Guild Wars 2

Warning long post: This is a SPvP build and this is primarily my build. This is ideally my thoughts alone and if you have any suggestions, constructive critique and feedback, i happily welcome it. Also this is purely on based on play style. If this does not fit for you, something else maybe will. But this, is what i’m happy to go into ranked with.

Hi guys. I have been playing a lot with various builds and i wanted to do something a lot different, just like many others when it comes to build viability and enjoying something different. This build is built around the general concept of the thief being “deadly” and deceptive with tricks and poisonous Venoms. I primarily wrote this post aiming for people who are not as knowledgeable about individual skills etc. but i hope veterans like my self find something new in this and perhaps give it a try. Plus, i have not seen any thieves use venoms as a part of their “burst” or sustain. Ive only seen few venom share builds primarily focusing conditions but they died out since p/d became a thing with bleeds only.

Now you may be thinking, “Wait, hang on… Venom builds have been done before and condition thief is just p/d?”

Well what if i told you that Thief can be deadly without being Condi specced or super high burst specced to survive and still bring a lot to the team play as well as 1v1?
First i would like to explain to you that this build ive been running and have been having great success with is not burst, nor bunker with lots of conditions. It is the kind of build that makes your enemy angry as you generally duel then in their face

I call it, Venomous Life Leeching Daggers build.

Wait now, hang on. Don’t hate it already. Let me tell you how this works.
6/0/5/3/0

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVlsMp5plOxrJ8PNRMhw7ufafYRg+aC-TpBFwACOCAOOEAEeAAYLDob/BAnAAA

If you are a D/D fan and don’t know what your death blossom is for? then you are going to love this as you will be using all your skills. Yes i agree with you that DeathBlossom is a mediocre skill and that i perhaps should be changed into something else but i for one enjoyed it the past month now.

The core of the build are the venoms. They give you extra damage, extra sustain, extra control. As we want to be all about controlling the fight, not enemies with fears and knock downs. No, this is OUR battlefield.

Breaking down the traits:
Deadly Arts:
1) Mug = 1k damage + 2.1k heal (applies poison of 1k damage and heal reduction by 33% for 13s)

Poison applies weakness, 50% chance for enemy to do glancing blows (Endurance regeneration and Damage dealt is decreased by 50%) = Awesome.

2) Quick Venoms = More uptime on venoms = more uptime on heals + damage + control.

Deal 10% more damage to enemies with a condition. (they will constantly have a condition on them regardless).

4) Residual venom: Your venoms have an additional strike. Let me break it down to you why this is so good in this build. First of, Basalisk venom is granted 2 additional strikes which means if your back stab or cnd gets missed or blocked… you have an extra. The duration does not stack, but thats not the point. We want to eliminate the chance of us missing our opening by our enemy being defensive with blocks, blinds and evades. Secondly, devour venom immobalize does stack. With 3 strikes, you are sure to keep your target well in place for 7 seconds for cnd, backstabs, auto attacks. Lastly, your venoms are part of your sustain and damage now. Partially meaning you can still burst your target.

Shadow arts:
1) Cloak in shadows: Blind enemies when entering stealth. Great after CnD. If not remove before you backstab, you a have a little less damage for them to miss with.

Stealth last 1 second long to max 4 seconds. Plenty of time to re-position

2) Leeching venoms: Your venoms do approx 388 damage to your target. This damage is not affected by armor basically free 388 damage to add to what ever skill you use. Heals you for 375 per hit.

Gain might on stealth: nice addition, more damage to our base attacks, more condition damage for our conditions.

Acrobatics:
Well… this one is about the dodge. You can choose your self whether you want vigor on heal, power on dodge, or faster movement in stealth. These are optional as they both add to your suitability depending on your play style. Your still getting 50 Endurance back per dodge, plus 10 per Wildstrike.

Ok now that i have explained the choice behind the traits. Let me break it down to the skills. And yes, you want to use all of them. Why? Because why not.

I use this build to apply a lot of pressure and to force my enemy to make a mistake. With 50% chance to life leech and lightning strike on crit makes the damage noticeable. Now you wont see it as much, as you will have 35% crit chance and no means of getting fury. It does not matter. Its not about the really high numbers, its about making a presence. Thieves are very deadly when they can stay in a fight without having to retreat far away to reset health and give up a capture point. No, we want our enemy to know that as long as we are around, we are a constant threat to them and its going to hurt.

The barbarian amulet gives a good amount of Power, prec, and Vitality. With 21k health. We wont get burst down, and we will be able to stand condition specced enemies better as we have both ways and means to deal with them.
Use hide in shadows and Shadow step to remove conditions if needed otherwise go ahead to use them for re-positioning.

*So how much sustain do we have?
Hide in shadows = 5490
Regeneration = 644 (total of 4.5 seconds)
Life leech on next attack on heal = 974 (Applied from rune on heal)
Devour Venom heal x3 = 1125
Basalisk venom Heal x2 = 750
Total amount of health regained = 8983 every 32 seconds. *

Now that does not include the rune of Vampirism 3rd bonus set. Rune of vampirism adds to our power, but also grants a nice new play style utilizing its bonus set. 15% when struck to gain life leech (another 974 health and damage). Additionally, its 6th bonus set that changes the game really well. When struck health below 20% we gain essentially mist form Immune to all damage and conditions for 3 seconds. Blinding powder and mist can trigger simultaneously, granting stealth and invul for 3 seconds. So basically around 4200 health, it will trigger.
What this allows us to do is to either buy us that extra time for our cooldowns. Plus, while in mist form, you can use what ever stolen bundle and apply vennoms granting you the ability to quickly gain health the second you get out of mist to steal, get health, cloak and dagger, Hide in shadows!

Now that i have talked about the “Sustainability” part of this build, lets move on to why this is practically living up to its name of deadly arts.

Firstly, Calltraps provide extra damage and crowd control in the field your engaging on because that is what we want. Catch an enemy into the calltrop, or force him into engaging into it. Either way. They either avoid it or try their luck. Now the bleed isnt what is dangerous, its the cripple. By limiting the speed of our opponent, we limit their leaping capability and kiting ability. The bleed is still nice damage but its not what we are betting our money on. By crippling our enemy, we can kite better in positioning dodging and apply pressure through our attacks. If i can force the enemy to burn their cooldowns on removing cripple or conditions, the better for me as i have a better chance at applying my venomous burst.

From attacking you want to do a full Auto attack chain, then cloak and dagger if you see an opening to gain stealth and that backstab. Backstab is a huge portion of your damage potential and pressure. Its not considered burst in this spec as your probably looking at around 3.4k backstab damage on most targets.

Use heartseaker only to close the gap if you find your self out of auto attack range. Don’t spam it as even though the initiative cost is fairly low… by using all your initiative your leaving your self vulnerable.

Death blossom when your opponent is crippled. While the damage isn’t awesome, the bleeds and free evade is. bleeds last 10 seconds if you manage to get all 3 hits in your looking at more damage pressure.

Dancing dagger your enemy to initiate a fight and/or when target is out of auto range. Cripple him/her and gain the kiting advantage.

Cloak and dagger. Well… this is your mind game skill as well as damage potential.

And now, Finally on to the burst portion. This is what makes this build fun and rewarding at least, to my opinion. This is purely on my play style theory crafting that i have put together to make this a very fun and effective.

The burst requires 3 factors to be in play before it is effective. 1; your enemy must have less than 50% health, 2; your own health must be close to around 50% health. 3; your 1 or both venoms must be available as well as steal.

Fulfilling these three factors will allow you to effectively burst taking into consideration of course that you are successful in doing so. Basically, your burst consists of

-cast Venom of choice
-pre cast CnD
-steal
-backstab
-auto attack.

Standard burst however the burst looks more like this in numbers. approximately. This is without critical hits or power boons applied:
*Cast Venom of choice:
Pre cast CnD
Steal (1.1k + 388 life steal)
CnD (1.1k + 388 life steal)
Backstab ( 2.6k + 388 life steal)
Auto attack chain ( 2k)
Total 7.9k damage *

Now this is an approximate damage based on testing on medium armored golems. The damage varies but this is approximately what we are expecting without critical hits. Life steal bypasses armor so it will always be 388 damage regardless of how much toughness the enemy has. You can also switch Devour Venom out for Ice Drake Venom which adds an extra 388 damage to our formula and chill to our opponent.

Add Lightning strike and life leech into that formula and we are looking well close to 9k burst.
And now, enemy is either dead or very low, poisoned, Immobalized, weakened, and panicking and we still should have 1 cloak heal and 1 venom to our disposal if we so wish to desire.

To summarize this build:
I found this build to be a lot of fun to play as the enemy suspects a certain type of builds. s/d evade for days, full glass cannon burst d/d burst, or condi p/d . Most of my enemies when seeing the d/d think im going to CnD steal to them so they dodge a lot more often while close the distance with both heart seeker and dancing dagger combo. (Dancing dagger first, then heart seek in for damaging same time).
Also most ignore calltraps as they just want to jump in and either burst me down as they think im squishy. lastly, nobody suspects the burst when i am low on health. The best is when i am put into mist form and my Steal and Devour venom comes out of cooldown during and i can manage to steal in to gain health and then burst down with CnD backstab combo. Generally i go from 1k health or less to 6k health so that i can live long enough to hide and shadows back up in health and continue the fight. This something else of a play style which, if you are looking for something deadly yet able to stay in fights longer instead of having to wait for cooldowns to pop back in. Then i can suggest you give it a try.

Whether or not you succeed in using this comes down to how good you are at reading your opponents moves and style. Many players have a fixed rotation which you can make into your advantage. Timing your dodges and Death blossom evades have saved me many deathly encounters with backstab thieves, Knock down Long bow rangers and other high damage potential specs.

Hope you like it.

vids or it didnt happen.

Take shadow’s embrace over cloaked in shadows and I’d rather go with soldier amulet. Without ferocity crits are kinda useless.

Nephrite.6954:

Take shadow’s embrace over cloaked in shadows and I’d rather go with soldier amulet. Without ferocity crits are kinda useless.

Not necessarily. Depends on if you have a good proc setup. D/D is above average as a proc set as well, and, depending on the build, you could stand to gain more from condi than you would from ferocity.

As an aside, Death Blossom is commonly touted as a weak skill when in reality it’s the best bleed stacking available to Thieves and synergizes pretty well with proc effects. D/D is not necessarily optimal for condi in pvp just due to the lack of conditions other than bleed, but it does work better than people tend to think. It’s also amazing in PvE with the lack of cleansing and ease of Caltrops layering.