Vindicator - Defensive Power Vindi Roamer

The community gave this build a rating, making it top-tier: Great

Focused on: Strike damage, Mobility and Sustain

Designed for: WvW Roaming

Expansions required:

Difficulty:

Normal

This build was last updated on February 27, 2025 and is up to date for the February 11, 2025 patch.

Overview

A versatile Power Vindicator roaming build for WvW that focuses on sustain while still dealing rather high damage. The build works with various secondary sets including Spear and Shortbow to go with its main Greatsword set.

Skill Bar

Greatsword

Spear

Utility

Utility

Skill Variants

Weapons

Spear is a versatile midrange AoE weapon introduced in the Janthir Wilds expansion with medium damage but plenty of utility value in the form of CC, evade frame and healing reduction via Poison. However it's not the only viable option:

• Hammer - good mix of ranged damage and survivability, but it's quite a slow and telegraphed weapon. Still a solid pick especially if you want something a bit more defensive.

• Shortbow - purely an offensive set, Shortbow offers very little in terms of defense. While it has the highest burst damage of the 3, it's also heavily reliant on projectiles. Unlike Spear, the skills on SB also require you to face your target, which makes it harder to use this weapon while you're being pressured and need to kite.

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Specializations

Variants

All 3 options are viable for the last slot of Invocation:

• Song of the Mists improves Quickness uptime.
• Charged Mists allows you to spend more energy each legend swap cycle, giving you more of everything.
• Roiling Mists is an excellent passive damage boost that pushes you near the crit cap, and the build has permanent Fury uptime to go with it.

Specialization Variants

Retribution can replace Salvation. Both of these are sustain focused specializations, but Retribution offers more damage in exchange for slightly worse survivability.

Equipment

Head
Berserker

Shoulders
Berserker

Chest
Berserker

Hands
Berserker

Legs
Berserker

Feet
Berserker

Backpiece
Marauder

Accessory
Marauder

Accessory
Marauder

Amulet
Marauder

Ring
Marauder

Ring
Marauder

Greatsword
Berserker

Sigil

Sigil

Spear
Berserker

Sigil

Sigil

Rune
x6

Infusion
x18

Relic

Equipment Variants

Runes

Other viable runes include:

• Rune of Superior Rune of Durability - good defensive rune with boon duration.

• Rune of Superior Rune of the Pack - offensive rune with boon duration, works well on both sets. You might slightly overcap crit chance when playing with this rune and Roiling Mists, so you should swap out a ring for one that has Dragon stats.

Relics

Relic of Evasion provides quite a lot of extra endurance regen which is important for various trait synergies. If you want to play a more offensive version of the build you could play with a different relic too, but in that case using endurance regen food is highly recommended. Other viable relic options are:

• Relic of Isgarren - better burst damage.

• Relic of the Daredevil - improves the consistency of some of your harder hitting skills on Greatsword. DON'T use it with Roiling Mists, works well with other Invocation GM traits though.

• Relic of Speed - significant mobility boost, could be useful for chasing down enemies or keeping distance while on shortbow or waiting for CDs/energy to come back up.

Consumables

Food

• - extra endurance regen, and the healing procs ensure effortless 100% uptime on Unyielding Devotion.

• - same as the previous option but offers slightly higher damage instead of sustain. More endurance means more dodges, and dodging is a key part of the build.

• - great offensive stats and extra tankiness via damage reduction.

Utility

• or , whichever is cheaper.

• Budget: either from Canned Food Crates found in WvW s or purchased from the Permanent Portable Provisioner.

Usage

General

• Invoking a legend resets energy to 50 (potentially 75 if traited), removes 1 condition, 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, low on energy, or need to cleanse.

• Rapid Flow allows for easy permanent Swiftness uptime.

• Dodging removes 1 condition via Eluding Nullification. This is your primary line of defense against conditions.

• Unyielding Devotion provides damage mitigation for a short while after you're healed. Ideally you should have permanent uptime, Rapid Flow and the Holo cake consumables could help with that.

Shiro

• Enchanted Daggers is a skill with life steal, which means the damage it deals bypasses any damage mitigation including Protection or even Endure Pain. That being said it still can't go through evasion or invulnerabilities such as Distortion.

• Impossible Odds can augment any skill and increase your damage output significantly while active. It's quite expensive though, so don't maintain it for more than a few seconds at a time, use it only for bursts. Note that it's only single target damage, doesn't cleave.
  • Always stop maintaining this skill if you're about to hit 0 energy - turning it off sends it on a 1 second CD while running out of energy results in a 4 second CD.

• Phase Traversal is great for initiating fights from range and immediately starting off with Quickness coupled with unblockable attacks. Quickness can be used to do burst damage or cleave downed targets better through auto attacking, while the unblockable attacks could seal the fate of enemies relying on blocking as their last resource option for sustain.

• Jade Winds won't be used often because it exhausts most of your energy pool, leaving you defenseless and with barely anything to capitalize on the CC. This should only be used to set up kills for your teammates, or to interrupt very important channels like a rez or a stomp.

Weapons and damage

• Mist Unleashed and Eternity's Requiem are great AoE skills, but the latter deals more damage against single targets. Use these on CD.

• Archemorus in a way acts as your 3rd offensive set.

• Scavenger Burst and Spear of Archemorus add a bit of extra reach if you're on GS or out of shortbow CDs. The Spear has a huge delay so you could even precast it in a fight and line it up with other damage sources for burst damage, or burst targets while the spear is charging which forces them to choose between using their defensives to avoid the spear or your other attacks.
  • Swapping legends doesn't cancel Spear of Archemorus.
  • Scavenger Burst applies Quickness which makes it a great setup skill for GS burst combos or it could speed up your attacks when you need downed cleave.

• Nomad's Advance does a lot of damage on a very short CD, if your weapon skills are spent then this is a solid option for pressuring targets at a reasonable energy cost. Being a mobility tool is a nice added bonus and makes it more versatile.

Spear

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

• Spear is built around Abyssal Raze (AR).
  • 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 multiple roamers.

• 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

• Greatsword is the more defensive of the 2 sets.

• Imperial Guard is great for blocking attacks under pressure and Phantom's Onslaught could be used not only as a gap closer but also a gap builder (just make sure you don't have an enemy targeted).

• The Kurzick (blue) side of Legendary Alliance Stance is your defensive legend, atlhough both the Luxon side and Shiro have some great defensive skills too.

• Tree Song is your mass cleanse and basically a 4th healing skill on the build because of how much it heals for each condition that's removed.

• Both legendary stances have access to an evade skill: Battle Dance on alliance stance and Riposting Shadows on Shiro. If you have energy but not endurance to dode then these are great options for avoiding damage. While Battle Dance doesn't directly remove movement impairing conditions (unlike Riposting Shadows) it does give you Resistance - it can be used while Immobilized so you'll be able to move freely after the evade frame.

• The best defensive skill is actually found on the most offensive legend: the Luxon skill Reaver's Rage is always useful. The Daze can stop incoming burst attempts while the Stability makes it easier to get a full channel of your heal off. It even breaks stun and does decent damage.

• If you're low on health it's common practice to use both Selfish Spirit and Selfless Spirit back-to-back, especially after Reaver's Rage for Stability.

• Urn of Saint Viktor is good for surviving heavy incoming damage if you have no other way to avoid it. It offers strong mitigation but also drains your HP and makes it so you won't be able to heal yourself, so don't maintain it for long. Only use it briefly, and rarely.