Guild Wars 2

Superior Rune of Perplexity: Changed the sixth bonus. This rune now applies 3 stacks of confusion for 6 seconds in a radius of 240 around the player upon using a healing skill. The internal cooldown remains at 15 seconds.

I’m always a fan of playing odd builds, and last night after saving gold, I was finally able to buy six Perplexity runes for a P/P condi thief; they were synergizing nicely with “headshot” to interrupt for 5 stacks, while also padding some additional torment.

They were meant to replace my Superior Runes of Tormenting, because the “on heal” effect isn’t reliable, even if using Withdrawl, the radius is too small to be effective.

Overnight, the change to the Perplexity runes have broken the way the build would work. Ideally, as a P/P thief, I want to be keeping my distance, and sadly, having to get close to the enemy to drop just 3 stacks of confusion might not be worth it. To top it off, they were bleeding expensive, I lost about 80g in one night of transactions.

A sad day for my thieves in general today, as my venomshare thief also took a hit from the nerf bat.

: +20% Confusion 40px.png Confusion duration; when you interrupt a foe, cause 5 stacks of confusion for 8 seconds. (Cooldown: 15s)

The old version of the Superior Runes of Perplexity before the changes for comparison.

Not only that but the “on heal” effects happen after the heal so you would have to withdraw onto your opponent for them to be in the affected radius. I’ve played the d/p plex build in moderation and it fun for a while but very expensive. I feel your pain. This patch has been a mess for thieves.

They should have made preparedness baseline and leave venomous aura alone. The original venomshare support build is weaker and made basi venom more desirable with the daggerstorm(haste) nerf. I had a zerg softener build. Black powder > Shadowstep > Daggerstorm + Haste, shadowstep out. Now that build is useless.

While I didn’t like playing against plex thieves, it was different and unique.

HAHAHAH! does not effect my DD build, because i use Runes of Adventure

The Plex rune change is a big nerf to int builds but thankfully this effects Mesmers as well. No more remote shatter spam for Plex hits. Even when it does land 3 stacks is way better than 5.

It certainly neuters my very OP Thief int build. I like the AoE function of the runes but using a heal offensively as a thief is generally a bad idea.

Good riddance to all perplex builds IMHO.

Azukas.1426:

Good riddance to all perplex builds IMHO.

Not sure they are gone but probably for the thief. The build I was running was so OP, I deleted it off the forums and was basically trolling 3+ players with little worry of losing that fight. It took timing to make it sing but it was stupid OP.

I can think of extremely cheesy ways to abuse this new change to perplex on thief. It’s unfortunate that I have to change my build to something that’s less fun and less skillful to play.

I can think of extremely cheesy ways to abuse this new change to perplex

Hmmm, I was wondering if it would be worth it to just strip down to 4 Runes of Perplexity, and augment the build with Rune of Orr or Krait.

But cheesy ways to abuse the new changes you say?

pulls up chair

Do tell!

Natwinter.9234:

I can think of extremely cheesy ways to abuse this new change to perplex

Hmmm, I was wondering if it would be worth it to just strip down to 4 Runes of Perplexity, and augment the build with Rune of Orr or Krait.

But cheesy ways to abuse the new changes you say?

pulls up chair

Do tell!

Unfortunately, I do not want to say what it is since it may or may not benefit a certain build that I do not want to play against.

Oh please, even if you say it 95% of thieves will run D/P anyways. That is what being a P/D thief for years has taught me. Sometimes people don’t listen.

Well it might be even more effective d/d DB build with channled vigor as heal. The build was low on interrupts so it was hard to leverage # 6.

I’m wholly new to the GW world, but I love theorycrafting and build diversity.

Alright, so I dole out stacks of confusion on heal, which frees me up from having to play duo-pistols for the interrupt; very cool, I prefer running Pistol-Dagger.

I can imagine something like this working by pre-casting Hide in Shadows, followed by a Steal, and the opponent now has 8 stacks of confusion and other conditions depending on spec. Heck, I might even grab Trapper’s Respite, so now they’re sitting on a trap for 4 seconds of immobilize, and more poisons and bleeds. Sneak Attack to unload more conditions, and Shadow Strike away.

Hmm, the wheels are turning.

Problem with it being attached to the heal is that thieves can rarely pop a heal in the middle of a group. The range is crazy small so a thief basically has to heal right next to whatever is wailing on it. I ran it for two hours and was getting demolished by good players.

IMO a better compromise for Plex would have been for it to activate on the Elite. It would have a longer cooldown but at least be able to be used offensively. As it is now, hard to see a build in the thief line that can maximize its tier 6 ability.

That’s a shame /sarcasm.

I feel your pain op, running p/p as a condi set now is worthless in wvw as any half decent player will cleanse or laugh at you now. whoever thought that confusion on heal was good wasn’t thinking. Its a “heal” skill not a attack skill. What should have happened is they reduced the 5 stacks on interrupt to 3 every 15 secs or leave it at 5 stacks of confusion per 25-30secs. Another gripe i have is how mesmer can still put out an absurd amount of confusion as well as other condi but now we cap out at 11stacks of confusion if we are lucky. “Headshot” should apply one stack of confusion for 3-5secs on hit not interrupt to make p/p condi builds viable. Wvw will now be filled with evade spam/ trapper thief because a build that relied on interrupts that took skill to land on decent players is gutted.

Does it trigger on mesmer mantra of healing? Is there a cooldown? If not…

I tried to make Perplexity work, but it seems to be a lot of effort to get only 3 stacks of confusion to stick.

One thing I’ve noticed about the sixth bonus which makes it a little more practical to use than the Tormenting rune: “This rune now applies 3 stacks of confusion for 6 seconds in a radius of 240 around the player upon using a healing skill. The internal cooldown remains at 15 seconds.”

If I use withdraw, the confusion AOE lingers for 6 seconds, so if the opponent tries to close the gap or gets close, they invariably get a little dirt on their hands. That being said, you’d be lucky to get 10 stacks in a single fight, which really doesn’t do much in the long run.

William Bradley Knight.2609:

Does it trigger on mesmer mantra of healing? Is there a cooldown? If not…

It only works on an actual heal skill activation. No passive heals or other skills will trigger its effect. The other “suck” part is that it goes off at the end of the heal. Very few classes have a heal that activates in under 1s making the lag on confusion application 1s or more in most cases.