One Handed Guardian Weapon

The image above is a screen shot of my one handed sword. I’ve always preferred swords as I think of them as more elegant than the other weapons, especially for an elf. Dwarfs normally prefer axes but lets face it, there is no point trying to look elegant if you are a dwarf. In the early days of Shadows of Angmar I used a spear which had even better animations than the swords. The sweeping cut animation being particularly dramatic with the wide arc sweep of a spear. However spears fell out of favour due to their perceived lack of dps and although now they should have the same dps as all other weapons they never quite seemed to recover from their bad press.

 My sword is a prized possession considering how long it has taken me to get it into this state.  The grinding of legacies, scrolls of empowerment and relics was a torture that I never quite managed to endure as I didn’t get the level 8 relics with the big morale bonuses. A lack of luck on critical relic forging also didn’t help.

It is a general purpose weapon for use in PVE and PVP so the legacies are a bit of a compromise of the two. Before the recent updates to legendary weapons I used to have different weapons for PVE and PVP but in terms of the grinding I would need to do to get five legendary items up to scratch in the new system I’ve decided against it and will concentrate on three items, a one handed sword, a guardians belt and a two handed sword.

I’ve left it with Westernesse damage for the moment. I always used to have Beleriand damage on my weapons but Westernesse was allegedly better for Barad Guldur so I changed it for that raid. I haven’t looked up what is current rated the best damage type so I have left it as it is.

In my opinion the most important legacy available to a Guardian’s weapon is Guardian’s Pledge Cool down. Maxed out this gives a -60 second duration to the cool down of the skill. Thereby bringing the cool down to 4 minutes from 5 minutes. If you are using the full Watcher armour set, this cool down can be brought down to 3 minutes. This reason alone makes the Watcher set the best armour for general purpose game play and especially for the ettenmoors but it also gives the best morale so for me this seals the decision to use this armour set.

At 5 minutes cool down the Guardian Pledge skill was used as almost an emergency skill in reaction to a particularly difficult circumstances but with a 3 minute cool down it can almost be used with abandonment in regular game play. 3 minutes is nothing for such a powerful skill. In the ettenmoors it is usually available at any time that I am attacked.

I am not particularly happy with the Subtle Rune of the Fortress rather that a morale bonus rune but ,as I have said earlier, I did not manage to ever attain the level 8 old runes with morale bonuses so the Subtle Rune of the Fortress it is.