Guild Wars 2

“Frost Spirit – Summon a frost spirit that has a 20% chance to grant bonus damage to nearby allies. Percent damage increase: 10%.”

Exactly how does this work? Does every attack have a 20% chance to do 10% more damage? And if so, why would I ever want to use what is essentially a targetable, easily-killable, stationary 2% damage buff with a 60 second cooldown?

Not that the other spirits are much better. All of them are stationary, easily killed, and extremely underwhelming. While it’s absolutely fun to have a total of five pets running alongside you, knowing that four of them are utterly useless is rather disheartening.

Thoughts and feedback?

Agadar.4931:

Exactly how does this work? Does every attack have a 20% chance to do 10% more damage? And if so, why would I ever want to use what is essentially a targetable, easily-killable, stationary 2% damage buff with a 60 second cooldown?

That, sadly, is exactly how it works. You can get the same effect with a fraction of the CD and absolutely no hassle by using Hunter’s Shot and Frost Trap.

All the Spirits suffer from this in 1 way or another. When someone designed the buffs, they obviously didn’t do the math out. They’re so absolutely worthless it’s not even funny. You might be able to make Stone or Storm usable with 30 points in Nature Magic for the 35% proc chance and boon duration, but that’s it. Sun Spirit is out-played by Flame Trap 100 times over.

I beg to differ. I find traps to do decent AoE and CC. Also, the AoE heal we have which also applies regeneration and removes conditions is pretty neat.

For some reason however I absolutely hate ranged traps. Perhaps I’m used too much to my old Hunter in WoW, but I must leave those suckers at my feet or I can’t use them properly.

Yes, 1 measly random condition.
Other classes have shouts that casually cleanse everything bad from the world while applying like every boon gw2 can give you to the whole group.
It’s a joke.

Traps are amazing if you trait into them.

This discussion is about spirits. Those are terrible. I would be OK with their mediocre buffs if they behaved more like a guardian’s spirit weapon. Let them follow us without a trait and make them invulnerable. Modify the CD/duration if you have to but summoning a spirit is just pointless currently. Even if not directly targeted they get popped by aoe damage within 4 seconds every time.

I think the comparision with traps is good though, because one thing about traps is that they are useful even if you don’t trait into them. In fact even if you don’t build for condition damage they are useful for their CC.

With spirits on the other hand, you need to trait fully into nature magic to make bringing one along viable. Then if you have spent 30 points in NM you are going to want to bring 3 right? or 2 at least. Not only that but you cannot trait them to be fully effective-you have to give up either 15%-plus proc chance or the activation enhancement trait. That would’t be so bad if they weren’t so borderline already.

Then you have to consider the opporunity loss for taking those traits. For example you can run a very strong condition/kiting build with no traits in traps and pick up some very strong defensive or offensive traits. Not sure if the spirits currently make up for the sacrifices you have to make to build around them.

Yasha.5963:

Then you have to consider the opporunity loss for taking those traits. For example you can run a very strong condition/kiting build with no traits in traps and pick up some very strong defensive or offensive traits. Not sure if the spirits currently make up for the sacrifices you have to make to build around them.

Pretty much. Even then, traiting into traps work nicely with condition builds because of bleed on crit traits and sigils, never mind that traps do condition damage too.

Nature Magic could’ve been a cool tree that worked well with Beastmastery, but you have to use every major trait to make spirits even remotely useful. That leaves nothing left really to trait on for your pet.

The frost spirit isn’t just about the damage buff. (And don’t get me wrong, it isn’t exactly glorious for that part.) It’s also about the Chill effect.

I use mine traited so it fires the Chill effect on death over the increased radius, but I don’t use the increased health for spirits trait. When something kills it, it hands out 5s of Chill to whatever is nearby. Chances are, I may already have used Cold Snap for another 5s.

Even if something doesn’t kill it, when the timer is up and it expires, the Chill effect procs then too.

It’s not the greatest ability in the world. Hell, it’s arguably not even a good one. But it is possible to use it with some effect in dungeon scenarios, if nothing else.

Unless I’m mistaken all the regular utility spirits have internal cooldowns on their procs which makes the 15% extra proc chance trait mostly worthless.