10 Man vs. 5 Man Buff Caps.

A while a go several buffs were increased to affect up to 10 targets specifically druid's grace of the land, warrior banners, and ranger spirits. While I do think that these were generally good changes, I believe some of them should be revisited and adjusted. Additionally I think it would be greatly beneficial to increase the buff target cap to ten for some unique buffs which are currently not brought because they are on builds that are too weak currently but at10 targets they could be worth considering.

Grace of the land, stone spirit, and perhaps storm spirit should be reduced to 5 target cap. Now that GoTL just brings might, there is no good reason for a druid to single handedly be able to keep an entire 10 man raid group permanently capped at 25 might where most other potential might stackers struggle to cap might just for 5 man. Nerfing phalanx strength just to replace it with the much stronger new GoTL serves little purpose. Stone Spirit likewise is makes all other sources of protection irrelevant as once signet of inspiration is accounted for it easily provides 10 man perma protection. Protection is a non necessary but very nice boon which many classes can provide, unfortunately none of them are worth considering as druid with stone spirit has the lowest opportunity cost by far. Storm spirit is obviously the least taken spirit of all of them, however since there was just a patch in which vulnerability application was reduced across the board, it doesn't make much sense to leave this one utility that can single handedly stack 30 vuln nearly permanently and potentially much more if the group has condi builds with high expertise, I would consider it low priority, but there was never a good reason to increase the target cap for it.

On the other hand, there are a few unique buffs that are pretty decent, but are not strong enough to make into the meta at all because they are attached to builds that are too weak. Increasing them to 10 man would in essence double their value for raids and give them a bit more of a chance to be considered in a comp. The two main ones I can think of are Facet of Nature and Vampiric Presence. Facet of Nature is in an awkward spot where the boon duration is pretty nice and could allow chronos and druids to run more offensive gear while still maintaining boon uptime, however when all the builds that actually benefit from the boon duration are spread between 2 different subgroups, you can't reliably get facet of nature to all of the targets that actually benefit from it and its value for only 1 or 2 boon supplying builds is far too low to justify herald's abysmal dps. Vampiric presence is a nice trait for blood necro which is basically never used for anything other than cheezing Matthias with a super safe tank comp. If VP is increased to 10 the logic could be extended to Spotter, empower allies, assassin's presence, pinpoint distribution, and strength in numbers, as they all work the same way. They were all originally not increased to 10 man buffs because they were entirely passive, however banners and spirits are ultimately so passive that it really is hard to say they are active with a straight face. I simply don't believe that is a valid argument to make.

Getting some of that stuff (like Revenants) to 10-man buffs might be a balance nightmare in WvW. A full split where every PvE buff is 10-wide would be the best option if Anet is ever willing to actually and fully split modes.