Guild Wars 2

Hi to everybody

I have just brought my guardian to the eighty lever and I don’t know what build to choose. I especially play PVE-Dungeon. I would want to make a versatile character, a mixture, I have read some guides and many recommend the build “Atruistic Healing” but I don’t like a lot it. In truth, I like so much the Spirit Weapons and I would want to make a build using those: is there someone that plays a Guardian Sprit Weapon and it recommends the use of it, or I must abandon the idea to follow this build? However is, can you krecommend me a versatile build for the guardian fun tu use?

A special thanks to all those that will answer
Good continuation

You never have to abandon a build if you enjoy playing it, simply devise one that fits your play style. Now as for spirit weapons, they used to be pretty popular in the early days of the game but fell out of favor once the weapons themselves became killable. They are really pretty weak to AOE which can melt them in no time flat. However there are some niche builds that revolve around damage against burning foes and spirit weapons causing burning if I recall correctly. You’ll have to go pretty heavy in zeal with maybe 10 in virtues for longer spirit weapon duration and then spread out the remaining points. Maybe radiance as that seem to synergize well with conditions. So maybe something like 20 25 something something 10 with 15 put wherever. Improved spirit weapon duration, recharge, not destroyed on command and causes burning. Spam your first vitue for burns and blinds and maybe take blind exposure. That’s just a quick and dirty place to start

Mr Pin.6728:

You never have to abandon a build if you enjoy playing it, simply devise one that fits your play style. Now as for spirit weapons, they used to be pretty popular in the early days of the game but fell out of favor once the weapons themselves became killable. They are really pretty weak to AOE which can melt them in no time flat. However there are some niche builds that revolve around damage against burning foes and spirit weapons causing burning if I recall correctly. You’ll have to go pretty heavy in zeal with maybe 10 in virtues for longer spirit weapon duration and then spread out the remaining points. Maybe radiance as that seem to synergize well with conditions. So maybe something like 20 25 something something 10 with 15 put wherever. Improved spirit weapon duration, recharge, not destroyed on command and causes burning. Spam your first vitue for burns and blinds and maybe take blind exposure. That’s just a quick and dirty place to start

Thanks a lot, mate.

One more question: how about equipment? Weapons and Armors?

Yeah, I have to say.. the Spirit Weapons are pretty useless. I thought they kinda sucked at launch, now I can’t see any reason to use them. They should either be totally reworked design wise or replaced with something worth while, but I can’t see how they find these as properly designed skills. The shield is the closest to being useful, but with how quickly these die, how unpredictable & uncontrollable they are &the long cooldown.. I don’t get it.

Spirit weapons are “ok” in theory, but seemingly bad in practice.

After the change to give them hit points, it becomes difficult to use them reliably for the duration of effect, thus reducing effectiveness. Beyond that, they are pets with long cool downs and short duration, so the impact they make in the long run is fairly small.

That said, spirit weapons provide some burst damage with hammer and sword, as well as provide good control with hammer, and great utility with shield and somewhat with bow.

Bow is often overlooked, but it does cleanse conditions on passive and it does provide a decent aoe heal, but the manipulation of it’s placement becomes an issue, same with shield.

Spirit weapons, are interesting ideas, but have limited use. At most you will see the most use out of shield because of the projectile absorption. Maybe some hammer in pvp scenarios to set up some control with knock downs and knock backs.

They have upped the life of spirit weapons in a few patches ago and it has helped a little bit in up time. Also if you are doing AOE heals/boons that will affect the spirit weapons as well, so things like Altruistic Healing will provide some extra healing while solo with spirit weapons.

I don’t want to count them “out” yet, but I don’t see a great use of them in most situations at the moment.

If you want to use Spirit weapons i’d go with something like 30/30/0/0/10 with zerker gear using sword/focus as mian hand. Use “fiery wrath” “Spirit weapon mastery”“Warthful Spirits” in Zeal, “Searing Flame or Inner Fire” “Powerful Blades” and “Right hand strenght” in Radiance and in Virtues i’d use “Unscathed Contender”

I would use F1 sword 2 focus 4 tp keep blinds up to keep blinds up, and for skills i’d use sword hammer and either bow or shield depending on location.

This is theory crafting havn’t actually used this build yet. should work in Dungeon and i will test it today maybe. hope this helped

with a full spirit weapon build there is no stun breaks or stability which can cause some problems in certain encounters.

edit: no swiftness either

Swiftness not need stability in f3 and 3rd utility can always be swap out if you really need a stun break eg Lupi. In general using 3 weapons would be fine since you have a party of 5 and most guardians run shouts and we are all over PvE.

Wukunlin.8461:

with a full spirit weapon build there is no stun breaks or stability which can cause some problems in certain encounters.

edit: no swiftness either

Stability, no, but you do have a stun break in the shield active. Want swiftness? take a staff >.>

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_%28shield%29
And if you’re good enough with blocks you can circumvent the need for stability at least 50% of the time. Those other 50% though, you’re playing with chance. I’m not saying the spirit weapon build works fine, because it doesn’t at all, but it can still be fun and semi-viable in the hands of a very skilled player.

The buff to the zeal trait “wrathful spirits” gives spirit weapons a significant damage boost. Combined with your own dps and two other sources of dps, guardian can take stuff down fast. But there is a problem as CMF mentions, spirit weapons have very limited duration and health.

What this basically translates to is that you are traiting for something that is only partially there. Leaving you extremely vunerable while they are down. If spirit weapons lasted until they were killed and had the amount of hp ranger spirits have. I’d say absolutely they are worth having.

The down time of spirit weapons is just too severe to consider a viable option in pve and pvp.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Wukunlin.8461:

with a full spirit weapon build there is no stun breaks or stability which can cause some problems in certain encounters.

edit: no swiftness either

Stability, no, but you do have a stun break in the shield active. Want swiftness? take a staff >.>

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_%28shield%29
And if you’re good enough with blocks you can circumvent the need for stability at least 50% of the time. Those other 50% though, you’re playing with chance. I’m not saying the spirit weapon build works fine, because it doesn’t at all, but it can still be fun and semi-viable in the hands of a very skilled player.

that stun break must’ve been added in that recent patch o_O

I find it more efficacious to trait for spirit weapon cooldowns than duration for that very reason. If they’re just gonna die anyway, you might as well speed the cooldown instead.

They can be healed though, so you can kind of mitigate their squish factor by running them in healing builds. Something like 30/25/0/15/0 for Selfless Daring + some Healing Power gear and a mace might help with the uptime.

Which kind of ties into what I think the original idea of spirit weapons was.

On release, the default pvp build for guardians when you went into the mists was a heal centric build with I think spirit sword. The lack of damag eyou have directly is made up by the spirit weapon.

As foodfad mentioned, you can heal them now, so having an AE heal build with mace and staff lets you buff them with empower, keep them fighting with heals, and let you spec for defense while they do your offense.

Problem is, it still isn’t enough and they are squishy.

And yes, they patched the spirit weapons with the same patch that gave us condition damage with power on zeal grandmaster. That changed it so they had more stun breaks in different utilities to provide more “build variation”….which hasn’t happened yet.

(skills that gained stun break with that patch)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_Judgment

(patch that introduced those skills and other changes made at that time)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/June_2013#Guardian

I have used the 20/0/0/30/10 (there is 10 points to put where you want) build that someone reccomended in SPVP and it works pretty well in pick up games. I was suprised that the 30 points in honour seemed to work significantly.

I’m actually hoping that some day they make spirit weapons function like Necromancer pets, except keeping the fact that they die untraited on the weapon’s secondary skill use. There is absolutely no reason not to do that now that they can be targeted. I can’t imagine why they have left them they way they are for so very long. I’d play a Guardian if only the Spirit Weapons had a longer (unlimited) duration, OR more HP/returned to being untargetable, OR had a more useful skill spread or usage (why not make bow heal at the guardian’s location or at a Ground targeted location?). I don’t even want all these things, just one of them to make them at least worth something. I so desperately want to like this profession as I like playing buffers/supporters/healers, but I want to be able to summon, too, and Necromancer/Mesmer just do it better right now.

I’m with Ramiah on this one, I wrote down all the issues spirit weapons are plagued by some 2 months ago here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Shield-of-the-Avenger-Improvements/2078620

I think SotA is already good enough so we can ignore it which leaves us with the sword, hammer and bow in need of a fix. On top of that they all share two major issues:
1. AI
- Ever wondered why that kitten BoT and SotA doesn’t stay by your side and charge mindlessly at the enemy despite they can’t attack at all? I guess someone in the dev team was too lazy to create a pure support NPC AI script. They didn’t even bother to fix the actual one they use, hence the “run to target > stop > swing > miss > wait for attack cooldown and run after it again” pattern SoJ and HoW use.

2. survivability
- Now here we stand in front of a whole lot of problems. Combining their limited duration with durability of a wet paper and rather long cooldowns even the stun breaker on SotA isn’t going to see much use, because it has to be already summoned (1.5s cast time, 30s duration, 48s cooldown) and the command can be used twice at most (12s cooldown) and it can be easily killed in under 3 seconds unless your enemy goes ranged. This results in a great dilema – “Will I cast the shield now so I have the command ready and risk it to run out of time before actual combat or will I try to cast it during combat and risk to be denied to do so?”

When ANet made them targetable they claimed that it will also make them a subject to support skills (boons, heals, etc.). While this is true I still think it was just a quick baked argument they threw in to cover the obvious nerf a bit, because in order to support them, you can only go virtues or symbols (which I prefer because of Zeal synergy and virtues requiring you to take additional traits in other lines you simply can’t get to). Shouts are out of question as they occupy utility slots as well.

Then there is also a problem with trait allocation, it’s too spread out, but I think that would be a subject for a discussion after the previous two issues are fixed.

While I actually like to run my 30/0/0/30/10 full cleric SW build as it seem to work with my playstyle the best, it’s just the two issues I mentioned here and rather high vulnerability to conditions and CC make it often really frustrating especially in WvW and high level PvE.

If they simply had a trait like the necro minion trait for 50% increased hp I think it would make all the difference in the world. Wouldn’t make them op, but would keep them from dying from a strong breeze. Also, I think the spirit bow, with it’s longer cd, and the fact it doesn’t actually attack enemies, only removes debuffs from you/heals a small amount in an area, it should be reverted back to no HP bar. It makes no sense for a non-combat entity to be killable. It’s condition removal is slow, it’s heals are “meh”, they’re good cover heals to top off, that’s about it. It’s not going to save you from dying in a pinch.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

If they simply had a trait like the necro minion trait for 50% increased hp I think it would make all the difference in the world. Wouldn’t make them op, but would keep them from dying from a strong breeze. Also, I think the spirit bow, with it’s longer cd, and the fact it doesn’t actually attack enemies, only removes debuffs from you/heals a small amount in an area, it should be reverted back to no HP bar. It makes no sense for a non-combat entity to be killable. It’s condition removal is slow, it’s heals are “meh”, they’re good cover heals to top off, that’s about it. It’s not going to save you from dying in a pinch.

It would HAVE to be a 30 Virtue trait.

There’s this build I used to love to play which was 100% spirit weapons and 100% symbols.

I abandoned it since it’s not as good as others in wvw.

But for a dungeon crawling build it’s pretty fun and good. Basically symbols are big, last long and are benefitial for your team (they heal bigtime) and bad for the enemy (big damage and applies vulnerability). And your allies will be shooting cleansing bolts all the time so conditions won’t be an issue.
It’s not good in wvw because enemies and allies won’t clump up like in dungeons inside symbols.

Utilities are all spirit weapons since the rest of the traits magically fit there. It’s fun to play and great in dungeons. You’ll enjoy it.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=V8;4RFF80X3sGF90;9;4T;0T959A;42694;9;530Fi0-c1UtZ9el-sWv1-Z5_B5;9;9;9;9;9;9;7VB-6q.

I would totally play that full-on Spirit Weapon / Symbol build if I wasn’t so stuck on having 20 in Radiance for the Virtue of Justice traits. But I just love spamming blinding Virtue of Justice against groups of enemies way too much, and VoJ is another thing that works really well with Spirit Weapons now.

So my Spirit Weapon / Symbol build runs mostly the same traits as yours, minus 10 from Honor and Zeal into Radiance. I’ve considered dropping 5 from Radiance (since the trait I REALLY want is Renewed Justice and VoJ almost makes A Fire Within redundant except for Sword / Hammer / Shield AoE against groups) to put another 5 into Zeal to grab the increased symbol damage, but haven’t really toyed around with it much yet.

I noticed you did not take A Fire Inside from Radiance. That was considered Mandatory not just a couple months ago. Has it really changed so much?