Herald - Spear Condi Shiro

Part of the current metagame

Our curator decided this build is in the current metagame regardless of rating. The community gave this build a rating, making it top-tier: Great

Focused on: Hybrid damage

Designed for: PvP Conquest

Expansions required:

Difficulty:

Normal

This build was last updated on November 24, 2024 and is up to date for the October 8, 2024 patch.

Overview

A high damage Condition Herald build for PvP, built around the recently introduced Revenant Spear.

Skill Bar

Spear

Mace/Shield

Utility

Utility

Skill Variants

Weapons

• You could play Staff instead of Mace/Shield for a more defensive setup. Take Shining Aspects on Herald.

Template Code

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Equipment

Spear

Sigil

Sigil

Mace

Shield

Sigil

Sigil

Rune

Amulet

Relic

Equipment Variants

Runes

• Rune of Dolyak - extra tankiness.

• Rune of Orr - high damage rune that also offers defense against conditions.

Relics

• Relic of the Demon Queen - further reduces enemy healing.

• Relic of the Zephyrite - defensive option, goes well with the Glint elite for instant activation.

Usage

General

• Invoking a legend resets energy to 50, procs various traits such as Invoking Torment or Spiritual Reckoning, and could even trigger the sigils of your active weapon set (if they are not on CD) among other things. Swapping legends is basically the main resource management tool in the build - swap whenever you're out of CDs or low on energy.

• Start on Dragon stance (Glint) and while still in the base activate the following 4 upkeep skills for party buffing:
  • Facet of Nature (use its active when your energy is about to hit 0)
  • Facet of Elements
  • Facet of Strength
  • Facet of Darkness

• Swapping legends deactivates the upkeep skills of that legend without sending them on full CD.

• Facet of Darkness is one of the most versatile and strongest skills in the build:
  • Gaze of Darkness is a cheap stun breaker and one of the few skills in the game that can reveal stealthed targets.
  • The Blind from Gaze can be used to avoid powerful attacks without wasting dodges, and can help you stomp warriors / revenants / engineers / rangers by blinding their downed CC. Even mesmers can be stomped with a little luck because of the AoE reveal.
  • If you're Blinded while channeling Chaotic Release you can use Gaze of Darkness at the last moment before the skill finishes its animation - in this case Gaze of Darkness will miss instead of your elite.

• Chaotic Release can be used to knock downed opponents away from their rezzing teammates, or to knock them off of capture points - this allows you to take the cap while bleeding them out, delaying their respawn.

• Upkeep skills continue to provide their bonuses for a few seconds after their chain skills have been used up.

• Shiro's quite good at chasing targets due to Phase Traversal. This can even be used as a mobility tool when moving between capture points, provided that you can lock onto a target. The unblockable attacks coupled with Quickness make this especially great at initiating fighs and immediately putting pressure on enemies, but the high cost can often force you to swap to Glint for an energy refill shortly after.

Damage

• Both weapon sets and both legends have great offensive capabilities.

• Legendary Assassin Stance (Shiro) is mainly for single target. Enchanted Daggers and Impossible Odds can either be used to deliver burst damage or even to boost the damage of your filler attacks like the Spear auto Abyssal Fire while all your other skills are on CD, or if you want to stay in range.
  • Maintaining Impossible Odds costs quite a lot of energy, use it only for a few seconds at a time when you're sure that you can keep landing hits.

• True Nature (Assassin) when used on Shiro is a cheap and strong AoE skill with boon removal. The passive bonus lingers for a few seconds, giving you armor ignoring damage procs.

• Legendary Dragon Stance (Glint) brings midrange AoE pressure to the table. Using some of your upkeep skills just to follow up with their chain skill is a perfectly fine thing to do, and Elemental Blast + Burst of Strength provide decent damage even from range. These are also extremely cheap, so you can weave them into burst combos anytime.

• Mace is fairly simple, just use Searing Fissure ⇒ Echoing Eruption in this order (for Might stacking) whenever you can.

• The spear autoattack automatically flips between melee and ranged versions depending on your distance to the target.

• Spear is built around Abyssal Raze.
  • The skill becomes more powerful the more you use it (you can see the stacks above the right side if your skill bar), and swapping weapons at 3 stacks of AR does an AoE attack.
  • It has multiple charges and you should never sit at max charges for too long, so keep using this as much as possible.
  • Every other Spear skill reduces its CD by a certain amount.
  • It'd make sense to use this skill right as you swap to Spear so you can start reducing its CD immediately with other skills, but Abyssal Blot (for CC) and Abyssal Blitz (for evasion) often end up taking priority.
  • The AoE ring is small and the skill's a bit slow, so it can be hard to land on moving targets. Works great as a followup to CC though, or if you're getting attacked in melee in which case the enemy isn't moving around as much.
  • The weapon swap bonus at 3 stacks is more of just a nice bonus. Don't camp spear just because you're chasing the 3rd stack, especially if you're out of CDs or getting focused by the enemy team.

• Abyssal Blot is the strongest skill on spear, delivering heavy AoE damage while also CCing targets and enabling you to land other skills freely. Makes it much easier to land AR too.

• Abyssal Force does decent damage and also recharges AR by a significant amount, use it whenever it's available but make sure that you're missing an AR charge.

• Abyssal Blitz is a skill with evasion and should be kept for defensive purposes.

Sustain

• Every weapon and legend offers some level of survivability.

• Spear and Shiro are the least defensive ones but even these two have evade frames, namely on Abyssal Blitz and Riposting Shadows.

• Mace has Echoing Eruption which mitigates incoming strike damage through Weakness.

• Both of the shield skills provide healing, cleansing and even blocking, although Crystal Hibernation is a much stronger block than Envoy of Exuberance. CH can also function as a time-out button - you can't move, but at least you should be protected from most attacks while stabilizing yourself as every pulse of this skill heals and cleanses conditions. At least you can move while using EoE though, and EoE can even be shared with allies, adding a small bit of group support to the build's toolkit.

• Riposting Shadows by itself won't help you against damaging conditions, but it does cleanse several movement-impairing ones all at once. Using this before your other condi removals will significantly increase the odds of those removing damaging conditions (like shield skills or True Nature (Dragon) when used on Glint).

• Facet of Light's chain effect Infuse Light is your jail free card - makes you immortal for the duration by converting all incoming damage into healing (except for fall damage). It's also by far your best tool for dealing with condition spikes. Some players may stop pressuring you once Face of Light's been activated, in this case you should just wait a couple of seconds before using Infuse Light. Make sure you get at least 10k healing out of this skill, try to predict when burst is coming and use Facet of Light in advance - FoL has a cast time thus cannot be used while stunned, but Infuse can.

• Facet of Chaos can instantly apply Protection even while CC'd, which makes it a really potent source of damage mitigation.

Top Streamers

• Twitch: Jelseeen

Related Builds

• Herald - Celestial Roamer - WvW version of the build.