Guild Wars 2

The 0 20 30 20 0 sword/focus + greatsword build

Commanders get focused and need survival in WvW. This is the build I have been using to good effect in WvW. For running with the zerg, you normally have sword and focus out. If you need to deal with siege or are in a standoff situation, use the greatsword.

The basic build is 0 20 20 20 0. You are not shattering as defense comes from phantasms and active clones. I put another 10 in Chaos to improve stealth durations. I would not change Dueling or Inspiration talents. Recharge on focus and sword and glamours is important, and clones on dodge are solid. The only important talent in the Chaos line is 3% defense per illusion. The rest are personal preference. You can take the reduced falling damage talent which is useful for porting people up cliffs or onto keeps. I have Mirror of Anguish mainly selected as you have no intrinsic stability in this build, and mirroring CC back at the guy targeting you may help you live to see another day. Other options for Mirror of Anguish are the falling damage talent, or the clones blow up and debuff talent.

The gearing is what I have on me right now. I am over 20K health with 3200 armor. Crit hit rate is up there to trigger vigor and let you dodge more. Fighting near your phantasms helps as they grant regeneration and through traits, protection.

A typical 1 on 1 fight involves dumping a warden on your target, then a field, and using sword 3 to leap through it. In the build linked I have portal, but if you are not going to be using portal, you can replace it with null field. You would then have 3 fields- 2 ethereal (null field and feedback) and one light (temporal curtain). Leaping through ethereal grants chaos armor, and leaping through curtain grants retaliation. If you cycle through all 3, you can have either chaos armor or retaliation up most of the time, which ups survival. Combine that with blurred frenzy and all of the other defensive buffs, and you can be very hard to drop. The bleeds, buffs, and debuffs build up to be a real nuisance over time in a tough single fight here.

The build shown has mass invis. I will only use time warp if I am running golems. Enhanced by Prismatic Understanding, both veil and mass invis let you position well for an alpha strike or get out of harms way when it gets too hot.

As far as gear goes, I went with a mix of soldiers and knights with Melandru runes and condition duration reduction food. Maintenance oil helps get that crit rate up from your toughness and vit. My goals were 20K health, 3K armor, and 50% crit rate. What is shown is what I am wearing now, which is not optimal, but it works well enough.

I’ll rehash some of the basic WvW tactics to show a bit where this kind of build pays off.

If you are taking down a keep or tower, you can dump wardens on the door to grant regeneration and protection and reflection to those manning the rams. You can dump feedback on people on top of the wall shooting at your rams, and yank them off with focus 4 x2. You can send up illusionary berzerkers from greatsword to trash siege. Greatsword 3 is a nice long range ground target that can wreck stuff out of line of sight on top of the wall. Greatsword 2 will bounce around from one target in sight to others not in sight. You can veil your zerg as they run up the ramp into the Commander’s room, dumping aggro and giving them a minor defensive boost on the way in.

If you are clashing open field in zerg v. zerg, after laying down veil so that your zerg is invis and not targetable on the approach, you can open with focus 4 x2 to knock down the enemy on the alpha strike, then dump a warden and feedback and leap through to hit them, or just spam sword 1 as you joust through them on the initial pass. Dumping a warden on downed foes is just mean as it will sit there and grind away and reflect their attacks, freeing you to go off somewhere else and do something. You can also establish a retreat portal before you go in to give you a hot out option if things are going bad.

You can put swords on a keep by setting up a portal out of aggro range of the keep, then running in with greatsword out. Hit mass invis just before aggro range, then range attack the door, and port back.

Havoc teams of 5-10 have a huge range of tactical options with the veils and ports and mass invis here. You can evade and surprise other units, and retreat by portal.

Fights on cliffs or walls can use focus 4 to toss people off the cliff, and if that is not enough, greatsword 5 to push them the little extra over.

For taking camps, you can set up your wardens and berserkers and just dodge roll to generate clones, keeping up 3 targets at all time, with veil and mass invis as options to disappear. Debilitating Dissipation (Chaos V) is a nice replacement for mirror of anguish as you will be dodging a lot, generating too many illusions. Extra summons beyond 3 cause one to be killed and trigger this AoE 5 target bleed/weakness/vuln.

This is not the best build for running through the enemy to establish a portal bomb. Yes you have invis and veil to avoid detection, but you really do not have a quick way of establishing a lot of clones for a fast distortion shatter to let you evade through a choke point and get in behind them.

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