Guild Wars 2

Corrosive Poison Cloud, it seems like a cool skill, but I have never seen it used! Does anyone use this thing?

it is very potent in wvwvw because of the heal debuff.

Its an OK skill its just there are better utility skills then this. The poison damage is minimal and effect doesn’t last long and also inflicts weaken on yourself, which is just too much of a negative for a placable skill that has not much usage.

I’ve used it in conjunction with Bone Minions for Area Weakness combo effects. You obviously transfer the self inflicted Weakness off yourself back on the target and for PvE you can set it up with Epidemic to spread the weakness further. Weakness stacks in Duration, so subsequent application extends the duration of the effect on the target.

It would be a lot better if it worked more like Choking Gas. As it is you are not very likely to get more than 5 seconds of Poison and Weakness ouf of it.

Unless I’m mistaken, isn’t poison cloud the 2nd best poison skill in the entire game?

It’s duration is 12s (Tooltip is wrong, it isn’t 15s. Report the bug and maybe it’ll be buffed lol) I use it in my bunker buster build for killing Guardians with a 32s cooldown. The poison is nice for wrecking their regens.

Its good but there are other must have utilities that a necro needs to be viable imo. This is 1v1, in team fights poison clouds are somewhat more viable if there is more than 1 necro.

Currently, weakness is trash.

And the best poison skill in the game is Thief Shortbow 4. Only takes initiative, and does a poison field that lasts 4 seconds. However each second you’re in there gives a stack of poison. So if you stay the full 4 seconds, it gives you a poison of around 15-20 seconds.

If you get the trait for "Poison skills last 33% longer’ which is a tier 1 trait for them. Each Shortbow 4 can potentially do a poison that lasts 30-60s long.

Its pretty kitten that a weapon skill beats a utility but eh what can ya do.

I think its very useful on a dagger necro, I usually throw it down, hit blood is power, then deathly swarm to get rid of my corruption effects and spread it around, plus you can use the trait to recharge corruption skills (which both of those are) faster so you now have 2 pros for using it. My main reason for using it though is for the weakness, not so much the poison cause I can restack that weakness from my offhand dagger skill, and no, weakness is not trash, especially when you see tons of glancing blows pop up. Reducing damage is just as important as any other damage mitigation. Now as far as pvp goes, nah I don’t really see much use for this skill as there are other utilities you should be focusing on.

And don’t forget the 15 power trait for thief.

3 sec weakness every poison application.

12 sec weakness for each 4 second poison field for 4 initiative.

+15% cond duration at least.

I don’t get the fuss over Corrosive Poison Cloud (coming from a strictly WvW and not sPvP viewpoint). Just about every Necro I know is rolling with a Staff as one of their weapon options, which gives you access to a poison. Then you can Epidemic to spread it to other people.

Weakness sucks, but I could in theory see how Corrosive Poison Cloud could be a nice area of denial skill. It’s just a bummer that it comes with the added caveat of self-weakness, which, arguably isn’t too bad because oh yeah weakness sucks.

I don’t understand the hate on weakness, it’s an effective 25% damage reduction. That’s like a full stack of vulnerability but in reverse.

striker.3704:

I don’t understand the hate on weakness, it’s an effective 25% damage reduction. That’s like a full stack of vulnerability but in reverse.

Endurance regeneration decreased by 50%; 50% of Non Critical hits are glancing blows (50% damage); stacks duration.

So no its not a 25% damage reduction at all. 50% of non critical hits does not mean 1/2 of the hits might be reduced if they are not critical, its 50% chance every hit which means it could never be a glancing blow or you could have 4 in a row if it was all non criticals. To be a effective defensive tool we need something more reliable then chance.

striker.3704:

I don’t understand the hate on weakness, it’s an effective 25% damage reduction. That’s like a full stack of vulnerability but in reverse.

Someone with a crit build (50% crit) it is a 12.5% dmg reduction. Up to 25% with 0% crit.

Even then it’s RNG based and NOT reliable at all. It also means it won’t be able to reduce any actual burst, since burst is usually from crits.

People are looking at the wrong half of weakness, which is why they think it’s crap.

walk out of said cloud, click one button, cloud effect nullified. damage done – minimal.

Mammoth.1975:

People are looking at the wrong half of weakness, which is why they think it’s crap.

Cause it is crap. Against condition users, its useless as they dont care if they glance or not, the conditions are still applied. Against power/crit users, the crit just overrides the weakness completely bypassing it.

The only main people its best to use against are people who run soldiers/valk/cleric and the people who use that their burst isn’t that scary in the first place making it a moot point.

Those battles are already pretty equal and fair that you wouldnt complain about weakness in the first place.

If weakness was something like 100% of non crits glance, then yes itd be somewhat useful.

Or like 50% of ALL attacks glance (including crits).

So currently weakness is crap.

I use poison cloud religiously.

Pretty sure most of us that said we use and like the skill also said we’d never use it in pvp, in fact I hate using staff in pvp too, its a good way to waste all your skills and get killed anyway. But in pve, the poison cloud is pretty freaking awesome. So all the arguments about how it sucks cause people can walk out of it, ect. Yeha we know thats why we don’t use it :p

Berullos.6928:

Mammoth.1975:

People are looking at the wrong half of weakness, which is why they think it’s crap.

Cause it is crap. Against condition users, its useless as they dont care if they glance or not, the conditions are still applied. Against power/crit users, the crit just overrides the weakness completely bypassing it.

The only main people its best to use against are people who run soldiers/valk/cleric and the people who use that their burst isn’t that scary in the first place making it a moot point.

Those battles are already pretty equal and fair that you wouldnt complain about weakness in the first place.

If weakness was something like 100% of non crits glance, then yes itd be somewhat useful.

Or like 50% of ALL attacks glance (including crits).

So currently weakness is crap.

Check the bold.

As usual, what works depends on the intelligence and reaction time of the opposition.

Against any relatively aware human, the skill is one button away from worthless. Against mobs however, it can be a life saver or breathing space.

But then again, you can just apply player skill rather than toon skill and kite the mobs until the cows come home for no real danger…

digiowl.9620:

Against any relatively aware human, the skill is one button away from worthless.

It covers an entire node with a 15 second poison field. I don’t use it because we have better utilities, but it’s strong.

Weakness: Endurance regen decreased by 50%; Does other stuff nobody cares about

In other words, it’s better for small fights where dodging really matters. You put it on people to soak up their Endurance. It’s an offensive skill more than a defensive one, even though the name would suggest otherwise.

Chill is the condition that wrecks damage output. Skill recharge reduced by 2/3. Ouch!

Only for those that has effective skills that recharge within 10 seconds. The rest are fire and forget for the most part anyways.

digiowl.9620:

Only for those that has effective skills that recharge within 10 seconds. The rest are fire and forget for the most part anyways.

Yeah, upon further thought it seems chill is best used to lengthen the cooldown on someone’s healing skill a bit. Kind of underwhelming, now that I think about it.

PinCushion.7390:

Weakness: Endurance regen decreased by 50%; Does other stuff nobody cares about

In other words, it’s better for small fights where dodging really matters. You put it on people to soak up their Endurance. It’s an offensive skill more than a defensive one, even though the name would suggest otherwise.

Chill is the condition that wrecks damage output. Skill recharge reduced by 2/3. Ouch!

You know what the worst part of it is? In a small engagement, if you use Corrosive Poison Cloud you basically screw yourself over too. Odds are you’ll be fighting someone with more/better escapes than you, and hey guess what – CPC applies weakness to you too! Might as well go Chilblains > Putrid Mark, or Enfeebling Blood, since that doesn’t also screw up your energy regeneration for those precious, precious dodges.

Deathly Swarm is very good in Corruption builds.