The community gave this build a rating, making it top-tier: Great
Focused on: Strike damage and Mobility
Designed for: WvW Roaming
Expansions required: End of Dragons builds
Difficulty: Easy
Beginner friendly This build is beginner friendly.
This build was last updated on March 28, 2026 and is up to date for the June 2, 2026 patch.
The usual, notorious Power Willbender roaming build for WvW, this time with Spear. Known for its high mobility and frequent bursts which make Spearbender shine when it comes to hit and run tactics.
守护者 (Guardian)
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Variants
Utility
Stats
Relics
Stormsinger remains a viable option, but following the nerfs there's no clear-cut winner for the relic slot anymore. Each have their pros and cons:
- the relic best suited for hit-and-run tactics. Usually adds 4-5% bonus damage throughout a fight, but this can be higher or lower depending on the matchup. Stormsinger's main strength is adding bonus damage to otherwise less threatening attacks, or upping the damage you can do in just 1-2 second melee contacts. Works really well if you either can't afford to linger in melee for too long at a time, or if your opponent is also trying to minimize melee contact (like a Thief or a Mesmer). The sudden damage procs can even help you end fights you otherwise couldn't have. However the more time you get to spend in melee, the weaker Stormsinger becomes overall.
- 7% damage boost with high uptime (nearly permanent). Your Virtue skills can proc this too, not just the weapon skills. Works best against lower damage but highly tanky opponents where you just want to stay in melee and pummel them as much as possible.
- this is a middleground between Fireworks and Stormsinger. You'll only get ~50% uptime on the damage boost, but during that time it's slightly stronger than Fireworks (10% boost). Works best if you can pull off entire burst combos before having to disengage for a bit. The trigger for this is also really convenient, since application tends to happen passively at the start of bursts (as it's tied mostly to teleports and F1-3 skills).
General
increases your critical strike chance by 25% via , pushing you near the crit cap while you have this boon. Always try to maintain Resolution or at least apply it before bursts.
Every Virtue skill is a mobility skill on Willbender. Besides their base functionality they are great for sticking to targets or escaping damage.
is refreshed after each kill so make sure you always have it on cooldown right before a kill. Using it also applies AoE which can be useful for stomping or making high priority skills miss. It's also one of the hardest hitting skills in the build.
Try to burn through all of your virtues before resorting to . RF is a great skill to use if you're being focues by the enemy team and you don't have any CDs left. Just keep in mind that this skill makes you lose capture point contribution for its duration.
One of Willbender's greatest strengths is its mobility:
s are important even when bursting targets as Blind spam prevents them from counterpressuring you. and all apply this condition on top of doing great damage. could fill a similar role as the is great for mitigating incoming damage while also pressuring opponents.
grants you and (among other things) which allow you to ignore CC and debilitating conditions like while bursting targets. Being a shadowstep (teleport) skill it could also reposition you right on top of your target so that you may follow up with immediately for burst damage.
Food
- strong mix of sustain and damage.
- cheap defensive option.
- boon focused option. Retains the damage reduction of the other ascended options while bumping up your boon duration and frequently giving you stacks, which at full potential makes it competitive with the damage of other ascended food (if you can keep scoring hits).
- non-ascended offensive option.
- active damage mitigation via more access to dodging.
- cheap crit chance boost (brings you up to 90%) with armor ignoring damage procs that also heal you.
Utility
- this can be seen as more of a defensive option. While the added movement speed could help you stick to targets better, usually that won't be necessary since you have plenty of mobility skills. It's quite useful for disengaging though if things go wrong, allowing you to easily leave/reset fights or just get out of melee range faster before two bursts.
Runes
- better boon duration without sacrificing too much damage.
- more tanky option.
- good offensive stats and better stacking.
Sword/Sword
The main source of burst damage here comes from the the offhand skills:
is both defensive and offensive, deals solid damage while destroying enemy projectiles. Note that the damage of this skill can be very unreliable in anything but melee range. is a good setup for this too.
has many uses: vertical mobility via teleportation, symbol for cleaving, to make an important skill miss, or a combo field which can be used to combo with a leap finisher.
Spear
Spear has its own unique mechanic called illumination. Using any of skills 2-5 and fulfilling the right conditions gives you the Illuminated buff, which increases the effectiveness of your next skill.
Starting off with is recommended, because it ensures that the rest of your combo is illuminated.
and go well together, you should aim to line up the 2nd strike of GD with the pass-through damage of HR.
is the main burst skill here, a powerful AoE with heavy damage that can also heal and cleanse allies in range. Make sure that this skill is always illuminated.
Burst combo examples
Willbender isn't a very complicated spec and you don't have to work hard to do a lot of damage. This section is only meant to give you a few ideas for sequencing, especially when it comes to doing damage with minimal risk.
Defensive burst combo
Spear Combo
You basically just go through your skills from right to left, 5 to 2.
Sustain
The build is rather squishy, Willbender relies heavily on its mobility to avoid damage, jumping in and out of fights to deliver burst damage while keeping melee contact to a minimum, unless the target has and .
is an excellent reactive skill which cleanses several conditions and even has an evade frame in case you need to dodge something but don't have the endurance.
is worth holding onto for its passive in order to get free condition cleansing, but don't hesitate to use it on low health (and even its active can cleanse conditions).
is a purely defensive stunbreak and your best answer against an overwhelming amount of conditions. Usually a last resort for when you're heavily pressured and other options don't cut it anymore.
is an excellent and versatile defensive skill. Short CD, breaks stuns, grants boons, it's also a ground targeted ranged teleport which adds a lot of vertical mobility to the build. Leaving attackers behind while teleporting to the highground can save your life. As with most Willbender skills, it's not purely defensive - the AoE it leaves behind upon landing is a good source of cleave damage too, so you could sacrifice this skill to chase or pressure targets if you're fine with giving up a defensive CD.
is also a stunbreak but most of the time it'll be used to execute burst combos from range. Worth holding onto for defensive purposes when every other stunbreak is on CD though.
As long as you have you're somewhat safe. It's an incredibly powerful defensive skill which grants you immunity to incoming damage and CC (other than fall damage) when under heavy pressure, and refreshes all of your Virtues which could either help you stay alive longer or run away.
