Guild Wars 2

I’m surprised I haven’t really seen any posts concerning the state of Spirits for the Ranger. There was a post that kind of touched on this, but for a PvP standpoint.

Currently, Rangers have no real viable support options due to the state of their main support skills, Spirits, having a host of problems. Conceptually, Spirits share similarities to Warrior banners, but the banners far outperform Spirits in every conceivable way.

I’ll provide a quick breakdown of what I feel the main problems are currently

1. Survivability: The largest issue at hand. Even with the double health trait, Spirits die far too quickly in any real large combat. This can be in larger DE’s or more commonly dungeon encounters. Simply put, AOE wrecks them. I’m fine with them falling to directed single targetting, but with all the AoE that gets tossed around in most dungeon encounters, it is VERY difficult for Spirits to stay up. Even with the 30 point trait to have them follow you this is an issue. With a long cooldown the fact that they die so easily is a problem.

I’m not sure the best way to fix this, but my guess is just giving them a flat AoE damage reduction in PvE only. Since I have not really played much PvP I can’t speak to that mode and would not want to upset the balance over there.

2. Active ability. Similar to our Pets, our spirits also have extremely sluggish active abilities. After clicking it, they have a fairly long wind up before they do the effect. This usually causes the ability to miss whatever it was trying to do in the first place. At the moment the active abilities don’t feel strong enough to warrent such a long cast time. I’d either boost the power of these abilities to justify the long cast (making it powerful but harder to land) or just keep the effect hte same and reduce the cast time.

3. Traits for spirits feel lackluster. At the moment there are 3 main Spirit traits in the Nature Magic tree that all Spirit builds take. Extra health, extra proc chance, and allowing them to move with you. While the second and third ones are mandatory for any spirit build, they don’t really feel exciting. The fact you have to wait until level 60 before the spirits move with you (and really a spirit build is TERRIBLE before that) makes playing ranger support very difficult at best.

I’d love to see the 30 point trait moved to either Tier 1 or 2 (or heck, even made baseline for spirits!). Maybe add in some AoE resistance to the health trait (as described in #1). Finally for Tier 3 talent, the “higher proc chance” trait could be improved and placed there… make it something like “All spirits give a passive effect of +10 to all stats (stacking for each pet, giving you +40 if you have all 4 spirit utilities out) and increases the chance for their effect to trigger by 15%” or something along those lines.

4) Possibly re-consider what some of the procs do. Right now the Storm Spirit and Sun Spirit are both considered pretty worthless. Due to how Burning stacks only duration, it is a fairly minor DPS gain to bring to a party overall. Honestly I could live with Sun spirit though, it does have small niche places (like if nobody on the team really has burning stuff). Storm Spirit giving Swiftness is USUALLY not worth it in most PvE encounters however. Swiftness is great, especially with how movement heavy so much of the game is, but due to the fact it’s a fairly unreliable proc, it’s hard to justify bringing this along usually… and it’s a T3 utility. I’m not sure the best way to change this, but in it’s current state almost nobody ever uses it. Maybe it’s really more of a PvP thing.

Honestly those are the biggest issues. Right now, support rangers really are all about Healing Spring and Call of the Wild (which are both amazing, don’t get me wrong). If pets F2 responsiveness was addressed, this would put yet another feather in their cap as well (and I know this is being looked at currently, which is great!). They fall behind other support specced classes right now, which is disappointing. Rangers don’t have a particularly powerful Control game and their Support options are sadly somewhat limited. This is putting most ranger players in the PvE world in to pure damage roles which is unfortunate.

I won’t pretend my suggestions above are perfect or the only way to fix things, but i just want to make sure that the state of spirits are known and that Arena Net are hopefully looking at them sometime in the near future.

I agree with you. The spirits need to be reworked as a whole.

At this point all spirits are useless. The only one is the epic skill that heals all allies.

Are they gonna work on the spirits ? Tried support for dungeon runs today with blue and red moa, horn off hand and some healing gear. even with stone and healing spirit out, party members preferred I go dps instead. =( not sure whether they are ignorant or the support just wasn’t very noticeable.

I completely agree with you ANet needs to fix the spirits.

Well thought out write-up on the Spirit situation. I’ve never thought of them in context with the Guardian Spirit Weapons – definitely some good information here.

I think I’d like Spirits alot more if the game considered them Pets, but they weren’t command-able with your profession mechanic and they weren’t affected by swapping.

It would open up all sorts of crazy synergy with Shouts, Traits and Signets.
I know I’d give a second glance to Signet of Renewal, Search and Rescue, and other support-oriented options I’d previously written off if I could achieve them from multiple anchor points on the playing-feild. And some pet enhancement options that just couldn’t quite eclipse it’s neighbors in value would receive a boost; Natural Healing, Speed Training, Expertise Training, Malicious Training, Signet of Stone. There’s a ton of ways to approach Spirit Survivability with all those options opened to you, and you can speed up the casting time and manipulate the efficiency of the activated abilities, plus it make for more interesting trait options insomuch that suddenly a ton more traits are on the table.

There’s some oddities like Sic ‘Em and Hilt Bash that are attack focused and would only work with Storm Spirit’s activated effect, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing in and of itself, just incredibly niche.

I think the spirits are just a little overnerfed at the moment. If they had a little more toughness/HP, they could be in a good place.

Also agree on the activation time being unnecessarily long for their actives.

That said, I haven’t done a dungeon yet, so I can’t speak to their effectiveness there.

Agree with you on the state of Spirits and actually just put up a post (well, series of posts) going over a few issues I have – Spirits are what I consider a big one.

Obviously I won’t repost it all here, just wanted to say that there are a lot of us on the same page. Hopefully ANet takes notice.

If you combine a long cool down with something that can’t move in a dungeon environment that requires constant moving from area to area you can end up with the fact that spirits are not really a viable support option. At most they might have some use in boss fights which are typically confined to a small area and are long lasting.

You can trait them to move but it seems somewhat a bad idea to make support utility for an entire class dependent on one high level trait. Even beyond ‘moving’, spirits have other issues that make them not viable.

I am not saying Rangers are weak. There are builds that are very viable, but they are limited in number and pretty much completely DPS oriented. The Ranger class — and Thief class as well — does not have the flexibility that most other classes do.

The holy trinity might be dead but some classes were left behind at the funeral.

I made a huge post about this, no one replied

Exactly the same thing really, just a sPvP point of view.

They need to have a 70% AoE reduction at least

Given that Munki replied to my post (and agreed), I figure I’d point out that my suggested solution is to basically borrow mechanics from the Guardian’s Spirit Weapons – Spirits shouldn’t have HP (they shouldn’t take damage) and they shouldn’t need a 30 point Trait required for them to move.

Yes spirits are quite useless as the yare now, and Arenanet really need to look into this and fix them.

The only one ever have a effect of my spirits is me miself and i.
As a longbow ranger i have a huge range 1500 and my pet is somwhat 100 behind me to give me the chance of +20% dmg buff.

I never can buff my party with the spirits because they have a much shorter range and when i drop my spirit in range of them, the spirit probally dies in 5 seconds or less.

This makes the spirit only HALF beneficial for me also because the use skill (chill condition) is never used .

In sPvP or WvWvW i cannot use spirits because they die almost instantly

If nothing else they are raid wide buffs, which I think at least gives them a place in wvwvw, but structered pvp and pve, – nope not at chance. Even in wvwvw they are a bit lackluster, while buffs are good, they are not good enough compared to the spirits dieing in one aoe.

Not sure how much of this post will contradict or coincide with the OP post, but I posted this on another thread:

Perhaps a spirit could replace the pet for 30secs (in the same way the Ele can summon axes, g-swords, bows etc.) and instead of attacking, they give off boons & conditions based on that spirit? This way they’d be a bit more viable (In that you can walk alongside them instead of leaving it behind) and you still get the benefits of them.

For example:
Sun spirit – Randomly gives Might for 3secs and randomly burns foes for 3 secs
Ice spirit – Regeneration and chilled
Lightning spirit – Swiftness and blinds
Earth spirit – Toughness and bleed.

By making them have a random chance of inflicting the above-mentioned status effects, they don’t become overpowered as you still have to sacrifice your pet AND a utility skill, but you still have the full effects of them.

EDIT: Just read that this is kind of how they work anyway except you have to manually activate the secondary skill. ¬_¬ sigh.

When I saw Ranger having spirits to summon, my first thought was “Wow, Diablo 2 spirits returned !” only to see the are .. oaksoul midgets which stay rooted, even in peril.

They should be able to follow the ranger whenever she/he goes until it expires without traits, and given extra speed/hp/toughness upon fully researching Nature’s Magic.

Anet should use ravens as spirits.

I really hope spirits get some attention soon as well. I am pretty stubborn and trying my best to make a spirit build work, but it is pretty painful to say the least.
Moving spirits needs to be either default or moved down to an earlier bracket, as it limits there effective use to level 60. Aoe. immunity or at least a significant dmg. reduction.
I love the idea to change the activated ability to a combo field, and like this posters idea of reworking their buffs:
Sun spirit – Randomly gives Might for 3secs and randomly burns foes for 3 secs
Ice spirit – Regeneration and chilled
Lightning spirit – Swiftness and blinds
Earth spirit – Toughness and bleed.

Agreed on the sad state of spirits. They’re entirely too squishy even when traited for double hp, and require heavy traiting to be marginally useful. In my opinion only the elite spirit is really worthwhile.

To make matters worse, the 15% extra proc chance trait is a trap due to the internal cooldown on spirit procs.

And what’s the point of the frost spirit? It seems to be the worst of them all. A less than 2% direct damage buff (does not affect conditions last I checked) is supposed to be worth a utility slot?

FireRunner.9481:

At this point all spirits are useless. The only one is the epic skill that heals all allies.

Except the Spirit of Nature just stand there and does not revive anyone when clicked even when on top of them and I have them targeted. Does not heal unless it’s allies only and not me. Does not heal pet for sure.

I like the idea of spirits generating combo fields. I REALLY like that idea.

Spirit skills are perfectly fine as they are now i.m.h.o.
They only need to deflect more damage !

I do agree that the spirits should give a better boon or condition as well, not only a “chance” to receive it, which is pretty silly if you ask me, and the chance of getting someting from a spirit, is sometimes woo low. They definetly need to nerd them, AND they should be able to walk with you all the time, JUST because atm, in PVE setting they seem very unnessecary before getting the trait which makes it possible for you to get them following you.

I feel like spirits have so many problems at the moment along with many Ranger skills. Many sound great but in practice they don’t work well at all. AOE reduction and moving as a baseline would be a great start to make them even a thought to use.

Totemwolf.4516:

I really hope spirits get some attention soon as well. I am pretty stubborn and trying my best to make a spirit build work, but it is pretty painful to say the least.
Moving spirits needs to be either default or moved down to an earlier bracket, as it limits there effective use to level 60. Aoe. immunity or at least a significant dmg. reduction.
I love the idea to change the activated ability to a combo field, and like this posters idea of reworking their buffs:
Sun spirit – Randomly gives Might for 3secs and randomly burns foes for 3 secs
Ice spirit – Regeneration and chilled
Lightning spirit – Swiftness and blinds
Earth spirit – Toughness and bleed.

Thanks man

As a lot of people have mentioned, Spirits are useless at the moment. They’ve been summoned to help the Ranger and his allies, not stand there and look pretty for the 0.76 seconds they’re standing around for.

They should assist both offensively and defensively.

I think nature spirit is fine it never lets me or my pet die and is backs up anyone using melee in big boss fights fairly well.