Alliance Battle Builds
Having gotten into AB a little more recently (its all Canmore's fault :P) I was wondering what builds people use for AB (if you AB at all, of course). My favorite build at the moment is a hard core AoE fire Ele/Assn build (which Canmore provided to me), relying on an instant cast of Meteor Shower followed by Assassin's Promise (for energy and recharge of MS) and some hard hitting AoE damage over time spells (I will post the full build later). While AoE spells may not be as good as spike spells for live players, in AB the damage over time spells work very well against the NPCs at the shrines (which, under C's tutelage, is what I now tend to focus on when in AB). In fact, with this build I can often singlehandedly take out 3 shrine dwellers (easy with casters and rangers as they tend to stay put, the war shrine guards are a bit harder since they tend to scatter a bit more). So what are your favorite AB builds, and how do you use em? :D

Because I approach AB like I do everything else (cough*run away, run away*cough) with the attitude that everyone's always looking for a monk, that's typically what I run. Generally I find something with an emphasis on Prot over Healing builds tends to be as or more effective than a straight heal, and I tend toward the less obvious elite of Divert Hexes over the obvious heal spike of Zealous Benediction for the reasons that A) fewer enemies are looking for it, and B) heavy hexes and condition spikes are frequently popular with the necros and mesmers. Yes it's a slow cast and yes it's somewhat e-heavy but it's worked for me for the last 8 Kurzic ranks. Other than that, general prot stuff. If you're squeamish about minimal heal, a hybrid of prot and heal are also pretty decent. I favour a blend of Word of Healing, Prot Spirit, Guardian, Patient Spirit, hex removal, condition removal, some other spam heal, and leave the last slot for "surprises". And by that I mean something like a shadow step to run away, a speed buff, an enchantment removal, an interrupt, or something else just to be a pain. As Jet mentioned, the ele capper is also lots of fun. Big damage and Assassin's Promise-based instant recharge makes very short work of the majority of capture shrine points. Personal play style tends towards mostly a cap focus, particularly a certain set of shrines as opposed to running the whole field, but with mild flexibility to try and take on an opposing team enough to temporarily remove them from play, esp if you take them out of your backfield (Backfield always = shrines closest to your home base. front field always = shrines closest to enemy's home base), or to defend a shrine before moving on. Other builds I've seen used to great effect are KD warriors and/or thumpers, water eles (IMO more effective if you have a classic nuker for aoe on the team as well; the water ele's better as a single spiker in these cases, or for snares), heavy hexers (particularly degen flavours). MMs are a bit of a dicey prospect, as there's lots of bodies, but also lots of nukers and people willing to steal your minions. Shutdown mesmers are always nasty too, either with key interrupts or the N/Me mix of curses/dom/degen style punishment. Sins are great for hitting key opponents or for getting your healer out of trouble. Or both. And it's always amusing to see what bizarre tricks other people try and pull every now and again, some more useless (the necro who decided it was a good idea to throw Avatar of Melandru) than others (Fragility/Virulence spike).