Guild Wars 2

Not sure how everyone feels about venoms, but here I go, I’m not too happy with them. For me to effectively use venoms i have to trait at least 20 into DA, which i don’t really want to do. I feel likeI ‘m making a venom build, not a condition build, seeing as all my focus goes into making my venoms effective so I can hold any kind of pressure on well made builds. I’d prefer being able to effectively use conditions on thief, without having to waste my traits on all these venoms. Understood we can hold,about 10 stacks of bleeds with caltrops and main hand pistol. But without venoms we can really only hold bleeds and torment… poison requires weppin swapping… and i’ll never use perplex. In surmise, please make venoms more standalone so i can focus my traits into more important things

If you have multiple venoms on your skill bar, you are running a venom build. It’s important to know what that is and is not.

Fully traited, a venom build involves pinning down enemies, supporting yourself and allies while being a little bit tanky, and flanking foes’ defenses with a mix of high-power/no-crit attacks and minor but sustained condition damage.

Venoms are pretty well balanced between control, support, and damage. If you want them to do just one of those at the expense of the others, I think what you really want is a completely new group of skills.

However, I would like to see the option of replacing some of the attack power and maybe toughness with condition damage. Simply put: melee thieves use power, but ranged thieves depend on conditions to get the same moderate output. That’s not so much a venoms thing, though.

A new trait could, for example, make it so that a thief using ranged weapons gets all condition damage from stacks of might, instead of half-cd/half-power. If placed right, this could be a big help to ranged venom-users.