Guild Wars 2

Currently, Spirits are terrible, except for rare occasions with many players (ie: WvW) and Dynamic Events.

Why? They are fragile and have poor trait support – it’s non-compressed, meaning that you need to fill ALL of your nature magic slots to make them a little less useless, and you still won’t be able to get all spirit-related traits. Their effects are relatively weak for their fragility, most of their traits are things that should be baseline, and they have a long cooldown.

In other words, I’d like to see them reworked to a large degree:

My solution

Spirits currently work as a constantly refreshing aura that has a 20/35% chance to provide a benefit with each attack (fire seems to work on a cooldown and with a longer duration than listed).

Instead of this, I would like to see them work as a single-attack application that is guaranteed to give its benefit on that attack and refreshes every 5 or so seconds. This removes the RNG factor and makes them a reliable form of support that is easier to balance to the more guaranteed numbers.

In addition, compress their traits. Remove +15% effect achievement, because it is now a guaranteed effect. Combine the spirit health bonus trait with the spirit skills trait. Combine the grandmaster spirit trait with one that reduces the cooldown of spirits.

For example:

Frost Spirit
Provides an aura that refreshes every 5 seconds. All affected allies deal x% bonus damage with their next attack. Does not stack with other next-attack bonus modifiers.

Bam. Fixed.