Spirit lord

A spirit lord is a Ranger or Ritualist specializing in exploiting spirits.

General principle
A spirit lord (commonly referred to as SoS or ST) serves the role of providing tactical placement of spirits that can be used for offensive/defensive party support, or simply as a "Spirit Wall" to help take pressure off the other players in your party.

Skills
A spirit lord is used by simply keeping their spirits alive and between enemies and their team-mates. Commonly Used skills include

Side skills
Since most spirit lord builds only requires 4-5 skills to work, spirit lords have plenty of room on their skill bar. Usually this is used to bring either some direct damage like Painful Bonds, or indirect damage like Splinter Weapon to help the team. Another opportunity is to use spirits based damage mitigation like Armor of Unfeeling or some healing skills like Mend Body and Soul.

Popular Side skills include
 * for its ability to remove almost all conditions on a single casting, in the presence of a spirit lord.
 * for its ability to increase the Damage efficiency of a spirits almost double.

Choosing your spirit

 * Earthbind is the only known skill to allow players to ignore knockdown-prevention skills. Some PvE monsters are immune to knock down, including Giants, Wurms, Dolyak Riders, and certain bosses and boss-like foes (i.e, Shiro, Rotscale, etc.). Spirit Lords should always consider bringing it when allies are employing knockdown skills and facing these foes!

Disadvantages
The single largest disadvantage of the spirit lord is its dependence on spirits to maximize effectiveness; an over-reliance fact that can be exploited by enemies intelligent enough to counter.

There are also some specific skills that deal with spirits, such as the Mesmer's Spiritual Pain, the Monk's Banish, the Paragon's Holy Spear, the Dervish's Banishing Strike and the Ritualist's Elite Consume Soul.

In terms of AI, spirits are of average intelligence with Defensive behavior, much more controllable than minions, but less so then henchmen. Usually, getting spirits to attack priority foes first requires the spirit lord's use of positioning via use of Draw Spirit/Summon Spirits.

Trivia

 * Historically popular names for this character have included: Soul Spinner, Spirit Wrangler, Spirit Master, Spirit Monger, Spirit Binder, Spirit Shepherd, Spirit Shaman, Spirit Spam, and Ritual Lord or Soul Twister.
 * The June 2009 and the February 2010 updates buffed various binding rituals and spirit-generating skills (notably Soul Twisting, Ritual Lord, and Spirit Siphon). This allowed for more rapid creation of stronger and longer-lasting spirits.
 * The spirit lord is often considered the Guild Wars equivalent of turtling.