Guild Wars 2

So, now that we’re in between seasons and just got a new balance patch, I decided to experiment around with builds. While I’m still pretty devoted to the meta D/P build, after trying out condi, I found a build that works pretty well.

Link to build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVl0MhSnYhTwoJw/ELtE2cJcF+C1CAHgFQ3i5JsFA-TJxBABfVGAr9HA4JAc9pAAA

The strengths of this build is that it plays well in team fights and the role is actually a lot like the S/D days of old. There’s a ton of evades and condi cleanse, which along with the rabid amulet, allow you to survive in the middle of a team fight. The AoE and heavy poison damage also make this a great build for cleave on downed enemies.

With the changes to Basi Venom, you can jump in on targets pretty reliably and drop down some heavy condis with venoms up then Steal -> Death Blossom -> Dodge.

Admittedly this is a pretty spammy build, but you do still want to spread out your dodges so that you keep up the condi damage buff from Lotus Training as much as possible. Even if you drop some condis and leave a fight, you’ll want to dodge occasionally to keep the ticking condis buffed.

Oh, and this is particularly good for Stronghold.

I find impairing daggers works better then Spider venom.

It is on a lower cooldown and if you trait brawlers better yet (you can use it every 20 seconds with brawlers). It has half the stacks of spider venom but overall not much damage loss because it more readily available. Most importantly that Immob is invaluable as it allows you to stack on some DBS and play catchup if he runs. Further to that since I use SOM Impairing will provide heals where spider venom will not (unless you go leechiing in SA) On top of all that it has Slow and slow is quite powerful.

The combos of the panic strike immob , the one on impairing (every 20 seconds) and BV can help you immensely.

babazhook.6805:

I find impairing daggers works better then Spider venom.

It is on a lower cooldown and if you trait brawlers better yet (you can use it every 20 seconds with brawlers). It has half the stacks of spider venom but overall not much damage loss because it more readily available. Most importantly that Immob is invaluable as it allows you to stack on some DBS and play catchup if he runs. Further to that since I use SOM Impairing will provide heals where spider venom will not (unless you go leechiing in SA) On top of all that it has Slow and slow is quite powerful.

The combos of the panic strike immob , the one on impairing (every 20 seconds) and BV can help you immensely.

Yea, I considered Impairing and I even ran it for a while, but here’s why I ended up with Spider Venom:

You get twice the poison, which is the highest dps condi on this build after Potent Poison, so your damage spike after popping the venom is much higher. Impairing may end up dropping about the same amount of poison over time due to the cooldown, but it’s significantly less burst.

Also, Spider Venom allows you to use the poison in an AoE application, which is particularly helpful for downed enemy cleave.

Finally, Impairing would rely on Brawler’s Tenacity, which means you lose 10% damage reduction for a trait that only affects one skills and gives less than half a dodge back every 20 seconds max.

The immob and slow are nice, but they’re still a short duration and considering the amount of cripple applied by this build, it’s not as big of a loss missing it as it could otherwise be.

All that being said, I would say that Impairing Daggers is a good alternative, even though it’s not what I ended up choosing here.

Well my own build has leaned towards healing over power. Yours more a hybrid so your heal of choice and the choice of weakening strikes might be more suitable.

I really do not need the extra 10 percent mitigation as I just heal up with one DB.

Now another interesting take is dropping DA and taking Trickery with pressure strike and using distracting daggers. In this build you wild actually trait SOH over BA and use those perplexity runes. In essence swapping in more torment and confusion over poison. A bit more intricate and much less DB spam but you can still keep a high posion uptime for heals even as all that torment limits the enemies ability to move around freely. This would then use uncatchable for a few more bleeds.

The BV , The SOH and the distracting daggers all sources of interrupts that can apply confusion and torment. (dancing daggers with BV preloaded works nice here)

Now as to slow. The slow off impairing daggers is one of the highest duration slows in the game. It really mucks up engies and elementalists and even more so the Greatsword reaper. Necro has many skills with high activation times and slow really puts a bummer on him using them effectively. I am a fan.

Impvvavrivg daggers, I can see, but Distracting Daggers is still a terribly designed skill. It’s a utility slot taken up for the equivalent of 3 head shots that you have to predict and pre-cast with a cooldown.

Even if it wasn’t so bad, it’s not worth taking a whole trait line just to get something out of it. There’s just way too much sacrificed for it:
– Weakness on poison
– Poison on dagger skills (the whole reason daggers shines above P/D on codi)
– Panic Strike
– 33% more damage from poison

And really the poison is the heart of what makes DA so strong. It boosts poison to be better than bleeds and almost as good as torment on a moving enemy while adding a lot of extra poison and weakness overall.

Dahkeus.8243:

Impvvavrivg daggers, I can see, but Distracting Daggers is still a terribly designed skill. It’s a utility slot taken up for the equivalent of 3 head shots that you have to predict and pre-cast with a cooldown.

Even if it wasn’t so bad, it’s not worth taking a whole trait line just to get something out of it. There’s just way too much sacrificed for it:
– Weakness on poison
– Poison on dagger skills (the whole reason daggers shines above P/D on codi)
– Panic Strike
– 33% more damage from poison

And really the poison is the heart of what makes DA so strong. It boosts poison to be better than bleeds and almost as good as torment on a moving enemy while adding a lot of extra poison and weakness overall.

Actually I used distracting it not as hard to use as it seems. . I found it works way more often when close in rather then at range and it not that hard to interrupt when you understand the opponent.

That said it certainly not as easy to DA line. it might well work with DD/DA/Trickery but I found I really liked acro too much. my own DB build now uses DA/DD/ACRO and I took what I learned from using distracting daggers and put on a power build with staff. (needless to say I am in WvW and a fan of interrupt sigils which Pvp does not have so interrupts not as good in pvp)

I find I get two out of three that get an interrupt on average

Trickery does have advantages over DA so it not so cut and dried as you suggest. You get uncatchable. You dodge a lot so drop lots of caltrops. You get more INI via preparedness generally meaning another DB. Klepto every 20 seconds is another 2 ini.

I note you take torment sigils in your own build. Same difference really getting poison off sigils (blight/doom) in a pressure strike build. When you add the damage from confusion/torment more bleeds in trickery and compare it to potent poison and poison in DA it pretty well a wash damage wise.

the advantage then becomes comapring having mroe weakness on an opponent and that panic strike as compared to having confusion on an opponet and more torment.

d/d condi its actually pretty fun. If you want, try using d/d+ d/d instead of SB, and using sigil of energy in both sets. before the patch, Sigil of energy gave 50% endurance (now it gives vigor so i dont know if its still viable) and with that you can stay a whole fight evading.
Also, IMO, sigils of torment are not helping you really much since it only gives you 50% chance on critical, and if you barely have 12% critical chance, the chance of applying torment is very low. You can try sigil of bursting or agony

Bleh, Sigil of Energy isn’t worth taking in PvP since the nerf.

Also, I realized that I had a Carrion sigil instead of Rabid. I updated the link at the top. With Rabid, the crit is 55%, which makes the torment worth taking, but otherwise I would agree.

Another update I made was switching to Rune of the Nightmare. Rune of Thorns is great for the extra damage since poison ticks so hard on this build, but the overall condition increase just seems to help more since it will also help weakness, cripple, immob, etc.

If you do want more endurance, you could consider Rune of the Adventurer. The power isn’t a great stats for the build, but 50% endurance on heal is pretty strong. I haven’t tested to see if this gives 1.5 dodges to Daredevils or if it’s just 1 dodge that’s returned, but either way, it’s not bad when you have an 18 sec heal cd.

i am using DA/TR/ACR with rune of adventure so i get back my dodge every 14 sec
with ROI so more initiatives works same as DD or even better also using the new amulet (power,condi, vit, tough)

That Adventuer rune is appealing but I am sort of hooked on SOM in a d/d build so rarely activate a heal.

babazhook.6805:

That Adventuer rune is appealing but I am sort of hooked on SOM in a d/d build so rarely activate a heal.

^

Though I’ve found that withdraw tends to give me better mileage if I’m doing back capping/solo stuff. These days I run SoM in stronghold and Withdraw in conquest.

SoM is super legit in PvE though. I almost never swap out unless I’m doing dredge fractal or the SW maze. Withdraw in dredge fractal just because I run buckets and thus am not hitting anything, and HiS in the SW maz for more stealth stacking to emergency escape glowy death dogs.