Guild Wars 2

From the last patch the Vigorous Spirits seems broken, i can’t get the water spirit to heal although is supposed to be a 70% chance. I have 70% chance critics, and the spirits does not activate so often.
Looks like it keeps 30% chance activation although i have the trait activated.

The trait “Vigorous Spirits” is not bugged, you really get 70% chance on hit to proc the passive heal (805 +0.09*Healing Power) of the water spirit. The problem is the passive heal having a 10 seconds internal cooldown, so you and allies in range can only get it to proc every 10 seconds with or without the trait.

“Vigorous Spirits” is only interesting for the 100% health increase regarding the water spirit, because 70% proc chance instead of 35% isn’t noticeable on a 10sec cd.

I use the trait for the frost spirit, because this one has no internal cooldown (since they fixed it, yay^^) and the party has 70% chance on every hit to get the 10% damage bonus.

I hope this answers your question, have fun !

Ah ok, thank you for clarify that. The cool down it’s not explained anywhere, I knew about the 9 sec cool down in fire spirit because I saw it in some forums. In guess stone spirit has it as well.
I think the “bug” then it is not to state the abilities cool down from the spirits.

That “feature” make spirits less than useful, having in mind that they have a life span of about one minute max if they don’t get killed before, and their abilities aren’t triggered because of the cool down feature. Mostly annoying to have to spawn the spirits during long fights for so little help.

The internal cooldown of the spirits passive effect is actually written in the tool-tips, though i admit the wording could be confusing. For the water, sun, stone and storm spirits you can read “effect recharge” or “interval: 10 seconds”, so regardless of the proccing chance, there will be at least 10 seconds between two procs.

To make it clearer : once the passive procs for a player, it goes on a 10 seconds cooldown for this player only, then when cd is over, every next hit has a 35% (70%) chance to trigger the effect again, until it procs and goes on cd again.

That’s why the trait “Vigorous Spirits” is only interesting for the health increase in the case of these 4 spirits.

The frost spirit has a much better synergy with the trait, because it doesn’t have a cooldown on its passive effect, thus increasing the average damage modifier on the whole group from +3,5% to +7%.

I wouldn’t say that the internal cooldown on the other 4 spirits renders them useless, they still bring reliably every 10 or 11 seconds :

Water Spirit : Healing (805 + 0.09*Healing Power)
Sun Spirit : Burning (2sec base +%condition duration)
Stone Spirit : Protection (3sec base +%boon duration)
Storm Spirit : Swiftness (8sec base +%boon duration)

Without internal cooldown, these would be incredibly OP^^

So, to sum it up, “Vigorous Spirits” is very powerful for the frost spirit, and for water/sun/stone/storm only worth it if you want to keep your spirits close to you in melee range of mobs/boss for the active effect.