Guild Wars 2

10 last pvp match at least 2 spirit rangers

are they the new thieves?

The current sPvP meta is dominated by condition damage. It’s dominated by condition damage because conditions require only a single stat in order to maximize their damage. This leaves classes the option to focus their other stats on things like healing power, toughness, and vitality. Any class that can use these stats are doing fine in the meta. This is why you see about equal numbers of engineers, necromancers, rangers, condition warriors, and guardians.

Now are spirit rangers themselves overpowered? Hard to say… I can understand the complaint if people were to argue they were. Perhaps it is a bit too powerful for their cooldown timer to be running after summoning instead of after the spirit’s death. The spirits themselves aren’t overly powerful though. In fact, the most complained about spirits are sun spirit, because they can keep burn on a target 100% of the time (but the ranger could already do this with torch), and the res from the elite (which is on a very long cooldown so chances are once you kill it, it can’t be resummoned like the others).

Personally, I think the issue is less to do with the Ranger itself being overpowered and more to do with conditions being the name of the game. Since I’m a pessimist and I have 0 faith in ANet, I fully suspect spirits will be nerfed into uselessness come September 3rd regardless.

Atherakhia.4086:

The current sPvP meta is dominated by condition damage. It’s dominated by condition damage because conditions require only a single stat in order to maximize their damage. This leaves classes the option to focus their other stats on things like healing power, toughness, and vitality. Any class that can use these stats are doing fine in the meta. This is why you see about equal numbers of engineers, necromancers, rangers, condition warriors, and guardians.

Now are spirit rangers themselves overpowered? Hard to say… I can understand the complaint if people were to argue they were. Perhaps it is a bit too powerful for their cooldown timer to be running after summoning instead of after the spirit’s death. The spirits themselves aren’t overly powerful though. In fact, the most complained about spirits are sun spirit, because they can keep burn on a target 100% of the time (but the ranger could already do this with torch), and the res from the elite (which is on a very long cooldown so chances are once you kill it, it can’t be resummoned like the others).

Personally, I think the issue is less to do with the Ranger itself being overpowered and more to do with conditions being the name of the game. Since I’m a pessimist and I have 0 faith in ANet, I fully suspect spirits will be nerfed into uselessness come September 3rd regardless.

i cant thank you enough for this well written answer, +1 for you and 1000 internet points.

I would like to further point out what makes these spirits overpowered (in the current meta). As we mostly all know. The three spirits in question are Sun, Stone, and Storm. As mentioned by Atherakhia, on their own, they aren’t that powerful. The issue lies in how they can be “abused” while working around teammates. Storm spirit provides essentially permanent swiftness to all allies, a much larger combat enhancing buff than many people realize as it not only allows you to reposition faster, but increases the range of any movement based skills. Stone Spirit provides your entire team with about a 30% protection up time, which is insanely high considering they can stack this with their own forms of protection, rendering normal damage fairly weak. However, the strongest of them all lies in the Sun Spirit. Not only does the spirit maintain about 30% up time of burning on your target, but it works for all your allies independently, resulting in permanent burning on many targets if used in conjunction with other skills that apply burning. Now that almost every player runs heavy condition damage, you can see how this gets a bit extreme. Couple this with the fact that the Sun Spirit reapplies long duration blinds for a short period when activated/killed and you can essentially shut down an entire enemy team for several seconds.

In conclusion, it isn’t a very powerful build by itself, but when used as a roaming build near allies, it’s power scales to horrendously high levels, granting allies like necromancers the ability to burn there target (think the new (before being nerfed) dhuumfire and how the community screamed op) much more frequently. Now add a spirit that has a crazy high group hps and can revive all downed allies and you have a recipe for disaster.

The spirits are easy to kill, it’s not as strong as you’re making it out to be.

The ranger will most likely have no stun breaker, do I need to tell you how to kill him?

The spirits are extremely easy to kill for a power build that can cleave.

The elite spirit can be stunned/dazed to stop it’s “revive heal” (watch for it’s hand going up, pretty big tell). Poison works on it, reduces it’s revive ability by 33%. So, someone below 40% health in downed state will not be revived.

Tricare.2946:

The spirits are easy to kill, it’s not as strong as you’re making it out to be.

The ranger will most likely have no stun breaker, do I need to tell you how to kill him?

The spirits are extremely easy to kill for a power build that can cleave.

The elite spirit can be stunned/dazed to stop it’s “revive heal” (watch for it’s hand going up, pretty big tell). Poison works on it, reduces it’s revive ability by 33%. So, someone below 40% health in downed state will not be revived.

And I’m not disagreeing with you at all. I’ve told people that a stunlock warrior is a hard counter to these spirit ranger simply because it has zero stun breaks and stability. All the warrior needs is zerker stance and to be able to land one stun. However, the spirits aren’t as easy to kill as you make them out to be. They are fairly tanky now, and with the Nature spirit out you can forget about trying to focus them as you will either die from the ranger before, or eat the activation of the spirits as you kill them, causing you to roll over dead anyway (really putting you at a severe disadvantage, but it can easily result in death).

I’m not saying NerF sPirit RanGrr NaoW! But I’m against the current condi meta and want to see anet make some serious changes to it so that power builds are a viable option.

Indoles.1467:

Spvp/Tpvp is a joke anyways. In WvW a zerker warrior can spin through with a GS and all the spirits die.