Guild Wars 2

Don’t get me wrong, I actually love this skill. I may be in a minority when I say that, but it’s one of my favourite melee skills and it tears apart might stackers and bunkers extremely well. It’s one of my favourite PvE skills, as well.

However, until the tracking gets sorted, it’s just way too unreliable. In fact, it’s pretty dodgy in its execution. Sometimes, even if my character is not doing anything and standing idly, it will take a short delay for my character to begin the evasion movement, and thus I get hit (usually one-shot by Subject Alpha’s ice technique that I time correctly to dodge over and still get hit due to this delay).

So to spice it up, I’m proposing a different skill altogether that works in sort of the same way. I’m proposing the first dual-skill chain.

Imagine the evasive movement shown by Death Blossom (leaping over the opponent). Now try and imagine a similar type of leap, only on an x-axis instead of a y-axis (you flip over sideways instead of pointing upwards). While flipping over the opponent, during one of the spins, your character drives the dagger vertically up the opponent’s back. This is the evasion and boon strip stage with slightly less damage than a 3rd stage auto-attack (the strongest). However, the boon is not just taken, but stolen and applied to yourself (with no refreshed duration). I shall call it “Disabling Leap”.

Then, as your character is cascading to the ground on the other side, Disabling Leap has been temporarily replaced with a second skill. If you press this in the time you have before you hit the floor (or perhaps there is a half-second when you’ve landed where it’s still active), your character evades a second time, but this time without moving. Instead, your character twirls around and hits with his/her sword for heavy damage (say the damage of the second strike of Flanking Strike or 15-20% more) in a short 360 radius, crippling all targets for 2-3 seconds (which gives you a small window to escape). I shall call this second skill “Dance of Death”. Alternatively, instead of a single 360 sweep, the skill could be similiar to Pistol Whip’s main attack, which is basically a channelled dodge/attack combo, so the dodges are continuous and there are 3-4 attacks within the quick twirl (say the twirl lasts one-two seconds in total), each refreshing the cripple if they hit. The total damage would be the same as suggested earlier, and the opponent has a chance to escape the full brunt of the attack.

Disabling Leap will cost 4 initiative (the boon steal is potentially a game-changer, so perhaps that part could be scrapped if there’s a problem with it that you guys find). Dance of Death will also cost 4 initiative. This means that the full chain is a huge drain on your initiative pool, and you cannot deal the extremely heavy hits without using the full set of 8. Death Blossom has proven to me a constant reliability with it’s evasion and tracking, so using the same mechanism, I think this setup could prove a lot more reliable and useful to an S/D setup. The same mechanics behind Flanking Strike are here, but there is a lot more to offer.

Any changes, criticisms or thoughts you have are welcome. I thought this up on the spot.

I like it. Gives me a reason to use something other than CnD or auto-attack while using S/D. The current Flanking Strike just needs a little more, and this seems to be one of the better solutions.

Something I should also mention is the slowness of the 2nd attack on Flanking Strike makes it near worthless against other players, since it’s so easily telegraphed and leaves a huge gap for the opponent to dodge and/or interrupt. This also mitigates that problem.