The Guardian’s current profession mechanic as it stands now is 3 signets. If you removed the word “Virtue” and replaced it with “Signet,” there would literally be no way to tell the difference. That’s a rather shallow design.
Additionally, it seems that Spirit Weapons were really a missed opportunity for something special. Right now what we have are mindless pets that do poor to mediocre damage, and get one mildly interesting skill on a silly-long cool-down. They have no legitimate impact on combat. I think they could be something more—something that’s better integrated into the identity and play-style of the Guardian.
So my suggestion is mainly in the image at the bottom of this post (it might be best to reference that before proceeding further), but I’ll flesh out the rest of the details in text here:
- Spirit Weapons are now tied to Virtue skills and, while active, function as actual weapons that take up appropriate weapon skill slots.
—> Current Virtues retain their respective recharge times.
—> A Virtue will begin recharging normally whenever it is triggered (a Virtue will continue to recharge even though a player is wielding its respective Spirit Weapon).
- Upon activation, Spirit Weapon Skills will superimpose themselves over top of one’s normal Weapon Skills in the appropriate spots.
—> As an example: while the Shield of the Avenger Spirit Weapon is active, it will super-impose itself over top of your 4-5 skills—even if you have a two-handed weapon—thus granting you new 4 and 5 skills for its duration.
—> You can only have one active Spirit Weapon out at any given time.
- Spirit Weapons can be slotted into any one of the Virtue slots and are interchangeable outside of combat.
- Spirit Weapons operate on [Initiative] (placeholder term, but it would function the same way) that regenerates naturally at a rate of 1 pip every 2 seconds.
—> If a Guardian completely exhausts his or her [Initiative], his/her currently active Spirit Weapon is dismissed and the [Initiative] bar is sent into a 15 second cool-down during which it will not regenerate [Initiative] points. This would prevent the Guardian from employing Spirit Weapons during that time. After the cool-down is over, the bar would resume regenerating normally. However, during this cool-down, the Virtues can still be triggered, recharge normally and maintain their passive effects when fully recharged.
- The term “Guardian’s Aegis” in the Virtue of Courage description refers to a new version of the boon Aegis unique to Guardians. After blocking the initial attack, Guardian’s Aegis lingers for 2 seconds and reduces incoming damage based on the source’s Healing Power (damage reduction improves on a curve that starts at 0%, but is capped at 25%).
—> This is to give meaning to Aegis’ duration and more depth to its usage. Instead of being a whimpy interrupt, it can now mitigate burst damage and multiple-hit attacks to an extent.
I’m still trying to think of whether it would be a good idea or not to make the Virtues into chain skills that would allow a player to pop a Virtue for its effect without conjuring a Spirit Weapon and replacing 2 or more Weapon Skills if he or she didn’t want that. Yet at the same time, it would slow down a Guardian’s ability to cycle through Spirit Weapon effects, which is really what I was going for with this idea.
There is also the F4 key which dismisses any active Spirit Weapon so a Guardian could theoretically just trigger a Virtue and then follow it up with F4 immediately in order to maintain his or her current Weapon Skills (even though that’s a bit unwieldy, and honestly you should be exploiting the fact that you get new Weapon Skills just for activating an ability).
Making the effects intrinsically tied would completely change the way Virtues work—but since that’s sort of what I’m trying to do with this suggestion, I guess I’m convinced that it’s for the better.
