What exactly do the Guardian summon weapons do?

Question

The Guardian is able to summon 4 different arcane weapons to aid him in battle. These include the Sword of Justice, The Hammer of Wisdom, The Shield of the Avenger and the Bow of Truth.

In all the cases, except the bow, the description says: "Summons an arcane (weapon) to defend you."

The bow says: "Summons an arcane bow to cure conditions on you and your allies.

The wiki doesn't do much better to elaborate exactly what it does. I have noticed that the hammer seems to be able to knock down foes and even push them back sometimes. The specifics from the sword and the shield is less noticeable so I don't quite understand what they do exactly. Can someone explain exactly what each weapon is capable of. I'm also curious how often the bow can remove conditions from my allies and me.

Please note that I am not talking about the secondary skills you can activate after you summon the weapons that will also destroy the weapon itself. I am referring to what it is capable of right after you summon it while its fighting on its own.

Because there are 4 different summoned weapons and only three non-elite slots to equip it, I am curious which of the summoned weapons are more advantageous in different situations. Knowing exactly what each weapon is capable of will go a long way in this decision.

Answer 1

I unfortunately don't have any specifics on the timing of specific abilities (such as the Bow's condition removal or each weapon's attack speed), but here's what I can tell you:

• Hammer of Wisdom auto-attacks, knocking back opponents on every third swing. Its active skill can be triggered to perform an on-demand knockdown.
• Sword of Justice auto-attacks, and can be activated to perform an AoE attack.
• Bow of Truth will automatically cure conditions on some sort of regular interval, and can be activated to create an AoE healing rain centered around the bow.
• Shield of the Avenger periodically creates a Shield of Absorption (with the same effects as the Guardian skill of the same name) centered around its location. In this video (@8:30), it appears that the first bubble is cast approximately five seconds after the shield is summoned, but that may have changed since that video was made. You can activate the shield to make it fly out (towards your current target?) and inflict Weakness on nearby enemies.
• All spirit weapons cannot be targeted or damaged by enemies.
• Activating any spirit weapon's "active ability" will destroy that weapon.
• All spirit weapons will despawn after a certain amount of time even if you don't use its active ability.
• You can have up to three spirit weapons active at a single time.