Leaping Death Blossom
I run a d/d bleed build. It works just fine.
Don’t forget that the “evade” only lasts a quarter of a second in the middle of the animation, making it all but useless.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I feel like LDB is the symptom, not the cause. The nature of gearing for something as narrow as conditions, at the expense of all other benefits, is a core design problem. Hybrid skills and weapon sets are more victim than culprit. Condition builds require a fairly heavy investment that benefits a tiny subset of skills. Such a narrow focus creates gimmicky, predictable and easily countered builds. Not focusing on them makes damaging-condition skills suboptimal, as they need to be weaker to account for the potential damage a condition/power or might-stacked glass cannon investment could tease out of them.
Even though Condition Damage is a narrow-focus secondary attribute, it gets gear priority on par with the universal primary attributes, and skills like this suffer for it.
My personal feelings: I feel like secondary attributes should never come at the expense of primary attributes in gear design. 1700 condition damage should never have been a thing. In gear selection, you should be able to give up crit-damage for condition damage, but not power for condition damage. Likewise, the specialized (and often poorly scaling) attribute healing power shouldn’t come at the expense of general survivability stats like vitality and toughness.
By making conditions supplementary, rather than a core source of damage, and secondary attributes a separate tier designed to refine a character’s focus, skills could be better scaled to compensate.
(edited by Clockwork Bard.3105)
If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.
The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.
I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.
But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.
As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.
@Clockwork Bard: You can just hybridize equipment.
Anyway, I find Death Blossom to still be one of my favorite skills. I run a D/D and P/D condi thief all the time in both PVE and sPVP, and Death Blossom rocks now. The evade is short duration, however it does put the thief behind the attacking enemy, making a lot of their attacks miss. It provides a long AoE bleed that can be spammed rapidly, and with just 50% bleed duration I can maintain 25 stacks of bleeding in AoE when comboing with caltrops. This makes LDB an excellent tool for condition damage.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.
The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.
I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.
But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.
As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.
Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.
I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.
The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.
The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
@Clockwork Bard: You can just hybridize equipment.
That doesn’t really address the issue at hand. Taking away potential condition damage to feed into a 0.5 power scale hurts that attack. Crits do nothing for conditions, shy of the little you can squeeze out of a Sigil of Earth. And your direct damage attacks are still hurting from the power/crit they lost feeding condition damage to the condition attacks. Hybridizing your damage stats just marginalizes everything all around, though it does cut some of your losses when conditions can’t pull their weight, either from hitting the stack cap or being cleansed.
Meanwhile, a full power/crit build that avoids bleed-stacking attacks gets all of their point investments on all of their attacks, with none of the drawbacks with which a condition stacker has to contend.
Condition builds can be fun, viable and deadly. I run a P/D build, and have fun with it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a glaring problem.
I haven’t found it to be very effective at all. I wanted it to be. It’s the coolest Thief skill. I used it while I was PvE leveling last year. But it wasn’t at all unusual to find myself flying unintendedly off a cliff, or worse, stuck behind an invisible wall.
I later tried in in PvP. With a condition build I think I was getting over 100 damage per tick on the conditions (probably could have been tweaked to do better), but nothing was dying. Granted I was hard to kill because they couldn’t focus on me very easy as I flew through the air, but I wasn’t killing much of anything. And then I thought about the damage. Even if I managed to double it to 200 per tick, would that really be effective? It would take 10 seconds to do 2k of damage, which is so ridiculously low, I could see why nothing was dying. And most classes will simply cleanse your conditions if they are at all a problem.
So…I haven’t gathered any scientific evidence, but I’ve seen enough of this skill that I never use it except to do a quick evade and reposition myself.
If anyone else is able to accomplish something more useful with this skill, I’d be glad to see how.
I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.
Trust me, I know that it is by far inferior to zerker, it isn’t even close, hence why I was saying that it needs buffs. If I’m taking PvE seriously its zerkzerkzerk every day all day… however when I want to have a bit more fun I go conditions. I’m skilled enough that I don’t need the imbalanced zerker stats (which multiplies in effectiveness, rather than linearly increase in effectiveness like conditions) to destroy people, so I might as well have more fun with the self imposed handicap. Some people just like the challange of playing the non standard, underdog builds.
But yeah, when I’m playing it to win it, zerkzerkzerk is the only way to do it… including on a Guardian if you’re the Guardian in the Warrior/Mesmer zerker party.
(edited by Surbrus.6942)
I haven’t found it to be very effective at all. I wanted it to be. It’s the coolest Thief skill. I used it while I was PvE leveling last year. But it wasn’t at all unusual to find myself flying unintendedly off a cliff, or worse, stuck behind an invisible wall.
I later tried in in PvP. With a condition build I think I was getting over 100 damage per tick on the conditions (probably could have been tweaked to do better), but nothing was dying. Granted I was hard to kill because they couldn’t focus on me very easy as I flew through the air, but I wasn’t killing much of anything. And then I thought about the damage. Even if I managed to double it to 200 per tick, would that really be effective? It would take 10 seconds to do 2k of damage, which is so ridiculously low, I could see why nothing was dying. And most classes will simply cleanse your conditions if they are at all a problem.
So…I haven’t gathered any scientific evidence, but I’ve seen enough of this skill that I never use it except to do a quick evade and reposition myself.
If anyone else is able to accomplish something more useful with this skill, I’d be glad to see how.
You… realize that Bleeding stacks, right? One DB stacks 3 of them. Use 3 DBs in a row and you’re doing 900 a second.
Condition ranting aside, I should note some amount of praise for LDB that hasn’t been mentioned yet. It is arguably the most accessible whirl combo finisher in the game. Okay, so blast is way better than whirl, but y’know… Just take the complement, LDB. I’m trying to be nice here.
You… realize that Bleeding stacks, right? One DB stacks 3 of them. Use 3 DBs in a row and you’re doing 900 a second.
Well, perhaps now that they lowered the initiative required, it might be worth looking at again, and 3 in a row might be more doable. In the past, I’ve only found it disappointing, but it’s been a while.
I would think the stacks are easily cleansed, however. Isn’t that the case?
If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.
The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.
I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.
But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.
As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.
Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.
I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.
The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.
The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.
Zerker is also weakened by barriers and protection and toughness, and also zerkers don’t have as much survivability. You only get those big beefy numbers when fighting something with no armor and no boons.
Of course, the damage is pretty good overall. If you run a full condi spec, you’ll get 3 × 20 bleeds with each death blossom. At 1400 condition damage, this does 6720 damage over the duration of those bleeds. At 1800 condition damage (that is, a fully dedicated condi build) this does 7950 damage, and it does this on top of the direct damage.
8K a pop is pretty good, considering that it bypasses protection, and you have 54% more HP than a zerker build while using it.
Seriously. I’ve done the math. Conditions are not horribly underpowered.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
Good luck getting a bleed to actually last anywhere near 20 seconds, though. Many classes will likely cleanse it off in ~5.
PvE enemies will die well before then, and bosses will just reach the stacking cap from all your teammates’ bleeds.
If you’re talking about dungeons, which are full of silver mobs that take forever to kill, then keeping it on for a full 20 seconds isn’t a problem.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.
The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.
I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.
But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.
As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.
Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.
I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.
The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.
The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.
Zerker is also weakened by barriers and protection and toughness, and also zerkers don’t have as much survivability. You only get those big beefy numbers when fighting something with no armor and no boons.
Of course, the damage is pretty good overall. If you run a full condi spec, you’ll get 3 × 20 bleeds with each death blossom. At 1400 condition damage, this does 6720 damage over the duration of those bleeds. At 1800 condition damage (that is, a fully dedicated condi build) this does 7950 damage, and it does this on top of the direct damage.
8K a pop is pretty good, considering that it bypasses protection, and you have 54% more HP than a zerker build while using it.
Seriously. I’ve done the math. Conditions are not horribly underpowered.
dude, are you a noob or something?
pop caltrops, spend all your 15+ini on the mob, see how your bleed stacks are removed by lol damage bleeds from party members (in pve)
should i mention the bounty missions where there is instant 25 bleed on them ?
where is YOUR damage there?
and if you have a fellow thief with the same build you can suck each other finger because damage is severly capped by the 25 stack limit
zerk(direct dmg) have such cap ? NO
somebody there @ a-net is lacking a brain, really
they could put only 1 bleed on LDB, then add 1 poison+ 1torment
same with caltrops 1 bleed stack+ 1 poison or 1 torment
i refuse to use conditions until they can have the same(or almost the same) as a zerker build
did i mention that objects are not affected by them ?
(edited by DanH.5879)
dude, are you a noob or something?
pop caltrops, spend all your 15+ini on the mob, see how your bleed stacks are removed by lol damage bleeds from party members (in pve)
should i mention the bounty missions where there is instant 25 bleed on them ?
where is YOUR damage there?and if you have a fellow thief with the same build you can suck each other finger because damage is severly capped by the 25 stack limit
This is why it behooves you to not blow your entire initiative bar and caltrops in 4 seconds. Learn to share, and push your bleeds onto the stack when it drops to 20, not before.
Yes, having 3 build-heavy builds ‘working together’ is counter productive, and should probably be fixed somehow. But if there’s two people in a group, they ought to be able to coordinate so the stack is permanently above 20 rather than spiking from 12 – 25 as they try and burst their bleeds back on.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
If you’re a condition Thief that uses LDB, then you need to have a decent amount of power as well. Your strategy is not as one dimensional when you’re build takes this into account.
The very short window on the evade just means that it requires more skill and practice to make the most of it. I use LDB to evade attacks all the time… although if it is an attack I really want to evade I’ll just dodge/Withdraw/Roll for Initiative because its still really hard to evade with LDB… I’ll generally only use LDB as an evade when fighting NPC’s, to get more practice.
I use I D/D condition build on my Thief, LDB is the main sources of damage, and a small amount of my damage mitigation. Having a bit of other offensive stats helps make the build not some one dimensional gimmick build, as I can still throw in some Power based damage.
But yes, Conditions are absolutely terrible in PvE if you are not working alone. When everything is lined up perfectly for the condition burst, I can simultaneously hit the bleed cap on multiple NPC’s by myself… which means that fighting NPC’s with even one additional condition damage user means that there isn’t even going to be much additional damage being dished out… you can’t really improve too much on 25 stacks of bleed and a redundant amount of poison.
As an aside, personally I think they just need to halve the application of bleeds, and double the damage of those bleeds. Basically everyone would be applying half the stacks of bleed but doing the same amount of damage, or some other way of factoring in more condition damage if they can’t simply increase the cap due to their servers exploding from having to keep track of all those numbers or whatever.
Condition damage is terrible even if you removed the stack cap.
I think you people truly don’t understand the math behind scaling and why berserker fares so much better with gear scaling, benefitting from 25 vulnerability stacks, and haste effects.
The damage gap is huge. Condition will never be viable in dungeons in its current state. They either need to nerf berserker crit cap to 62% like spvp to bring it somewhat closer but it’ll still be an issue.
The lack of DPS meters has really done terrible things to this game, enabling people their magical thinking and letting anecdotes run false narratives.
Zerker is also weakened by barriers and protection and toughness, and also zerkers don’t have as much survivability. You only get those big beefy numbers when fighting something with no armor and no boons.
Of course, the damage is pretty good overall. If you run a full condi spec, you’ll get 3 × 20 bleeds with each death blossom. At 1400 condition damage, this does 6720 damage over the duration of those bleeds. At 1800 condition damage (that is, a fully dedicated condi build) this does 7950 damage, and it does this on top of the direct damage.
8K a pop is pretty good, considering that it bypasses protection, and you have 54% more HP than a zerker build while using it.
Seriously. I’ve done the math. Conditions are not horribly underpowered.
Mobs in dungeons don’t stack toughness or protection or don’t use walls.
This is why it behooves you to not blow your entire initiative bar and caltrops in 4 seconds. Learn to share, and push your bleeds onto the stack when it drops to 20, not before.
Yes, having 3 build-heavy builds ‘working together’ is counter productive, and should probably be fixed somehow. But if there’s two people in a group, they ought to be able to coordinate so the stack is permanently above 20 rather than spiking from 12 – 25 as they try and burst their bleeds back on.
i WANT to blow all my ini and trops in 4 seconds ! what’s the problem here?
and if 5 identical condition thieves happen to be in the same party?
2 fight, the other 3 stay and watch ?
Mobs in dungeons don’t stack toughness or protection or don’t use walls.
Except in HotW and CoE and SE and Fractals and Molten Facility and Aetherblade’s Retreat. Those are just the dungeons I play frequently, and if I were to painstakingly go through every dungeon and document every boss, I’m sure that a ton of them use some form of blocking or protection or have high toughness.
stuff
The bleed stacks aren’t removed at all. It’s a funny thing, but even in random pugs, multiple condition users are rare. Let alone in a pre-mades where you know you’re going to be the only condition user. Even in groups where you have people with lolbleeds, the fact is that they aren’t build for their bleeds, and so they only cause bleeds on scattered occasions and on random enemies. A dedicated condition thief applies bleeds in a large AoE, where the bleed cap barely hampers damage if at all.
FYI, every time you try and come up with a specific boss or specific instance where conditions aren’t effective, I can just come up with a specific boss or instance where direct damage isn’t effective. You also show your n00b by saying " I won’t run conditions until they are as effective as zerker". That is just plain stupid: it would make zerker useless since conditions would then have the same damage as zerker while also having a lot more defense.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
I think, in its current state, condition thieves are somewhat sub-par, at least when compared to a necro, engi, or even ele. Each of those classes can spam conditions while controlling the fight and contribute with a greater variety of conditions so that a single cleanse won’t wipe out all your work. I’d like to see LDB either scale better with power or have a longer evade time attached so that I don’t feel like I wasted my initiative if I accidentally press 3 in a fight with a crit/power build.
This is why it behooves you to not blow your entire initiative bar and caltrops in 4 seconds. Learn to share, and push your bleeds onto the stack when it drops to 20, not before.
Yes, having 3 build-heavy builds ‘working together’ is counter productive, and should probably be fixed somehow. But if there’s two people in a group, they ought to be able to coordinate so the stack is permanently above 20 rather than spiking from 12 – 25 as they try and burst their bleeds back on.
i WANT to blow all my ini and trops in 4 seconds ! what’s the problem here?
and if 5 identical condition thieves happen to be in the same party?
2 fight, the other 3 stay and watch ?
You just told me the problem in your other post: if you spike 25 bleeds all on your own, you’re forcing any other bleed applied, intentional or otherwise, to push one of your (high damage, high duration) bleeds of the stack. And once some of them get pushed off by 2s bleeds that have expired (And by other 10s bleeds that have not), you’re sitting at low initiative with your bleed utility skill on recharge, and the boss only has 18 stacks of bleeding on it.
Whereas if you cap yourself intentionally at say, 14 bleeds, you can probably maintain that stack indefinitely, while the rest of your party manages another 11 bleeds to cap out against bosses. Then none of your initiative / caltrops bleeds will be wasted on the boss because they got pushed off the stack.
It will also allow you the flexibility to always boost the bleeds back up if the stack falls below 21, and still have some initiative if you need to C&D for stealth or want Heartseeker through a combo field for an aura.
As to the “5 identical condition thieves” question? Yeah, you’re kind of screwed. I won’t sugar coat it, you simply should not bring 5 condition builds to the same dungeon, and thieves are especially bad for this. I question the probability of this occurring in a PUG, but if it did, you would all be fighting over the bleed stacks at every boss. I think 2 thieves could get along, but 3 would definitely have conflict.
Edit: As to Death Blossom itself, I’d love to see them extend the evade portion of the skill, to give it a sort of safety even while in melee. They could also change the bleeds to be more intense on a shorter duration (Something like 5 bleeds for 5 seconds) but that would just make it easier to cap out and harder to maintain a tall stack of bleeds.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
(edited by Softspoken.2410)
wohaoh. Guys. I run a deathblossom bleed/sustain thief. It works fine for me. I’m not saying it’s the optimal build, but the point is that it’s viable, provided you’re not playing at the very top level of play.
The nice thing about deathblossom is that it is aoe and hits 3 times. Combine this with signet of malice and shamans amulet and you get lots and lots of sustain. I heal for about 170 per trigger of sig of malice. I also heal for about 400 per deathblossom from the assassin’s reward trait. That’s close to 1k heal per deathblossom. With high toughness, that’s a lot. And that’s just versus 1 target. You can also get hits on ranger pets, mesmer clones, necro minions, engi turrets, thieves guild thieves, elementalist elementals, and guardian spirit weapons. Against warriors, the stolen skill is great since it does a lot of small hits, and it’s aoe. I’ve popped that before for a near full heal. Dagger storm can have a similar effect. And even though the evade on db is only 1/4 of a sec, when you’re in a 2 or 3v1, you’ll evade lots of stuff over the course of the fight.
Admittedly, you can’t survive off the sustain alone, (which is augmented by regen from traits and gear. And sigil of leeching on weps for more healing. No i do not use stealth.) so I use a lot of evades from sigils of energy on each wep set.
Db may not be the best, but it’s certainly viable and can be very fun to play.