User:Masel/Builds/Willbender

Pistol + Torch Condition Willbender

Build Rating (Subjective)

Criterion	Rating
Burst Damage	4/5
Sustained Damage	4/5
Utility Options	4/5
Survivability	3/5
Difficulty	1/5

Condition Willbender has a very simple-to-learn rotation and is lots of fun to play in open world. It has good burst damage for a condition build, since it mainly relies on  Burning. It has access to a lot of mobility via its Virtues and lots of utility built-in, making it an excellent choice for beginner Guardian players in instanced content and open world PvE.

Link to the DPS Build in the Build Editor:

DPS Build

Link to the OW Build in the Build Editor:

OW Build

Playstyle + Skills

Skill Type	Skills
Virtues
Pistol + Torch
Scepter
Utility

Playstyle

Guardians evolve around Virtues and - as the name implies - are excellent support builds for allies. While they are great at supporting allies around them via  Aegis,  Stability, condition cleanses and other boons, they have relatively low amounts of passive defense for themselves and a low amount of health. On top of that, they have relatively few native mobility options.

Virtues

• Willbender alter Virtues by making them mobility-based and lowering their cooldowns.
• As a trade-off, the virtues will only provide their passive effects for their duration, like the periodical  Burning from   Rushing Justice and healing from   Flowing Resolve.
• You can have multiple virtues active at the same time!
• On willbender, the virtues will place Willbender Flames on the ground in different shapes, dealing damage and applying  Burning when using  Searing Pact.
•   Rushing Justice should be maintained as much as possible, as it applies  Burning every few attacks and is responsible for massive amounts of damage. With  Permeating Wrath, it applies to up to five targets and triggers every three attacks. With  Alacrity, it will have a cooldown of 8 1/4 seconds, allowing you to keep this up almost 100%. It will apply a Light Aura to you, reducing incoming condition damage by 10% for 4 seconds.
•   Flowing Resolve and   Crashing Courage are excellent tools for defense and mobility.
•   Flowing Resolve will heal you every few attacks and includes an Evade window, so you can use it to dodge incoming attacks. It will also give you  Vigor when using  Restorative Virtues and  Regeneration when using  Virtues. It will further cleanse  Chilled,  Immobile and  Crippled, which is a great side-effect for open world!
•   Crashing Courage grants  Aegis and  Stability every few attacks, allowing you to block attacks and ignore incoming Control effects. It is a Shadowstep, teleporting you to the target location. It will also grant  Protection when using  Virtues.

 Restorative Virtues

• This trait is important, as it changes how often you can use damaging weapon skills, such as  Zealot's Flame,   Zealot's Fire and   Symbol of Ignition.
• Every time a Virtue triggers, it reduces the cooldowns of your active weapon abilities by 1/4 second.
• Combined with   Rushing Justice, this trait makes condition willbender scale more heavily with  Quickness, as it increases the pace of hits applied to enemies.
• Through this, even pure power weapons become great options when they apply many hits in quick succession (e.g. Greatsword with   Whirling Wrath).

Weapon Skills

•   Through the Heart is a strong auto attack chain that applies  Bleeding. This allows you to trigger Relic of the Fractal reliably.
•   Peacekeeper is a strong ranged skill that applies lots of  Burning.
•   Symbol of Ignition is a Symbol that also applies  Burning. This seems like a pure melee skill at first as it places a Symbol on your position, but it has two functionalities: if an enemy stands inside it and you hit that enemy, it will apply  Burning. If you shoot a projectile through the symbol, it will make that projectile apply  Burning. Those two effects share a cooldown, so you can do one or the other. But this way, the skill works both at range and in melee range as long as you stay close to your symbol.
•   Zealot's Flame and   Zealot's Fire apply a lot of  Burning on both casts. The first cast is instant, allowing you to use it at any time. Once you activate the first, you have 3 seconds to use the second cast. Always use both casts, as using the second does NOT cancel the pulsing  Burning from the first.
•   Cleansing Flame is no significant damage increase over auto attacks, so we are not using this as part of the regular rotation. It can be used to cleanse Conditions off of allies. Note that the cleanse does not apply to yourself, making it lackluster in solo gameplay.

Utility Skills

Skill Choice	Notes
Litany of Wrath	Insanely strong heal, as it heals you for 33% of all damage you deal. With a bunch of burning stacks ticking on enemies, this will make you basically immortal for its duration, so that you only need to survive the 14 seconds of downtime until it becomes available again. In instanced content, it allows you to pump through high incoming damage (e.g. Gorseval the Multifarious's Ghastly Rampage).
Whirling Light	Great for Damage, applies a bunch of  Burning stacks.
Purging Flames	Insanely strong ground area-of-effect ability that applies  Burning and cleanses conditions off of allies. Always use on cooldown.
Signet of Wrath	This is just there for the passive condition damage it grants. You can use it to apply  Immobile, but try to prioritize other ways of applying Defiance bar damage.
Heaven's Palm	Strong skil for Defiance bar damage, always keep it for that purpose. Note that the damage and Knockdown can be easily canceled by other skills if you press them too early during its animation. Be careful and wait until the Defiance bar damage applied!

Rotation Concept

• The rotation concept is very simple: camp Pistol & Torch and win. Precast 2x   Flowing Resolve and   Crashing Courage for stacks of   Lethal Tempo.

Then use the following skills on cooldown:

1.   Rushing Justice is priority #1, as explained above.
2.   Purging Flames
3.   Symbol of Ignition
4.   Zealot's Flame &   Zealot's Fire
5.   Peacekeeper
6.   Whirling Light

CC Skills for Breakbar Damage

•   Heaven's Palm
• You can use an offhand Pistol for an additional Knockback via   Jurisidiction. This has a very low damage trade-off.
• Immobilized via  Signet of Wrath

Gear

Important Stats (descending in Importance):

1. 100%  Burning Duration
2. ~30% Overall Condition duration
3. Maximize Condition Damage

• Since the vast majority of damage comes from  Burning, it is important to reach 100% condition duration on it.

Gear

Armor	Prefix	Rune
Head	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Shoulders	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Chest	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Gloves	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Legs	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Boots	Sinister	Superior Rune of Balthazar
Trinket	Prefix
Amulet	Viper's
Ring 1	Viper's
Ring 2	Viper's
Accessory 1	Sinister
Accessory 2	Viper's
Backpack	Viper's
Weapon	Prefix	Sigil
Pistol (Main Hand)	Viper's	Superior Sigil of Earth
Torch (Off Hand)	Viper's	Superior Sigil of Bursting
Scepter (Main Hand)	Viper's	Superior Sigil of Earth
Purpose	Item Type	Source
Damage	Ascended Food	Cilantro and Cured Meat Flatbread
Damage	Non-Ascended Food	Plate of Beef Rendang
Survivability	Ascended Food	Peppered Cured Meat Flatbread
Survivability	Non-Ascended Food	Oysters Gnashblade
Damage	Utility	Toxic Focusing Crystal
Survivability	Utility	Potion Of Karka Toughness
Damage	Relic	Relic of the Fractal

• For a budget variant, simply replace all armor pieces of Viper's with rare/exotic Ritualist's and all ascended Sinister with rare/exotic Carrion. For the backpack, you can use a Crafter's backpack of the highest tier and select either Celestial or Rabid.
• Ascended gear is always ideal, but exotic gear is fine for everything aside from higher-tier fractals.

Traits

Radiance
Virtues
Willbender

Radiance

• Radiance massively increases the damage you deal via  Burning and and increases Critical chance by around 19%.
• Through  Amplified Wrath, it extends the duration of  Burning you apply via by   Rushing Justice and further extends the damage of  Burning by 10%.
• With a Torch equipped,  Radiant Fire will activate another instance of   Zealot's Flame on critical hits, with a cooldown of 10 seconds. That allows you to cast   Zealot's Fire a second time. The cooldown on this is not affected by  Restorative Virtues, causing the casts of  Radiant Fire and  Zealot's Flame to diverge eventually.
•  Renewed Justice refreshes   Rushing Justice whenever something you damaged dies, allowing you to use it more frequently on encounters with adds.

Virtues

• It gives 180 condition damage and increases the frequency of  Burning applied by   Rushing Justice, making it trigger on every third hit and burning in an area.
•  Master of Consecrations increases the duration of   Purging Flames by 2 seconds, increasing both the total stacks of  Burning and number of conditions cleansed.
•  Inspired Virtue grants  Might,  Regeneration and  Protection on casting the respective Virtue and gives 1% increased Strike damage for each unique Boon you have.
•  Inspiring Virtue grants 10% Strike damage whenever you actviate a Virtue.

Willbender

• Willbender increases your condition damage by 120 and makes your Willbender Flames apply  Burning on hit.
•  Restorative Virtues is covered in a dedicated section above.
•  Lethal Tempo increases all damage dealt when Virtues are activated or when their effects trigger, requiring you to maintain at least one of them to benefit from the increased damage.
• The grandmaster trait  Tyrant's Momentum reduces the duration of   Lethal Tempo, but increases its potency. Therefore, it is even more important to maintain   Rushing Justice to keep it up.

DPS Rotation Showcase

You can find my most recent rotation showcase here.

Open World Build

Note that this build still uses scepter instead fo pistol; the playstyle and build doesnt change aside from that weapon choice, so you an use it the same way as before! You can find my most recent open world build showcase here.

Increasing Survivability

For OW, it can make sense to make a build more forgiving, so that you can sustain on your own.

• The first major step to increase survivability versus bosses is to stay on Pistol. That allows you to deal damage from range so you can kite dangerous enemies instead of facetanking their damage. You will have to go into melee for   Rushing Justice periodically.
• Staying alive on condi guradian builds is made easier by   Litany of Wrath, which heals you based on your damage dealt. If you have a bunch of burning stacks on the enemy, this will keep you alive for its duration. As pointed out above, it boils down to surviving the downtimes of   Litany of Wrath.
• On willbender, we’ll kinda violate the “no gear change” rule. That is because changing the body armor to something more survivable on guardian is very cheap, as you don’t have to rely on a lot of Viper's gear to optimize your stats.
• The second step to increase survivability on this build is to get an exotic set of rabid or dire armor very cheap. Just look for "Galrath" and buy a full set of exotic rabid armor for the price listed below:

Item	Trading post
	Buy	Sell
Galrath's Helm	…	…
Galrath's Pauldrons	…	…
Galrath's Chestguard	…	…
Galrath's Gauntlets	…	…
Galrath's Legplates	…	…
Galrath's Greaves	…	…
Total	…	…

• Then put a second set of   Superior Rune of Balthazar on it, which costs only … per piece.
• Use the survivability food and utility item listed above for -10% damage taken and 150 Toughness.
• You can also decide to change your amulet to Celestial or Trailblazer, as you can get it cheap via Candy Corn Orichalcum Amulet, respectively. Make sure to put a Black Diamond or Chunk of Petrified Echovald Resin on the amulet, as it natively includes Berserker's on the upgrade.
• Make use of   Flowing Resolve for an Evade and   Crashing Courage for  Aegis and  Stability.

Boon Coverage

•  Holy Reckoning in  Willbender,  Inspired Virtue in  Virtues and  Inner Fire in  Radiance help covering  Might and  Fury on yourself.
•   Crashing Courage,  "Save Yourselves!" and Relic of Durability will maintain a good uptime on  Protection, drastically reducing the amount of strike damage you take.
• You will also natively maintain  Resolution through  "Save Yourselves!" and  Virtue of Resolution.
•  Swiftness is covered by  Righteous Sprint and  "Save Yourselves!".
• Condition Willbender has no reliable source of  Quickness. Therefore, using   Jade Tech Offensive Overcharge and   Jade Tech Defensive Overcharge will massively increase your strength in solo gameplay.
• These give for 150 additional Toughness, Vitality, Condition Damage and Power as well as all boons aside from  Stability,  Resistance and  Resolution on entering combat. These effects can be pre-stacked by using an Enchanted Snow Diamond Tonic repeatedly when out of combat. They will fully cover  Quickness and  Protection in general roaming, where you enter and exit combat frequently!
• In story instances (or if you don't want the hassle of reapplying protocols), you can abuse the synergy between Relic of the Cavalier and   Blast from the Skyscale to apply lots of  Aegis,  Resistance,  Might and  Quickness to yourself. It does not have an internal cooldown and applies the boons on every hit of   Blast.

Dealing with Incoming Conditions and Control effects

•  Absolute Resolve in  Virtues removes three conditions awhenever you use   Flowing Resolve. I recommend using this in open world, as it takes care of conditions and provides decent passive healing.
•   Flowing Resolve also removes  Chilled,  Crippled and  Immobile from you.
•   Crashing Courage applies  Stability every few hits, allowwing you to ignore incoming Control effects.
•   Purging Flames cleanses conditions on each pulse, so you can try to stay inside it.
•   "Save Yourselves!" and   Signet of Judgment are both Stun breaks that you can use on demand.