This is a great thread! Glad to see the discussions being had.
I’m noticing a lot of people wondering and estimating the size of attacks, durations, and things like that… I will talk with our balance team to see how they feel about adding more detailed skill facts to the spirits.
We’re aware that spirits need more than just skill facts – we’re working on resolving that as well.
Thanks Robert.
I hope that some care is taken when changes to spirits are being approached. There are a lot of issues with spirits but with how underrepresented they are I’m concerned some changes are going to be made that undermine the goal of actually improving them if the end result is a drastic change in functionality. As someone that is actually using these skills, I don’t consider their base functionality a core issue with spirits whatsoever; where they fail is in the general balance of their effects and the player’s ability to rely on them due to their health/toughness.
Here’s what I think about them after spending some time actually using them:
Sun and Stone spirits’ aura effects are good. I don’t think either of these needs to be significantly changed; if no changes are made to the general spirit ICD I could see the base duration on these going up to 4s instead of 3s. The active abilities are a little less useful – I think Sun Spirit could stand to apply a small burn as well as blind when activated, and Stone Spirit could add a 3-stack Bleed or just leave a longer-lasting Cripple field when used.
Frost and Storm spirit have the opposite problem; their activated effects are pretty decent but their auras are very poor. Frost adding 10% damage to a single strike no more than every 10s (and in reality more like 12s) amounts to peanuts. You’d need a 10,000 damage attack just to get an equivalent bonus to Sun’s proc even assuming no condition damage or duration bonuses, and while it is front-loaded and cannot be removed like Burning, the vast majority of procs will not land on hits anywhere near this value. It’s weak enough that at a minimum I think this value should be doubled unless the ICD is modified. Storm is another that has a questionable value, since Swiftness is the kind of boon where the value is dependent on the player’s need for it; an uncontrolled proc severely damages the overall value of Swiftness, and I would prefer this to simply be removed in favor of a different effect, moving the Swiftness to the active ability on top of the damage.
What’s really hurting spirits’ usefulness aside from the above considerations is their ability to survive, and to a lesser extent the long activation/cooldown time on their abilities. They’re simply too easy to lose no matter what type of content you’re doing. The risk of losing them at all to damage is a significant consideration compared to something like a Warrior’s banner, and by itself should be enough to warrant them having substantial health. Something like 10,000 base health would be enough to make them vulnerable to targeted attack while not making them so trivial to neutralize. The value of the 2x spirit health trait is totally undermined by their pitiful base health right now, to the point where doubling it has too small of an effect on extending their average lifespan.
The ICD is also another thing that needs to be examined as it essentially removes almost all of the value from the 15% proc chance trait. A trait like this doesn’t even really make sense with such a long ICD; the trait should instead lower the ICD which will then result in an appropriate gain in average effect uptime. I would also consider lowering the base ICD of all spirits by 2 seconds.
My last suggestion would be to add a 20% cooldown reduction to one of the current spirit-related traits in Nature Magic, probably to the Grandmaster trait Spirits Unbound since that trait is not necessarily a net gain in power and would make the trait more interesting (since it would no longer be a strict functionality decision on the player’s part).
