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 March 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.
Template Code
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Specializations
Variants
All 3 options are viable for the last slot of Invocation:
- improves
Quickness uptime. - allows you to spend more energy each legend swap cycle, giving you more of everything.
- 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:
- - good defensive rune with boon duration.
- - offensive rune with boon duration, works well on both sets. You might slightly overcap crit chance when playing with this rune and , so you should swap out a ring for one that has Dragon stats.
Relics
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:
- - better burst damage.
- - improves the consistency of some of your harder hitting skills on Greatsword. DON'T use it with , works well with other Invocation GM traits though.
- - 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 .
- - 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.
- allows for easy permanent
Swiftness uptime.
- Dodging removes 1 condition via . This is your primary line of defense against conditions.
- provides damage mitigation for a short while after you're healed. Ideally you should have permanent uptime, and the Holo cake consumables could help with that.
Shiro
- is a skill with life steal, which means the damage it deals bypasses any damage mitigation including
Protection or even . That being said it still can't go through evasion or invulnerabilities such as .
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- and 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.
- and 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 .
- 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.
- 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 (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 (for CC) and (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.
- 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.
- 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.
- is a skill with evasion and should be kept for defensive purposes.
Sustain
- Greatsword is the more defensive of the 2 sets.
- is great for blocking attacks under pressure and 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 is your defensive legend, atlhough both the Luxon side and Shiro have some great defensive skills too.
- 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: on alliance stance and 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 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 and back-to-back, especially after Reaver's Rage for Stability.
- 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.
Ratings
Devestation instead of invocation, swap to surging rune. Overall similar dmg maybe slightly worse if you get unlucky with crits but near permanent resistance is an incredibly huge survivability boost.
Probably one of the best roaming builds around. Insanely good sustain and damage, and for some reason it even got buffed last week.
Comments
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