Budget Support Builds
In Guild Wars 2, support builds are critical to both fast and safe clears of content. As a general rule the majority of teams for high end PVE content such as raids and fractals have greater need of support players as opposed to DPS players.
Often it is difficult for newer players to get multiple sets of gear for both DPS classes and support classes.
In addition often completely optimal support builds such as harrier druid may require gear that is expensive or time consuming to acquire.
However, one advantage of support builds is they very rarely need completely optimized gear to be effective and there are some very good variations of popular builds that work with relatively inexpensive exotic trading post/karma purchased gear. These builds can execute at the same level as optimized builds with extremely minor (in single digit percentages) tradeoffs in healing power or boon duration.
Fundamentals of Budget Builds
The heart of building a support build involves some combination of diviner, minstrel, harrier, or magi gear.
Diviner gear is used for support DPS power hybrids such as dps alacrity renegade or dps power quickbrand. These builds are difficult to replicate and truly do need diviner gear so we will not attempt to create a budget version of these builds.
Magi gear is purchasable from the trading post with the exception of trinkets that can be bought with Karma.
Harrier and Minstrel gear can be replicated with a combination of Giver gear, Magi gear and platinum doubloons that can all be purchased from the trading post.
Druid:
General
This build has 1450 toughness which should be communicated to the tank, but in general in all the most optimized runs, the toughness will not be an issue. Otherwise with 71% boon duration this build is still capable for 10-man might with proper rotation along with good uptime on all the other essential druid buffs.
This build uses Monk runes which require 3 days of running Ascalonian Catacombs. It is strongly recommended to run AC for these runes, but an alternative is to run water runes instead.
Chronomancer:
CC Version
This is a build with 1750 toughness so it can usually serve as both the main tank and off chrono. It is a fairly tanky build and can be made tankier by replacing some of the magi gear with giver and replacing the runes with durability runes. This build runs domination for extra CC.