I've wondered about this with a bard character of mine and now I have a guiding blade swashbuckler that is making me wonder again.
The guiding blade can hand out teamwork feats like candy on Halloween. He can do it as a standard action for the first six levels, and at seventh level it becomes a swift action.
The ability says you now "can" do it as a swift action. My question is: "Must" you do it as a swift action? Could you instead choose to use the ability the old fashioned slow standard action way? There are a lot of things that use swift actions and the action economy of the swift action can get pretty precious. I know that in general you can't swap out a move or standard action for a swift action, but this seems like a possible exception.
The next question I have: If you can use either a swift or standard action to activate the ability, can you activate it more than once in a round. The guiding blade ability states that it can be activated multiple times to hand out multiple feats. So, could a 7th level guiding blade start by handing out a teamwork feat with a standard action, and then hand out another as a swift action?
1. Per the "can" text, the action used is the guiding blade's choice.
2. Yup.