Guild Wars 2

I think Spitit weapons and symbols don’t work well together. However, the Zeal line improves both and thus the improvement for one type is wasted.

Spirit weapons focus on range. While the sword and the bow may work in melee the hammer knocks your target out of melee and the shield only works if you are at range.

The Zeal line has Adapt, Master and Grandmaster major traits to improve spirit weapons. However, all minor traits improve symobls and symbols focus on melee combat.

Staff uses a Symbol that is ground targeted and thus can be used at range.

Sword and Greatsword both have gap closers that cause blind which can help to negate knockback (Also large enemies such as champions and bosses have Defiant which severely reduces the effect of crowd control such as knockbacks)

Also just because the trait line has minor traits that affect Symbols, doesn’t mean you have to pick the Spirit Weapon traits or that you have to use Symbols any more than necessary or that you even have to use the Hammer of Wisdom.

I wouldn’t say spirit weapons are primarily for ranged combat. You can cast them and make them chase people, but their speed is very slow. They work best when you have people cornered or hindered in some way, and since if you are using spirit weapons you’re likely using an offensive build, you should bring melee weapons that give you better damage than the ranged ones.

Heinel.6548:

you should bring melee weapons

In my opinion spirit weapons don’t work well if you use melee weapons because:
The shield dosen’t protect you if you and your enemy are under the dome shield. The hammer knocks the enemy away from you.

While the movement option of the (Great)sword allows you to close range quickly, that makes combat more complicated and the hammer seems to knock back multiple enemies in different directions, thus you can only follow one of them which reduces your damage output.

Of course I don’ need to use symobls but than alle the benifits of the minor traits in zeal are wasted.

Neither of those are short comings of melee weapons.

The shield primarily shield the guardian from kiters, who will themselves be trying to gain range superiority on you. It covers the weakness of melee weapons and allow you to move in without taking initial fire, which is all the advantage a ranged user has against you. Once you catch up to them they’re dead. (If you are PvE, you are suppose to stand at the edge of the shield)

The hammer similarly is a control weapon. It’s primary purpose is to relieve pressure, which you’ll likely get a lot of if you are in melee range. The damage is really just a side bonus, its attack cycles are too long for the damage to be relevant. If you are using the hammer offensively, it’s command ability is a knock down, not a knock back. It helps you pin down your target, disables it and add to your spike. This coupled with the hard hitting abilities from melee weapons is the guardian’s bull’s charge + 100 blades.

Now, of course, if you are primarily a ranged type of user or your build is glass cannon, fighting at range with spirit weapons is a viable choice. However, to say spirit weapons do not work with melee makes no sense.

Mh what I’m trying to say is (considering only PvE):
Symobls are effective if your enemies and you stay in them the whole time. The Hammer of Wisdom knocks enemies out of symobls and in turn force you to follow them to stay in melee range.

If I improve my spirit weapons I need to spec in the zeal line and take major traits. When doing so I have no choice but taking the minor traits as well which improve symobls.

Now if I use my trait improved Hammer of Wisdom it makes my improved Symobls less efffective.

The same is true for the Shield of the Avenger since you don’t want your enemies stay in melee range and thus in the symbol since this implies that your enemies is inside the dome shield and thus the shield is pointless.

Hence I think having minor traits for symbols in a trait line with major traits that improve spirit weapons is not a good idea because you can’t maximise the effectivness of one type of skills.

The symbols only last 3 seconds, and even if you don’t knock people back, they will move away from it themselves…

Heinel.6548:

The symbols only last 3 seconds, and even if you don’t knock people back, they will move away from it themselves…

Symbols last longer than 3s. In PvE npcs don’t move away.

Spirit weapons have problems. Symbols are okay, but their trait placement is a problem.

Symbols don’t do so well offensively in PvP. However, the Zeal trait line has 3 minor traits that all deal with symbols, which devalues the trait line. I would recommend removing at least one of them or making them more useful such as making the “symbols are larger” into a higher tier minor trait.

Spirit weapons have lots of issues. The AI still needs work. The shield and bow don’t work so well when you’re mobile. The hammer’s knockback makes using melee weapons frustrating. In addition to that, to make spirit weapons viable, you need to take a lot of traits that often don’t help you out besides improving the spirit weapons. At minimum, I would suggest making the command ability not destroy the spirit weapon. However, the base cooldown on the command would be doubled and add a trait to halve the command cooldown. That makes the trait less necessary but still useful.

Symbols are problematic in that if you are moving you do not get the benefit out of them, and if the target is moving they are not affected to full duration as well.

Stationary PvE style fights gain more benefit out of symbols than a PvP fight. Not to say symbols are worthless in PvP, just not as effective in a majority of fights. Bunker style point protection uses symbols fairly well.

Spirit weapons are pretty unique. The sword and hammer do fixed damage that can only be increased by the traits, so for builds with low damaging stats such as power/crit/crit damage, these can help provide extra damage to “keep up” with everyone else.

Also for builds that are higher on damage they provide just that extra push if you really want them.

Hammer is great control and CC. Sure it sucks having the target get knocked around but it is really easy to walk over to them and continue to beat them while they are down.

Shield is highly effective in stopping ranged attacks and the weakness debuff it can do bounces between multiple targets, so it is good at melee damage mitigation in groups as well. I am not 100% sure but I think ranged attacks within the shield are still prevented from landing also.

The bow is often overlooked but still pretty strong in certain scenarios. The healing it does is not affected by healing power, but it can provide fairly good healing over time without needing to dip into healing power at all. Also the condition removal it provides is a nice passive, but I wish I fired off more frequently or to the whole group at once at least.

Now to the original topic, they don’t work well together. I agree that the placement of spirit weapons in the zeal line that increases power an awkward choice. The default guardian build in sPvP that you are given when you first go into the mists has a staff/mace/shield build that focuses on symbols for defensive measure and spirit weapons for offensive measures, so that is possibly what they were trying to imply.

Having defensive symbols and offensive spirit weapons?