Guild Wars 2

First, I’ll establish my stance on Venoms and Venomsharing.

I heavily dislike the concept of sharing at the moment. BV and DV being somewhat of an exception, Venoms are simply forbidden from being strong by themselves because of the possibility of sharing them out.

evilapprentice said it best in another thread – “Go ahead – try to design a utility worth taking on its own that won’t become OP when shared with 5 people.”

However, I still like the aura concept. I’d like to find a middle ground where Venoms all have proper individual strength, but don’t require such enormous investment that build diversity is flat-out impossible.

So, how about this?:

- Venomous Aura as a trait is abolished

- Venoms, as a default, deploy as a consistent AoE aura (let’s say a radius of 600) around the Thief. When an enemy is attacked within this aura, the enemy receives the Venom effects until charges run out. Missing or blocking will not remove a charge.

- Subsequently, the amount of charges, condition durations etc would be changed to be somewhere far above normal Venoms but then not reaching the maximum potential of the previous Venomous Aura (5 times more charges). This means that a lone Thief can get a lot more out of each Venom without teammates around.

- Then, when the Venom has been deployed, a second skill would become available, an Overcharge of sorts. I’ll call them Coagulations. This creates a secondary effect and expires the aura immediately on use. Cooldown would be increased on using it. These skills would add more use to Venoms other than condition application, getting decent AoE effects. To get these extra effects you would lose the conditions, but the trade-off should be good.

- An important thing to note here is that now the Venoms will not be cooling down as you are applying the charges, as the Coagulation will be in the slot at that time. You must expire the aura yourself by Coagulating or using up all charges, and THEN the cooldown begins. In my examples you will see what might be considered odd condition uptimes if you do not recognise this.

Let’s take a Venom as an example, and apply my idea to it. Remember, numbers are not quite so important, just think about the concept:

Currently:

Spider Venom (45s CD) Poison foes with your next five attacks.

Spider Venom (30 s): Your next five attacks inflict poison.
Poison: 6 s (504 damage)
Number of Attacks: 5
Venom Duration: 30 s

Revamped:

Spider Venom (30s CD) Deploy a vial of Spider Venom around you that poisons foes struck within.

Spider Venom (30 s): Attacks inflict poison.
Poison: 3s (252 damage)
Number of Attacks: 15
Venom Duration: 30s
Radius: 600

Miasma (Coagulation) (increases Spider Venom CD to 45s):

Concentrate your Spider Venom in to a hideous Miasma that knocks foes off their feet before dissipating.

Knockdown: 2s
Unblockable
Radius: 600
Number of Targets: 5

Let’s take another example, like Ice Drake Venom.

Currently:

Ice Drake Venom (45s CD): Chill foes with the next three attacks.

Ice Drake Venom (30 s): Next three attacks inflict chill.
Chilled: 1 s
Number of Attacks: 3
Venom Duration: 30 s

Revamped:

Ice Drake Venom (30s CD): Deploy a vial of Ice Drake Venom around you that Chills foes struck within.

Ice Drake Venom (30s): Attacks inflict Chill
Chilled: 1s
Number of Attacks: 15
Venom Duration: 30 s
Radius: 600

Brain Freeze (Coagulation) (increases Ice Drake Venom CD to 45s):

Concentrate your Ice Drake Venom, dazing and Weakening foes before it dissipates.

Daze: 3s
Weakness: 8s
Unblockable
Radius: 600
Number of Targets: 5

Regarding traits, this opens some other options as well.

- Leeching Venoms is now much more advantageous to a lone Thief (up to completely broken levels, we’re talking 5.7k healing per Venom in full Berserker), but group healing with a full party would be diminished somewhat. Playing with numbers can find a good middle ground, but I won’t get in to that.

- The existence of an Overcharge/Coagulation gives way to new traits to encompass the usage of them.

- Residual Venoms would be more underwhelming in its current state, so this could be changed to something else.

- Venomous Strength could be changed to gaining a Might stack for each successful hit of a Venom. A lot to play with there for lone and group support.

Some examples of new traits:

Poisoneer’s Altruism – Transfer 3 conditions from yourself and nearby allies to nearby foes when you trigger a Coagulation.

Alchemist’s Reflexes – Break stuns when you trigger a Coagulation.

Dissolution – Venom charges remove boons (ICD per target)

Hopefully a revamp in this sense would provide true individual worth for each Venom without requiring 12 points of trait investment and providing perhaps even greater strength to a lone Thief than with a group (I think this should absolutely be the case when considering sharing – you go from amazing solo utility to great group utility. That’s how sharing works, dividing resources among yourselves instead of magically conjuring 5 more sets of the same thing). Taking even 1 Venom as a choice over Infiltrator’s Signet or a Deception would be a win for this, in my book.

Thanks for reading if you got this far and let me know what you think. Not only about this, either – I’d like to hear how you would tackle Venoms!

I was thinking of a relatively easy fix: Buff Venom base application amounts/allow for training into sufficiently-higher stacks, and have that be the total pool shared by all nearby party members (so they are not spent on other random people who are just close by/running by); I.E., solo venom thief gains all of the venom abilities himself anyways buffing solo venom uptime considerably), but shared would lead to faster-stacked effects with no impact on the full-party utility and better venom burst since only one venom can be applied at once for Leeching Venoms, anyways.