Guild Wars 2

D/D (power), P/D (condi), S/D (power) all use off-hand dagger in their builds. There have been a number of threads recently and historically that discuss buffing these weapon sets in the context of off-hand dagger. The sPvP patch post also suggests skill splits as a first step towards potentially introducing game wide adjustments. Most of the suggestions I’ve seen involve Cloak and Dagger and are more functional changes than the adjustments Gaile suggested they were initially willing to consider, quoted below:

Recharge
Damage multipliers
Healing multipliers
Number of conditions/boons applied
Duration of conditions/boons applied
Skill cost (energy and initiative)
Functional* (only if none of the above would suffice to address an issue)

So I’d like to use this thread to lay out the potential options for Dancing Dagger and Cloak and Dagger, focusing on non-functional changes. I think smaller buffs are better if also paired with nerfs to other classes that make the skills naturally more useful. I don’t see a need to buff the abilities by adding in new condition application—rather by adjusting the amount/duration of conditions that are already applied.

Dancing Dagger (base description)—The damage isn’t incredible, but it doesn’t have a huge initiative cost and applies a decent amount of cripple. The range is also quite good. I’d compare this to the auto attack on the shortbow. You can get ranged cripple aoe and damage at 900 range for 3 initiative. This skill often gets compared to Head Shot, an on demand interrupt, unfavorably, due to the massive difference in utility between the two.

Dancing Dagger (suggestion)—I would consider an on bounce change. The ability doesn’t really need more damage and is more effective against multiple enemies. For that reason I would change the cripple effect as follows. 1st hit is 3 seconds of cripple, 1st bounce is 3.5 seconds of cripple, 2nd bounce is 4 seconds of cripple, final bounce is 4.5 seconds of cripple. This adds to the utility of using the ability without a massive adjustment or functionality change. It also brings it somewhat closer to an on demand interrupt in terms of relative utility.

Cloak and Dagger (base description)—Cloak and Dagger applies vulnerability and does medium damage in addition to granting stealth. The speed of the strike is relatively slow. For this reason it can be much easier to dodge. It is also simultaneously vulnerable to being blocked/invulned against. This is compared to Black Powder + Heartseeker because a thief can use that combo to gain stealth from anywhere.

Cloak and Dagger (suggestion one)—The vulnerability granted by landing the ability is somewhat low compared to the difficulty of pulling it off. It just seems strange that it is 3 stacks and not say 5. A lot of the discussions around how to buff D/D (power) have been focused on buffing backstab and increasing the vulnerability on CnD would indirectly buff a follow-up backstab. It would also be a relatively small change compared to other choices.

Cloak and Dagger (suggestion two)—Another change that has been suggested has been to make this skill unblockable. The reason this is a popular choice is the potential use of basilisk’s venom to make this skill unblockable. The adjustment to return to only one stack of venom indicates granting multiple unblockable attacks was, however, a concern for the balance team. I would separate the attack into a damage component with vulnerability and a component that grants stealth. It even makes sense with the name “Cloak and Dagger.” Make the stealth component unblockable. Keep the slowness of the dagger strike and the cost. This would be a larger, although not functional, change but I would like at least to test it out to see if it becomes overpowered.

Despite being one of the primary D/D advocates on these boards for the past four years, I don’t really think there’s a good fix out there for OH dagger via CnD alone without changing other professions or other elements of the kit. I’ll propose the latter, in full, below.

I’m going to be speaking from a PvP/WVW perspective only here, because not much will change in PvE unless MH dagger auto and staff auto get nerfed.

If we simplify the needs of the kits respectively, we get the following list of what we want as results:

S/D: A little more utility and pressure love. It can’t burst at all to make engages meaningful enough to stay in the fight for long. OH dagger doesn’t really play a big role in the kit at the moment, and is weak for having these two low-impact abilities. It’s essentially carried by IS/IR and FS/LS.

P/D: An unknown performer at the moment dependent on how the changes to SStrike fly.

D/D Power: Meaningful utility, meaningful damage sources not dependent on CnD, meaningful purpose.

D/D condi: More depth in play, higher skill ceiling to keep it viable at more levels of play.

Problem Skills:
S/D: Dancing Dagger
P/D: Unknown
D/D Power: Backstab, DB, DD, CnD
D/D Condi: None really because DB covers all needs of the kit, just not as well as those needs could be covered in general (So considerations for enabling more skills for condition play).

Since we know CnD is a tough nut to crack, I think we should consider saving it for last and doing a re-evaluation at the end.

We’ll therefore start with Dancing Dagger.

For S/D and power D/D, the skill simply lacks good use-cases. It costs too much and doesn’t deal enough damage unless it bounces. Even for the condi builds, the cripple is almost meaningless in the current state of the game where everyone’s hyped up on resistance, mobility-impairment reducers, and superspeed and gap-closers/openers. It only really serves as a form of AoE cleave. For condi, the cleave isn’t meaningful. So we need to make it so.

Upped consistency and damage for power + increased usability for condi =
Dancing Dagger: -> Fan of Blades // Lacerate: (0.6); Cost: 3 // 0; Target-required, target-centered AoE. Removed bounce -> general AoE.

Fan of Blades: Range: 1000. Throw a spread of daggers at your target and up to four additional nearby others (450 radius), crippling them (3s) and inflicting the Daggerstruck Effect (5s, with caster source). Gain 50% additional movement speed when moving towards one of your Daggerstruck foes.

Lacerate: Retrieve your daggers from your Daggerstruck foes, with varying effects based on their proximity to you.
(130 range): (0.9) Rip your daggers from your Daggerstruck foe(s) within range and inflict 4 stacks of 3s bleeding and 3s cripple on those afflicted.
(900 range): Reel in your daggers from your Daggerstruck foe(s), inflicting 2 stacks of 3s bleeding.

What this resolves:

Utility and burst for S/D – Movespeed gains, enemy movespeed reduction, and extended cripple potential while providing synergy with IS/IR for generating the quick ability for consumption of Lacerate to get in and start the fight with enough pressure to stay.

Mobility Utility and AoE and utility improvements for P/D – It’s freebies, at this point, although it may warrant a nerf to SStrike due to the extra condition pressure and enabling of SStrike more often from the bonus mobility.

Mobility, utility, non-stealth damage source for D/D power. 3 initiative for 1.5 scaling when in melee going from ranged to melee. It’s no Shadow Shot, but it’s enough to give D/D some gas when not able to backstab while not needlessly burning excessive initiative to be able to do something useful.

Mobility, utility, and damage distribution for D/D condi. I know you’re thinking this is OP, but this ability carried big gains to other sets. As such, we’ll need to change Death Blossom a little bit.

Onward to fixing what we just potentially broke, and to keep the train going, fixing D/D power, too.

Death Blossom: Surge forward (450 unit travel distance), resulting in a spiral of (3×0.3) strikes while evading attacks. Inflicts 3 stacks of 6s bleeding upon landing to nearby allies (130 range).

Ever play a reaper? Yea, this is basically a mini Death’s Charge but made an evade instead of projectile deflection (well, and not a leap and dealing less damage).

Results:

Huge utility and mobility gains to D/D power while providing awesome evasion and engage/disengage potential, with some solid on-engage damage to boot. It’s still no Shadow Shot, but this combined with the new Dancing Dagger provides a huge boom for 7 initiative for a 2.4 damage coefficient on a good-feeling, fast hard engage + bleeding + cripple. The end-damage hitbox also allows for extra evades during stealth while not being revealed if casted away from your opponent. it’s not unfair, either, since that damage takes a few seconds of setup and animations to let your opponent respond if they can.

Big mobility and burst bleeding gains for D/D condi, despite lower DoT. I know what you’re thinking about the DPS loss, but I have answer for this, too. To compensate, we’ll let those thieves who really want to make condi D/D truly a master of the deadly arts be more rewarded for playing better; we’re changing Dagger Training, too.

Dagger Training: Your dagger attacks apply 2s -> 1s poison (yea, 100% chance).

A simple change, but a huge one. This makes D/x condi have way more opportunities to deal damage without depending on RNG, and really amps up those aforementioned condition damage abilities. D/D condi can now combo for damage! DD (1Poison) -> DB (3 bleeding 3 poison) -> Lascerate (melee) 4 bleeding 1 poison) = holy moly that’s a lot of damage. While the durations are all shorter, D/D condi can now deal a little bit more damage while requiring a little bit more from players to really get all that damage in.

So where were we? Right, CnD – the problem child. Based on how the profession could be played right now and what’s left on the list, I actually don’t see a problem with just cutting the initiative cost to 5, upping the vuln to 5 and have it last for 6s to allow more of them to be chained better in a sustained fight, and then calling it a day. No crazy unblockable stuff necessary, since the mid-fight potential on OH dagger goes up so much, while just a little bit of accessibility tweaking to CnD makes it more usable but not excessive.

Fixing the stealth attack ICD to .25s (account for animations this goes to 1s) would improve pretty much everything about the usability of OH dagger as well, particularly for D/D.

Hope you didn’t find this too long to read :P

I agree that cripple is much less effective in the Resistance and post HoT meta. I would prefer that Resistance made conditions 33% less effective rather than the 100% immunity they currently enjoy. I’d prefer that in part because then we get less into power creep to compensate.

Cloak and Dagger (Option 1)
Cloak and Cloak and Dagger applies stealth after the attack. Not dependent on hitting your foe. This would give Cloak and dagger much needed utility

Cloak and Dagger (Option 2)
Add a small movement to Cloak and dagger so we could actually land it without relying on steal.

Death blossom
Nothing, it’s fine as it is.

+1 to Deceiver’s suggestions. I play D/D condi, and that sounds more. . . well, fun to play than the current loadout. Having options across all my attacks would be nice.

I’m wary of changes that comes through traits because that doesn’t address baseline and only buffs the specs that already take the traitline in question. I’ve seen D/P condi builds for example that already take Dagger Training. Rather than buff the traits I’d like to adjust the weapon skills themselves to be inherently more useful.

I’ve already suggested smaller changes so now I’d like to suggest slightly larger ones.

Cloak and Dagger (option 3)—add a short evade frame to CnD. 1/4 second at the end of the animation. Makes it harder to interrupt and increases the ability to use the ability in a tight spot with lots of damage flying around.

The thing is that hybrid weapons do not work without trait investment on any build unless their primary purpose is utility.

D/D is fundamentally as it stands, and always has been from its original inception, a power-based kit.

While I heavily believe in decoupling traits from weapon skills in terms of cooldown reduction, damage modifiers, and the likes, if changing how the kit performs and making it good at either is something that’s sought-after, decisions that are fair and fun in this regard are nigh impossible to make without breaking something somewhere. Make DT baseline and D/P condi overrides D/D. Put other sources of condition damage on weapon skills and you end up either potentially making power builds get too much extra innate condition ramp, or end up making one skill still optimal for its condition application and causing the build to going back into spamming just one skill for its damage. This is especially problematic for Death Blossom because it also has built-in-negation.

In all honesty, the current gains from DT aren’t worth it in most cases for the damage gained. It’s better to play full-turtle Acro/Tr/DrD on D/D condi because it just gains more from spamming more evasion, and the damage loss given the bonuses of Acro is negligible or even non-existent outside of PvE due to the initiative recovery and vigor increasing Uncatchable uptime.

The changes to the rest of the kit I’ve proposed are net improvements for D/D’s utility, so like almost all other builds in the game, trait choice comes down to wanting to play offensively, defensively, or utility-oriented. D/D can still work well without choosing to use DA in this case as well; the aforementioned kit provides higher burst bleeding than currently at less initiative, just it deals less potential sustained damage on a target that doesn’t cleanse, which is realistically in most cases a direct buff to D/D’s potential damage output as it is, since odds are the 10s-long bleed stacks will be cleansed well-before maxing out, anyways, and the current build, unless running Lotus, will not have any worthwhile access to cover conditions, while my proposed one would via cripple, further assisting the build. Further, the damage coefficient potential has been massively increased on these abilities; builds running some power like Carrion or Viper will see dramatic increases in raw power damage to help offset this, turning the kit into a more hybrid-friendly one while not just encouraging wasting initiative. Since the evade and group-fighting is also better, it allows for skilled players to maneuver well and utilize the kit in full to avoid more sources of damage better than currently, rather than just evading into opponents due to the lack of re-positioning potential on the kit as it is making such attempts futile. The DT change just makes that burst application much deadlier from both DoT and utility perspectives at the expense of likely losing a defensive trait line option somewhere. In essence, it’s the same tradeoff most builds make when deciding on whether to take Acro, SA, DA, or even the lowly CS.

Honestly, the only problem with CnD right now is the lack of reliability. It doesn’t need any extra amount of gimmicks, extra punish, extra evasion to opponents trying to punish, etc. And that’s coming from someone who plays his entire build solely dependent on landing the skill once or twice per encounter. Overbuffing it or just making changes to CnD alone will do absolutely nothing for the kit except make it seem more unfair in the few situations it can win in, rather than making the weapon more useful to use in a broader range of encounters, which is the reasin why D/P is so dominant to begin with; it doesn’t have a weak encounter scenario relative to the others.