Condition Herald

May 2023

Condition Herald is a tanky teamfight DPS that focuses on burst Burning and Torment damage, and is especially useful for shutting down Stone Heart Tempest , which is the meta healer as of this patch.

Playstyle

This build is sturdy, so don’t be afraid to follow the teamfight target and pressuring it as hard as you can as long as you’re not focused by damage dealers.
Combo with Embrace the Darkness when sticking to targets to deal significant condition damage and utilize Legend Swapping trait procs to help your bursts.

Details

Dealing damage

The damage this build does can be boiled down to a rotation more easily than most PvP builds. You want to try and execute this rotation or something close to it on the teamfight target. this is usually most effective against a support.

There’s seveal things to understand about the rotation and how this build deals its damage:
Legendary Demon Stance is where you can deal significantly more damage, but are more vulnerable. A lot of your damage will come from the pulsing field of Embrace the Darkness.
Embrace the Darknesshighly compliments your mace abilities. Each time you use an ability while upkeeping the field, the next pulse will do double the torment. This also creates a Dark Combo Field. Blasting this field will blind enemies around you.
Banish Enchantment is an extremely high pressure skill. It removes 3 boons, applies 3 torment (Abyssal Chill), and chills for 3 seconds. This skill is extremely effective against Elementalist and Guardian specifically, but works well against other professions too, especially if they’re vulnerable to chill or highly reliant on boons. This skill will hit up to 5 targets in the line between you and your selected target, so you can extract a lot of value out of this in a teamfight.
Call to Anguish is the last pressure skill in the mallyx kit. It’s generally a damage loss to use this, unless you’re doing a combo with a teammate, or pulling down a kiting opponent. It has its uses, but don’t press it off-cooldown.
Next, your mace skills do most of the heavy lifting.
Searing Fissure will do incredible damage if your opponent just stands in it. So use it to cleave dead bodies, or combo with Banish Enchantment to make it harder to get out of. Searing Fissure is terrain sensitive. Jump casting it to a higher ground can prove useful to counteract this issue.
Echoing Eruption does significant power and condition damage, while applying weakness and blasting a field. It also leaps slightly forward, acting as a small gap closer. Use into Embrace the Darkness to also blind enemies, instantaneously blinding, weakening, and tormenting on impact, orSearing Fissure to gain might for extra damage.
Then, your Legend Swapping is here to complete the burst.
This damage is very hard to avoid completely, because it’s staggered by 0.75s. First, Song of the Mists triggers. Dealing some damage and either applying burning, chill and torment (from Abyssal Chill), or torment and slow.
0.75s later, Invoking Torment procs with Diabolic Inferno, applying torment, burning and poison.
All of this adds up to pretty considerable damage if it all connects, and you get this benefit while still attacking.

While in Legendary Dragon Stance, you mostly want to land Elemental Blast, use Chaotic Release if you need Crowd Control (recommended to deal with downed bodies), use mace abilities and complete the mace auto chain, which is nothing to be scoffed at. The third attack applies 13s of poison, which is very significant pressure.

If you’re stuck on staff, you won’t be dealing much damage. On Legendary Demon Stance, try to maintain Embrace the Darkness to retain pressure, and use Banish Enchantment to boost the pulsing field. On Legendary Dragon Stance, you can also use Burst of Strength.

If you have conditions on you, True Nature is a massive damage increase. You will gain significant might, which will temporarily apply extreme pressure to any enemy you already have conditions on. Then, you will also relieve pressure from yourself and apply a condition burst to up to 5 opponents.
You should use True Nature on cooldown when you have conditions, unless you expect to receive even more conditions very soon.
This skill is also unavoidable by any means with exception of Invulnerability.

Mobility

One of the biggest drawbacks of this build is the lack of mobility. Namely, the lack of teleport abilities can make you significantly slower than a lot of builds in some maps.

But let’s discuss the options you do have. In terms of movement speed, we’re doing pretty good. We have permanent Swiftness access with Rapid Flow, and some extra on top with Rising Momentum.

In combat, you’ve Echoing Eruption to gap-close, and Call to Anguish to both gap-close or run away.

Out of combat, you can still use Call to Anguish. But better most of the time is the mobility rotation.

Sustain and Healing

Like any revenant build, it’s important to plan out enough energy to be able to stunbreak in the near future in case you get jumped. Be mindful to always be near the next Legend Swap or enough energy to use Pain Absorption and dodge in time to avoid significant damage. In Legendary Dragon Stance During the damage rotation, we deliberately pop Facet of Light. This is not a DPS increase, but it will allow us to activate Infuse Light instantly, even while disabled if we need to. It’s recommended to save this for when you very much need it. Otherwise, double tap Facet of Darkness Gaze of Darkness and dodge.

This build boasts very hefty sustain. As mentioned, when in dire straits, we should resort to try and absorb large amounts of damage with Infuse Light. Otherwise, we have many smaller heals to keep us generally healthy:
Empowering Misery, will be more potent when we have more conditions; Envoy of Exuberance, can also be used to heal/cleanse a teammate under fire; Crystal Hibernation, also a block and your biggest condition cleanse; Renewing Wave which is also a blast and a cleanse (can blind with Embrace the Darkness); Mender's Rebuke to also upkeep Rapid Flow. When you stunbreak you will also gain some HP with Glaring Resolve.
These add up to quite a lot of healing, and when combined with the Rabid Amulet, means we’re pretty difficult to kill and thus, won’t be focused first very often.

In addition to healing, you’ve several active defenses between your Dodge, Warding Rift, Crystal Hibernation, Surge of the Mists and of course Infuse Light.
These are pretty important to cycle efficiently if you’re going to be standing on node in a teamfight, so don’t spam them, and cycle them with your heals.

This build deals effectively with conditions. Between your Renewing Wave, Crystal Hibernation and Envoy of Exuberance (which cleanse because of Hardening Persistence) you have significant condition cleanse, as well as a very powerful condition transfer in True Nature.
Keep in mind that enemy condition builds with transfers of their own could be extremely dangerous, and should be met with caution.

Dueling

Condition herald, due to its tanky nature, can double down as a duelist if need be. (Especially Mace/shield Staff).
Depending on the meta, and current builds being played, and whatever you’re facing, your milage can vary.
You’d need to know the current metagame matchups, but generally speaking, this build shines into other tanky builds, and can struggle against high damage evasive builds that may successfully avoid your damage and burst you down.

Variants

Rune of Orr Is also a popular choice into a condition heavy teamfight.

Demonic Defiance over Acolyte of Torment will sacrifice some damage but significantly improve usability into condition heavy teamfights.