Build:Herald - Power Shiro

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

Focused on: Strike damage, Mobility and Utility

Designed for: PvP Conquest

Difficulty:

Hard

This build was last updated on January 11, 2024 and is up to date for the October 8, 2024 patch.

Overview

A high skill cap PvP Power Revenant burst build, created primarily to roam between capture points looking to +1 fights and teamfight. The build's a pure glass cannon with high damage and very low survivability - while the build has several tools for avoiding damage, it can do very little to correct mistakes which makes this rather unforgiving.

Skill Bar

Sword/Sword

Staff

Utility

Utility

Skill Variants

Weapons

• Greatsword over Sword/Sword - Secrets of the Obscure makes it possible to play the build with Greatsword for increased AoE pressure and survivability. Take either Relic of the Daredevil for higher consistency on GS attacks or Relic of the Defender for more healing.

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Specializations

Variants

• Swift Termination trades sustain/armor ignoring procs for higher burst damage, makes you better at finishing off low HP targets.

Equipment

Sword

Sword

Sigil

Sigil

Staff

Sigil

Sigil

Rune

Amulet

Relic

Equipment Variants

Sigils

• If you want more defense against conditions replace one of the Sword sigils with Sigil of Cleansing and replace Cleansing on Staff with Sigil of Escape.

Runes

• Rune of Vampirism - bit more defensive option, trades ~6% crit chance for 1.3k+ extra HP. The 10% extra health bonus from Draconic Fortitude factors in vitality from runes too, so you get a bit more HP out of Vampirism than stated.

Relics

• Relic of Leadership - adds a new source of condition removal to the build, cleansing several conditions whenever you use an elite skill (once every 30 seconds). Works well with Glint's elite because it has no cast time.

• Relic of Isgarren - higher burst potential.

• Relic of the Sunless - this might seem like a condi relic at first, but it scales quite well with Power. Jade Winds is the perfect setup for this relic, spawning the pool under a stunned target.

Usage

General

• Invoking a legend resets energy to 50, removes 1 condition and could even proc the sigils of your current weapon if they're not on CD. 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.

• Begin on Legendary Dragon Stance (Glint) and immediately activate the following 3 upkeep skills for party buffing:
  • Facet of Elements
  • Facet of Strength
  • Facet of Darkness
  • Optional: add Facet of Nature to the mix just before leaving from spawn, especially if a teammate wants to stack boons (a ranger using Call of the Wild for example)

• In combat don't try to maintain your Glint upkeeps for too long, in most cases they shouldn't stay up for more than 3 seconds. Activating Facet of Elements and Strength only to immediately follow up with using Elemental Blast and Burst of Strength is a perfectly fine thing to do - these are also some of your best AoE skills.

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

• • Both elite skills have obvious tells and are easy to dodge, stow weapons to cancel casting if they're about to be evaded/blinded - this will save all the energy cost and only send the skill on a cd of 5 seconds. The same qualities make these skills perfect for fake casting by stowing weapons immediately after beginning the cast, baiting enemy dodges/blocks without spending energy/CDs.

• 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.

• Movement speed is capped at 33% while out of combat, making Swiftness just as strong as Superspeed. During combat however Impossible Odds can be used for boosting your mobility, which is also useful for disengaging.

• Facet of Nature's active chain skill is best used while on Shiro as a source of ranged poking/AoE cleave.

Dealing Damage

• Herald no longer has the sustain it once had, and staying in melee range without active blocks or evasion could quickly overwhelm it. Although generally perceived as a melee build, there are quite a few ranged skills that will play an important part. The build's geared towards massive burst damage and utilizes hit-and-run tactics.

• Song of the Mists delivers an attack whenever you swap legends. Swapping to Shiro is an easy way of instantly getting Quickness, setting the stage for burst combos or helping you cleave downed targets with autoattack spam.

• Use skills like Elemental Blast, Chilling Isolation, Shiro's True Nature (Assassin) or Shackling Wave to poke from a safe distance if going into melee would be too dangerous (bunch of hostile AoEs on point for example).

• Create openings where you can pressure targets uninterrupted by utilizing your CC skills such as Surge of the Mists or Chaotic Release. Make every moment count by capitalizing on the setup with tools like Quickness, Enchanted Daggers and Impossible Odds to further increase the damage of your followup burst.

• Shackling Wave and Deathstrike will serve as the primary burst skills in the build.

• Unrelenting Assault works best in 1v1s, where the damage isn't split. In teamfights it's mainly used for the evasion.
  • Note: If you're facing an opponent with access to Stealth land Facet of Darkness chain skill on them to apply Revealed, as stealth cancels Unrelenting Assault.

• Glint's Burst of Strength and Elemental Blast and Shiro's True Nature (Assassin) are cheap and excellent sources of AoE burst damage.

• 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. Either follow up with hard hitting attacks or a Surge of the Mists if you wish to interrupt them (and to cancel their blocking skill).
  • This skill is quite expensive though, you might want to blow your remaining energy on a few weapon skills while upkeeping Impossible Odds for a few seconds before swapping to Glint to replenish your energy.

• Jade Winds won't be used much because it blows pretty much your entire energy pool, leaving you defenseless and with barely anything to capitalize on the CC. That's not to say this skill is useless, it's quite a strong CC but you need to know when to use it. Some examples:
  • Setting up kills for your teammates, in which case it doesn't matter if you run out of energy because they can finish off the stunned enemies for you.
  • Joining a fight that's already in progress. Here you could use Jade Winds as an opening move trying to tip the scales in your team's favor and then simply swap legends for an energy refill.
  • Interrupting very important channels like a rez or a stomp.

• You should interrupt Jade Winds with a weapon stow if you feel like the skill's going to miss, for example if you got Blinded. It's too expensive to be wasted.

Stacking Damage Sources

• Most Sword skills deliver multiple strikes per use, making this set ideal for stacking damage procs. Proper use of these effects contribute a lot to the burst damage of the build. A skill like Unrelenting Assault might not be a major threat on its own but when every attack also delivers 2-3 other attacks it's suddenly quite formidable.

• 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. It's more of a burst CD than a healing skill in many cases and it's quite cheap.

• Consuming Shiro's True Nature (Assassin) (F2) causes the passive life steal effect to persist for several seconds thanks to Draconic Echo.

• Impossible Odds can augment any skill and increases 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.

• While Burst of Strength doesn't add another source of damage, it does provide a bonus damage modifier and Draconic Echo further increases this bonus by keeping Facet of Strength's passive Might stacking going for a few seconds after use.

Burst Combo Examples

These are merely supposed to give you some ideas for doing burst damage, you don't have to follow them all the time

Ranged combo

1. Enchanted Daggers then wait a bit for your energy to bounce back
2. Phase Traversal
3. Impossible Odds
4. Chilling Isolation or Shackling Wave
5. Any of your other skills on the weapon set, or swap to staff for a CC (skill 5). If you don't have the energy for followup skills just swap legends for a refill. Alternatively you could cut Impossible Odds from the rotation if you're energy-starved.

Melee Combo

1. Surge of the Mists
2. Activate Impossible Odds when SotM starts moving forward. Note: if you started this chain on Glint then legend swapping to Shiro for this step would also grant you Quickness from Song of the Mists and could even proc the sigils of Staff. The Quickness however is wasted on SotM so in this scenario you might want to consider swapping legends near the end of the cast and only activate Impossible Odds when you use Shackling Wave.
3. Weapon swap
4. Shackling Wave
5. Deathstrike
6. Chilling Isolation

Glint AoE Combo

1. Chaotic Release
2. Elemental Blast
3. Cast Burst of Strength but immediately swap legends, the skill won't be interrupted
4. Activate Impossible Odds while still casting BoS
5. Chilling Isolation

Self Sustain & Conditions

• 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. 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 is instant.

• Revenant doesn't have any mass cleanses, instead it's the proper chaining of smaller removals that's going to do the trick:
  • The highest possible number of conditions that can be removed in one combo is 8 (9 if we count Blindness, which you should attempt to remove before starting the chain).
  • Ideally start with Riposting Shadows to get rid of all snares and hard-CC such as Fear and Taunt. This skill alone could remove 4 different non-damaging conditions thus increasing the chance of cleansing the more important, damaging ones with other skills. The evade frame of the skills also ensures that you won't be inflicted with new conditions.
  • Swapping to staff removes a condition thanks to Sigil of Cleansing (if taken) and swapping legends can remove another one via the trait Cleansing Channel, bringing the total count to 6. If you were already on Staff it's still possible to proc the Cleansing sigil with a legend swap, as explained earlier.
  • Finish the chain with Renewing Wave.
  • After this you should be safe, but you've also exhausted your kit so play defensively for a while in order to avoid getting hit with new conditions by chaining blocks/evasions, or just staying at a safe distance for a couple of seconds.

• The combination of Staff and Shiro gives the revenant amazing tools for disengaging/stalling. Riposting Shadows gives 15 endurance whilst also evading and removing every hard-CC / snare from the player. In addition to that Staff has a short CD block/evasion in form of Warding Rift and Surge of the Mists.

• Safest way to benefit from Enchanted Daggers when you need it for the healing is to use skills with evasion/blocking that also deal damage, such as Warding Rift, Surge of the Mists, or Unrelenting Assault.

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