, etc.

Spirits should move with ranger period. Movement is the only thing they have going for them over banners. It makes it easy to take then from fight to fight during their lives. A longer duration should also be in the works.

Other than that, either increase their effectiveness, give them more health, or give them some sort of aoe resist, because in pve they die when enemies look at them, and that makes their activated abilities useless, since we mabey get them once if the spirit is in range.

As stated in the release, all we know is that spirits will now be stationary with NO ability to move them. Not sure what this means yet …

They’ve said their being reworked to go along with this but HP, Activateds, and whatever else is in the air. They removed the 70% increase talent to procing so I’m imagining their becoming baseline

My biggest problem with Frost Spirit is that the buff is RNG. 35/70% chance is a solid kitten . It needs to be 100% guaranteed baseline, just like banners. Oh…. And stupid for them to have a health bars.