Guild Wars 2

READ THIS THREAD BEFORE POSTING ON SPIRITS

Spirit Changes

1. Spirits will no longer move.
2. Spirits will be heavily buffed to account for this. Think GW1 Nature Rituals but they probably won’t affect both allies and enemies equally.
3. Devs confirmed that the recharge on spirits will be heavily reduced.

What do you think of these changes? What would you want the spirits to be changed to if they were to become immobile?

REMEMBER: NONE of these changes are final. These are ALL prototyped and are highly likely to see changes based on YOUR feedback.

Spirit Rangers are a rare breed as it is, unless the spirits have a massive health pool or defense they will continue to be a specialty flavor within the rangers kitten nal of builds.

Think about it tho, if you hide this somewhere obscure in clock tower, it could be really hard to get this down!

I think they would benefit from ground targeting, like how Turrets can be.

Alexander.9810:

I think they would benefit from ground targeting, like how Turrets can be.

My worry is that you can put turrets in insane places with that trait. For example, try throwing a turret on the roof of the temple in Temple of the Silent Storm! Also, spirits don’t require line of sight, which could be pretty scary if you could throw them.

Limiting the range would be an answer to that, like 600/900 range or something.

Unless you are going to be a bunker ranger or a bunker druid spec i don’t really see a point in taking them, unless the cool down is really low.

I would actually be okay with AI builds if the AI is easy to kill, but they have a low cooldown and placement matters a lot. That would force movement on the part of the attacker to get rid of the Spirits, but not so much time that the Ranger just laughs and kills them easily.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Think about it tho, if you hide this somewhere obscure in clock tower, it could be really hard to get this down!

The common misconception about spirits: They are only wanted for their passive buffs.

The active abilities of Spirits are quite powerful, blinding stomps, nuking with Call Lightning, and of course the immobilize/cripple on Stone Spirit.

The second misconception about spirits: They are AI.

Spirits do not actively do anything by themselves. They are essentially summonable team wide signets, that can be killed.

I’ve played a lot of Spirit Ranger because it was the only viable build on Ranger for the majority of the time I was actively playing. The build has a much higher skillcap than most people realize. Locking people down with Stone Spirit and Drakehound in order to burst with Lightning spirit is a pretty pivotal part of being successful on a Spirits build and I’ve barely seen any other Rangers do this apart from Tany/Azron.

The first thing I don’t like about making Spirit immobile is that it finally seals the deal on them being horrible 100% of the time in WvW. You won’t even be able to roam with them anymore.

The second point I have is that Spirits is a support build. It isn’t a Turret Engineer whose job is to camp a node and let the turrets do all the work. Spirit Rangers were intended initially to watch home point, but constantly be moving into small scale fights on different nodes.

The third reason is that without the ability to move, their current active abilities are almost entirely worthless. Enemies will just move out of the way. This would imply that a complete rework would be needed in order to give them new active abilities that did something while stationary.

Fourthly, even Spirit passives have fallen way behind the times with the current amount of power creep we have in the game. 2 seconds of burning every 10 seconds is very small damage compared to combos like Fire/Air. Other meta classes already have great access to burning (Ele/Engi/War) and don’t even really benefit from Sun Spirit that much.

Making Spirits immobile would also result in either them needing something like 30,000 health to last for longer than a minute on a mid node against an ele and a warrior spamming AoE. That would make them impossible to kill in a 1v1 situation and overall reduce the counter-play.

PvP Community: We hate AI. Nerf it.
ANET: Ok, let’s buff spirits! Oh, and let’s make the engi supply crate a turret too! haha. That will really upset the playerbase. haha!

Honestly i’d rework spirit like banners warrior for some bunker build with no damage but only for support team mates.

I’m ok for support elements like boons but no condi/passive damage that creates tanky build who does great damage and are braindead to play.

Spirit ranger was kitten for this game like engi turrets is now.

Problem is always the same, tanky builds with great damage, super strong in 1vs1 and can fight on node without any problem.

So no, thx, not this design.

We had spirit ranger meta and it was really really bad.

Tanky build with great damage = bad.

I want Nature Spirits to have very low duration or the ability to blow them up.

60 second duration is too high for PvE roaming or dropping frost spirit down for a dungeon run.

I am glad spirits are being looked at. I don’t mind them being immobile so long as we have a way to terminate the spirit prematurely so we can move to a new location and summon them again. They’ll also need a much larger range for their passive effect, maybe something like 5,000 units. Which is the same as a ranger’s pet leash. Maybe spirits die automatically when the ranger leaves the effected area.

Their active abilities also need to be ground targeted and be ranged. That way the spirits can remain stationary and the ranger can actively choose where they want the spirit’s active ability to activate. Maybe have a 600-900 range from the spirit on the active abilities so you DO have to put the spirits somewhat close to the field to get their full effect. It also makes positioning massively important as a ranger might move too far from a spirit to benefit from the active effects.

Wolfey.3407:

Unless you are going to be a bunker ranger or a bunker druid spec i don’t really see a point in taking them, unless the cool down is really low.

I would place them at mid for the mid fight.

I’ll leave this here

If you’re dumb enough to place Spirits like dumb turret engis place their turret.

I highly doubt the new spirits are going to have a huge range of placement and still be effective, and i highly doubt they are going to have a large enough defense or hp to survive one good sized aoe.

Do you have ANet’s secret plans? I didn’t know ANet told you that Spirits won’t have large enough defense or hp.

After all, if ANet wants to balance their game, they would do that or something else. So pretty much, your “It won’t work because you don’t think anet would do x, y, z” is dumb.

Here is why

I’m gonna spitball for a second. Would you be okay with any one of these changes (or a modification of them)?

1. Frost Spirit – Foes in range who are disabled suffer from chilled when hit. Chilled foes take 10% more damage. Radius 5000 (5k radius is basically, if you can target it, it is in range)
2. Water Spirit – Allies in range have +400 vitality and regeneration. Radius 5000
3. Spirit of Wind – All projectiles (enemy and ally) move twice as fast. Projectile finishers always critically hit.

When the spirit is summoned, the flip over skill will destroy the spirit and they would go on a 10s cooldown. If they are destroyed, they go on a 30s cooldown.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I’m gonna spitball for a second. Would you be okay with any one of these changes (or a modification of them)?

1. Frost Spirit – Foes in range who are disabled suffer from chilled when hit. Chilled foes take 10% more damage. Radius 5000 (5k radius is basically, if you can target it, it is in range)
2. Water Spirit – Allies in range have +400 vitality and regeneration. Radius 5000
3. Spirit of Wind – All projectiles (enemy and ally) move twice as fast. Projectile finishers always critically hit.

When the spirit is summoned, the flip over skill will destroy the spirit and they would go on a 10s cooldown. If they are destroyed, they go on a 30s cooldown.

I like the current nature spirits. Some numbers could be buffed. I think the radius of the current Nature spirit is too small, but 5k range may be too big. 1500 range seems fair to me. There are tons of spots where I can hide them while still getting buffs.

I like the idea that destroying spirits takes them to cooldown but I don’t like the idea of them being destroyed go into a much larger cooldown.

Since spirits are immobile, it is strategic to put them far away from the melee train as possible. So the active effect where it damages nearby enemies is counter intuitive.

But what if we can teleport spirits instead of destroying them? By pressing the flip over skills, the spirit will teleport to you and then do the active effect. Cooldowns won’t need to be touched, nothing would have to be touched.

runeblade.7514:

Do you have ANet’s secret plans? I didn’t know ANet told you that Spirits won’t have large enough defense or hp.

After all, if ANet wants to balance their game, they would do that or something else. So pretty much, your “It won’t work because you don’t think anet would do x, y, z” is dumb.

Here is why

I stated twice: “I highly doubt”.
Not “I’m rather sure” not “I’m positive” nothing that confirms anything on Anets plans which no forum specialists knows.

My ideas <- again another term that is not absolute, is that the range will be around if not slightly larger then their current range which will not really be enough to escape a well placed AoE.

Currently the passive radius of the spirits is 1,000
The Active is 240

Elite:
Passive Radius is 240
The active is 600

You are only getting half of the use out of a spirit if you’re only going to use it for it’s passives. Keep in mind that they can not move, all you have to do is learn which color = what spirit and kill the ones that benefit the most.

To give you a better perspective of radius, Log on a Ranger and use Long Bow Skill 5: Barrage, look at the green circle, the radius of that is 360. That’s 120 larger then the spirits active range and the elites passive range. So if you wish to use spirits for their actives, 1 Barrage will hit them all.

So the radius needs to increase or they need more hp/ defense then what they currently have or its just 1 barrage and slash and dice away while the ranger is waiting for the CDs to go away.