Guild Wars 2

I’ve been doing a good amount of largely sPvP lately and have been doing rather ok against most people. However, it seems that against someone with half a brain I can’t win against them in a 1v1 setting or deal enough pressure against them.

I run with a 0/30/30/5/5 build that focuses on conditions through traps and SB/axe torch and survivability through hp, pets (wolf and cave spider). I run with the flame trap and vipers nest as my traps and lightning reflexes to help me survive.

The problems I’m having though are just frustrating. The immobility of traps keeps getting abused by enemies that never stay in for more than a tick and most people run with condition cleanse spam anyways. Even when I lead the traps in front of them they never seem to hit more than two ticks before the other guy is out of the trap even when he’s crippled or chilled. Furthermore, the poison and bleed application of the SB seems sub-par when they keep getting cleansed or they just don’t seem to do much damage when they do manage to stay on.

The classes that I’m having the most trouble are mesmers and eles, but anyone that abuses the immobility of the traps is really hard to kill. Staying alive is less of a problem unless they burst me down when I don’t see it coming or things are on cd, but no matter what, a decent player seems to be able to whittle me down faster than I can when nothing hits him or stays on him.

So my questions are pretty much if I’m doing something wrong or is everybody having this issue? Am I running a bad/obsolete build? Is there anything to do against this kind of play or is that pretty much the best counter to trappers? Is there any way to make the traps hit most of the time without using the spider’s F2? Any tips, advice or help is welcome.

Like I said, it’s pretty frustrating to lose to someone that’s just running around in circles spamming some random stuff and avoiding your main source of damage while your own pet’s bugging out trying to hit him and just cleansing off whatever does manage to hit him…

Vipers Nest really only needs to be taken if you are going to go with three traps on the bar (it’s a strong damage build).

The trap you are missing out on is Spike Trap, which has a 1s immobilize not listed on the tooltip, and doesn’t pulse (meaning everything is applied right up front).

From personal experience, a good idea is to toggle fast cast ground targeting on, then put the trap buttons in a comfortable place around your movement keys, so that you are able to use them on the move. You should ideally be able to continue strafing, dodge if necessary, and toss traps, all in stride (basically on reaction, not having to waste precious moments moving your hands to hit a button that you could be strafing or needing to dodge).

If you take 3 traps, your stun breakers become passive (wilderness survival III, and IX to a lesser extent). On this sentiment, make sure you can keep track of whether they are on cooldown or not (this is done mostly by feel, and recognizing when one has been used) as well as making sure you can use your weapon dodges to react accordingly (specifically, mesmers immobilize and shatter spike. Warriors mostly use immobilizes to get off the majority of their damage now as well in a 100b build).

Also, your build, while not obsolete, can be made more defensive by dropping the 5 in beastmastery and picking it up in Nature Magic for Nature’s Protection. Natures protection can potentially act like a cheap Bark Skin (the grandmaster trait) and reduce incoming bursts you couldn’t react to significantly enough to keep you in the fight. After the quickness nerf, the 5 points in BM for a 2s haste isn’t anywhere near as valuable as it used to be.