My main is a guardian, and like many other players I feel like they need a new ranged weapon to really round them out. As I was thinking about it, though, I realized there was another area where Guardians are a bit weak: condition damage builds. And as I thought about existing weapons, nothing really fit the style of the Guardian, so the best I could come up with was to suggest a new weapon: the short-spear.
DISCLAIMER: I did not (intentionally) steal any of this idea from anyone else. I’ve yet to read anyone come up with something like this, but I don’t doubt that someone may have already mentioned it. If you have, I apologize if I seemingly ripped off your idea, I didn’t do it knowingly. If you have come up with this before, let me know and I’ll certainly love to give you credit.
The focus of my thought was getting the idea out there, so you’ll not see mention of real damage number, condition stacks or actual cooldown values. My thought is those details will get ironed out during the balancing phase. Right now I’m just trying to generate an idea and circulate it.
I feel like the short-spear should be a one-handed weapon, and for the Guardian it should be a 900 ranged weapon. With other classes it could easily be a melee weapon, since most of them already have the ranged weapons covered.
Anyways, here’s my thoughts on how this would work for a Guardian, let me know your thoughts/improvements.
For Guardian, the short-spear focuses on mid-ranged condition damage with one or two CC effects thrown in; All skills have 900 range
Skill 1 – Chain
- Rapid Throw – no wind-up; medium damage
- Leg Shot – low wind-up; inflict bleeding (enough duration to stack during auto-attacks) and cripple (short duration, no need to stack it during auto-attacks)
- Power Throw – medium-to-high wind-up; high damage; inflict weakness (short duration, no stacking with auto-attacks)
Skill 2 – Symbol – Holy Retribution – low-to-medium wind-up; Create a symbol by marking ground with multiple spears; AoE/Targetable; Pulse damage and bleeding throughout course of symbol; unblockable (maybe, not sure about the unblockable, could make it too OP)
- Can be traited with existing traits for larger radius/longer duration/heal allies
- Important note: that this symbol does nothing for player or allies without traiting for it
Skill 3 – CC – [Need a good name] – Throw spear with such force the spear is embedded in the enemy and knocks them down; low-to-medium dmg; Knockdown effect
- If attack hits (and after a short cooldown), skill changes to a new skill for a few secs (like #2 on Guardian Staff); Retreive the embedded spear pulling the enemy toward you; This will increase the cooldown on the #3 skill (again, similar to Staff #2 skill); deals no damage, but applies pull effect
- Can be traited so that if the Throw is blocked (not evaded or missed due to blindness, ONLY blocked) the skill will inflict Torment condition; no damage will be dealt and the second skill in the chain will still not trigger
TL;DR – I think a short-spear would make a cool one-handed, 900 range weapon for Guardians that would fit their style and make condi builds viable for the class. Thoughts?