Self-Quickness Generation Would Greatly Improve Design and Performance of Open World Willbender Builds

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

Hey Guys!
I am a massive Willbender enjoyer and as a player who spent quite some thousand hours playing as a guardian in PvE, mainly as a Willbender since EoD release in the open world but also instanced PvE, I want to discuss what has been on my mind for a long time of Willbender gameplay. I am aware it’s quite a lot of text so I have added a TL;DR at the end. I am lookign forward to what you guys think about the topic. Thanks for reading!

Introduction
The Guardian elite specialization Willbender is a melee-focused archetype that relies on high mobility as well as on relentlessly and consecutively attacking its target. As opposed to core Guardian mechanics, the Willbender generates value from active usage of their virtue by opening a stance-like time frame during which consecutive hits will trigger the virtue’s passive effects. Naturally, the Willbender’s playstyle revolves around quickly delivering as many hits as possible while your virtue’s stance is active. In this post, I want to discuss the matter of self-quickness generation on Willbender builds in a solo PvE environment, i.e. mainly open world (OW). This post is not addressed to instanced PvE, PvP or WvW. The Willbender’s situation in instanced PvE has already been discussed in overwhelming quality and quantity by u/ObsoletePixel. Furthermore, I do not play PvP and WvW in sufficient amounts neither to form a well-founded opinion nor to discuss these game modes in greater detail.

Why would the Willbender playstyle greatly benefit from self quickness generation?
Due to the aforementioned nature of the Willbender’s specialization mechanics quickness will greatly improve the performance and design of Willbender builds. Being able to increase its attack rate directly plays into the Willbender’s success criterium.

Another point I want to bring up is the matter that many skills that are frequently employed by damage-focused builds, both condition and strike damage, are channeled skills. Channeled skills are a skill type that activate over a period of time. Willbender builds often make use of such skills as they tend to be multi-hitting. Examples of frequently employed channeled skills are Whirling Wrath, Zealots Defense, Cleansing Flames, Whirling Light and Flash Combo as found in recent builds provided by build creators such as SnowCrows but also the newly added pistol skills Peacekeeper, Hail of Justice and arguably Jurisdiction. As channeled skills provide their value during their cast time, I feel that all of those skills inherently benefit greatly from quickness as it allows them to deliver their value at a higher rate.

On a personal note, it seems to me that most channeled skills, especially Whirling Wrath and Zealot’s Defense, feel very slow when applied to a fast-paced playstyle without quickness. Additionally, I feel that quickness allows for a much smoother rotation and queuing of skills, which in turn greatly improves the feel and performance of builds that rely on a fast-paced playstyle. While all builds generally benefit from quickness, it seems to me that Willbender builds do so to a very great extend for the reasons I described above.

An excellent example of how quickness greatly plays into a build design is in my opinion the Necromancer’s elite specialization Reaper. Reaper builds, especially those focused on strike damage, are able to generate permanent pulsing self-quickness when in shroud through Reaper’s Onslaught. The permanent quickness uptime greatly improves the gameplay since two of the major damaging shroud skills, Death’s Charge and Soul Spiral, are channeled skills. According to my mind, this design is very coherent and well-rounded, which, among other factors, results in the Reaper rightfully being one of the most popular OW builds. To draw the parallel, I feel that Willbender builds would benefit from self-quickness generation in a similar fashion.

How should self-quickness generation be implemented?
While Willbender builds have access to minor sources of quickness, I strongly feel that many options such as rage and celerity sigils and cavalier relic are insufficient, inconvenient to use and heavily rivaled by other non-quickness alternatives. The elite shout “Feel my Wrath!” provides mentionable amounts of quickness but in the end is not enough to sustain reasonable quickness uptime due to its 30 sec CD. I thought about different ways of how to implement self-quickness for willbender builds that affect its performance in a solo PvE environment only and I have come to the conclusion that implementing self-quickness on the grandmaster trait Tyrant’s Momentum in PvE only, similarly to how alacrity is generated by Phoenix Protocol, is the optimal answer. That way, PvP and WvW are not affected and self-quickness generation rarely improves performance in an instanced PvE environment due to the near permanent presence of boon support. Adding self-quickness on Tyrant’s Momentum does not change any traits in a major fashion and therefore requires little development attention. Additionally, it requires the player to choose between either self-quickness or (group) alacrity, which is a good thing in my opinion. I also believe that this change fits the virtue thematically.

TL;DR
In this post, I have described the Willbender’s design and how it is lacking an important tool to fully facilitate its enjoyable and rewarding gameplay in perfection which is self-quickness application, as it greatly improves channeled and multi-hitting skills. Because I think that self-quickness should be baked into the Willbender’s kit rather than be added by relics and sigils, I come to the conclusion that implementing self quickness on the grandmaster trait Tyrant’s Momentum in PvE only would greatly fit and improve the Willbender gameplay and furthermore would not impact the balance of PvP, WvW and instanced PvE.

[Ferus.3165]

You have feel my wrath and quickness sigils? What more do u want? FMW offers 20% quickness uptime and with both sigils you get potentially another 40% uptime. And that is without boon duration or the eod jade protocols... and the uptime is even higher if u apply alacrity

[Gaiawolf.8261]

I always thought is felt backward that firebrands have quickness abilities while willbenders have alacrity. Willbenders want to burst quick during their virtue windows, while firebrands would benefit more from lowering the CDs of their tomes, support skills, and reapplying burn stacks.

[Bunny.9834]

On 5/20/2024 at 9:44 AM, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

I always thought is felt backward that firebrands have quickness abilities while willbenders have alacrity. Willbenders want to burst quick during their virtue windows, while firebrands would benefit more from lowering the CDs of their tomes, support skills, and reapplying burn stacks.

This has been something that would greatly streamline the builds for GW2 and its LFG system. 

Assign Alacrity to Healers and Quickness to DPS. 
 

 

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

3 hours ago, Bunny.9834 said:

This has been something that would greatly streamline the builds for GW2 and its LFG system. 

Assign Alacrity to Healers and Quickness to DPS. 
 

 

Be aware that streamlining will also pose the threat of removing uniqueness from builds. Additionally, I don't think the choice between quickness and alacrity should be made based on the build's role (i.e. healer or DPS) but rather based on its playstyle.

For reasons of brevity, I did not talk about the matter of qFB vs. aWB, I however agree with what Gaiawolf postet earlier. WB strongly benefits from quickness, as I described in my original post, whereas FB benefits strongly from alacrity: There are many non-channeling skills in its kit, predominantly all of its tome skills and mantras but also lingering AoEs such as Purging Flames and symbols. While those skills are cast faster with quickness, there is no further value gained from them once active. To clarify, Purging Flames or Epilogue: Ashes of the Just do not tick faster when under the effect of quickness. I would argue that, appart from increasing the intial casting speed, quickness is not of great use for playstyles that revolve around using non-channeled skills such as lingering AoEs. At the very least, it is of less use than alacrity which straight-up increases the rate at which the skills can be used. 

Now, this is not to say that quickness is useless on FB or alacrity is useless on WB. They of course have their inherent benefits (e.g. quickness allows for better skill chaining on FB, alacrity allows for more frequent virtue usage on WB). My point is that FB and WB would even more benefit when having quickness and alacrity swapped because it massively plays into their respective playstyles. Surely, this is mostly relevant for open world content rather than for instanced PvE because you will always have 100% uptime of both quickness and alacrity provided by your boon supports in instanced PvE. I still fundamentally believe that design such as that discussed above matters even if its irrelevant for instanced PvE.

To come back to the original comment, there possibly is a tendency for heal supports to benefit from alacrity rather than from quickness, but there surely are those healer builds that would much rather use quickness than alacrity. An example is heal WB (albeit not extremely popular) which generates might, regeneration, alacrity and healing (due to the stacking hammer symbols on its auto attack chain) by concesutively hitting a target. In parallel, cqFB as a DPS build would rather benefit from alacrity than from quickness if the concept I described above is correct.

Cheers!