Power Dragonhunter Everything You Need Script

Hey everyone, this is Sheff, and in this video we're going to talk about everything you need to play Power Dragonhunter for the first time in a World vs. World group. This includes basic profession mechanics, build options, synergies, rotation and skill combos, and your role in a larger organized squad. Each of these sections is timestamped, so if you'd like to skip around the video to the parts that you want to see, go right ahead.

Dragonhunter's role in an organized group is to generate high spike damage through use of its symbol and trap mechanics, though the profession also offers some defensive utility and boon support to your group overall. Your profession-specific skills, called your Virtues, are enhanced versions of the base Guardian virtues. F1 applies a chain to a targeted enemy, and can be activated again while the chain is active to pull foes to you. F2 is a ground-targeted leap that you can use to reposition quickly. And F3 is a damage mitigation skill that blocks attacks from enemies in a cone in front of you, enabling Dragonhunter to mitigate damage across your party and your squad. To start, I'm going to show an example clip of me in a fight, and then we'll pick apart and discuss each element of the build, and what it contributes to your rotation and skill combos, in the rest of the video.

[[ fight clip ]]

Beginning with our gear, we'll be using a mix of Marauder and either Dragon's, if you own End of Dragons, or Valkyrie's, if you don't. Dragonhunter gets an impressive 55% crit for free from traits and boons, so you'll want to aim for a 45% crit chance unbuffed with whatever mix of attribute prefixes you choose to run. The build linked in the video description is optimized to do this, but it's not the only combination that works here, and if you're lazy, just running full Marauders is fine as well. For our weapons, we'll be using Greatsword and Spear, but if you don't own the Janthir Wilds expansion to get access to Spears, you can also run either Axe/Focus or Scepter/Focus as replacements. On each of our weapons we'll use a Sigil of Force and a Sigil of Energy for a flat damage increase overall. For Runes, we'll use Runes of the Scholar to stack additional Ferocity and Power, and for our Relic, we'll use Relic of the Brawler -- yes, despite the fact that Relic of the Dragonhunter is named after you, the consistent damage increase of Relic of the Thief is a more reliable choice overall.

For utility skills we'll use Shelter, Stand Your Ground, Test of Faith, Procession of Blades, and Renewed Focus. Shelter is your heal, but more importantly, it's a two-second channeled block and an important part of your ability to mitigate damage. Stand Your Ground serves much the same role here as it does on Firebrand, as a source of Stability for your party, but some of your trait choices also rely on you having the Resolution boon active, which Stand Your Ground also provides. Test of Faith and Procession of Blades are both damage skills, and will place a trap at your feet when activated. It's usually best to try and place these traps where they'll immediately activate and apply damage, unless you're very sure that an enemy group will walk over them when your own group is using their spike damage. Finally, Renewed Focus is a damage mitigation skill that gives you three seconds of invulnerability, but also recharges each of your Virtues skills, F1 through F3. If you feel like you need to use Renewed Focus to survive, try and get at least F2 and F3 on cooldown, so that you can refresh them as you use RF.

For our traits, we'll use Radiance 233, Virtues 113, and Dragonhunter 331. In Radiance we get our first passive boost to our crit chance from our minor trait Radiant Power, giving us an extra 10% crit against Burning foes, and 150 Ferocity. Burning is a very common condition in World vs. World, and we can generate it ourselves using our F1 Virtue, so it is easy to assume this crit boost will usually be active. We also refresh our F1 virtue every time we defeat another player with Renewed Justice, making it easier to spread Burning to foes. In our major traits, we take Right-Hand Strength despite not using any one-handed weapons, to get a free 4% crit chance or so. We take Righteous Instincts to get an additional 25% crit while we are affected by the Resolution boon, along with a bit of free Might every second. And we also take the major trait Retribution, to give us an additional 10% strike damage while affected by Resolution. Your sources of Resolution on Dragonhunter are on Stand Your Ground, Spear 2, and Greatsword 4, so you'll want to be using these abilities during your spike damage rotation in order to make sure you're getting the bonus critical hit chance and strike damage from your Radiance traits.

In Virtues, we further improve on our Resolution uptime, and pick up even more strike damage increases. Our minor trait Power of the Virtuous reduces the cooldowns on our Virtue skills, letting us use F2 to leap and F3 to block for allies more often. The Virtue of Resolution minor gives us Resolution any time we activate a Virtue, and makes Resolution last longer, which helps the uptime of our traits in Radiance, while Inspired Virtue gives us additional boons on each of our Virtue skills, as well as a flat 1% bonus damage per boon, which can be up to 8% extra damage in World vs. World. In our Major traits we take Unscathed Contender, giving us 7% bonus damage while above 90%, and an additional 7% damage when affected by Aegis, we take Inspiring Virtue, giving us a bonus 10% damage after activating any of our Virtues, and we take Indomitable Courage, turning our F3 Virtue into a source of group Stability and personal stunbreak, for extra survivability.

Finally, in our Dragonhunter traitline, Pure of Sight gives us bonus damage based on our distance to an enemy, starting at 5% in melee, and increasing to 15% as we move further away. Dragonhunter is a very melee-oriented profession, but at worst, this still counts for an extra 5% bonus damage. In our major traits we add a damage coefficient and immobilize effect to Wings of Resolve, our F2 Virtue, and also improve our movement speed. We improve the radius and duration of our party-wide F3 Virtue Shield of Courage, and we heal ourselves and remove conditions any time we block an attack with Hunter's Fortification. Even though this trait has a one second internal cooldown, many of our channeled block abilities are longer than one second. Hunter's Fortification will trigger a maximum of two times off of your heal skill Shelter, and a maximum of three times off of your F3 Virtue Shield of Courage, in addition to triggering off of any aegis you get from the passive effect of your F3 Virtue as well, or off of Aegis that you receive from other party members.

Dragonhunter's damage rotation is complex, both in terms of the number of skills that you can use to contribute to it, as well as the conditions and requirements that you have to maximize your strike damage, so let's go over each of those in detail. We're able to deal our maximum amount of damage when the following conditions are true:

= We have given ourselves Protection or Resolution in the last four seconds to trigger Relic of the Brawler, for 10% strike damage
= We are attacking a foe with Burning to trigger Radiant Power, for 10% critical chance.
= We have Resolution on us currently to trigger both Righetous Instinct, for 10% crit chance, and also to trigger Retribution, for 10% strike damage.
= We have activated a Virtue in the last six seconds to trigger Inspiring Virtue, for 10% damage.

These are the four steps of your damage rotation that you personally can make sure are true. There's also the bonus damage from boons in Inspired Virtue and the bonus damage for Aegis and health from Unscathed Contender, but these are a little more difficult to control, and you can generally leave these up to the supports in your party to take care of. The easiest way to make sure these four conditions all apply as you begin your damage rotation is to use your F1 virtue to apply Burning, while also activating Inspired Virtues, and also using Stand Your Ground to generate Resilience for Relic of the Brawler, Righteous Instinct, and Retribution. Once you have completed that checklist, start by dropping both of your traps, Procession of Blades, followed by Test of Faith. Procession of Blades has a half-second cast time, while Test of Faith is an instant cast, so you can use the latter as the former casts. With your traps activated, follow up with Spear 5 to Illuminate your Spear skills, cast Spear 4 at your feet to make sure that it's Illuminated, then cast Spear 3, also making sure that you are still inside of your Symbol from Spear 5 to Illuminate this skill as well. Weapon swap into Greatsword, use Greatsword 4 to reapply Resilience to yourself, and end with Greatsword 2. You can use Greatsword 3 to reposition yourself and deal a bit of extra damage if necessary, otherwise, cast Greatsword 4 once it comes off cooldown, weapon swap back into Spear, and use your Spear autoattacks until Spear 5 and your traps come back off cooldown to start your damage rotation again.

That said, the biggest difference between a good Dragonhunter and a great Dragonhunter is not the exact order that you use your skills. Instead, it's in the positioning and placement of your skills, and while that's true for many professions, it's more important on Dragonhunter than almost any other damage profession in the gamemode currently. Almost all of your skills on Dragonhunter are placed at your feet and have a relatively small radius, so you need to be close enough to enemies in order to apply damage effectively, but not directly in the middle of an enemy stack where damage is high. Instead, your goal on Dragonhunter is to attack the fringes of a group, trying to overlap your damaging effects with enemy players while staying in a relatively safe position yourself. The best way to do this is to practice your rotation in the Special Forces Training Area, or in Armistice Bastion, or even just to look at the size of the symbols attached to Greatsword 4 and Spear 5, as this is about the radius of most of your damaging abilities. Try and cast your skills on one side of the symbol, while keeping enemy players on the other side, and you'll usually have enough distance between you and opposing players to stay relatively safe.

If you do find yourself too deep inside of an enemy zerg, the good news is that Dragonhunter has a lot of personal survivability tools. Shelter is going to be your best option for emergency damage mitigation, giving you two seconds of blocks as well as healing and clearing a few conditions from you thanks to Hunter's Fortification. Shield of Courage is a party-wide block, and it's a good idea to use your F3 Virtue while cleaving in melee to help soak as much damage as possible from an enemy group, while also providing extra Stability to your allies thanks to Indomitable Courage. Your F2 Virtue is a leap that also clears Immobilize and other conditions when used, and you can either save this to leap out of a tight spot, or use it to quickly reposition to a good spot to drop your traps. And Renewed Focus is your strongest overall personal survivability tool, but because it recharges all of your Virtues when used, you want to try and save it for last after you've already put your F2 and F3 skills on cooldown, so that you can double-cast them later. Shelter and Renewed Focus also have fairly lengthy channel times associated with them, so if you can, try and drop your pulsing damage abilities before using either, so that you can continue to deal damage while channeling them -- this would be both of your traps and both of your Symbols, Greatsword 4 and Spear 5. Given how long Dragonhunter's damage rotation is, and how many skills it involves, it's sometimes necessary to stop your rotation halfway through in order to survive if incoming damage is too high. You generally want to cast both of your Traps together, but if your damage rotation becomes decoupled from your Trap cooldowns, casting either the Greatsword rotation or the Spear rotation alongside your Traps is usually enough damage to generate downs anyway. If your commander is calling for a spike and you don't have all of your skills available, just try and cast anything that you have up, as all of your damage abilities are on relatively short cooldowns and you can get them back quickly.

In the current World vs. World meta, spike damage professions like Berserker, Holosmith, and Dragonhunter, are fairly interchangeable, but Dragonhunter does have some unique advantages. First, access to Shield of Courage is a strong defensive utility that can negate significant amounts of incoming damage across your squad, so if your support players are relatively weak, using Dragonhunter to compensate could help your squad's ability to sustain damage overall. And second, Dragonhunters using Virtues as they do in this build have access to decent shared Stability across your party, both on Stand Your Ground, as well as on double casts of Shield of Courage thanks to Renewed Focus and Indomitable Courage. That said, Dragonhunter needs to be very close to enemy groups in order to deal damage, while other damage professions like Berserkers using Longbow, Holosmiths with Rifle and Prime Light Beam, or Vindicators with Hammer and Scavenger Burst, have more flexibility in their positioning and range of damage application. Using Dragonhunter effectively requires that your squad be able to get into melee and survive there, and so professions with good Barrier application like Specter or Scourge compliment the profession well, as well as professions with good Protection uptime and damage mitigation ability, like Support Tempest.

Anyway, I think that's about all I've got for this video. Dragonhunter is a technically demanding profession that requires good positioning, good skill usage, and good awareness of how your traits and boons combine to maximize your spike damage output, and is a good fit for players looking for a damage profession with a high skill ceiling that also contributes to your squad's overall survivability with strong defensive boons and damage mitigation abilities. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy playing, I definitely recommend that you try it out for yourself and see how it feels. If you liked this video and you want to see more build guides, hit the like button and subscribe to the channel, and if you think there's something that I forgot in this video, or wasn't clear, leave a comment to let me know. I also stream World vs. World on Twitch every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9pm eastern, if you want to watch me play some of these builds in real time and ask questions there. But until then, I've been Sheff, and enjoy the rest of your day.