Guild Wars 2

So just wondering what you guys think, would Sinister armor with viper weapons and viper, sinister mix accessories, trinkets, etc. be on par with power thief? Just wanted to try something new. Any insight would be nice.

There is a venomshare build on meta battle that is pretty solid. It gives you some options in regards to sinister versus vipers for the trinkets.

It doesn’t have the same theoretical max as power thief but it is viable and very fun.

It also gives a bit of utility with a shared basilisk venom which is handy depending on the encounter. For example it can pretty much solo break Vale guardian and is up for every one of his break phases, which would allow your revs not to swap to staff.

The problem I have with the build is that it’s just flat out annoying to play outside of 25+ fractals and raids and events like Triple Trouble.

The issue is it has very little spike damage, but out shines a power build in a prolonged fight, particularly against any champion, leg or boss with increased toughness. This is do to the ramp up time to build up the high condi stacks.

So like, my power build can just one shot trash on a critical with Vault, but it takes three times as long to kill trash with the condi build, because of the ramp up time needed to build stacks. In reverse, the condi build does better against champs, legs or bosses, because it has a large enough health pool for initiative, energy and cooldown times to start influencing your ability to sustain DPS with staff while providing ample time for the condi build to ramp up.

I think it also has more practical sustained DPS, beyond the theorycrafting calculations, because evasion is built directly into the two offensive tools it uses, so you aren’t taking a DPS loss when you have to evade defensively.

I like it. Whenever I do log into GW2, I usually play my thief and spend my crafting materials on working towards a Viper set.

But you still end up with this desire for a seperate power set for farming and open world.

If the build had some way to spike, it would be ideal for both.

Everything you stated there is true. I personally only really use my thief in raids.

One other piece to consider is that an ascended medium viper set is much more versatile than an ascended berserker medium set.

Vipers with Berserker runes is best in slot for Thief and Engi, and can be viable on condi druid too. There are probably better rune combos for condi druid, but you can definitely make it work.