I thought it might be fun to try getting back on the horse a bit with the "themed gw2 builds which are ultimately bad, but which are bad in an interesting way" thing. I thought about trying to do one per attribute combination, but I don't actually have an idea for most of them.
Oh well, anyway: here's my themed build for the vigilant (Laranthir's ascended) attribute combination, one of the most nonsensical combinations of stats Arenanet has ever put out: power/toughness/concentration/expertise. I don't think anyone has used this for anything ever—you're building condition duration but you have power, not condition damage, so it doesn't really do anything. Maybe it's supposed to be for WvW, for immobilizing opponents for a long time? If they... don't have a cleanse? Yeah, I've got nothing.
Well, 13 years after the game launched, we finally sort of got a trait (inferno) that can take advantage of that somewhat? Thus: open world commander toughness aggro boss (?) overkill quickness inferno specialized elements evoker.
Our extremely-contrived scenario here is that we're the commander of a huge squad, none of whom brought any boons or tank gear or have any idea what's going on (maybe we're Laranthir, and our Vigil troops' training sucks), and our enemy has toughness aggro like a raid boss or something I guess just go with it. We're thus going to take a build that gives >100% quickness to 5 allies and fully double its quickness duration, presuming that as random allies move closer to/farther from us we'll be doing decent uptimes on ~10-15 allies (along quite quite a lot of might and some minimal protection/stability), which is a fair portion of the way toward "the most one player can contribute to total squad damage output."
We'll make sure we have ~1650 toughness so we're the tank if no one else has tank/heal gear—this is a bit more toughness than full celestial, which is given by the level 80 boost; if someone has more than this, they're making a deliberate choice and they can tank. We're then putting pretty much the rest of our build into burning damage using inferno; let's say we're the most skilled member of our team, so we can tank without much additional defensive considerations and our rotation will be top-notch so we want to maximize our damage output. This vigilant/diviner/celestial mix does in fact maximize power and burning duration (inferno!) in order to do so given those other constraints.
Now, is this build... good? No, not really! We don't really give fury or protection! Locking yourself into fire scepter/focus gives you no flexibility to heal or do breakbar damage! This much quickness duration will mostly just overcap 5 people! I basically burned the entire second traitline because there's nothing good to do with it! We don't do any outgoing healing at all! Play herald with commander (if you want to go overkill on stability and survivability) or ritualist/celestial mix (if you want to deal damage). See if the ritualist spec in commander/zealot is too annoying to play with boss aggro. At least play the healing version of this, with full celestial and karakosa relic.
But hey: this uses vigilant equipment and is at least coherent, which isn't something I thought I'd ever say. Honestly, it might be kind of playable in the upcoming raid quickplay mode if they no one else in your group brings quickness, and if anet adds any toughness-aggro bosses to it later on? (Though they almost certainly won't, because... I mean, that would be chaos.)
Anyway: here you go, hardcore Laranthir of the Wild stans who actually crafted ascended gear for the theme. Have fun!
snowghoul
annaxmalina
vaporwave
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
titsay
blakekathryn
2087
