Guild Wars 2

Used with a MH axe mostly, although I like to change to a sword when killing trash just to freshen things.

Dagger – 4 poison + evade, 5 ranged bleed + cripple
+looks good with a sword
+poison condition is not provided by MH axe so gives more different conditions to cleanse
+cripple helps to close down distance
+heal debuff
+bleed stacks with axe’s bleed
+shorter cooldowns than torch
-sword 3 is poison anyway

Torch – 4 ranged burn, 5 fire combo field + burn
+looks nice with sword + axe
+burns do nice big numbers
-fire trap provides a fire combo field anyway
-no cripple to close down distance to runners
-no built in evade
-both burns, compared to poison, bleed and cripple on dagger

So which is better? This is mainly for PvE, but dabbling in WvW too. I use traps mainly as utilities.

Axe + Torch. Much higher damage in a condition build. Use Shortbow as your alt weapon to take advantage of your fire combo fields.

Fire combo fields provide too much damage with shortbow to be using dagger for it’s poison.

Torch. i go sword torch its a ton of fun and ton of aoe and ton of dps. clears things soooo fast.

One more for torch, since it synergizes well with a weapon swap right after 5 to take advantage of the combo.

I have yet to found a proper way of taking advantage of the dagger. It’s just that with a sword you have good CC on the 1st ability and with the axe you have the chill, so the cripple seems redundant to pair with either. The evade on 4th is nice albeit in a short window of effectiveness, although i can see it going more with a sword for extra survability… some scenarios maybe.

i usually go greatsword for the gap close, evasion and block and daze/interrupt. it has tons of defensive tricks and also u can get it up to a lot of aoe, dps + burst dps if u really wanted to build that way. i run sword torch on a second set so once im done with gs i switch over for sword torch. hence never really needed dagger’s evasion, nor did the throw impress me. i have a cripple throw with greatsword and torch throw.

I use Axe/Torch
Sword/Dagger as my weapon combo’s