Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trying out a variety of different spirit builds in open world PvE and dungeons lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re extremely lackluster in comparison to everything else available to the Ranger.

When it comes down to it, they are simply not worth the expenditure of trait points or utility slots, because there are a number of fundamental problems with how they work.

First, the spirits themselves are extremely vulnerable to damage. Even traited for additional health, they have virtually zero survivability in any dungeon encounter — often being one- or two- shot by enemies seconds after they’ve been summoned.

Traiting Spirits Unbound (to allow the spirits to follow you) and then staying at range does not help their survivability in the least. Many mobs will simply chase them down and kill them or simply attack them with their own ranged options and kill them. Either way, they still end up dead — and you miss out on their effects.

I could understand the lack of survivability if the cooldown were lower or the effects of the spirits themselves were better, but in most dungeons I’ve run they provide their bonus to characters in the vicinity once before being killed. Twice, if you’re lucky.

Which brings me to point two on why spirits are so lackluster…

Quite simply, the effects of the spirit are relatively unreliable for characters with slower attack rates. They work fine if you’ve got a fast auto-attack or if you’re using Rapid Fire or Unload or something similar — especially if you’ve traited to increase the chance of the effects being applied.

But if you or your teammates are using something slower, the effective “up time” on the boons granted by the spirit is pretty abysmal. It’s definitely not something that you’d want to waste a utility slot on — or base an entire build around.

To my mind, that’s a bit of a problem. I can’t think of many other support-style utilities that rely as heavily on group composition and that are appreciably worse based on profession/weapon selection.

Pretty much every other utility in the game benefits everyone about the same, regardless of how they’ve chosen to build. So why don’t the spirits?

Between the lack of survivability and the unreliability of applying their effects to characters with slower attacks, the spirits really are lackluster compared to every other utility skill available to the Ranger (including the Shouts)..

It’s true that you can trait heavily to make spirits moderately more useful, but that in itself requires a considerable investment of trait points which could otherwise be spent on things that are significantly more effective overall.

Hopefully, at some point in the near future, when we get those Ranger “quality of life” changes that were talked about a while back., we’ll see some love for the Spirits. Until then, though… I’m going to make some suggestions as to how I’d personally re-work things.

So… Here goes…

Let’s scrap the idea of spirits being separate entities altogether and instead treat them as a kind of transformational shamanic mask. Essentially, the ranger would take on the spiritual characteristics of a particular element, animal, or whatever and would so manifest subtle changes in his appearance to reflect that nature.

So… Instead of a spirit being summoned as a separate entity, it would instead appear on, near, or around the ranger himself. Perhaps as some kind of ghostly-looking aura or effect — in a manner similar to how you get the ghostly animal animations when using certain weapons.

Aesthetically, this would do away with one of the things that bugs a lot of people about the spirits: that they appear pretty much identical to a scaled down oakheart with some kind of ghost effect applied to it — almost like placeholder art.

In gameplay terms, it would effectively remove one of the biggest problems with the spirits while staying true to the general vibe of the ranger itself.

To simplify the aesthetics and to compensate for the balance issues that might be created by not being able to destroy the spirits (and thus deprive the Ranger of his buffs), you’d probably want to restrict rangers to having only one spirit active at a time (like the Stances of the Warrior).

The secondary skill for each of the spirits could remain essentially the same, effectively allowing you to dismiss the spirit early for the usual situational effect.

Traits that affect spirits as separate entities would, of course, need changing. Vigorous Spirits might instead increase the duration (or lower the cooldown) on the spirit skill itself, while Nature’s Vengeance might allow the situational effect to be used without dismissing the spirit, and Spirit’s Unbound might grant vigor to allies affected by the spirit or periodically remove chilled, crippled, and immobilize from the Ranger.

Anyway… Just an idea.

You didn’t really talk about what these new spirits would actually do, but I really like the idea of spirits becoming a Rangers “stances”, and I think making the spirits untargetable like a Guardian’s spirit weapons is the best way to go about fixes their frailty.

I just don’t believe Anet will make any substantial changes any time soon. But no amount of tweaking the numbers will save a fundamentally flawed mechanic.

While I didn’t read the entire thing (or most of it), I think I understand what you are looking for and when I thought about it, I entirely agree. Some ideas I got after some thinking (that you may have already stated, I didn’t read everything)

Each spirit has its own unique aura around the ranger so other players can easily see which spirits they have active without the problem of overlap. Sun spirit adds a fire effect around the ranger’s hands. Stone spirit levitates stones around the ranger’s legs. Storm spirit creates a small cloud above the ranger’s head that occasionally strikes lightning (inside itself). Frost spirit engulfs the ranger’s torso in a blue mist. The elite spirit remains an oakheart thing and it should automatically follow the player (no trait required). A trait idea I just thought of would be to reduce spirit cooldowns by 20% and reduce internal cooldown on effects by 20% (from 10s to 8s). Another trait idea, active effects can be used twice before the spirit “dies”.

The active effect can be issued manually and many traits would need to be reworked, but I still think this would be a very positive improvement for support/spirit rangers. Personally, if something like this gets implemented, I would … idk, be happier with anet. Not saying I’m not happy, but the snail pace patching while competing products are near release (TES:O may be huge competition) has me worried.

So I gave this a little more thought…

I deliberately made the assumption that the designers would want to keep the effects of spirits largely the same, but… If the mechanics were to be changed and the overall theme of nature-based “elemental” spirits kept, what I’d do is:

Change the spirits skills so that only one type of spirit can be active at any given time. If a player activates a spirit skill with a spirit already active, the new effect simply overrides the older one (which then goes on cooldown).

The effects of the spirit would vary based on the spirit itself, but would generally work by providing bonuses both to the Ranger and to any allies that happen to be within range (up to the usual cap for area effect abilities).

This would most likely work best as a pointblank AOE centered on the Ranger that pulses every three seconds to a range of 600 game units or so. The Ranger and any ally caught in the pulse would receive the benefits conferred by the active spirit.

To compensate for how powerful such an effect could become, you’d probably want to limit the effective spirit uptime. A 15 second duration with a 60 second cooldown sounds about right to me. Traited for say +25% duration and 20% faster recharges, it still wouldn’t be too powerful.

A Ranger could also opt to end the effects of the spirit early by triggering its secondary “flip” skill (y’know, after it’s summoned, the skill changes to something else). This would allow players to trade off ongoing benefits for a more situational ability.

As for the specifics of what each spirit would do, well…

As a general rule I’d have each spirit periodically remove a specific condition on all characters affected by the pulse (every 3 seconds). I’d also have it apply a condition on the next attack made by each of those characters (once again, refreshed every 3 seconds). Active abilities would vary but generally would be AOE in nature.

This could work such that:

Frost Spirit: Removes burning each pulse. Causes the next attack to apply one stack of Vulnerability for three seconds. Flip ability does an AOE chill for 5 seconds.

Stone Spirit: Removes bleeding each pulse. Next attack applies Weakness for one second. Flip ability grants AOE stability for 5 seconds.

Storm Spirit: Removes cripple each pulse. Next attack applies Blindness for one second. Flip ability does AOE daze for 0.5 seconds.

Sun Spirit: Removes chilled each pulse. Next attack applies Burning for one second. Flip ability does AOE damage.

Depending on how powerful those combinations end up being, you might split off the condition removal into something that you get only if you trait for it.

As for the elite — Spirit of Nature — I’d bring its cooldown down to around 120 seconds or so, but keep its duration roughly the same as the other spirits — perhaps a smidge longer.

Instead of removing specific conditions, the spirit would instead convert any conditions that affect a character into boons. This would occur at a rate of one conversion per second.

I’d probably avoid having this skill having any kind of “on next attack” effect like the other spirits. It’d be powerful enough with just the condition conversion.

The flip skill for the elite I would imagine working in a manner pretty much identical to the Engineer’s Elixir R toobelt skill. Once activated it would create an area of effect which would restore 20% of a downed teammates health per second for 8 seconds.

So, yeah… There you go.

It’s really bumming me out that Anet hasn’t given us any interaction in these forums at all about spirits, all these great ideas and suggestions seem like they are blowing in the wind

from my experience, any point or trait invested in boosting spirits are wasted.
However, there are a few boss encounters where switching your utility to a spirit or two for just that fight is desiderable.
Also the elite spirit is pretty decent, as it heals himself.

But i would trade all the spirits and all the traits for a couple of untraited war banners. Those things are awesome and are what spirits shoud have been (if not more powerful, as spirits can actually be killed by anything looking at them badly)

One of the things I find really annoying about spirits currently is that 4 traits exist to improve them. Now consider our other types of skill signets have 3, and traps only need 2 for max effect.

A simple thing which would benefit the ranger loads would be to remove 1 and make it automatic, my personal choice would be the double health trait. The upside to that would also mean that they could add a new trait that supports greater build diversity for the class.

I know this wouldn’t solve all the problems with spirits, but one major issue I currently have is that any spirit build has to pick 3 out of 4 traits to even think of having any kind of use. Ideally what should be happening is we should have a choice of either taking 3 traits for max spirit usage or picking 2 out of 3 for a more diverse build.

Well spirits have always been scaled down oak hearts and unlike in GW1 they have a fancy particle effect around them….

And I’m not sure whether or not I like your suggestion, could you go I to more detail as to what it’d do?

Not going to lie, one of the builds I’d be absolutely interested in playing is a Spirit ranger. That said, I’d have to agree with DEDEN that they have a very conflicted nature. On one hand, traiting them seems to encourage you to run with them at range, but all of their activated abilities are small point blank AoEs. To get the most out of the AoEs, you have to go into melee where they’re almost bound to die immediately. Further, in that mode, they’re essentially inferior traps with passive buffs attached.

Vigorous Spirits (+50% health) and Nature’s Vengeance (activated effects are larger and trigger on death) could honestly be rolled into a single talent. This would support their use in melee combat by giving them a little more ability to survive and also encourage their active effects.

Spiritual Knowledge could be enhanced to support use of spirits as buff bots from range. The 15% boost to chance to proc is odd given the internal cooldown. Maybe also allow their activated effects to be ground targeted (900 range?)

Spirit’s Unbound needs something more. Giving them the ability to move is both a blessing and a curse for either ranged or melee use since you can’t toggle the follow on or off to safely place the spirits and then move on. I’d suggest a 20% cooldown reduction be coupled with this talent.

Ultimately, ANet may be looking for a more substantial rework that would make most of these changes useless or potentially ridiculous. But I think they’d be very useful to make spirits feel more versatile / competitive given the other options.

P.S. Circle of Life should trigger on spirit or pet death… not the ranger’s death =P