Power Willbender

October 2024

Power Willbender is a roamer that excels at skirmishing, outnumbering, sticking to and bursting targets given its high mobility and damage and has excellent tools to stay alive.

Introduction

Our main role is to generate as many kills as possible in teamfights and outnumbers.
With willbender our virtues are now all movement skills, making us very mobile.
Use your virtues procs and high damage to run down enemies that cannot afford to trade blows with you.

Quick Tips

• Use to evade attacks.
• Use right next to a moment you’re going to unleash a burst like into .
• Use inside the hitbox of an enemy to deal extra damage.
• Use multi hit skills like , or and symbols to proc and as often as possible.
• Try to maintain to keep up your high critical chance from
• Try to avoid using before you’ve used and unless you have no choice.

Damage

Willbender heavily relies on modifiers to reach its full damage potential. The important sources of damage amplification are (activating and and ), (activating ), and , which is applied when activating a virtue or triggering the passive effect of a previously activated Virtue (, , ).

To maintain these modifiers, there are a couple of aspects to keep in mind:

1. Use your teleportation skills as often as possible to set up damage, since they constantly reapply through .
2. Use your Virtues (, , ) liberally. They not only provide additional  through , but also prevent your empowered stacks from running out. While the Willbender Flames left behind after the use of every Virtue already help with activating the lingering effects, it’s perfectly reasonable to between bursts to maintain stacks.

Spear is a burst heavy weapon with great AoE pressure.

• is your most spammable skill, it’s great for cleaving and chasing targets while still dealing damage.
•  is a very high burst skill. Ideally use it on disabled targets that will be forced to tank the entire thing.
• Try to land  early, as it does decent power damage over time but mostly ccs any target hit and enhances your next abilities cast inside of it thanks to .
• Use  on a node or multiple targets. Hits quite hard, heals and cleanses conditions from you and your allies.

Swords have good catchup and single target damage.

• is your highest burst skill on this kit. make sure to hit the second strike.
• Use to catch up, applying to setup further burst, nice damage and preventing your target from retaliating.
  It’s also a shadowstep and will therefore apply .
• has great damage but bad tracking, so use it up close and personal only.
• is a very good gap closer and applies a to prevent counter pressure.
• has decent damage on its 3rd strike. If you can, finish the chain.

Apart from maintaining , is a great gap closer and source of and , allowing you to run down enemies that can’t defend themselves from your high damage output.

also is a great gap closer and deals high damage. Beware of the animation locking.

compliments both weapon sets. It’s just a great area damage skill that is hard to avoid and should be used as often as possible.

Sustain and Healing

Willbender has access to decent healing and self-sustain on its own – although Willbender’s Virtues variant is best paired with a Support Build in teamfights to not run out of resustain too fast. provides significant healing on a short cooldown, but only if you take damage in the time window. Thanks to and , Willbender has almost permanent uptime which provides 33% condition damage reduction. is an important repositioning tool that also grants to allies thanks to .

Willbender has decent condition cleanse from the combination of and . removes up to three conditions on each activation from you and your allies – as well as all movement-impairing conditions from yourself; it can be used either to cleanse yourself or your teammates. Your most powerful cleanse comes from . is not only a stunbreak, but also converts all conditions on you into boons. This can be very powerful if you’re getting locked down by classes like Necromancer, Mesmer, or Ranger.

While pressuring the opponent, the lingering effects of and can greatly reduce the pressure taken through resustaining with or defensive boons from . Especially when cleaving downed enemies, it’s a great idea to dash over () or teleport onto () them to not only deal additional damage with your Willbender Flames, but also to stay healthy.

Lastly, make sure to take advantage of and before you use . The invulnerability and reset on is one of your best disengage tools, allowing Willbender to extend into the enemy more than most other roamers can as long as it has its ready to fully restock its defensive CDs and get out safely afterward.