Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing around with guardian builds recently and took a close look at BoT for the first time, traited correctly you can get ten conditions removed over 30 seconds plus an aoe heal. Yet I almost never see people use it, is there some huge flaw to it that I’m not aware of?

If we are talking dungeons it’s because it’s not needed and there are far better utilities with shorter cool downs. The bow requires party members to stand within it’s aoe when activating the special. Cleanses are also easily accessible through traits.

Bow of Truth is mechanically awful, as well as being balanced poorly. Essentially what happens is, when you summon the bow it fires an arrow every five seconds or so which cleanses one condition and heals a small amount. However, it picks a random target, whether or not that target has a condition or needs healing at all. So for the entire duration of the skill, you may very well not actually cleanse a single person.

Furthermore, the bow’s Command skill is a point blank AOE centered on the bow. What that means is that most of the time the bow is going to be in the wrong place whenever you want to actually use the heal.

Neither the bow’s default “attack” nor the Command skill scale with healing power.

If the bow were smarter about who it hit, and the Command skill was targettable, and it scaled with healing power, then Bow might be useful. But as it stands it’s really crappy. In my opinion, tied for worst skill with Signet of Mercy.

I think the biggest issues with it at the moment are the facts that:
1. The heal doesn’t scale with healing power. So it doesn’t really have a place in healing builds.
2. The AoE active is not targetable, so not only is it restricted to close-ranged situations, it isn’t very flexible when someone needs that healing who’s far away from you, and it can also force you into uncomfortable positions just to make sure the AoE is on the right spot.
3. Since the bow is entirely a defensive ability, it doesn’t get affected by a lot of the spirit weapon traits, so it doesn’t fit in spirit weapon builds either.

Personally 1 and 2 are the biggest issues for me.

I really like the idea behind the skill and the potential to what it could be, but I just think that ArenaNet did a really, really bad job at the execution for the ability.

There is one more and very important problem – AI. It uses the same AI as any other summon which makes it charge at your enemies despite not having any offensive ability at all. Shield of the Avenger also suffers from this AI deficit, but its abilities at least make up for it unlike BoT’s random condition cleansing and PBAoE command.

Hold the Line converts 1 condition (with the option of also removing another one) off 5 people every somethin like 24 seconds, heals for 2k+ and gives protection.

styx.7294:

Hold the Line converts 1 condition (with the option of also removing another one) off 5 people every somethin like 24 seconds, heals for 2k+ and gives protection.

Not natively. You have to go into Pure of Voice to get the condition convert. Also, the healing is 780 health, not 2k+

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

styx.7294:

Hold the Line converts 1 condition (with the option of also removing another one) off 5 people every somethin like 24 seconds, heals for 2k+ and gives protection.

Not natively. You have to go into Pure of Voice to get the condition convert. Also, the healing is 780 health, not 2k+

I just assume it’s best to compare skills with their trait support.

Hm, is that what the heal is? Posted at work so couldn’t check the number. Sorry for the error.