Spirit Woods, also called Traverse the Spirit Woods or Spirit Run, is an event encounter and the second encounter of the Spirit Vale raid wing.
TL;DR
- In the first room, stand in rift capture zones before they explode.
- In the second room, stand behind a pillar to bait and kill spirits.
- In the third room, DPS players run through rifts and take down Ethereal Barriers; support players stand in rifts.
- In the fourth room, split up and stand on all the pressure plates at the same time.
- Portals and stability can be of great help throughout the encounter.
Table of Contents:
Special Roles
This encounter benefits greatly from stability.
A Mesmer bringing Portal Entre, Mimic, and Blink can be incredibly useful in the first and third stages of the encounter. This role is not strictly required, but makes both the Spectral Rifts and spirit race much faster. It can also be fulfilled, though not as well, by Thieves bringing Shadow Portal or Scourges bringing Sand Swell.
Core Mechanics
Spirit Fury
Spirit Fury is an environmental AoE that will periodically occur during several stages of the encounter. It’s represented by a yellow AoE indicator and activates shortly after it spawns. It will damage and knock back any players it hits.
Ectoplasm
Ectoplasm is an attack used by the Angered Spirit enemies found throughout each stage of the encounter. It is a large AoE containing blue goo. It will cripple any players that try to walk across it.
Stages
Unlike bosses and even most other event encounters, the Spirit Woods are not one continuous encounter. Instead, they are made up of several stages spread out across a large portion of the map, each of which form individual events; the encounter as a whole is essentially the raid equivalent of an event chain.
Thanks to this unique characteristic, each stage of the encounter can be completed one at a time. Failing a later stage does not force the squad to re-complete previous stages, and you can take indefinite breaks between the stages (so long as the squad doesn’t leave the instance).
On the path between the Vale Guardian arena and the area where the first stage of the Spirit Woods occurs, there are several spirit enemies. These can be ignored. Additionally, they may not spawn if you open the instance beginning at Spirit Woods.
Spectral Rifts
The first stage of the Spirit Woods is at the bottom of a small cliff face, right after the Ley Rift following Vale Guardian. 5 spirits will be in this area; killing them begins the event.
Once the event begins, Spectral Rifts will begin spawning. Each appears as a red capture area with an orb at its center. When at least one player is standing within the area, the ring turns blue. Rifts spawn randomly in one of five set locations.
For each active rift, a progress bar will appear in the top right; the more players in the rift, the faster that bar progresses. When it is filled, the rift disappears. If 20 seconds pass before the bar is filled, it will explode instead and instantly down all players. The stage will end after completing 20 rifts, opening the gate to the next area.
Throughout this stage, champion and generic spirits will continuously spawn. In addition to general damage pressure and the Ectoplasm mechanic, these spirits can also sometimes kick players to knock them back. If you have a shadowstep or gap closer, you can take advantage of these spirits to move across the area more quickly.
Located in this area are two Adrenal Mushrooms. Players with the Adrenal Mushroom mastery can use these to recharge their movement or stability-granting skills.
Solution:
Move into Spectral Rifts as quickly as possible to capture them before they explode. Applying stability to your group is very beneficial.
Cleave down spirits on your way to rifts, or use ranged attacks to purge them while capturing rifts.
Avoid Spirit Fury and Ectoplasm, or use stability to ignore the latter.
Abandoned Outpost
After crossing a bridge, players will enter the next stage, the Abandoned Outpost. Upon entering, 9 spirits will spawn around the room. Additionally, a cluster of friendly spirit NPCs will appear in the center of the room; they will merge into an aggressive champion-rank spirit.
The gate to the next room will open when 7 of the 9 non-champion spirits in this room have been killed. Two of the spirits will always spawn standing on a fallen pillar to the right; the rest of the spirits will be spread across the room in random locations.
Located in this room is an interactable brazier which will grant whoever touches it a bundle that removes their weapon skills. Carrying this bundle to the end of the Spirit Woods without downing or dropping the bundle will allow you to light another brazier, granting the Keep the Lights On achievement and spawning an additional chest.
Solution:
Ignore the champion spirit. Bring stab to prevent it from CCing you.
Stand behind one of the pillars on the back side of the room. This will force most of the spirits to walk to you, making it easier to cleave them down and clear the room. Leave when the splash text appears on your screen; the remaining spirits can be ignored.
Spirit Race
Players will find themselves on a balcony overlooking a large drop; they must use their glider to survive the fall to the area below. Once someone jumps down, the next stage will begin.
Once the stage begins, a wall of spirits will appear behind the group and begin a constant advance. Anyone who touches the wall is instantly killed. Players must traverse forward and destroy four Ethereal Barriers to finish the stage and despawn the approaching wall.
Ethereal Barriers have particularly large hitboxes, allowing them to be hit from especially far away. Be careful when using shadowsteps against them, as this will often result in you teleporting backwards due to the size of their hitboxes.
Ahead of each of the Ethereal Barriers are Spectral Rifts, which function identically to the rifts from the first stage of the encounter. The path will also be filled with spirit enemies and Spirit Fury AoEs.
Immediately after the third Ethereal Barrier is a gap. Players must jump and use their glider to get across, or else they will fall to their death.
Solution:
DPS players walk through rifts and focus on killing the Ethereal Barriers as quickly as possible. Supports stay in rifts and capture them.
Providing swiftness, superspeed, or stability can help the group progress through each section much faster.
Cemetery
After completing the spirit race, players will traverse down a corridor where several spirits will combine into a champion spirit. This can be ignored; stealth is helpful for getting the group past it.
At the end of that corridor, the squad will enter the final stage of the Spirit Woods at Bandit’s Rest. Located in this room are five pressure plates; players must simultaneously stand on all five to open the gate and clear the encounter. Downed or defeated players do not count as standing on a plate.
The room is filled with spirits, and stepping on a plate will spawn additional spirits, which can push you off of the plate; as such, it’s best to wait until your squad is in position to press all five plates at once before stepping on them.
The route to reach each of the plates is as follows:
- Arrow: Turn left and walk past the stairs to find it in an alcove. The player who takes this one will usually get the most damage and CC pressure from nearby mobs.
- Circle: Go up the stairs and walk along the branch. Jump off right before the mushrooms jumping puzzle and glide to the small building. If you attempt to reach heart but fail, you can usually land at circle instead.
- Heart: Go up the stairs, walk along the branch, and complete a short jumping puzzle across the mushrooms, then glide to the plate on top of the raised platform.
- Square: Go up the stairs, jump to the branch, then jump across to the other half of the wall. Drop down near the winged statue to find the plate.
- Star: Go to the right, up the stairs, then left. Near the eastern wall, there is a small gap covered by vines to your right. Enter it, then turn left; the plate is inside.
Solution:
Split up to find and stand on all of the pressure plates simultaneously. Bring stability to prevent spirits from CCing you, and wait until all players are ready to stand on their plates.
After completing this room, and by extension the Spirit Woods encounter as a whole, there will be an interactable brazier in the next room before the Gorseval arena. If a player brought the torch from the Abandoned Outpost here, they can interact with the brazier to grant the Keep the Lights On achievement to everyone in the squad and spawn an additional chest.
Strategies
Spectral Rifts
Portal Strat
Bring 1-2 players with access to a blink and a portal. This can be accomplished by a Mesmer using Blink and Portal Entre, a Thief using Shadowstep (or any of its other many mobility options) and Shadow Portal, or a Scourge using Sand Swell. Mesmers are the most ideal for this role, since they can use Mimic to recharge their skills more often.
Most of the squad stand still in Spectral Rifts rather than running between them. The portaler blinks to the next rift and creates a portal for the other players to follow, instantly porting the rest of the squad into the rift. If there are multiple portalers, they should take turns teleporting to rifts one after another. If there is only one portaler, the squad may sometimes still need to walk to the next rift.
There are two Adrenal Mushrooms on opposite sides of the arena. Touching these will instantly refresh a player’s skill cooldowns, but each mushroom can only be used once every 30 seconds. Portalers should take advantage of these to keep their portal and blink skills up.
Split Strat
Send each of your squad’s subgroups to a different section of the arena. One group will be in charge of the two rifts in the northern half; the other will be in charge of the three rifts in the southern half. Each group walks into and captures rifts as normal, but only the ones on their side.
Stack Strat
The strategy generally used by PUG groups. The entire group stays together and walks to each rift. Bring stability to prevent the group from being CC’d by spirits.
| Strategy | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Portal Strat | – Minimizes travel time and ensures all ten players are in the rift, making this by far the fastest strategy. – Requires almost no input from most of the squad, making this extremely easy. | – The encounter’s difficulty is offloaded onto the portalers. If something happens to them, it may be difficult to recover without a portal. – If a player gets CC’d and misses the portal, they will be completely separated from the group. |
| Split Strat | – Consistent and easy to perform. – Reduces the area each player needs to cover. | – Only 5 players will ever be in rifts at a time, making them close more slowly. |
| Stack Strat | – Simplest and easiest strategy. – Keeps the entire group together at all times, making it easy to recover from downed players or other mistakes. | – Slow. – Often forces the group to walk long distances across the arena. |
Spirit Race
Portals can be used to significantly speed up this stage of the encounter. This role is best filled by a Chronomancer, who can use Continuum Split to gain an additional cast of their blink and portal. It can also be performed by two players both bringing portals.
Open the first portal on the group as they finish killing the first Ethereal Barrier. Blink as far forward as you can and open the other end of the portal. If playing a Chronomancer, use Continuum Split before opening this portal to refresh it and Blink. If everyone takes this portal, you will skip the flag that causes the Spectral Rift in this section to spawn.
Open the second portal on the group as they finish killing the second Ethereal Barrier. Blink past the flag that spawns the first Spectral Rift, then use Mimic before placing the other end of the portal in the second rift.
After killing the third Ethereal Barrier, the entire group jumps and glides into the first Spectral Rift. Open your portal there; the group will wait in the rift. Step slightly forward, then blink to where the second Spectral Rift spawns. Continue forward and open the other end of the portal in front of the final Ethereal Barrier. There will be two active Spectral Rifts behind you, but you should be able to kill the barrier and end this stage of the encounter before either of them can explode (the end of the spirit race event prevents them from exploding).
Spirit Woods Skip
This skip requires a large amount of precise platforming, but allows you to escape out-of-bounds and skip parts of the encounter. It should be performed by one player, and should be done as the rest of the squad is completing the Spectral Rifts stage of the encounter like normal.
Starting in the corridor between Vale Guardian and the Spectral Rifts arena, walk left near the Ley Rift and jump onto the rock behind it, then onto the nearby tree. The trunk has a protruding ring you can stand on. Face the wall, then jump and glide to the right in order to climb further up the rock. Walk left, skirting the large hole in the rock, and get as high as you can before hitting an invisible wall. From this position, turn around and glide onto the large spotted mushroom on the eastern wall of the corridor.
Use a targeted leap skill to land on the rock to your left. Now that you’re on top of the wall, head southeast until you find the corner between two walls. The right wall is about twice as tall as your jump height, and there is a tiny bit of geometry you can just barely land on to climb up it. This jump is incredibly inconsistent and you will likely fail it many times, but you have plenty of time to attempt it as the squad deals with rifts.
Once you get up, walk west along this platform until you hit yet another wall. Jump and glide, following the stone arch right above your head, and land on the pitcher-shaped part of a tree in front of you. Carefully jump onto a branch that bends eastward, then use a leap to get onto the northwest branch. From here, jump and glide, hugging the left wall. You will pass over the Spectral Rifts arena and land on the large root that serves as the arena’s western wall.
Walk north until the root forks. Stay on the taller left root, then leap onto the tree ahead and slightly to your left. From there you can jump and glide onto a wall. You are now above the transition room between the Spectral Rifts arena and the Abandoned Outpost, and you should see the canyon the spirit race takes place in ahead and to your left. From here, the skip can be utilized to speed up the rest of the encounter.
Fast Spirit Race
You can either execute this strategy alone, or glide down into the Spectral Rifts arena and portal a couple of squadmates up with you. While the squad finishes the rifts and completes the outpost room, glide from the wall onto the top of the large tree trunk that the spirit race takes place inside of. Follow the trunks all the way to the end of the spirit race, gliding between them where necessary. When you reach the end of the final trunk, glide down and stand at the leftmost corner of the final Ethereal Barrier. The damageable entity will not have spawned yet, but the visual will already be present. Attempt to swap to a more damage-oriented build in the brief pause where the main squad gets out of combat.
When the main squad activates the spirit race, the Ethereal Barrier in front of you will become damageable. The Spectral Rifts in this section won’t spawn, since you are past the flags that trigger them. Kill the barrier, then /gg and wait for your squad to kill the previous three. When you respawn at checkpoint, you will be in front of the cemetery with the rest of your squad.
Achievements
I Can Outrun A… Ghost
Escape the Spirit Woods without getting crippled.
Despite the description claiming you must complete the Spirit Woods, only the spirit race stage is counted for this achievement. Complete that stage without stepping into any of the large Ectoplasm AoEs created by spirit mobs.
It is possible to cheese this achievement, as it does not require you to be alive when the spirit race ends. Help capture the first Spectral Rift to gain contribution for the event, then kill yourself with /gg.
Keep the Lights On
Light the brazier at the far end of the Spirit Woods without dropping the spectral torch.
The spectral torch is obtained by interacting with the brazier in the Abandoned Outpost. It is a bundle, and the player who picks it up will lose their weapon skills. If that player is downed or transformed, or if they attempt to weapon swap, they will drop the bundle, and it cannot be picked back up.
Complete all remaining stages of the Spirit Woods, then interact with the brazier in the room before the Gorseval arena.
Quick March
Outrun the ghostly mob in the Spirit Woods in under 2 minutes.
This achievement is quite easy; the straightforward PUG strategy is likely to earn it without additional effort. Complete the spirit chase segment of the encounter in the time limit. To improve your odds, you can bring swiftness or superspeed to move your squad along more quickly, or employ the portal strat.
Alternative Guides
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