Guild Wars 2

Thief

•Leeching Venoms: This trait no longer affects gadgets.
•Shadow Refuge: Added a radius skill fact to this skill’s description.
•Smoke Screen: This skill’s blinding pulse no longer follows the thief.
•Spider Venom: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.
•Devourer Venom: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.
•Ice Drake Venom: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.
•Skale Venom: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.
•Basilisk Venom: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.
•Assassin’s Signet: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.

To my knowledge, venoms already acted that way- you lose 1 charge when your attack miss/block/evade/obstructed/invulnerable (at least for Basilisk Venom).

Did they post something just for the sake of posting under the thief section?

Not bad, where’s the stealth nerf everyone and their mom kept QQ about and saying we were surely going to get?

And is different from what thieves had before…how? Unaware of the smoke screen thing tbh. The shadow refuge skill radius description is just awesome, i mean that alone will make up for the fact that if u are not that good with distance perception you can mess up your steal and potentially your opener (as if…) for instance.
Thank you OP for the patch notes. Hope ppl get to see this and get the chance to comment about it before the disturbance in the force is felt and this thread is moved to “thief and it`s headache”.

I think we can look at this as a bug fix that was direly needed for venoms and AS. However, the question is: Did they also fix BV bug with ranged weapons, or is that to be expected in a near future update?

Also, I’m quite disappointed to see no changes to P/P…STILL!!!!

Lofat.2406:

Not bad, where’s the stealth nerf everyone and their mom kept QQ about and saying we were surely going to get?

Since most of the complaints were about WvW I guess this would count:

WvW & PvE: Our culling system has been updated to use affinity culling, which favors allowing players to see important enemies regardless of the local player population density.

Taril.8619:

Lofat.2406:

Not bad, where’s the stealth nerf everyone and their mom kept QQ about and saying we were surely going to get?

Since most of the complaints were about WvW I guess this would count:

WvW & PvE: Our culling system has been updated to use affinity culling, which favors allowing players to see important enemies regardless of the local player population density.

From my understanding, that means in a zerg situation, the thieves are the first ones that show up to the enemy. Yummy thieves!!!

On another note: The following nerf made me sad: “The Orichalcum vein in Southsun Cove is now a regular vein instead of a rich vein.” =[

Just in case anyone makes embarassing remarks on Venom changes; all skills of all classes that trigger “the next # hit” were fixed in the same way.
It was a bug that caused us and other classes to not count dodged/blocked hits as an attack.

I’ll have to try it out, but I’m reading this to mean that missing (as in whiffing the air, not evaded) no longer takes a venom charge away, which is pretty nice.

Hmm, I was dumbfounded about that. I think they mean that the charges are only lost in the situation described. Currently, you’d lose a charge if you used an attack on no target at all or if it Missed which means if it was out of range.

The fact leeching venom doesn’t work on gadgets anymore is sad though, here goes the best reason to use the trait :/

stof.9341:

Hmm, I was dumbfounded about that. I think they mean that the charges are only lost in the situation described. Currently, you’d lose a charge if you used an attack on no target at all or if it Missed which means if it was out of range.

The fact leeching venom doesn’t work on gadgets anymore is sad though, here goes the best reason to use the trait :/

Hm…so you’re saying that basilisk venom could work like this?

Steal is on cool down; basilisk is not.
Target is 600 range away.
I cast basilisk then use 2 HS to catch up to my target and basilisk will hit?

Necrochild.1497:

I’ll have to try it out, but I’m reading this to mean that missing (as in whiffing the air, not evaded) no longer takes a venom charge away, which is pretty nice.

This is my understanding too. I’ll find out once I get back home I guess.

Useless tweaks .-.

I don’t really understand, didn’t the venoms already take down one charge if they missed?

Sifu.6527:

Hm…so you’re saying that basilisk venom could work like this?

Steal is on cool down; basilisk is not.
Target is 600 range away.
I cast basilisk then use 2 HS to catch up to my target and basilisk will hit?

Possible.

Sithaco.4673:

I don’t really understand, didn’t the venoms already take down one charge if they missed?

Please note that they didn’t say you’d lose one charge when you Miss. When you are Blocked, Evaded, Obstructed or hit someone Invulnerable => lose a charge. But they did not mention Miss.

What about slow-moving projectiles that are dodged simply by moving away from them mid-combat? Projectiles such as the Necro Staff 1 come to mind where such a scenario is frequent.

Karl McLain.5604:

The charges are actually no longer reduced if you receive a ‘Miss’ notification or are just swinging your weapon out of range. They’re still removed if you’re blocked/evaded/obstructed (combat misses, essentially). They also used to remove if they were on a projectile that lasted too long, or on non-attack skills such as Caltrops or Smoke Bomb. All in all, venoms and other charge-based attack bonuses have been improved and made much more reliable.
-Karl

Thanks for the clarification Karl. Am I to understand that this also mean that BV is fixed for ranged weapons?

Karl McLain.5604:

The charges are actually no longer reduced if you receive a ‘Miss’ notification or are just swinging your weapon out of range. They’re still removed if you’re blocked/evaded/obstructed (combat misses, essentially). They also used to remove if they were on a projectile that lasted too long, or on non-attack skills such as Caltrops or Smoke Bomb. All in all, venoms and other charge-based attack bonuses have been improved and made much more reliable.
-Karl

Thanks Karl. This is awesome!

Karl McLain.5604:

The charges are actually no longer reduced if you receive a ‘Miss’ notification or are just swinging your weapon out of range. They’re still removed if you’re blocked/evaded/obstructed (combat misses, essentially). They also used to remove if they were on a projectile that lasted too long, or on non-attack skills such as Caltrops or Smoke Bomb. All in all, venoms and other charge-based attack bonuses have been improved and made much more reliable.
-Karl

Very very very nice.

Now Venom share is a lot more useful, much needed fix thank you.

I expected to see an increase in the Leeching Venom’s range.

I’m an inexperienced thief, leveling to 80 on a venom build this whole time. I see this as a tremendous nerf to venoms.

Before, if I used Spider Venom without the added hit trait, it applied over five attacks. If an attack hit on multiple targets, it applied the effect (life steal included) to each target hit, so with shortbow or sword, this meant Spider Venom could proc 15 times.

Now, venoms apply per hit; whether I cleave 3 targets twice, hit one target with pistol 5 times, or fire two shots from my shortbow that bounce between two targets, my Spider Venom is only ever gonna proc 5 times.

tl;dr, my venom effectiveness was reduced by 66%.

And here I was expecting the AoE nerf to happen to my Elementalist.

It always worked like that for AoE attacks.

In my experience, if I swung my sword five times, if I hit a single target, Spider Venom would proc five times, and if I hit three targets, Spider Venom would proc five times per target, adding up to 15 procs between them all. Now, if I swing my sword five times on a single target, Spider Venom procs five times, and if I swing my sword five times on three targets, Spider Venom hits the first target only twice, one additional target twice, and the remaining target only once: a total of five procs either way.

Can anyone confirm if I was receiving the benefit of a recent bug? Was this an older, unaddressed bug? Or was this simply a nerf to AoE venom builds?

Edit: Basilisk Venom never worked like this and is totally unaffected; I’m only talking about the utility ones.

Tairs.3802:

In my experience, if I swung my sword five times, if I hit a single target, Spider Venom would proc five times, and if I hit three targets, Spider Venom would proc five times per target, adding up to 15 procs between them all. Now, if I swing my sword five times on a single target, Spider Venom procs five times, and if I swing my sword five times on three targets, Spider Venom hits the first target only twice, one additional target twice, and the remaining target only once: a total of five procs either way.

Can anyone confirm if I was receiving the benefit of a recent bug? Was this an older, unaddressed bug? Or was this simply a nerf to AoE venom builds?

Edit: Basilisk Venom never worked like this and is totally unaffected; I’m only talking about the utility ones.

I thought the venoms didn’t do that when I was playing BWE, but I never rly experimented with venoms. However, I do believe that venoms were meant to proc only 5 times, and not on “5 swings that hit multiple enemies” ..

Guess that explains why venoms rarely ever worked on ranged weapons.

Karl McLain.5604:

The charges are actually no longer reduced if you receive a ‘Miss’ notification or are just swinging your weapon out of range. They’re still removed if you’re blocked/evaded/obstructed (combat misses, essentially). They also used to remove if they were on a projectile that lasted too long, or on non-attack skills such as Caltrops or Smoke Bomb. All in all, venoms and other charge-based attack bonuses have been improved and made much more reliable.
-Karl

I’m sorry Karl but I heartily disagree. Before, each bounce from my shortbow would only use one charge. Allowing me to really maintain good CC especially since DURATIONS don’t stack on certain venoms. Now arenanet has made it so a charge is used per bounce, severely reducing the amount of applications of venom. This MIGHT have been acceptable if durations stacked (i realize spider and skale do stack in duration) AND if the venom share range was increased but now you’ve effectively removed any incentive from using a venom share support build. P.S. I know you also fixed the whole venom share on gates/invuln supervisors trick.

There is only one build left for me now with my thief that hasn’t been nerfed into uselessness and even then the #3 ability has been broken in forever.

I would suggest if you have a problem with mass duration stacking on CC abilities, don’t make them charges of on next hit as opposed to a buff that has a chance to proc on next hit and let us have multiple venoms up at a time.

Only thing I ask regarding venoms atm, is that BV be instant cast (like the other venoms), or AT LEAST half the cast it has now…OR last for 2 hits, not 1.