Guild Wars 2

Spirits offer many possibilities and I am sure that A-Net wanted to avoid “ghost wars” as it sometimes took place in Guild Wars 1 when teams build walls of spirits or when a specific spirit was vital to a certain team build.

However, spirits as they are now are rather lackluster. Even if the effects of them were great, there is little skill required as you simply create them whenever you can. To address this issue I make the following suggestion:

Make the effects stronger and more noticeable but make it so the spirit can’t be up all the time. For example, duration = 60 secs, cd = 120 secs.

Create a trait that allows rangers to recharge all spirits if a certain condition is met. For example, if the ranger kills an opponent (internal cooldown 90 secs) or when their health reaches 20%.

Create spirits with global effects so that there might be a drawback if used incorrectly. For example, Frozen Soil (rezzing takes twice as long), Bountiful Harvest (whenever you receive boon X, you also receive boon Y), Swamp Spirit (whenever you suffer from cripple, you also suffer from 3 secs of confusion)

Allow the ranger to ground target the spirit in order to place it where he wants so that he can place them out of harm’s way. (or just create the spirit directly under the ranger and not somewhere in the vicinity.)

Some ideas for effects of spritis:
Whenever you are knocked down, you also suffer from bleeding. (global)
Boons on allies last 25% longer but dmg from allies is reduced by 10%. (just your team)
The spirit pulses every 15 secs. With every pulse cripple and poison are removed from allies and foes are crippled for 2 secs.
Elite spirit: when a foe receives swiftness, they are instead immobilized for 1 sec.

Personally, I already like the way spirits work (few complaints here and there)
- lessen the internal cd for the buffs (bring it down to 5?)
- give them passive regen by default (really hard enough to keep them alive)

Also, all the traits need to be built in already. Even with the x2 spirit hp trait, they still melt if something farts at them.

I would like the placement and the activation of spirits to be a strategic choice. As it is now the only thing you’ll want is to maximize uptime.

It is true that spirits die quickly if targeted but I would like this to give the opponent a chance to neutralize the spirit. Low health of spirits should be balanced through strong effects and maybe a larger range of its effect.

I have little sympathy for rangers who want to take their spirits in the midst of battle and expect them to live very long.

Then what’s the point in them being mobile via trait? The very existence of that grandmaster trait scream “take them into battle”.

Also, the range at which they grant their buffs is pretty small. Planting them somewhere strategic doesn’t mean anything because you need access to them. If you can access them then your enemies do too.

On the other hand, traits that would punish enemies for killing spirits would be nice. That would be a good trade off for them being sooooo extremely squishy.

Such a trait already exists: the effect triggers when the spirit is killed. Not that it is very strong, though.

That’s 1 trait that only affects melee.

What I’m talking about is something that would make your enemies say “RUN! Some idiot just killed the ranger’s spirit.” rather than “Was something there? Did we just kill something?”

Something like 10 stacks of might when the sun spirit gets killed, or 30sec of protection when the stone spirit gets killed (is an exaggeration).

Lose internal cooldown and most spirits will be spot on for effect if they are proccing often and even more so traited. As it stands the effects are lack luster with how often they trigger (dead often before second pulse) and spirits really function as nothing more than second rate trigger detonation traps.

Also move the trait for spirit walking down the chain to first tier, its not worth using spirits until then and by then most rangers have already settled into a different build.

Also heard Spirit passive only targets one person (need confirmation)? If that is the case then these things are useless in a support build.

Less squishiness is always a plus.

Spirits give their passives to everyone in range. What I did notice is when someone else dropped the same spirit, I would get 2 buffs(1 each each from both spirits).

Seetoo.9316:

Spirits give their passives to everyone in range. What I did notice is when someone else dropped the same spirit, I would get 2 buffs(1 each each from both spirits).

Good to know, I forget where I heard it from and it bummed me out. At least it shares. with all or at least 5.

Here’s what I’d do with spirits….

~ First off, remove the current activated abilities. They’re terrible. The effects are weak, they’re way too slow to activate and they don’t really play into the spirit’s role as boon support.

~ The trait that gives larger activated abilities / active abilities on death would now give the spirits their current ability on a timed pulse (maybe every 8 seconds). So if you take this trait, Frost Spirit will pulse AoE chill every 8 seconds, Sun Spirit would pulse AoE blind every 8 seconds, ect.

~ Give each spirit a new activated ability which would give you a guaranteed proc of the spirits’ respective buff. Sun Spirit would give every player’s next attack a guaranteed burn (think Virtue of Justice), Stone Spirit would give every player Protection, Storm Spirit would give every player Swiftness. Frost Spirit is kind of tricky since its passive isn’t a boon and wouldn’t be worthwhile on a single shot, it would either give Might or maybe give a damage boost for the next 3 attacks or something. Each effect would last longer activated than the “random” buff you get from passive, longer burn duration / longer boon duration, but be on a relatively long cooldown (40 seconds perhaps, or maybe even 60 seconds so that its one use per spirit summon).

~ Remove the internal cooldown on passive buffs, or at the very least signifigantly reduce it (no more than 3 seconds)

~ Increase spirit health. Yes, Spirits shouldn’t be tanking, but they should be able to take more than 2 random melee hits or 1 AoE before dying. Having the health of an Engineer turret (the ranged turrets of course, not the thumper) seems about right.

This way Spirits maintain their primary role as a passive buff, but also have an active buff so you have some control over it if you really need it now.

I still would like my spirits to be how they were in GW1, or hell, take away the proc nonsense and make them pulse, every second they apply 1s of what ever boon/condition on any ally/enemy in range (obviously make frosts change to something else or just make it so all allies ALWAYS deal 10% more while in range) then make their active apply another effect for say 5 seconds (IE next 5 pulses apply 2s of a condi/ something else) fire could be blind (or might to allies if they want it to be less enemy focused) frost would be chill, stone would be cripple and storm would be just raw damage (lightning strikes), Spiritual Knowledge could then increase the effectiveness of the effect IE longer boon/condition and more damage %, and they could change Spirits Unbound to increase the range of the effect from 900yds to 1500 BOOM spirits immediately effective, elite is worthwhile, they’d need to be strategically placed and their low health is justified.

Having just recently made an all spirit build just for kicks and to get a feeling for how bad spirits were, a couple observations:

Sun spirit is actually really good in a group without another source of burning, or even solo. Remember you and your pet benefit from it which means your foe will be burning around 60% of the time given a fast attacking pet and a fast attacking ranger (since it’s not a guarantee and its on a 10 sec cooldown).

Stone spirit is decent, I haven’t tested to see if spirits have a target cap, but given how they work I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. If they don’t this one could be a game changer in WvW if placed well.

Lightning spirit is crap, needs an additional effect to be at all useful. I’d suggest a 2 second weaken proc that follows the same rules as sun spirit in addition to the swiftness (more to placate people who actually like the swiftness, because frankly it looks entirely useless)

Cold spirit is crap, a 10% damage bonus once per ten seconds on a class with the lightest hitting attacks in the game? Even if it procced on your best attack every time this still is a tiny tiny buff compared to sun spirit. I’d suggest adding a 2 sec chill proc.

Moving spirits are crap, this trait will get your spirits killed and is really only useful for solo pveing where you don’t need spirits in the first place. Better to use spirits strategically for hard fights and put them out of range of AoEs.

Spirit buff range is about 900ish, tested this in the mists and it was about as long as my axe’s effective range, this is actually a really good range, I wouldn’t mind seeing it boosted to 1200, but this is already good enough to place a spirit out of harms way and still have it boost the entire team.

Spirit active abilities are all crap, they’re all too small and require the spirit be in melee where it’s going to die. Center it on the ranger instead or better yet on both.

Watching how fast other players face melted when I was in a group with sun spirit active was honestly comical and made me have some hope for them, I think they’re fixable and potentially quite powerful, I’m already planning on whipping out sun spirit while on burn-lite teams.

I would advise against specializing in spirits though, the traits are largely useless, even the double life one is of suspect use given they still die incredibly fast once they start taking aggro.

Just my 2 cents

Infatum has a very lovely summary on ranger spirits there. I only ‘slightly’ disagree with the usefulness of stone spirit, as the protection just doesn’t last long. Perhaps if the swiftness on lightning spirit affected you outside of combat, it would be worth using once. Even so, generally swiftness has no real use in combat.

Seetoo.9316:

Personally, I already like the way spirits work (few complaints here and there)
- lessen the internal cd for the buffs (bring it down to 5?)
- give them passive regen by default (really hard enough to keep them alive)

Also, all the traits need to be built in already. Even with the x2 spirit hp trait, they still melt if something farts at them.

I agree wif this suggestion. Also like to add manual placement of spirits rather than random spawn. This would enable us rangers to strategically place them so they have higher chance of survival.

Stone spirit is one of those powers where you have to kind of do the math to decide if its useful or not because it’s rather underwhelming during game play. Doing the math though it provides a 33% reduction in damage with about a 30% up time (I tested it at a 3 second duration despite what the wiki says). Which essentially translates into a single utility to give a group a 10% reduction in incoming damage. Obviously there will be times where more hits are protected or less hits are, but overall if you used it every play session that’d be your average return with other protection buffs stacking with it to make the return more reliable. There are likely better skills, but in a system like gw2 one utility to provide an entire team with 10% mitigation is not too shabby, but also not very flashy. I completely see why you might be underwhelmed by it though :-)

@Infatum, not sure if it’s a bug or not, but currently the frost spirit has NO ICD and as such is much much better than the sun spirit…. especially since it applies to heavy hitters like thieves and warriors AS WELL as pee shooters like us, and as such it instantly becomes a better ability then sun spirit where the burning can be applied by someone else, and could be done -better- by someone else if they have condition damage and you don’t (granted in a group completely filled with condi damage builds sun would be better because the condi damage used for the burning damage is based on the person who PROCS the effect, NOT the spirits owner.)

Yea I main a spirit ranger build, sun spirit is awesome, stone spirit is also worth the slot in my opinion, and I don’t have much of an opinion on the frost spirit. It’s active is relatively strong, and if both the stone spirit and the frost spirits actives both hit the the same target that guy is not going anywhere. Cripple + chill is practically an immobilize.
The storm spirit seems useless. Swiftness isn’t all that great in combat, especially since I need to trade one of the more useful passives for it, and the active lightning damage is paltry.

In big pve like dungeons and world bosses the follow trait does indeed just seem to get them killed.

In sPvP and WvW the follow seems like a godsend. Many players just ignore pets, and player AoE damage typically isn’t enough to kill them before the ranger can move them. If somebody is in melee range with me I can also activate all my spirit abilities and they practically can’t fight back for a few seconds with enough conditions on them that they can’t easily cleanse either.

In wvw the passive buffs do great things for big groups, having the spirits up can make groups look bigger than they are, and activating the spirits actives during a retreat gives your guys a huge headstart allowing more to get away safely. And I’m not even mentioning how great the nature renewal spirit is in long fights, with it’s multiple AoE rallies, and ability to cleanse all conditions on everyone around.

I’m not saying that the spirits don’t need a buff, since the storm spirit is borderline useless, and all the spirits but the nature’s renewal really need some more toughness, but they can be a huge boon to a team in wvw. If they get buffed too much they could very quickly go from UU to OU in wvw.