Guild Wars 2

So I decided to test out a spirit build today. I traited in ‘spirits have a 15% better chance to apply effects’. This means spirits should have a 35% chance to apply effects. Roughly one in three shots.

So I took out the fire/burn spirit and start shooting at some dummies. These were the results:
Test 1:
Dummy was burnt 2 times out of 36 shots

Test2:
Burnt 2 times out of 34 shots

Test 3:
Burn 2 times out of 31 shots

Test 4:
Burn 2 times out of 32 shots

I repeated this test at least 10 times, the large majority of the time the dummy only got burnt twice, rarely once and rarely three times.

However, the dummy, when it did get burnt, recieved three ticks of burn damage! (as opposed to the 1s of burn the tooltip says it does).

I have yet to test the other spirits.

Bugged? Perhaps, maybe that’s why the player base thinks they are broken while ANet thought they were fine. 30 ish shots seems like it should be a decent sample size, especially if you’re using that over and over and still getting the 2 procs. Maybe larger numbers would yield better or more accurate results? I’m not saying you’re wrong, just throwing that out there.

Yup – I’ll try doing it with a steady pvp bow so it does less damage. Maybe there is some sort of cooldown between how often it can proc? That would actually explain it as the burns usually happened roughly the same time between each other.

Test 1:
5 Burns out of 100 shots.

Test 2:
5 Burns out of 100 shots

Test 3:
5 Burns out of 100 shots

The burns always happened at roughly the same intervals, so I guess there must be some sort of cooldown. Not once did the burns happened within 10-15 shots of each other (thats out of 300 shots, and you would expect that to happen at least once?). I’ll try and see the shortest time they proc from each other.

Ok so it seems there is a 10 second cooldown for the spirits burn proc. Did it 5 times and everytime the burns happened within 10-12 seconds of each other. I’ll test it more later, but it seems pretty obvious from the results. It seems there is a 35% chance for it to proc, but it can only do it once every 10 seconds!

Good observations. I would really hope that ANet puts more detailed info into the skill descriptions… sigh

Actually ive tested this way myself.I was thinking.When attacks means any of the 5 weapon skills,that includes the bounces that axe make.So 3 bounces mean 35%35%35%=105%.So i always gonna have the protection buff.When i tested tho.I didnt had it all the time but ive noticed that it didnt happened random but at certain times.Every X secs i dont recall exactly.
So thats what i thought.It has a CD
The 35% chance aint that bad imo if we assume that its not only from auto attacks
The problem is that the spirits die easily and they dont give so much to be viable support

Hmm, very interesting. So in a way, the cooldown acts like a diminishing return. With that said, if its an AoE buff, does that mean that 1 of 5 party members will have a 35% chance of doing whatever it is every 10-ish seconds? Not worth using if so. OR is everyone able to proc every so many seconds? That’s a big difference. Is it factoring in everyone’s shot as a total or the total or each individual? That might make a difference if everyone is using different attack speeds right? Hmmm…. You have me thinking sir lol.

I did some testing with the protection buff last week. Essentially I shot golems for the full 60 seconds of the spirit rather than counting shots.

I got the protection buff on average 6 times every 60 second period.

I got the swiftness buff 4-5 times for 40-50 seconds total.

What I noticed is there seems to be 2 exclusions.

1) It won’t reproc when the effect is already in place.
2) It won’t reproc in the same 5 second spirit buff active window. (Impact on short boons not long)

I didn’t do enough testing to be absolutely certain of that, but that seemed to be the rule.

For something with a long boon(swiftness 10 seconds) got great coverage had reporcs happening the moment the boon dropped.

Protection I never got the proc until 3ish seconds after the boon dropped.

Never stacked either boon and tested with LB, SB and axe(Which all had consistent total proc numbers over 60 seconds).

The numbers above were traited +15%.

I think it is proccing on a 35% chance, I think there are some exclusions to be figured out when it can’t proc. My testing wasn’t enough to be certain what those were. And seeing as they are on the fix list I wasn’t going to take the teim to design something.

In other words spirits isn’t bugged. Just crappy.

Well swiftness spirit is quite good.

I suspect the direct damage bonus might be as expected as well but didn’t have a stability weapon to test with.

I think when they nerfed them they added an exclusion on top of an existing exclusion however.

Dardamaniac.1295:

Actually ive tested this way myself.I was thinking.When attacks means any of the 5 weapon skills,that includes the bounces that axe make.So 3 bounces mean 35%35%35%=105%.

That’s not the way probability works.

When we have 3 chances for a 35% proc chance, we calculate the chance that all 3 attacks don’t proc:
Probability of no procs = (100%-35%)(100%-35%)(100-35%) = 27.5% chance of no procs

And then take the inverse of that:
Probability of at least 1 proc = 100% – 27.5% = 72.5% chance of at least 1 proc

Protection spirits seem like they have the same 10 second proc cooldown.

Would really like to know if it is once every 10 seconds for each person, or just once every 10 seconds for everyone though