Guild Wars 2

After the patch hit our dps builds through the change to quickness, I thought I’d take a look at our other ranger utils. As the title suggests, one of the primary types i looked into were spirits. Now we all know that the dev team devoted some major attention last patch to the engineer’s turrets. While arguably still not enough for a pure turret build ( which imo is a silly concept anyways ), it’s moving them in the correct direction towards viability imo.

I thought I’d make this topic than, to discuss what WOULD make spirits viable. Not having looked into spirits before, I don’t know what their state was like —- since ever. Looking at the descriptions for example, I thought spirit of stone looked actually pretty viable ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stone_Spirit ), as an activate-able immob is always pretty nice, but poor ignorant me thought that I’d be able to stack 2 secs of protection 50% (traited) of my hits for every 6 out of 10 seconds. How silly of me…

Regardless, I don’t know whether or not this internal cooldown on the spirits ability to proc its effect per player has been in the game since launch, but I feel like adjusting this 10 second value would be a key way to improve the spirits’ viability. I always hear about how it’s a problem that spirits are so fragile ( die to stray aoes ), however to me the problem isn’t that they aren’t durable… it’s just that they aren’t useful enough. People don’t even need to target them ( like they would on that boss in FoTM, name escapes me at the moment ).

Constructive discussion is appreciated.

Edit:
Forgot to mention a bullet point that I wanted to bring up:
I believe they probably adjusted the chance for a spirit’s effect to proc on hit based against outdated build editors online from 15% ( or so ) to 35%. That’s all well and good… except it kinda makes (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spiritual_Knowledge) completely useless with the internal cooldown the way it is. 35% on ten seconds by itself is already way too long on the internal cool down, especially for the ranger who, despite the nerf to quickness relies more on # of hits per second than most of the other classes.

Maybe if they rolled all the spirits into the elite. But even then, it still dies in two seconds.

I think that if they didn’t die so fast and had a faster casting time they would be viable. And in my opinion, the Sun Spirit is the most viable out of all of them.

Exactly how much health do they have anyway? Before and after vigorous spirits.
And do they benefit at all from the Ranger’s own toughness or vitality?

One would think they would, even the Mesmer clones benefit from toughness, not to mention skills and traits that can give them even more health. Thou that being said, you can generate clones ad-nauseous, so it’s kind of the point that they would have low HP.

Spirits on the other hand, given their 60 second recharge which can’t be shortened, should at least be able to benefit from the Rangers vit and toughness, should they go out of their way to make a tank build. I doubt that’s the case currently, but they should.

I wouldn’t really have an issue with their survivability, if their cooldown wasn’t as high as it is. Thou all that being said, idk how tough they are since I have yet to test them, or if people are just exaggerating.

Yoh.8469:

Exactly how much health do they have anyway? Before and after vigorous spirits.
And do they benefit at all from the Ranger’s own toughness or vitality?

One would think they would, even the Mesmer clones benefit from toughness, not to mention skills and traits that can give them even more health. Thou that being said, you can generate clones ad-nauseous, so it’s kind of the point that they would have low HP.

Spirits on the other hand, given their 60 second recharge which can’t be shortened, should at least be able to benefit from the Rangers vit and toughness, should they go out of their way to make a tank build. I doubt that’s the case currently, but they should.

I wouldn’t really have an issue with their survivability, if their cooldown wasn’t as high as it is. Thou all that being said, idk how tough they are since I have yet to test them, or if people are just exaggerating.

I agree 100%. Although a Mesmer’s clone is theoretically a copy of the original, it should pull some of the stat configuration from the ‘Cloner’, which it does. On the other hand, if I understand this correctly, the Rangers ‘Spirits’ are conjured by the Ranger as a type of eternal force of the Ranger’s being. The Spirits should then be either invincible since they are in spirit form, or have the same attributes of the Ranger.

hmm… obviously this is a very small sample of player opinions, but it seems that you folks are fine with the current effects that the spirit provides, if the spirit were to be able to maintain its presence longer?

My personal opinion, is that making it such steers it towards too much towards a passive playstyle, particularly if it’s invulnerable. Aside from benefitting in a specific area, all that would be done would be dropping a spirit down and triggering its effect when it is favorable for you based on positioning. Not neccessarily a bad thing per se, but a bit bland in my opinion.

I still believe that the proccing of their effects need to be looked at and adjusted, as, while they might be intended in a more supportish role, they don’t appear to have been designed to have been able to procc so easily within its window. 35-50% chance per hit, once per ten seconds? I just don’t understand how that is reasonable. the amounts that the active skills on the spirits ranges from 1-3 times for the spirits duration, and perhaps I should consider the effects of those more..

My personal stance would be that spirits would be improved by making them into things that our enemies would actively want to destroy, rather than having them be just accidental casualties. Of course… this will probably need balancing in the pve aspect of things, as bots could probably create a spirit train (can be traited to follow ranger) and with npc ai… they can’t let spirit passive effects be too powerful.

Spirits get a MINOR amount of your toughness, it’s not nearly as much as say a Mesmer clone, but when I went with a toughness spirit build i noticed my spirits were living quite a lot more than my normally high vitality spirit build.

In addition I learned that spirits play VERY nice with each other, the ICD is PER SPIRIT not per effect (unless this has been ninja nerfed since December) so an army of spirit herders is not only annoying as hell to hit due to the traveling pack of meat shields (especially if they run hyenas + commanding voice + ogre runes like I do).

As for overall viability, for 1v1 you’re gonna be pretty… Meh… But you’re a force multiplier!

The issues I have with Ranger spirits are two-fold:

1) They are horribly squishy, even when traited. One AoE from anything above a Veteran mob is going to one-shot them.

2) Unless you invest heavily in Nature Magic (a trait line that gives few stat benefits of significant use for a Ranger), having a stationary spirit on a long cooldown (and a painfully small buff zone) really doesn’t mesh well in a game predicated on staying mobile.

ItIsFinished.9462:

Yoh.8469:

Exactly how much health do they have anyway? Before and after vigorous spirits.
And do they benefit at all from the Ranger’s own toughness or vitality?

One would think they would, even the Mesmer clones benefit from toughness, not to mention skills and traits that can give them even more health. Thou that being said, you can generate clones ad-nauseous, so it’s kind of the point that they would have low HP.

Spirits on the other hand, given their 60 second recharge which can’t be shortened, should at least be able to benefit from the Rangers vit and toughness, should they go out of their way to make a tank build. I doubt that’s the case currently, but they should.

I wouldn’t really have an issue with their survivability, if their cooldown wasn’t as high as it is. Thou all that being said, idk how tough they are since I have yet to test them, or if people are just exaggerating.

I agree 100%. Although a Mesmer’s clone is theoretically a copy of the original, it should pull some of the stat configuration from the ‘Cloner’, which it does. On the other hand, if I understand this correctly, the Rangers ‘Spirits’ are conjured by the Ranger as a type of eternal force of the Ranger’s being. The Spirits should then be either invincible since they are in spirit form, or have the same attributes of the Ranger.

Yeah, well the idea I have in my head is that of the Ritualist from GW1, which was my main profession btw. The spirits could take somewhat of a beating, and could be augmented to take even more if need be.
But if you placed them too close together, they would tend to die from a single AOE, so you had to think about where you placed them.

Their CD varied, but few of them took as long as 60 seconds to recharge, but were more around the 30-45 second range, more or less. Or course, you could could summon more spirits in GW1 then in GW2 (at a time), so you would always have at least a couple out if you were not reckless with them.

GW2 spirits on the other hand sound like you have next to no control over them, and are too easy to kill. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if they never moved, so long as they had a short CD so I could place them where I wanted them to be.
That way the skill in using them is dependent on the player, not the AI.

Just some thoughts.

Well, I’m sure there will be the usual dissenters here that will tell us Spirits are great and we just need to L2P, but here’s Jonathan Sharp’s take on Spirits.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/The-main-spvp-questions/page/2#post1726102

JonathanSharp.7094

And yes, Ranger spirits are in the same boat as Warrior banners. They were VERY powerful before ship, but after changes, they are on the lower end of the power curve right now. So they’ll be slowly adjusted over time to bring them back up as well.

I would be very happy with a trait that provides better range for spirit effects to proc. That way they could be placed more strategically away from battle (something that seems ranger-esque imo). I could care less about Spirits Unbound as a Grandmaster trait, its pretty weak for GM trait anyway, so that could be changed to “Spirit skills have longer range,” maybe even “and recharge 20% faster,” but thats probably pushing it. They wouldnt even really need to change the name.

But thats wishful thinking and wont happen…so heres to hoping they do something about their survivability at the very least.

Spirits have an activated ability that generally affects enemies nearby. Unfortunately if there are enemies near the spirit then it quickly dies making any ability pointless. Seeing the spirts interrupted when they are activating their ability is unbelievably frustrating. You can trait to have spirits activate on death but that’s just making them traps, and we already have traps, or just traiting to compensate for the failure of the skills.

They also don’t have enough health. Traiting for extra health on the spirit is also just traiting to compensate for the failure of the skills. I’m guessing it would be impossible to set spirit health that is suitable for SPvP and dungeons so perhaps it’s just a bad concept.

So I’d (1) make the spirits non-corporeal so they don’t die (2) remove the activated effect and/or (3) always give the current activation effect when the spirit is first created. Rebalance the power of the spirits once the concept is workable.

I’d like if they actually hurt the person who killed them (like some decent amount of damage) so that people fighting us can either leave them alone or attack them and take damage from it.

I’m basically in agreeance with Strooper.

There’s risk/reward gameplay in keeping the spirit close enough for the use of their activated effect, but in practice it’s much more risk than reward. Nature’s vengeance really does make the whole thing feel redundant to traps. The immobility, the randomness, and the passivity of them are also things I don’t really like about the design.

Personally I’d like to see them revisit the core concept and go in a Bloomhunger-esque direction with the new beam tech.

More like, the Spirit is an anchorpoint that will shoot a laser beam at you on command which causes you to be the center of an AOE group buff, and anything it hits en route to you is subject to a secondary effect. Like, if you’ve got Stone Spirit down and command it to use it’s skill, you and the buddy next to you will get Protection, and a mob between you and the Spirit would get immobilized.

More mobile, less random, less passive, spirits don’t have to be in the heat of things to use their abilities so their HP is less a factor in their performance.

Stooperdale.3560:

Spirits have an activated ability that generally affects enemies nearby. Unfortunately if there are enemies near the spirit then it quickly dies making any ability pointless. Seeing the spirts interrupted when they are activating their ability is unbelievably frustrating. You can trait to have spirits activate on death but that’s just making them traps, and we already have traps, or just traiting to compensate for the failure of the skills.

They also don’t have enough health. Traiting for extra health on the spirit is also just traiting to compensate for the failure of the skills. I’m guessing it would be impossible to set spirit health that is suitable for SPvP and dungeons so perhaps it’s just a bad concept.

So I’d (1) make the spirits non-corporeal so they don’t die (2) remove the activated effect and/or (3) always give the current activation effect when the spirit is first created. Rebalance the power of the spirits once the concept is workable.

Yeah, no I don’t really agree.
I’d rather that they could tank damage, so that in WvW it could be a viable strategy so as to soak up AOE damage instead of your allies taking damage instead.
They just need to be able to tank a little better then what I’ve heard about them.

That, and have a shorter CD. I’d rather they acted like a mix between GW1 Ranger and Ritualist spirits, this is meant to be 250 years in the future right?

Kaos.9162:

Maybe if they rolled all the spirits into the elite. But even then, it still dies in two seconds.

Hey, you just summed up engineers and turrets! <3