Guild Wars 2

SPIRITS tend to be looked down upon from the Ranger community.

If you could clearly sum up what exactly is wrong with Spirits for a developer could understand, and where its the most useless, please do so.

Oh oh I know I know!!

They are boring.
They require traits to MOVE.
They don’t provide anything incredibly interesting.
Compared to say banners… Well they are just meh.

A single warrior f1 can kill all of them (excluding elite).

Generally: Long cast times, shorter durations than banners, worse buffs, and finite health.

Also from a PvP perspective any condition based build is non viable due to shoutbows and staff eles.

With a few words: ranger spirits are % based buff from an easily destroy-able source with quite long CD, and that concept is bad.

When traited spirits goes from useless to bad, its uses is very niche, like frost spirit for dungeon bosses, and in a semi-effective PvP build, in WvW it is just useless no matter or what.
During the Ranger CDI many suggestion was given to the devs, let’s see if something will be made with the new specialization system and the elite specialization.

The devs are very aware of why people don’t like spirits, but for your clarification:

• At the moment, you have to invest all your traits in to them to get them to be any good. And if you stick all your traits into them, you need to take at least two for it to be worth the investment. That’s already being changed with the upcoming trait revamp.

• Incredibly boring playstyle, both to play with and to play against. AI spam in this game is horrible. That’s being fixed a bit with the trait revamp by having them be stationary.

• Speaking of stationary, warrior banners can’t be killed and have 100% effectiveness with better effects. Spirits can be killed, have random procs, and have crappy effects. Supposedly all of this is being addressed with the trait revamp, but we haven’t seen any examples yet.

Fluffball.8307:

The devs are very aware of why people don’t like spirits, but for your clarification:

• At the moment, you have to invest all your traits in to them to get them to be any good. And if you stick all your traits into them, you need to take at least two for it to be worth the investment. That’s already being changed with the upcoming trait revamp.

• Incredibly boring playstyle, both to play with and to play against. AI spam in this game is horrible. That’s being fixed a bit with the trait revamp by having them be stationary.

• Speaking of stationary, warrior banners can’t be killed and have 100% effectiveness with better effects. Spirits can be killed, have random procs, and have crappy effects. Supposedly all of this is being addressed with the trait revamp, but we haven’t seen any examples yet.

I think the thought was that our spirits can move with use without having to pick them up/plant them like warrior banners so they needed a counter.

That being said I’ve always hated them and particularly hated when it was the only real PvP build. Spirit rangers + Hambows was the worst meta imo and actually drove me to level to 80 for WvW since you could run a functional Power build there. Haven’t been back to SPVP since then.

Hopefully the devs will make them more interesting and not so passive. I could see them functioning similarly to necro wells, but they have seen many ideas and I don’t really want to go into all the ways the could be better right now :/

Their passive buffs are lackluster

• Frost Spirit 10% damage bonus 70% of the time … so 7% damage increase (negating that it could buff an AA and ignore a harder hitting attack). This 7% pales in comparison to other utilities brought by other classes … Warrior Banners being the best example.
• Sun Spirit: if anyone in your group has condition damage and has burning uptime covered, this is causing your group’s dps to drop whenever someone with less condition damage overwrites the other’s burning
• Earth Spirit: this one is okay … but compare it to a Guardian Hammer that gives 100% up-time on protection to their group … when stacked, but that’s when you want that protection.
• Storm Spirit: 8s of swiftness 70% of the time with a 10s ICD … and I have to stay within 1,000 range of the spirit … this one is obviously horrible

Their activation skills have stupidly small ranges.

• I have had a mob right next to my spirit and it didn’t hit the mob.
• Targets have to be practically on top of the spirit to be affected … and when a target is on top of a spirit, they usually accidentally cleave the spirit to death while attacking their actual target.

Their activation skills activate slowly. Couple this with their crappy range and it’s bad.

Currently, the 70% proc requires a trait … reportedly becoming baseline in the future.

Currently, the require a trait in order to be mobile … trait disappearing in the future?

Currently, they have a short 1,000 range and are made of paper … which gets them killed quite quickly and easily.

What’s wrong with Spirits:

• Passive buffs are % based.
• Die far too easily
• 10 second Internal cooldowns (minus Frost Spirit)
• Actives have a small radius
• Actives are clunky, slow, and sometimes do not activate.
• Water Spirit is horrible

Anet has already shot themselves in the foot stating they are going to make Spirits better, and yet, kept the design choice of the % base chance of passives. Not to mention, the only Spirit-related trait left is Nature’s Vengeance.

Will have to wait and see if the actives are going to be changed, if not, then it will be a waste of a GM slot and should be made baseline.

On top of what everyone else here said the actives are also almost impossible to hit with.

If they are traited to move then you have no control over where they go. They run around trying to keep up with you with the same pathing as miniatures enjoy, which is to say they sometimes run off in a weird direction or stop randomly. You can’t aim where it’s going to go off, and in a heavy movement game like GW2 there’s no way the enemy is going to stick around long enough to get hit.

If they can’t move then well… The enemy would have to actually TRY to get hit by the attack by moving on top of them during the long cast animation.

On top of having actives that cannot be aimed the spirits die very quickly and have a long summoning time, which makes it hard to place spirits mid-combat.

Simple way to change all of this would be to give spirit actives a 600-900 range and make them ground targeted. That way you could place the spirits off point and still control where the actives activate. Then cut the cast time in half so you’re not so easily interrupted. Suddenly spirits are a lot more fun to use and more effective.

But that still leaves them with their other issues of having lackluster passive bonuses and being made of paper mache… Or Radditz.

I suppose the biggest culprit of being awful is water spirit. As a spirit you want to cast it out of the way pre-combat. During this time, if you’ve placed the spirit well, you and your allies get a rather meh heal every 10-11s, or a bit less than 80(+ 0.09) health per second (regen is 130(+ 0.125), though importantly the two effects stack). If things go a bit sour you at least have access to 2-3 Aqua Surges, a worse Heal as One that makes your spirit splash the area around them for a heal that you can’t improve with healing power. Once your 60s are up, your healing skill is now a weaker, longer cooldown heal as one with over double the cast time that gives a little extra healing to your allies, because no one is going to watch you cast your healing skill for 2 seconds and not have at least went to target the spirit. If an opponent got the drop on you, then you skip right to the point where your 60s are up and feel really bad about your life choices.

Also I’ll add that you cannot place them accurately which means you can’t place them outside of AoE range, on structures etc… like you can with banners. They get put down in a random area around you which means they often go down in aoe Ex: Chest seal of Cliffside fractal.

If I had to summarize:

A fire and forget glass banner that traded support potency for modest/redundant area control, despite not being any kind of positionally accurate.

They are banners that die and work only 35/70% of the time in pve, pvp the actives are more useful but they still die.

Not mention you (if I recall this correctly) can interrupt the ranger as they cast the spirit, while they are activating the secondary skill or interrupt the spirit during the long animation leading up to the seconardary skill.

Summing the up they are clunky to use the trait that allow them to move also allowed you through movement to cancel the secondary skill of the spirit. Also the only reason people cry about spirits as AI spam is one that idiot shoutcasters ‘petting zoo’ comment and two they can body block, not because they spirits share much else with the other summons in the game (which can fight as will as have a secondary skill)

I am completely content with Spirit Ranger never being viable ever again.

I had enough of the build in the old condi meta to last me a lifetime.

Boring is about the best answer.

Its a shame really that so many ranger skills are amazing fun but at same time we get boring signets and then get slammed with another boring passive system with spirits. Basically AoE signets lol.

Justine.6351:

Boring is about the best answer.

Its a shame really that so many ranger skills are amazing fun but at same time we get boring signets and then get slammed with another boring passive system with spirits. Basically AoE signets lol.

I always thought our Signets (other than SotH) were more interesting than the other classes, but that’s just me.

Now that the signets affect rangers, they’re way more powerful activated than passive. So it’s sort of irrelevant that they’re signets.

Aerathnor.8305:

Justine.6351:

Boring is about the best answer.

Its a shame really that so many ranger skills are amazing fun but at same time we get boring signets and then get slammed with another boring passive system with spirits. Basically AoE signets lol.

I always thought our Signets (other than SotH) were more interesting than the other classes, but that’s just me.

Oh they certainly are. 6sec dmg invulnerability? +25% dmg/stability/HUGE 8sec? Those 2 are crazy. But getting meh spirit passives stacked with a class that has full signet set too?

Im afraid while removing the spirits traits and making them base/non moveable will seem cool its still going to be boring passive cast and forget. Should make their special attack useable. No spirit AA or anything silly, just another skill a ranger can use periodically at like 10sec recharge so its active.

Justine.6351:

Aerathnor.8305:

Justine.6351:

Boring is about the best answer.

Its a shame really that so many ranger skills are amazing fun but at same time we get boring signets and then get slammed with another boring passive system with spirits. Basically AoE signets lol.

I always thought our Signets (other than SotH) were more interesting than the other classes, but that’s just me.

Oh they certainly are. 6sec dmg invulnerability? +25% dmg/stability/HUGE 8sec? Those 2 are crazy. But getting meh spirit passives stacked with a class that has full signet set too?

Im afraid while removing the spirits traits and making them base/non moveable will seem cool its still going to be boring passive cast and forget. Should make their special attack useable. No spirit AA or anything silly, just another skill a ranger can use periodically at like 10sec recharge so its active.

Yeah, spirits have always been “blegh” to me, I posted earlier about how the spirit ranger meta pushed me out of Spvp. They’re like the unwanted children of MM necros and banner warrs whill being less effective than both.

I’d rather have a spirit ranger on my PvP team than a banner warrior or MM necro. Spirits are lame, but they’re still effective.

Fluffball.8307:

I’d rather have a spirit ranger on my PvP team than a banner warrior or MM necro. Spirits are lame, but they’re still effective.

True, I probably shouldn’t have said “less effective”.

“Lame, but effective” probably sums up most of the hate spirits get from rangers and other classes :p

Came here to add about the % being bad and should be 100% (if not more since they are killable) like warrior banners… but it looks like that was covered already. Oh, and it looks like it was covered that they die, easily to a sneeze AOE.

Personally, I never liked the fact that they can be traited to move and I’m glad that functionality will be removed in the future trait changes. Beyond the buffs they get, I always thought the active skills of the spirits should have been ground targeted teleports, i.e. you target somewhere with the skill and then the spirit will teleport to the location and then insta-use the AoE upon porting.

Beyond that, yeah the buffs the spirits provide seem lackluster compared to banners. Yeah, banners are boring but I find them somewhat flexible in that I can still pick it up and use skills with it (they could speed up the #5 tho and I think it’d be fine). Spirits should also provide other unique static boons. Keep the % effects they provide now but also give them something else like:

Frost Spirit = gain frost aura and cleanse burning if you are chilled (anyone with their buff, that is)
Storm Spirit = gain quickness if you are stunned/dazed (again, anyone with the buff)

And honestly don’t like the killability of them either. Just make them pretty much hazards you can only move a couple times before they vanish.

Ragnar.1546:

Oh oh I know I know!!

They are boring.
They require traits to MOVE.
They don’t provide anything incredibly interesting.
Compared to say banners… Well they are just meh.

You also forget to mention it is some of the few buffs that actually dies. Not only that, it dies rather quickly, especially in PVP.