Guild Wars 2

An old “bug fix” to ranger spirits still needs to be reverted.

A long, long time ago, ranger spirit active abilities were given a 1 second cooldown supposedly to prevent them from bugging out. In reality, the 1 second cooldown did absolutely nothing to fix the bug which was related to spirits moving while given the order to use an ability and failing to execute the ability. It still occurred long after summoning spirits for rangers that had the trait that allowed them to move.

The “bug fix” was a direct nerf to the speed with which you can spawn and use spirit abilities, including the elite spirit, meaning that it takes a full second longer to revive a downed ally with this ability. While the initial cast time of the spirit plus the active was obviously balanced against warrior banner, rangers are left with—per usual habit—an inferior ability compared to those available to other classes.

This is just one of many bugs and balance issues still affecting rangers, but the fix for this one should be very easy. Why wasn’t the 1 second cooldown removed a long time ago?

We are rangers. Also, absolutely no one besides me ever mourned about their nasty stealth-nerf to spirits. We are just a class that certain developers do not like.

Spirit of Nature just needs to be reliable.

One of the solutions that would fix everything was:

• Spirits and their active abilities are now swapped.
  Upon ability activation – you spawn a spirit to use his active effect and keep providing passive benefits for a set period of time.
  ~ Spawned spirits work the same way as currently.
  ~ Spawned spirits no longer can be killed to provide their active effect
  ~ They no longer die upon active effect since they spawn with it.
  ~ Cooldown of base spirits increased to 30 seconds, Elite unchanged
  ~ Life-span of spirits is now 20 seconds, 45 for elite.

- spirits provide their benefits for ~13 seconds after their death from dead bodies – which would make them a solid stationary boosts with 100% uptime if stationary.
It would make perfect sense, improved quality of life by tons, made all the abilities reliable, wouldn’t make us feel bad about playing them into full potential.

Currently, when playing spirits, you either choose having passives or actives. You cannot have both. So you never play around their potential.
And that’s just toxic and wrong.