Spell types: active, passive, triggered

Spells come in three types. All use the same ranks and glyphs.

Active spells are cast by you with a hotkey, spend mana and have a cooldown.

Passive spells are toggled on in the spells window and then stay on. They reserve a share of your maximum mana while on, so you have less mana to cast. You can run up to four at once, and together they may reserve at most 70% of your mana. Examples: Iron Skin (armour), Eagle Eye (critical chance), Arcane Attunement (spell damage), Verdant Aura (life regeneration), Fleet Footed (movement speed) and Inner Focus (mana regeneration). Passives give increased and flat bonuses.

Triggered spells are slotted into a trigger slot and fire by themselves when an event happens: a hit, a critical strike, a kill, taking a big hit, falling to low life, a block, or on a timer. They have an internal cooldown and spend a little mana per proc. You have three trigger slots, unlocked at character levels 20, 35 and 45. Today the live triggered spells are the five Avatars; other triggers are planned (not yet in the game).

Avatars. At level 45 each vocation learns an Avatar: Steel, Light, Storm, Nature or Balance. Here an Avatar is a triggered spell, not a long active. Each qualifying action has a chance, from about 6% at rank 1 to about 15% at rank 20, to turn you into the Avatar for 5 seconds with a big defensive and offensive boost. Afterwards it must recharge for 15 seconds. That means roughly one fifth of the time in form. The tooltip states your expected uptime.

Safety limits. Triggers cannot start other triggers. There is a minimum interval between procs and a cap on how many payloads you can execute per second.

Changing setups. You can toggle and equip at any time, even in combat, but there is a short cooldown after switching, and a passive turned off in combat cannot be turned on again at once.

Related: Spell ranks, Ascendancies.