Guild Wars 2

One and a half Seconds to cast it

Cures 1 condition every 5 seconds…..lasts 20 seconds…that’s just 4 conditions and it has 5 person limit. So that means it just fires wherever the condition are 4 times?

The healing command is ok but after you think you need to summon the bow to use it the moment you need to use it passes.

It doesn’t attack so it can’t add the condition portion of Expeditious Spirit – the only spirit weapon related trait.

Can this one if not all the spirit weapons get a revamp?

+1 to this. It’s one the most useless ways to cure conditions in the game at the moment. Spirit weapons in general could use an overhaul and they could definitely start with this bow.

Arcaedus.7290:

+1 to this. It’s one the most useless ways to cure conditions in the game at the moment. Spirit weapons in general could use an overhaul and they could definitely start with this bow.

This ^.

Sadly if you expect Anet to actually fix the many many many traits, utility skills & weapon skills on guardian your likely never going to be happy.

My best advice is to roll an engineer, rev or elementalist.

They can do everything the guardian can do better + have other things like run speed traits, viable summons, reveals, CC and even stealth in the case of the engineer.

In the long run if enough people stop playing guardian it may actually encourage them to overhaul the class & its many traits, weapons, skills. Nothing else so far has shown any progress towards that.

So tell your friends, roll something else.

- All SW need to be cast instantly
- OR activate their command upon summoning right away
- SW should attack right away and spawn next to the target IF you have a target IF not they spawn next to you as is

The SW Mastery should be moved to Radiance and swap with Radiant Retaliation. This would create an actual build option utilizing shattered aegis, AH, and SW Mastery to basically build your own allies to bounce of aegis and boons. while still maintaining a hard choice if you would go for SW burn build. Radiant retaliation (possibly buffed by a 33% retaliation damage modifier) makes much more sense in zeal to compliment Wrathful spirit, Kindled Zeal / GS Mastery (our only weapon that provides retaliation on its own(hammer combo aside)) and you could use it with perfect inscription.

I am not saying that this is a great build but would make way more sense.

As is retaliation might as well be removed from the game

Here my view on the subject

- Spirit Weapon : I think that Spirt Weapon work great. But the problem is that they work 20sec on a cooldown of 60sec. Forcing their user to pretty much have no utility skill 66% of the time. Just like minions their cooldown start after they die, but minions have cooldown between 16 to 32sec while Spirit weapons have cooldown between 45 and 60sec. Additionnaly, Spirit Weapon have a maximum duration, while minions have none. For this reason, I think that the cooldown on spirit weapon should be drastically reduce.

- Bow of Truth : Reduce cooldown from 60sec to 20sec. Shoots one arrow each 5 seconds per ally (max of 5 ally) in a radius of 600 around the guardian. The Command skill is now ground targeted and have a radius of 600. The Healing power coefficient go from 0.05 to 0.1

- Shield of Avenger : Reduce cooldown from 60sec to 48sec

- Hammer of Wisdom : Reduce cooldown from 45sec to 15sec.

- Sword of Justice : Reduce cooldown from 30sec to 10sec

After that the Spirit Weapons shouldn’t reduce cooldown on summoning spririt, only add burning and reduce coolown on the command skill.

Sword is too dull, but the best one out of the pack. Hammer can be good against Defiance bar but generally too disruptive to use in most circumstance. Shield’s situationally good, but can be unreliable when it comes to positioning. Bow, lol.

I tbh, have a dislike to the spirit weapons all together, I think they could be stronger as a Summoned weapon that does 1/2 Major attacks Providing utility or CC then Dissapear instead of Dealing with bad AI on a rubbish pet styled thing.

but then again maybe that’s down to the fact I just don’t enjoy using spirit weapons.

Oh lol. I’m such a noob then. I go to fights with spirit weapons all the time lol

Spirit weapons shouldn’t disappear. They should be destroyed by enemy attacks and then put on cooldown which can stay the same. Bow should pulse condition removal every 5 seconds and the command heal should be much stronger. We should get new healing skill that will heal us just a tiny bit but heals our summoned spirit weapons a lot. Mistfire Wolf should get bonuses from traits that affect spirit weapons – it is obvious he goes with the theme of spirit weapon guardian but I know they would never do it…. Traits on spirit weapons should add strong burning damage on sword, stability and slow on hammer, protection on shield and regeneration on bow (I don’t mean constant uptime of these boons/burning…burning can be every 5th hit on sword and boons can be on skill activation)

This way spirit weapons guardian could actually be viable in raids and pve content in general. I’m not a PvPer so IDK….figure out the balance between game modes yourself.

Three suggestions-
The first is to make the weapon summon actually an attack (like the one oddball warrior trait with banners). Shield drops down in a protective bubble, sword damages and burns a single target, etc. Immediate value that then sticks around and does stuff for you. Make one a stunbreaker for funsies.
The second would be to hybridize in necromancer- The command skill is the only part with a cooldown, and the weapons use it on death. Otherwise, they hang around and automatically do their job (removing condis, knocking over, etc.) with no time limit, though they can still be killed. Sort of like flying signets that burn things.

I do love the idea of running a shattered aegis build with Retreat + Shield 4 + bunch of spirit weapons, though.

Third suggestion is to steal DH’s schtick a little- Tie the spirit weapons to the virtues (possibly leaving some out in the cold, I don’t know) and add functionality fun that way. Sword attacks for twenty seconds and burns things… and if you hit Virtue of Justice, it goes nuts with the fire fields. Shield attacks for twenty seconds and blocks shots… and if you hit F3, it stuns everything around it. That sort of setup. Alternately, just tie them in universally: F1 gets you AOE burning around all your dudes, F2 gets you condi removal and heals, etc.

Something that puzzles me, its two things:

1) the weapon grabs agro from mobs.

2) it also does some minor damage.

Still I don’t understand how these two things happen since the bow is not supposed to do damage.

I set the bow in auto attack. Then, when I grab agro from a mob due to getting to close.. The bow goes towards it, damage it (not sure how) and stays facing the mob. The mob attacks the bow.

I suspect it’s some burning for touching?

Try it with low level mobs.

Spirit weapons are generally just a huge tuning disaster. Too long of a cast time, they don’t last indefinitely/too short of a duration, their cooldowns don’t start immediately, enormous cooldowns, attack intervals are too slow, numbers too low, they’re extremely frail (which would be a good weakness if they were actually strong), etc. There’s a ton of simple easy-to-do changes the devs could do to fix them, but balancing underpowered things and tuning things properly seems like something ANet is incapable of doing for some reason.

Something that particularly annoys me with the bow is that there’s a cast time when activating its command despite the fact that no other spirit weapon has this. The area for its command isn’t really big enough for its kind of ability either (a heal over time). It should be as large as something like Healing Rain.