Playstyle Overview
Vigour revolves around utilizing his unique mechanic, Radiant Runes, to generate powerful healing, shielding, or damage. To help achieve our goal we follow a couple simple rules.
1. ABC: Always be casting. When in doubt, Dawnflare. You want to be generating as many radiant runes as possible and to do so we need to always be doing something to aid that. It’s important to learn what generates runes and what doesn’t to ensure you’re not wasting globals and missing out on what makes Vigour so great.
Keep important abilities on cooldown and maintain buffs/debuffs. There are maintenance-type tasks that you should try to maximize. Having 100% uptime of Soulbrand on enemies and Rune Of Renewal on at least 1 ally is crucial for Rune generation. Cast your short cooldowns like Radiant Blast frequently, since they also generate runes. In big AoE pulls it's good to get a Dawnbreaker Orb out for both rune generation and damage. The more friendly and enemy targets it hits, the more Runes you’ll generate, so aim carefully. Be mindful not to launch it into unintended enemy packs.
2. Avoid Wasting Radiant Runes: Runes are your primary resource, used to cast your most powerful abilities. Even when there’s not much to heal, avoid over capping them unless you’re intentionally saving for an upcoming damage event. Don't be hesitant to sneak in more damaging spells if damage intake is low and rune generation is high.
Rotation
Before Grand Design (Early-Mid Game)
This is the priority list for early on (pre Grand Design). Focusing on maximizing your Radiant Rune generation and keeping your party alive with Greater Heals.
- Keep Rune Of Renewal active on your Tank as often as possible. It’s always most efficient to reapply this before the buff fades for the increased heal.
- Spend any other runes on applying Soulbrand to enemies. The more dots you have up, the more runes you’ll generate and the more healing and damage you’ll do.
- Cast Radiant Blast off cooldown
- Cast Dawnbreaker Orb with Epiphany buff for free uses and additional rune generation.
- Cast Circle Of Light for party wide healing, just remember the circle is pretty small so positioning is important.
- Cast Greater Heal. You’ll be spamming this a lot early on, swapping targets a lot. Just be wary of your mana.
- Dawnflare spam enemies for rune generation and damage.
Don’t be afraid to use cooldowns such as Lightshaper's Ward on targets taking heavy damage, and try to use Runic Proliferation regularly. It’s a lot of additional runes you gain on a mere 60 seconds cooldown so missing multiple uses of this ability can hurt your healing, damage and mana over the course of a dungeon. Keep in mind as well every rune you generate will cast a Greater Heal on the lowest ally due to Master Of Triage, making Runic Proliferation a pretty strong cooldown just by activating it.
Remove Magic should be used on any dispellable debuff. Throw Book is our crowd control option, and is best used to help control caster mobs. Levitate is a nice personal defensive that also provides movement speed, so don’t be afraid to use it often early game. Later on this ability becomes more important via Ascending Avatar.
With Grand Design (Mid-Late Game)
This is the priority list once you gain access to the Grand Design talent and onwards.
- Cast overcharged Rune Of Renewal to apply it to all of your allies. Casting this again with it already active is your primary way to heal significant amounts of AoE damage. Having this always on every member of your party greatly increases your rune generation and group healing on recasts.
- Cast overcharged Soulbrand to apply your dot to multiple enemies for massive rune generation and damage.
- Cast overcharged Luminous Barrier whenever there is predictable group wide damage incoming. It’s incredibly powerful if you can plan ahead.
- Cast Radiant Blast off cooldown
- Cast Circle Of Light as a way to heal up multiple party members within a small radius. You can comfortably spam this to meet AoE healing checks during your Avatar Of Light, or Ascending Avatar windows.
- Cast Greater Heal. At this point this is your filler heal if you find yourself in the rare occasion you have absolutely no runes. This is a great way to spot heal tanks, especially during Ascending Avatar when it's an instant cast.
- Cast Dawnflare. This is your filler damaging ability that you’ll spam in-between everything else. Once you acquire your legendary this cast becomes incredibly short.
Some things to note are that Luminous Barrier quickly becomes the primary button you’ll use once you are familiar with the damage patterns in the dungeons. You’ll always want to have Rune Of Renewal and Soulbrand active for the rune generation, but preventing damage with Barrier is incredibly strong in scenarios where you can. You don’t want to do this at the cost of reapplying Renewal if it means your group will be one shot by an incoming boss or trash AoE.
Once you unlock the talent Radiant Soul, it becomes even more important to Radiant Blast off cooldown since it adds 3 seconds duration to any active Rune Of Renewal, Soulbrand, AND Luminous Barrier. In combination with the Beacon In The Dark talent you’ll get regular resets of Radiant Blast too, allowing you to do this even more.
Radiant Runes
We’ve mentioned Radiant Runes a handful of times now and how important it is to manage them properly, so let’s actually talk about it. Radiant Runes are Vigour’s unique class mechanic, displayed as orbs beneath your character.
Runes are generated through your various abilities, or with refunds from your Spirit stat, and are used to cast a handful of different powerful abilities that cost these runes instead of mana.
The more Runes you have, the more effective you can be. It can take some time to get used to this, and due to the nature of how you build these, it takes time to ramp up before you really get going too. Managing this mechanic is key to succeeding on Vigour.
Early on it’ll be far more difficult to be able to do everything you want with your runes. Consistently casting Radiant Blast off cooldown, alongside maintaining multiple Rune Of Renewal and Soulbrand will aid your generation a lot but I’ll touch on that more below.
Rune Generation
Vigour can generate runes with Dawnflare, your filler damaging ability, Radiant Blast, and all of your Rune spenders.
Spending Runes
Vigour has 4 powerful abilities that cost runes. These are Rune Of Renewal, Soulbrand, Luminous Barrier and Dawnbreaker Orb. Each is potent and used in different ways.
Rune Of Renewal costs 1 Radiant Rune and you’ll always keep this active on at least your Tank. It causes all your healing to echo on that ally for an additional 25%. The bonus healing also generates Radiant Runes so it’s important to maintain. If you cast this again on a target that already has Rune Of Renewal active, it heals for an increased 200%, making it the largest heal in your arsenal when used this way. This is a great way to spot heal your tank/anyone with an active rune assuming you have the resources to do so.
Soulbrand is your 1 rune cost maintenance debuff you’ll apply to enemies. It deals quite significant damage, and generates Radiant Runes over time as it does damage. It refunds its cost over the duration and then some, so it's extremely efficient to apply this early in a pull.
Luminous Barrier is very powerful for managing predictable damage. It’s a large absorb shield at the cost of 1 rune on a single target. If you’re able to plan ahead this is incredibly strong.
And lastly Dawnbreaker Orb. You conjure an orb that travels out from you slowly, healing allies it touches and dealing damage to enemies. I like to get an orb out early into AoE pulls if there isn't much damage happening as its a good rune generator that pays for itself + more if aimed properly. Be careful with aiming it into distant packs and pulling unintended mobs.
Grand Design
Later on you’ll gain access to a talent called Grand Design. This talent massively enhances your rune spenders, allowing you to hold down the cast to overcharge them. Doing this makes each ability hit 4 targets respectively. It helps your healing, rune generation, and damage by an absurd amount and it makes Vigour significantly stronger once this talent is acquired for the small cost of 1 additional rune per ability mentioned above.