Guild Wars 2

Now that weakness will affect very popular crit heavy builds, might we look at making a build around keeping it up permanently, or as long as possible?

The reduced durations would make it difficult but increased condition duration setups can gain a lot back. At least 50% or better would be recommended.

Main sources a build would use and base length:

Weapons
Enfeebling Blood (Dagger 5): 6s.
Staff 4 Into 3 Combo: 3s.

Utilities
Corrosive Poison Cloud: 3s every 3s for 12 second – and poison field for more weakness combos.
Signet of Spite: 10s.
Corrupt Boon: Corrupts Might into Weakness (5s). Might is prevalent.
Well of Corruption: As above (5s).

Elite
Plague Form 3: Weakness 1s every second.

Traits
Weakening Shroud: 6s PBAoE weakness on entering Death Shroud.
Withering Precision: 5s on Crit (once per 20 seconds).

Transfers
Deathly Swarm (Dagger 4)
Putrid Mark (Staff 4)
Plague Signet
Aquatic Life Blast
Epidemic (enemy to enemy)

Misc
4pc Rata Sum Rune Bonus: +20% Weakness Duration.
Sigil of Debility: +10% Weakness Duration

We have a lot of sources of weakness if we want, and its not much of a stretch to tailor into a fairly traditional condition build, without much sacrifice. Question is, will it be improved enough to be worthwhile.

Even with the update, weakness has a 50% chance for attacks to deal 50% damage. That’s on average a 25% damage reduction that you have to sustain on enemies and considering that removing conditions is much more prevalent than removing boons, I’d say weakness is inferior to protection (33% damage mitigation) in terms of damage reduction.
However, weakness isn’t just good for its damage reduction. It denies the enemy the endurance they need to maintain their dodges during combat as well.

I can’t really say if a build focused on weakness would work well in tournaments considering the abundance of condition removals and the short duration (or long cooldowns) of weakness, but I sure would like to try a weakness build in tournaments regardless after the patch.

im just afraid final stats on weakness post patch will be worse than current weakness we get.

i am happy as it works now i don’t want it to be worse.

I believe the allegedly leaked patch notes changed it to a 25% chance for any attack to fumble, which I believe is a 12.5% reduction in direct damage. If that is correct it does make weakness more of a factor, but not enough to base a build off of, IMO.

Roe.3679:

I believe the allegedly leaked patch notes changed it to a 25% chance for any attack to fumble, which I believe is a 12.5% reduction in direct damage. If that is correct it does make weakness more of a factor, but not enough to base a build off of, IMO.

12.5% of a 20k health pool though is 2500 health. A valuable amount to have extra when a thief is trying to burst you down.

Thing is I don’t think going for perma weakness or near so, really requires much deviation from a normal condi build. Mainly its the two traits, weakening shroud and withering precision you would need. Probably losing hemo, lingering curses, or master of corruption.

No, it wouldn’t be hard to do with a condi build, but if you want damage mitigation it would probably be easier to just focus on protection which will probably be a lot easier to get if they change the spectral skills.

12.5% isn’t insignificant, I’m just saying it’s not worth focusing on.

25% fumble chance will make weakness even worse than what it is right now considering most durations have been cut in half.
I’m very dubious about the result.

I think you guys are limiting yourselves to a solo perspective. Think of it like this; if you are in a team, your guardian is going to be spitting out protection shouts like crazy and you throwing down weakness, adds to not just his mitigation but yours as well.
Add in an Ele that throws down frost aura for a few seconds and you’ve got yourself 50% damage mitigation.

You are right in that regard. But in an offensive situation, the weakness (which I favored for its anti-endurance effect) is severely reduced in effectiveness due to its harder application and reduced duration.

I don’t really like stuff like weakening shroud, it would seem to me that withering precision, which delivers weakness on crit to be far more reliable. That in addition to enfeebling blood, should be a lot of weakness already.

Not sure what the context is, but a 20/30/20 minion build would work fine here. Or a 0/30/20/20/0 well build, and take ritual of protection, giving you both aoe protection to go with your weakness.

Currently between weakening shroud and withering precision I can stack 20+ seconds of weakness on someone in 3-5 seconds, and proc withering often enough that’s it’s effectively impossible to cleanse.

But as Burjis has said, the endurance regen reduction is a massive part of the condition (outside of PvE), and the heavy nerfing of almost all weakness durations, on top of a unpleasant CD on withering precision (weakness is twice as good as burning, What?) which makes it impossible to consistently apply weakness after the patch.

This wouldn’t be bad, except for the fact that the new weakness will only result in better damage mitigation against fairly high crit builds, and even against them, because of the reduced access to the condition, overall weakness will be in a much poorer state post patch.

Don’t forget Weakening Shroud has a 15 sec Internal CD.

I don’t exactly think it’s the best idea to make entire builds that apply weakness, we get to apply it a lot which i think is why Anet changed it so it’s less underrated and Necros are seen to be more valuable on the offensive support side.

Still, we’ll have to see how valuable it actually is.

I don’t know, they should have left the endurance regen at 50% to counter those perma vigor builds since we don’t get our own vigor at all. The 25% fumble chance will be nice when it works but I really hate RNG when it comes to something like defense.

I’m glad it’ll affect any attack now, but I think regen nerf is a mistake, especially with half the duration.