Does anyone actually use these?
I personally love the play-style of being able to have a heap of spirit weapons fly around me and cause havoc but the actual use and power they have is so varied and gimmicky that I just never stick with it in the long run. I tried it out in PvP, WvW and PvE and sometimes it works nicely, but generally, it’s not worth the trade-off and I can do better with other builds.
I’ll try summarising my findings in 4 points:
- You need to sink a big load of trait points into these for them to be of any use. While that’s true for some other skills too, spirit weapons are generally completely useless unless you’ve upgraded them with all possible traits. Most skills such as shouts and certainly meditations become better with just a few traits. Spirit weapons need all these traits to be decent, that’s what I find the distinct difference. The most powerful aspect of the spirit weapons is their unique ability. Having them vanish when using it, is such a drawback that you simply must trait into them, otherwise they just hog your utility slot and do nothing but tickle people when used.
- Overal damage. They attack rather slowly and even traited, the damage they cause isn’t exactly high, even with the 50%. They can cause burning, which increases your damage by 10% if you’ve traited for it but really, in terms of flat out damage, they’re not very useful. A valid argument would be that you can have four up at once so the damage spike would be too big if they all had big damage. Still, there are utility combo’s already in the game that do exactly that. Meditations for example can spike my damage so high that I can use it to quickly kill somebody before they realise I teleported.
Overall, this isn’t so much of a problem. They do stick around a fair amount of time – again, if traited – so they eventually deal good damage if not destroyed. I just feel the 50% increase in damage should not be a trait.
- Varied utility. The sword and hammer generally work to smack down an enemy and deal AoE damage but the shield and the bow are designed to impair enemies and heal you and your allies. I understand that you need some of this and some of that for a build to work but it feels odd that you’d put so many points into Radiance and Zeal and invest in pure damage to then have two of your spirit weapons not be damage orientated at all. The variation is nice but you can’t really use the shield or the bow in other – more support orientated – builds because without traits, they’re more or less worthless and other healing skills simply out-do them, such as shouts.
- Cast time. Now this could be just me, but I feel this is the kind of thing there should be a trait for, to make the cast instant. I’ve seen them destroyed in combat quite often and when I summon a new one, I often take quite a bit of damage while casting. Moreso when I have to resummon multiple ones. It’s okay in bigger fights but in duals, you can bet the other guy isn’t going to waste his opportunity for big damage while you’re busy waving your hands. It’s not a biggy, and again, it could be just me but it feels like this would be a better thing to make a trait for than: Spirit Weapons deal 50% more damage, which they should probably do without that trait.
I’d really like to see more people make or use spirit weapon builds but I almost never see anyone use them. I’ve seen them once or twice in PvP but those are mostly gimmicky builds and I’ve never really seen them in WvW or PvE content. I wondered why that is but I think it’s simply because compared to other builds guardians can have, nobody feels spirit weapons is worth the investement.
This isn’t meant as QQ. I love the balance guardians currently have going for them overall and I’d like to commend the Anet team for making the classes so diverse and more or less equal in power. I’d just like to see this heavily underused line of utility skills brought to the forefront somehow and become something we see more often.