Firebrand's role in raids?

What do you guys think the Firebrand's role will be in raids? I'm in the process of making my ascended gear. I have a few berserrk pieces, but I have also recently leveled my crafting. In the beta weekends I found Firebrand to be a lot of fun, and would like to play it in PvE. I don't mind if its tank, healer or DPS, but of course I want to play the "meta" build, so I am wondering what you guys think the Firebrand's role will be in PvE, and raids more specifically?

With how it is set up right now, the only role it could possibly fill is DPS. With changes I'm hoping actually occur we'd have to see what they are before seeing what might be able to be done with it.

I see a few potential roles for a Firebrand that will vary quite a bit depending on what group comp you're trying to create.You can easily make a 'pure DPS' firebrand, that still generates some ancillary quickness for the group. I am guessing it will parse based on the current numbers somewhere around 30k DPS on a golem with raid buffs. The build would probably looks something like this:Condi DPS

Additionally, you may find a group comp that allows you to fill the role of quickness bot but still wants to pair you with a chrono for alacrity. The Chrono can cover a small portion of the quickness and allows them to go full zerk/scholar gear and work some alacrity and minor quickness into their kit without making them a slave to commander/leadership/dumplings. I would estimate this somewhere in the ballpark of 27k DPS on a golem with raid buffs.Condi Quickbot

The last likely role I see for a Firebrand in raids is as a 'healer/support' guy taking the place of a chrono and druid in a raid that already has a druid. This would be a fairly support oriented setup focused on providing prot/aegis/regen/stability and generating quickness for the group. You free up 1 spot in the 5 man party with the 2 support roles condensed into a single character, which allows an extra 'real' DPS. This would be ideal for tanking bosses that hit hard (Xera, VG etc.) or if you were going to use a magi druid or ele for your sub-group healing.Support Firebrand

@Azoqu.8917 said:With how it is set up right now, the only role it could possibly fill is DPS. With changes I'm hoping actually occur we'd have to see what they are before seeing what might be able to be done with it.

It should be noted that this may be true for CURRENT raids. Seeing all the utility and changes they are giving new elite spec's I'm guessing new raid bosses will require more utility such as stability and possibly aegis or aoe stun breaks.

I think you could run firebrand for perma quickness while putting out a lot more damage than a power chrono but you still do not have easy access to the alacrity.

Either these elite specs are going to be drastically reworked/nerfed or they are going to design the new content around these new elite specs, more specifically raids.

Either way the next few months are going to be fun and interesting to see where ArenaNet takes Guild Wars 2.

Considering the current low duration application of Burning (Tome of Justice has too long a cooldown), Quickness that can be replaced by a Chronomancer that already gives Quickness, Alacrity, shared Distortion and some heals, until they release Firebrand with hopefully buffs to its Burning duration/stacks and replacing that Bleeding (which has no synergy whatsoever with Guardian) with Burning, I don't see a place for Firebrand in Raids right now.

Until nothing changes with druid spirits, grace of the land and alacrity no one is running anything else than mirror. So maybe dps, but there most certainly will be some elementalist spec people would prefer to take over any guardian.

@Velho.7123 said:Considering the current low duration application of Burning (Tome of Justice has too long a cooldown), Quickness that can be replaced by a Chronomancer that already gives Quickness, Alacrity, shared Distortion and some heals, until they release Firebrand with hopefully buffs to its Burning duration/stacks and replacing that Bleeding (which has no synergy whatsoever with Guardian) with Burning, I don't see a place for Firebrand in Raids right now.

The cooldown for your Tome of Justice will be 17.42 seconds with alacrity and virtues traited.During this cooldown we have these skills to rotate through to keep damage output up:

• Purging Flames
• Zealot's Flame -> Zealot's Fire
• Blazing Edge
• Mantra of Flame
• Flame Rush x2
• Flame Surge
• Symbol of Vengeance (No burn but still worth the case it seems, not tested)
• Searing Slash (Third hit on Axe auto)

This is plenty to do in between our Tome of Justice cooldown of 17.42 seconds without our DPS dropping completely. I'm confident if you were to put a firebrand running this build into a raid now, it would be doing very good DPS. Although, a lot of this will change when the expansion lands with balance changes and such.

Everything above was theorycraft'd using gw2skills.net. If information on gw2skills.net is incorrect, then this information posted here will also be just as invalid.