Guild Wars 2

Ok…. I’m sure it’s been said before and it’s quite obvious that spirits need reworking in all phases of the game. I just came up with the thought of what I think would be a nice re-work:
Remove the squishy beast thingies that can’t follow you around anymore, and make the spirit “infuse” itself into the ranger once the utility is clicked.
Everything else works as before. (The passive buff icon is applied). The activated portion of the spirit utilities would also be the same except the ranger has them activated where ever they are at the time. The radius should be the same as traps.

The animation should be similar to the bear animation that happens on great sword 2. The ranger would shout something cool and glow in the respective spirit color for a half second then the buff icon is applied.
The frost spirit would be either a polar bear or arctic wolf,
The Sun spirit – Phoenix
The Storm Spirt – Air elemental
Stone Spirit – Earth elemental
Water Spirit – Shark
Nature Spirit – Oak heart (same as it is now)
The key think is to infuse the ranger with the spirit rather than having a spirit follow them around. This would make them viable as they provide buffs to the ranger and his pet as well as teammates without the chance of being killed.
They wouldn’t be OP because you still have to sacrifice utility slots to use them. Anet could adjust stats if needed for balance. Again, I don’t think the ranger should “become” the spirit; just get buffed by it.
The activated portion of the spirits should all involve the spirit being sacrificed. The spirit should leave the ranger’s body and use its attack on the target. For example: Make the Elite, nature spirit’s activated skill place a large radius “rez circle” on the ground. The spirit leaves the ranger and walks over to a random (or closest) downed opponent in the circle and revives them! The Sun spirit should fly to the opponent and meld into him causing the blindess.This should be dodge-able, and the spirit should “chase” the target for x seconds then disappear, to be fair.
Sorry if someone already came up with a similar idea. Just my thoughts
-Karnac

I don’t think they need anything complicated/requiring of a lot of work. Just make the buffs potentent enough to be desireable by a group, and either make spirits immune to damage and tethered to the Ranger so they move with him/her, or increase their range dramatically so they can be placed out of harm’s way yet still effective. I dont’ know why Anet can’t figure this out.

I think Anet wont do that because they are afraid they would be too powerful. They wont a chance for them to be killed. You’d have necros and engis wanting their stuff to be unkillable too
I guess they could make their duration limited if they make them unkillable. It would serve the same purpose. I think they dont want them to be like banners or turrents. They wanted to go for variety. Besides, my way is funner

Karnac.2574:

I think Anet wont do that because they are afraid they would be too powerful. They wont a chance for them to be killed. You’d have necros and engis wanting their stuff to be unkillable too
I guess they could make their duration limited if they make them unkillable. It would serve the same purpose. I think they dont want them to be like banners or turrents. They wanted to go for variety. Besides, my way is funner

You are comparing apples to asteroids.

Engi turrets and Necro minions primarily serve to attack people.

Engi turrets don’t die easily, can be made very, very tough, can freaking reflect projectiles and can be healed easily by the player. They are generally never killed unless the engi sacrifices them on his own for knockback, or the engi stands next to them while getting aoe’d.

Necro minions are useless in fights for the same reasons our pets are, and are in desperate need of the same aoe damage reduction as our pets. For many of the minions, the use of their actives does not outright kill the minion, and for the ones that do, the sacrifice is very beneficial (large heal or stunbreak+teleport). The pets are killable because they provide body blocking and massive condition reflection for the necro.

Ranger spirits serve primarily to buff people, and they are dead when their actives are triggered. No ranger wants the spirits to die, they aren’t used for body blocking, and no one expects to keep body blocking if the spirits become damage immune. You cant kill a banner. You can’t kill Spotter, Strength in Numbers, Soothing Mist, Virtue of Resolve, or any other spirit-like Aura.

Counter to Ele Frozen Ground, Flame Burst, Lightning Touch, or Ranger Muddy Terrain? Nothing really. Short of “well, don’t keep standing in it” for the first and the last.
Counter to Warrior Battle Standard: don’t let him near the dead body to get off a long casted spell.

There is no reason for them not to be immune to damage: Their passive don’t require counters any more than existing Auras do, and their active spells all have similar counterparts on other classes without counter. Spirits are further countered by all being PBAoE: Dont stand near the spirit / ranger and you dont have to worry about the detonation. Making them killable with a passing thought on top of this makes them completely unusuable. Making them immobile on top of that now requires us to have the words “UNUSABLE” in bold face caps added to the skill fact.

Just drop the spirits all together and make them aura’s that radiate from the ranger (basically what the OP and many others have suggested), or make them damage immune and follow the ranger (the latter is a worse choice, because it still looks like a ridiculous zoo and means execution of the actives becomes dependent on sloppy AI pathing bull___, but its better than nothing).

Can someone explain why Sun Spirit scale with the condition damage of the ranger but no other spirit does?
At the very least all spirit need to scale with the ranger stats and have the same animation speed than sun spirit.

I’d like spirits to possess the ranger or something.. rather than being those instakilled stationary things we currently get. At least then the buff provided moves with the ranger and isnt instantly deleted when something sneezes in its direction.

Currently they are worse than banners in every possible way except cooldown.

Spirits need to be a part of meta. Having said that, at the moment meta is a joke so that’s why only 1 spirit is viable. I hope that will dramatically change with HoT, but the rest spirits need revamp. They are a joke at the moment.

Also, is there any reason they are still damage-able? It would not make it OP to have immortal spirits. The PvP spirit ranger who moved a zoo is long gone anyways…

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

Also, is there any reason they are still damage-able? It would not make it OP to have immortal spirits. The PvP spirit ranger who moved a zoo is long gone anyways…

In GW1 spirits were killable, but they had a huge range; 2500+, I’d guess. They showed up on the mini-map, IIRC. If Anet were to give their passives enough range to cover maybe 2 PvP nodes, and perhaps make them more potent, it might make a spirit Ranger desirable to have on a team, and give enemies incentive to find and kill the spirits instead of killing them just by chance, as it is now.

Raven.9603:

Just drop the spirits all together and make them aura’s that radiate from the ranger (basically what the OP and many others have suggested), or make them damage immune and follow the ranger (the latter is a worse choice, because it still looks like a ridiculous zoo and means execution of the actives becomes dependent on sloppy AI pathing bull___, but its better than nothing).

I AM the OP That’s what i said…make them “possess” the ranger. Spirits are pointless in their current state.

I’ve long been a fan of this idea and toyed with it in my head a lot, but given how the Revenant is calling upon past spirits / legends, won’t this be stepping on some toes?

This is why when the mechanic was announced I knew spirits would remain useless as they are because they’ll want to sell the Revenant class mechanic and don’t care that spirits are rubbish.

I use Spirits in my PvP build since ever (i didn’t even bother about the spec nerf) and they do have some issues but what you are suggesting is going to be more of a disadvantage than profit.

I started writing a logish essay on Spirits comparing it to minions turrets and auras in detail with stats/cooldowns and other numbers and also pointing out real situations but I deleted it since I realised anet doesn’t care about ranger as it does for anything else. Anybody remembers the Day they were showcsing every specialization on twitch before the patch hit? I was not even surprised nobody was showing the ranger. But hey! They found 4 people showing off the engineer.

Also the first time they talked about the changes for spirits on PoI they did not even mention that they removed the upon-death-active trait, which was a major change aside from removing their ability to move. It was like they were too ashamed of what they did to spirits and they should be.