Herald - Shiro Roamer

The community gave this build a rating, making it second-tier: Good

Focused on: Direct damage

Designed for: WvW Roaming

Difficulty:

TBD

This build was last updated on February 19, 2022 and is up to date for the October 8, 2024 patch.

Overview

A Power based Herald build for WvW Roaming with exceptional burst damage and mobility. While the build has plenty of active defenses in the form on block and evade frames, its passive sustain and condition cleansing are rather low, which makes this build not very beginner friendly.

Skill Bar

Sword/Sword

Staff

Utility

Utility

Template Code

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Specializations

Variants

• Thrill of Combat - while this trait lowers your burst damage, the life steal will boost your sustain a little bit and could help you survive longer engagements.

Equipment

Head
Marauder

Shoulders
Marauder

Chest
Marauder

Hands
Marauder

Legs
Marauder

Feet
Marauder

Backpiece
Berserker

Accessory
Berserker

Accessory
Berserker

Amulet
Berserker

Ring
Berserker

Ring
Berserker

Sword
Marauder

Sword
Marauder

Sigil

Sigil

Staff
Marauder

Sigil

Sigil

Rune
x6

Infusion
x18

Equipment Variants

Runes

• Rune of Superior Rune of Leadership - less defensive option for better boon uptime and active condition managment, the 6th bonus procs instantly with the Glint elite.

• Rune of Superior Rune of Surging - good stats and a useful proc once again for the Glint elite.

• Rune of Superior Rune of Strength - offers the most damage but lowest sustain.

Consumables

Food

• - great offensive stats and some direct damage mitigation.
  • - a bit more defensive but equally viable option.

• - highest damage option, no damage mitigation but the life steal procs still provide some sustain.

• - this food provides some defense against condition damage without sacrificing damage.

• - active damage mitigation via more frequent access to dodging, and the Might generation has synergy with various traits.
  • Budget version:

• - cheap precision bump and armor ignoring damage procs that also heals you.

Utility

• or .

Usage

General

• Invoking a legend resets energy to 50, breaks stun, 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/break stun.

• 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.

• 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.
  • 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

• Playstyle:
  • 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.
  • Use skills like Elemental Blast, Precision Strike, Shiro's True Nature (Assassin) or Shackling Wave to poke from a safe distance if going into melee would be too dangerous.
  • 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 will serve as the primary burst skill in the build.

• Unrelenting Assault works best in 1v1s, where the damage isn't split. In team fights 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.

• 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.
  • 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. 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).

• 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.

• 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. This should only be used to set up kills for your teammates, or to interrupt very important channels like a rez or a stomp.

Burst combo examples

• From range: Enchanted Daggers ⇒ Phase Traversal ⇒ Impossible Odds ⇒ Shackling Wave ⇒ any of your other skills on the weapon set, or swap to staff for a CC (skill 5).
• Melee: Chaotic Release ⇒ (optional step) swap legends and use Impossible Odds ⇒ Shackling Wave ⇒ Deathstrike ⇒ Precision Strike

Self sustain & how to deal with 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, and potentially 12 with Rune of Superior Rune of Leadership if taken but that's pushing it).
  • 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 Superior Sigil of Cleansing 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.

• If taken The best way to proc Rune of Superior Rune of Leadership is to activate Facet of Chaos, which is a cheap instant skill. You don't even need to use the second part of the chain to get the effect to proc, although you may still want to do that in order to get rid of the energy draining (in case you can't just legend swap out of it in due time).

• 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.

Related Builds

Power Shiro (sPvP) - Conquest PvP version.