Guild Wars 2

finally settled on a profession I like the guardian yay(only took me a year) really loving the sword torch combo, totally unsure on what off weapon to use but that’s meh , been looking at skills and everything and I hardly see anyone use spirit weapons ,

Are they bad for pve? looked down on in dungeons ect? Don’t want to put all I have into making something around skills that are going to be a pain in the kitten .

I have tired to use the search function but couldn’t find anything on them, maybe its me ,perhaps there is thousands of threads about them if there are I am sorry for repeating the question

The main problem with Spirit Weapons is that they tend to die very easily in dungeons due to heavy AOE. Same story in large scale PvE events and WvW. You can kind of get around that by using a build with lots of healing and group defense. Your Spirit Weapons get healed by things like Battle Presence just as much as your player comrades. Add a Mace or Hammer and some symbol healing and they can usually stay alive, unless there’s some particularly nasty spike damage flying around.

All that said, for open world PvE they work just fine. I don’t recommend using more than one or two of them though, because for most open world content you really don’t need anything the Shield and particularly the Bow have to offer.

I also don’t recommend actually taking any of the traits for Spirit Weapons, because there are often far better traits that you could be taking in exchange.

So ultimately, it depends. But they are pretty frowned upon as being the weakest of the Guardian skill lines for the above reasons. You can make it work, but it takes more effort and you get less reward, other than the satisfaction of using a really cool skill.

Once upon a time, Spirit Weapons were invulnerable. No one used them, so Arenanet decided to nerf their health.

There have been a few fantastic guides which show how to make the most of spirit weapons but spirit weapons are so bad that the threads get deleted. I suppose anet doesn’t want anyone to suffer.

They are bad for serious play. But they can be lots of fun. Sadly people in this subforum dont like us having fun and decided to get the relevant threads deleted. Anyway heres some vids demonstrating the power of spirit weapons.

haviz POV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ootwqKs9ki4
Dub POV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJMS-zBvlB8

Thanks, completely unsure of them even if they do seem be a use for the lvl time at least.
I’ll look into the other skills find ones that suit me

once again thank you for the replys

It’s too bad they’re so weak compared to the other guardian skills because they were what makes the guardian unique.

In my humble opinion ANet destroyed any viable use of Spirit Weapons when they removed the immortality.

When they were still immortal for the duration a Spirit Guardian was a rare sight as the build was very weak overall (due to the traits being all over the place). I believe I actually was one of the few who tried to make it work on my server.

Then ANet decided it would be a good idea to remove the immortality, making Spirit Weapons completely useless.

So then I was forced to change and made a Shout build with AH+PoV and survivability increased tenfold! Makes you wonder why the Spirit Weapons were nerfed so ridiculously in the first place as they were already pretty useless to begin with.

But yeah, nobody saw that nerf coming and as to this date I still have no clue what the devs were smoking at the time to push through with that change.

I guess it was a case of “Promoting build diversity by killing build diversity”

Yeah I really liked Spirit Weapons back in the day. They did need a change, though – they were super exploitable. You could channel the cast, go through a tower gate in WvW, finish casting outside, and run back in and have 45 seconds of unkillable harassment against anyone attacking the gate. It was absurd and there was no counter to it because it was immune to CC and damage. Nasty nasty. You could also sometimes straight up summon it through walls.

Spirit weapons are ONLY even remotely useful in SPvP, where you can defend a node against an attacker with them. Though, that’s about as far as it goes in my opinion. Their health and damage are pitiful and their cooldowns are few too long for what they do. They also require a huge chunk of your skillpoints to be traited and leave you with little room elsewhere.