Guild Wars 2

This trait seems contradictory to me.

Spirits – like many abilities – seem to serve a dual purpose. They provide aoe buffs and can be killed to do an instant attack. But generally you’re only interested in one or the other.

Being in the Nature Magic spec I’d think that most players equipping this trait are much more interested in their buffs. Accordingly what they’d probably appreciate is being able to instantly resummon them – with the balance being they lose their on death or activate ability.

As it is I don’t use them and almost never see anyone else using them in solo content. A 20 sec cooldown means you can’t use them every fight and they’re just not worth the effort.

I think it’s a huge shame. They look awesome and apart from the druid elite spec are the only aspect of nature magic that rangers have. Take the cooldown away and I’d use them all the time.

I agree that it is a shame to see that the active skills of the spirit are not used or perhaps I should say underused. However, the active skills have the same cool down than the spirit so I struggle to understand what you would gain by removing the cool down.

Back to the trait, I see here no suggestion about it. Personnaly I think they should renamed the trait to Nature’s boon or Nature’s blessing since as it is now it have nothing to do with “vengeance”.

They should bring back the effect ti this trait, that the active effect activtes by death of the spirits, if natural by time or killed doesn’t matter.

Still not sure why we can’t have 2 traits and expand on Spirits. Seriously, replace Instinctive Reaction with Vigorous Training, split Nature’s Vengeance into another master trait, and buff both of them to compensate so each trait isn’t too weak.

Something like:

Nature’s Bounty (Master): Spirits periodically grant boons to nearby allies (same ones as the current Nature’s Vengeance). Spirit active AND passive ranges are increased by 50%. An increased passive range would help when Spirits Unbound was removed, and it also makes their effective range span a wider area like the GW1 Spirits.

Nature’s Vengeance (Grandmaster): Spirits automatically use their active skill when defeated. Spirits gain retaliation (3s) and stability (3s) when sacrificed. This brings back the “vengeance” part of having Spirits use their active when defeated, and also introduces a bonus if the player is willing to sacrifice it.

Added stability so the Spirit can sustain 1 CC in order to execute their active without being interrupted, and minor retaliation to deal damage to those that strike it while it is sacrificing itself. Pretty thematic and solid as a trait.

i think spirits still should go back to the Gw1 days large area of effect , easy to kill but Powerful in terms of boons and support for Survival if ignored but since people tend to ignore Spirits due to AOE of its current smaller Radius needing to be in range all the time not much Charater postion moving at all required you can just 900 yard kill them with anything really .

if the radius was increased to 1500 yards with Supporting effects on passive , it will give rangers a reason to use them as a tactical strategy to draw people off points to kill the spirits since the spirits at that distance from a cap will only effect those using ranged , the melee or person on the cap can just move into a hiding postion forcing the ranged user to move on point negating the Spirits tactical use .

this was key in the Gw1 alliance battles and pvp arenas by changing the Dynamic of the play style just having a ranger with spirits on the team in gw1 effectively ment the opposing team had to change rotational strategy or have the +1 or +2 with other ranged options or Fast Mobility to counter the spirits which allowed 2vs4’s in terms of Survival rather than damage but on a flip side the Damaging spirits had shorter radius or Time alive . (which needs to happen again) Standardised radius and Amount of time alive killed spirit Diversity in the way they where used Tacticaly.

in terms of natures vengence , i think based upon the suggestions above with less life for Damaging spirits ect this should Revive the Dead spirit in question without cooldown making these deadly at short range but less time alive , if they bring back things like the dust spirits ect which caused conditional blinds ect with a higher hp value Revival on death would keep the Damage the same but the threat of being too close dangerous and improve the Support spirits time on the field (no real changes needed apart from :

1. support spirits getting more time on the field and a larger radius.
2. damaging spirits , less time on the field , same current Radius.

plus the additon of two new spirits would be very good to fill in the middle ground these would be control effect spirits blind ect.

Dadnir.5038:

However, the active skills have the same cool down than the spirit so I struggle to understand what you would gain by removing the cool down.

Caeledh.5437:

Being in the Nature Magic spec I’d think that most players equipping this trait are much more interested in their buffs. Accordingly what they’d probably appreciate is being able to instantly resummon them – with the balance being they lose their on death or activate ability.

My point was that having invested heavily in a buff heavy specialization, players equipping this trait are probably much more interested in the buff effect of spirits than their activated ability. But being on a 20 sec cooldown means they’re not available enough to be useful most of the time.

Open world content is typically over a lot quicker than that. Open world end game content is likely to see spirits die a lot…. and spend much of their time unavailable on cooldown. Lots of both open world and instanced content also has a lot of moving around. With spirits no longer able to follow you and being on a 20 second cooldown…. well you get it.

So the trait would trade that activated ability for losing the 20 second cooldown.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Still not sure why we can’t have 2 traits and expand on Spirits.

I wholeheartedly agree. Across the board I think rangers and all classes could benefit from more trait variety. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. The limited trait options mean that developers can determine a fixed number of optimal builds for each profession and try to balance them against each other. The more traits there are, the harder that gets.

But yes I’d like this. GW seemed to offer a lot more variety in this department.

spirits are that bad simply because Aney decided to remove the trait Spirits unbound.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spirits_Unbound

That trait must come back. Then it won’t matter if the area of the active is too small, as long as now the spirits follow you the actives may be considered PbAoE.

The come back of the mobile spirits is key to make the class fun to play and open more builds. Even all pve except raids could benefit from mobile spirits.

I’m on the fence when it comes to spirits unbound.

They were definitely more useful that way. With mobile content or just open world PvE you could get better uptime from them. But there was still some downtime and thematically I kind of like them immobile.

Caeledh.5437:

As it is I don’t use them and almost never see anyone else using them in solo content. A 20 sec cooldown means you can’t use them every fight and they’re just not worth the effort.

People use personal DPS skills over group buffing abilities in solo content? Shocker.

What even is solo content? Doing the story? Or open world? Like you need a specific build to do either one of those.

In everything else pve, dungeons, fractals, raids, spirits are heavily used.

Caeledh.5437:

I’m on the fence when it comes to spirits unbound.

They were definitely more useful that way. With mobile content or just open world PvE you could get better uptime from them. But there was still some downtime and thematically I kind of like them immobile.

Yes both cases are used: mobile for open world, fractals and pvp\wvw.
Immobile for static content like raids and some fractals.

That’s the reason of asking for the trait back, you want them mobile you got it if you trait them, like it was before. we have many useless traits that could be the placeholder of that one.

The only thing i didn’t like from the spirits back then was the design of being minitrents running around. Now they have the small light bulbs or wisps, which is much less obstructing in the screen

But we have been asking the change back from the dreadful balance that broke them and aney doesn’t seem to care… Probably related to too many objects for their servers with Atom microprocessors.

I really wished they would add back Spirits Unbound, too. Even if it was a trait-split that only applied in modes that didn’t complain about the petting zoo.

Like, if Nature’s Vengeance for PVE & WVW only additionally made it so Spirits could follow us around. Man, that’d be swell.

That would be the simpler way to go about it.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit too. My experience with using them has actually been decent, as I’ve been able to drop them in each fight when running fractals (with obvious exceptions like the jumping puzzle part of uncategorized), and was able to see positive gains with the trait for my group. That said, most of the kill switch abilities on them aren’t that good, with the possible exception of spirit of nature.

Then I decided to compare them to other similar abilities. The first that came to mind was banners. Banners also provide a buff, but they have a smaller radius (600 as opposed to 1000), but have the upside that they can be picked up and moved, even used in this mode to provide other buffs, including swiftness, which is useful in running battles with pugs or OW events. I forget how the durations compare between the two.

I know they aren’t ideal for other game types. Not sure if this one can really be effectively balanced across game types.

Edit: I get using a trait to unbind them, but it would have to be a GM trait for that, cuz that is too big of a tactical gain.

Also, food for thought. If the spirits follow you, they would get hit by AoEs that target you, whereas their lifespan would probably be longer otherwise.

Edit again: the petting zoo complaint should apply to necros before rangers. They spawn way more followers than we do.

Not really food for thought at all. Maybe back a couple of years ago or on-paper, but not now. Damage reduction in PVE negates this issue. In WVW, any Spirit Ranger would (and should) hang in the back or mid. If you front line with fragile Spirits, that’s on them.

As I suggested above, lump it in with Nature’s Vengeance for the 2 game modes that could benefit from it the most as they once did or make room for it by tossing out Instinctive Reaction and shifting some traits around. I’ll be kitten ed if NM is going to have 2 GM traits related to Spirits. That’ll be one shoddy way to layout traits.

There’s not much to think about it balance-wise. Active on-death is gone, so some of that is already taken care of in competitive modes. Would have been nice for PVE, but with the damage reduction, it would have also been counter-intuitive.

I’d love to see Spirits Unbound come back and I’ve been pushing for this for years. Necros can run MM, Guards still have Weapons, although both of these are not truly viable Spirits had been nerfed with the boon duration and ICD, with the removal of the Cele Ammy I feel like they wouldn’t be so broken anymore.

Of course, I’m dreaming here. I miss my GS spirit build more then anything else.

Aylpse.6280:

…Guards still have Weapons…

Don’t envy those. Their cooldowns make them pretty useless. They’re as cool looking but rarely seen, if not more so, than spirits.

Yeah, I’m hard pressed to think of a set of utilities on any profession that needs to be redone more than those guardian spirit weapons…