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Looking for a harbinger build


blackbeard.5438

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For instanced content you'll want to use this - and while not made for solo play will ofc also get through content like Story easily.

/E: I completely agree with @Nimon.7840 on this below though.

If you want something really low intensity to blast through OW and Story with Auto Attacks, you can try this.

Edited by Asum.4960
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Problem with harbinger, you basically can't play the same build in open world and instanced content if you want to have fun in open world and want to be "useful' in instanced content.

 

For open world go with a celestial approach - there are various very good builds.

 

And for instanced content I'd recommend not playing harbinger at all.

Yes it will be fun at first, but harbinger has several problems:

Healer: not viable (well you can play it, but it's not good)

Quickness: honestly just play Herold, same dps with better boons and more utility, while also being a lot easier to play imo.

Dps: while the numbers are pretty good, you have to invest way more time than if you just played scourge. and if you played scourge you'd still be more useful than harbinger, because there's no utility on harb.

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The Viper beginner build is good. Go for something like that first; it will give you a good gear loadout to branch out into more specialized builds later on. Celestial might lead you into a gear dead end, and can corrode your "skill" with the class.

What Nimon said is not exactly correct, or where it is, it's overstated. Harbinger does *good* DPS, and is easier to play than Scourge, but less versatile and less forgiving. The Quickness build also benches higher than Scrapper or Herald.

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5 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

The Viper beginner build is good. Go for something like that first; it will give you a good gear loadout to branch out into more specialized builds later on. Celestial might lead you into a gear dead end, and can corrode your "skill" with the class.

What Nimon said is not exactly correct, or where it is, it's overstated. Harbinger does *good* DPS, and is easier to play than Scourge, but less versatile and less forgiving. The Quickness build also benches higher than Scrapper or Herald.

Viper might be too squishy for new player. It needs blight stacks, which reduces harbi HP quite a bit and punishes badly timed dodges and healing. Celestial for personal instances would be better.

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Attempts to compensate for the Harb's fragility come in two flavours:
 - Celestial gear. Expensive, but gives you tons of defensive stats. It does decrease your DPS, but not as dramatic. This is tolerable, but "growing out of it" will cost you lots of money, and a reset in relearning how to play Harbinger.
 - That strange signets-warhorn-swapless build, or some other death magic-minions build. At that point you are not playing Harbinger, you are just plinking at stuff with your pistol for pitiful damage. Entirely dead end.
Third is, I guess, a combination of the two, which combines the worst aspects of both, for no benefit.
Neither "does good", and neither are something I'd recommend to players. At worst, I'd go for the "beginner viper" build, but with, like, some traiblazer pieces. Trinkets, for example, because season 3/4/5 has them for cheap; nabbing a pair of TB rings and an amulet will see you wearing effectively heavy armor, 25k+ HP, while not destroying all your DPS, and you can reuse trinkets on other PvE-condi-sustain builds later on (fb, ele, for example).

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3 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

Attempts to compensate for the Harb's fragility come in two flavours:
 - Celestial gear. Expensive, but gives you tons of defensive stats. It does decrease your DPS, but not as dramatic. This is tolerable, but "growing out of it" will cost you lots of money, and a reset in relearning how to play Harbinger.
 - That strange signets-warhorn-swapless build, or some other death magic-minions build. At that point you are not playing Harbinger, you are just plinking at stuff with your pistol for pitiful damage. Entirely dead end.
Third is, I guess, a combination of the two, which combines the worst aspects of both, for no benefit.
Neither "does good", and neither are something I'd recommend to players. At worst, I'd go for the "beginner viper" build, but with, like, some traiblazer pieces. Trinkets, for example, because season 3/4/5 has them for cheap; nabbing a pair of TB rings and an amulet will see you wearing effectively heavy armor, 25k+ HP, while not destroying all your DPS, and you can reuse trinkets on other PvE-condi-sustain builds later on (fb, ele, for example).

Considering you need to supply and upkeep your own boons in solo play, which make up a massive portion of ones damage, Celestial at times actually even is a DPS increase over Viper's solo, but especially Trailblazers (for condi/hybrid builds), and at worst a very minor loss for drastic survivability and easy of play gains. 

 

In solo play, Celestial Harbinger with Strength Sigil and Deathly Haste is practically the same DPS as the meta Viper Harbinger with Bursting and Approaching Doom, given everything else is the same. 

Just that the Celestial version is fully ranged with drastically more stats, especially defensively (and more fun to play with perma Quickness), while the Viper version is out of paper with little sustain and needs to be in 180 range (so in actual solo play, where you move around and kite a lot more, Celestial well pulls ahead in every metric). 

With boon access (Deathly Haste and Elixirs), inbuilt sustain (from Alchemic Vigor) and hybridised damage, Harbinger especially is practically made to benefit from everything Celestial has to offer.

 

I get the kneejerk reaction against any defensive stats, since those have historically been a terrible idea to run in GW2 - but since it's buff, Celestial is pretty clearly the superior choice to run for solo play. 

Does one need a second proper DPS set later if one wants to transition into endgame content? Sure. But as long as one still does any solo stuff, Celestial isn't wasted - and incredible flexible to move around for different builds and even professions. 

Trailblazer especially is pretty much completely superseded by Celestial, and your arguments in the end for getting TB apply more accurately to Celestial - I don't think it's a waste to get a set of it for every weight class played to solo things a lot.

Edited by Asum.4960
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1 hour ago, Asum.4960 said:

Considering you need to supply and upkeep your own boons in solo play, which make up a massive portion of ones damage, Celestial at times actually even is a DPS increase over Viper's solo, but especially Trailblazers (for condi/hybrid builds), and at worst a very minor loss for drastic survivability and easy of play gains. 

In solo? Yeah, granted. It also leaves you "kinda far" (not very far, tho) from the intended experience of the e-spec, and the *expensive* investment in celestial gear means you'll need another expensive investment later on if you want to do anything else.

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22 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

In solo? Yeah, granted. It also leaves you "kinda far" (not very far, tho) from the intended experience of the e-spec, and the *expensive* investment in celestial gear means you'll need another expensive investment later on if you want to do anything else.

The "intended experience"? Well, it's not just solo play. Celestial Deathly Haste Harbinger also is exponentially better in any casual group setting with it's 5 player perma Quickness and Fury - from metas to dungeons to low level Fractals. Or even WvW play and the like. 

Literally the only place in the game where Viper full DPS has the edge is end game instanced group content - and there I agree with Nimon that Harbinger, despite it's good looking benchmark, isn't a particularly compelling pick in any capacity. 

 

So I find it slightly narrow minded to call that small niche the one and only "intended experience" or way to play the spec.

On 12/12/2022 at 9:50 AM, The Boz.2038 said:

The Quickness build also benches higher than Scrapper or Herald.

Quick Scrapper and Herald are power builds with decent to good bursts, FB is Burning. On fights with phases, which is most of them, they are very likely to well pull ahead of Harbinger. But even if not, the choices of things like perma Superspeed, perma Prot, enhanced Regen, moderate to fantastic Stability access, cleanses, projectile hate and other various Utility between those three makes each well worth over the theoretical (since very slow to ramp) 1k extra DPS on Harb.

Edited by Asum.4960
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On 12/12/2022 at 9:50 AM, The Boz.2038 said:

The Viper beginner build is good. Go for something like that first; it will give you a good gear loadout to branch out into more specialized builds later on. Celestial might lead you into a gear dead end, and can corrode your "skill" with the class.

What Nimon said is not exactly correct, or where it is, it's overstated. Harbinger does *good* DPS, and is easier to play than Scourge, but less versatile and less forgiving. The Quickness build also benches higher than Scrapper or Herald.

Qherald 30,7k with allies 31,7

Qharbinger 32,4k

> Always play Herald.

- way more boons

- way more utility

For a small dps loss of 1k, even less in real fights?

Is it overstated, that harbinger is bad? Yes, but it's also not very good like herald.

 

Do your group a favour and play qherald unless you absolutely dislike herald.

 

I'd also disagree, that harbinger is easier than scourge, at least if you are looking purely at dps.

Scourge can basically permanently be ranged, while harbinger wants to be in melee range.

Scourge does not have that much room for tweaks in it's "rotation" while you can switch little things on basically each PvE encounter on harbinger, to squeeze out a little bit more dps.

Yes if you want to use the built in support skills on scourge more efficiently, scourge suddenly gets a lot "harder".

And choosing the right utility skill might be hard for some people as well, cause there's quite some useful stuff you can bring for your group as a scourge (epi, portal, poison cloud, wurm, spectral grasp, extra boon corrupts) and you have permanent access to those utility skills.

Harbinger has quite a fixed set of utility skills, you can basically only exchange one elixir for another but that's it.

 

 

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