Willbender needs more love than what it got in today's balance stream to help its playability.

[Pixel.8012]

This stream was awesome for quality of life improvements and build diversity for most classes, but yet again willbender only got residual quality of life improvements targeted at dragon hunter (greatsword 4 aftercast fixes, sword buffs) or firebrand (buffs to condi guard in general, not just from this patch in particular but historically), but willbender has a few playability concerns that neither of the more popular guardian specs have and they absolutely need looking at; namely:

1) Willbender needs 1sec more duration on f1

Willbender's f1 duration doesnt last the entire duration of its cooldown, there's a 8.16sec cd and an 8sec duration on justice which makes willbender feel unnecessarily punishing in situations where you cannot afford to cast f1 off cooldown -- increasing the duration of f1 by one second keeps the rotation as it is fundimentally the same but allows for willbender to not immediately hemmhorage dps the second a party member drops any alacrity uptime or you can't find an opportunity to cast your f1.

2) Radiant Fire needs a rework, badly.

Radiant fire has been a source of a bit of pain for firebrand player for the past few years, but because firebrand brings two mainhand weapons (axe and scepter) it's seldom an issue because you're not spending an eternity in your tome. But for willbender, you're hurting your build diversity substantially on account of the fact that willbender can bring greatsword, which restricts your ability to cast torch 4 until you're on sword/torch. However, because of the way that the cooldown for radiant fire works, if you miss a weapon swap by literally a half second at all, suddenly your instant cast for torch 4 is locked behind the projectile cast. This causes you to lose a lot of dps (often through no fault of your own, see whisper of jormag as a really easy example -- if you get launched in the air as part of the fight you can drift your weapon swap cooldowns and harm your damage through no fault of your own) over the course of the fight, and makes playing with greatsword feel horrid for willbender players that want to explore it as one of their weapon choices. This can be easily fixed by having radiant fire not trigger the flip-over skill, and instead just granting the flip over skill an ammo charge. That way, you're never losing the ability to cast your torch 4 because variables outside of your control. It's still a loss to not weapon swap off cooldown, but it doesn't throw a wrench in your rotation and artificially make certain variations of the build unfun for no reason.

 

I love this spec, I don't mind if it doesn't get the same level of affection as the more popular guardian specs, but for an update largely targeted at increasing playability issues I really hope to surface some concerns that I and the small handful of other willbender players in endgame pve content that i've spoken to share about a spec we really care about, even if it isn't defining the metagame.

[Sagedurk.7358]

It doesn't really help either that alac willbender requires 2 GM traits just to be able to give party wide alac in the first place
One of them directly contending against Tyrant's Momentum, and the other is contending either another damage GM trait, or a whole TRAITLINE. Power Alac Willbender doesn't have access to the Radiance traitline, due to being forced into the Virtues traitline just to be able to take Battle Presence to share alac to the party

[MagicBot.1570]

Power alacrity WB also needs groupe share might and some buffs on offhand sword to be honest

[Sagedurk.7358]

3 hours ago, MagicBot.1570 said:

Power alacrity WB also needs groupe share might and some buffs on offhand sword to be honest

Holy Reckoning, reduce the might duration and make it sharable. Every single willy build takes Restorative Virtues, unless you're power dps and don't have an external reso source like hfb, in which case you take Vanguard Tactics. Yes, even the heal build.