Vlast Avenger- am I missing something?

[eyestrain.3056]

In the patch notes a month or so after PoF dropped, I became curious about the newly added Vlast Avenger due to its relatively high cost (time intensive, since gathering 50 shards takes a bit of farming), so I spent a few days here and there gathering honed shards and bought one.

The item seems to be one time use only, is used immediately on purchase, and can only be purchased once per day. It's active for 15 minutes unless you die or change maps and is a projectile based bundle weapon. It is pretty strong versus most branded enemies, but unfortunately Branded Earth Elementals are some of the most common enemies in the area and they have a long lasting projectile reflecting barrier, which means if you accidentally shoot it (while firing through a group of other branded, or because the earth elementals are starting to pile up around you), you'll shoot yourself. There is a single fairly weak aoe and a melee knockback, but the rest of the skills are projectiles, which makes it slow and borderline useless against the many earth elementals.

 

There are plenty of bundle items in this game that aren't very useful, but I'm rather puzzled about the somewhat elaborate means of acquiring this one considering how relatively pointless it is. Why are there an item that exists solely to get this gun that only works in one small area of one map, which is only useful against certain enemies, and is actively dangerous to use against a large portion of those enemies? If this were meant to make clearing the renown heart and hero point faster or easier, it's a bit backwards since you'll easily finish the heart three times over before you have enough shards to purchase one gun.

The patch notes made this seem like a fun new thing to try, and I figured it would be a pretty pointless but fun OP novelty bundle, but the farming involved to get one and the amount of projectile reflect making it dangerous to use leave me wondering. Why?

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

I was hoping that it uses the ammo to fire since it implied you get a permanent version. What a waste of time. Another item with a terrible description.

[Khisanth.2948]

It was a fun item but it is still a "try once and ignore it forever" sort of thing for various reasons including the ones you mentioned. The shards are easy to get if you go hydra hunting. The biggest obstacle I found was that the slivers stop dropping once you complete the heart for the day so you have to avoid doing anything else that might give heart progress or use multiple characters. The slivers are soul bound but the shards are account bound.