Guild Wars 2

So I originally started out playing a condi ranger, so I got a bunch of vipers ascended gear from the ranked PVP rewards. Currently it is bugged (so a GM tells me in a support ticket) that you can’t change the pvp gear in the forge. I am not really liking the ranger right now and Id love to play my thief.

So for things like fractals and open world, could a condi thief still be ok? I was not playing one when the nerf hit last year so I’m not sure how bad it is now. What do you all think?

The share radius was reduced by a third.
(which means the share area size was more than cut in half)

skelk venom was buffed though. heals a lot more than it used to
devourer venom was also nerfed, but not a big deal pve

Condi thief can work quite well. Consider throwing in some HP trinkets (Dire-Rabid) and weapons for more survivability.

There are D/D and D/P condi builds, which can use Dagger Training to create significant poison damage, and P/D builds which have the greatest variety of base condition access and have the advantage of providing pressure from range.

In PvE venomshare, which is what I use in all game modes, is quite viable because the share radius doesn’t matter when everyone is beating on a mob together. You can easily get bursts of DPS from sharing poison that will be impressive in their own right.

Nerfed in PvP formats with an explicity VS build, buffed for baseline thief not running a VS build, and generally buffed in PvE since the venoms which got explicitly nerfed weren’t really used much, anyways.

In WvW IF you have a disciplined group venom share can turn an entire battle around in your teams favor. Just note that your own role will change here considerably as you yourself are extremely vulnerable and will just act as a source for venoms to your team.

Just as example there have been more than one occassion where we had a smaller group trying to root a like sized or larger group dug into a camp with siege and made multiple pushes to no avail. I and a couple of other thieves switched to all venoms and loaded up the group then stayed at range for the push and the battle changed dramatically in our favor.

In PVE and WvW I have seen my own poison ticks after share go well over 10k per tick even as high as 15k on occasion when potent poison traited and the others apply those vuln stacks.

This not something you will do all the time. For the sake of survival it pretty rare you will ever trait more than 2 venoms at once unless the third is Basi. I have tried Skelk with the lower cooldown and am still not impressed. It comes closer to HIS but still can not displace withdraw or Channeled Vigor as go to heals.

saerni.2584:

Condi thief can work quite well. Consider throwing in some HP trinkets (Dire-Rabid) and weapons for more survivability.

There are D/D and D/P condi builds, which can use Dagger Training to create significant poison damage, and P/D builds which have the greatest variety of base condition access and have the advantage of providing pressure from range.

In PvE venomshare, which is what I use in all game modes, is quite viable because the share radius doesn’t matter when everyone is beating on a mob together. You can easily get bursts of DPS from sharing poison that will be impressive in their own right.

Do you use the build that is on meta battle?

No, the build I use is in my signature. All my builds are theorycrafted by me and may or may not reflect the thinking of the builds on websites like metabattle.

My fractal, pve build

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVl0MhimYnTwpJw/ELwEm3X4M0Gm7glwUoWCIAUAA-TZRAQBG4QAEtnAAAOBAasMQW2fAA

Wondering if anyone has an answer to a quick side-question. Do venoms shared with allies use your personal condi dmg/healing power for skelk, or theirs?

Yannir.4132:

Wondering if anyone has an answer to a quick side-question. Do venoms shared with allies use your personal condi dmg/healing power for skelk, or theirs?

I’d imagine that since it’s a buff that’s applied to them it uses their stats.

No it uses yours. The damage increase shows up on your combat log. The increase does not appear to vary depending on whether or not the person with the venoms on them is condi based or not.

The apps of conditions use your condition power and condition duration not that of the targets. They also share healing power.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Venomous_Aura

While this an outdated page the mechanics of Aura in this regard were not changed.

Just take a condition build into pve against a boss and share poison wth 5 others. You will see huge poison ticks and especially if you using p/p to add on might.