Guild Wars 2

Since the specialization patch i was very much in love with the merge of venom traits into 1 trait line.

I am a venom d/d thief at heart and love to play that role of getting ready for battle by coating my daggers in deadly venoms that will hurt my enemy and give me the advantage i need. Sadly, venoms are not looked at like i do and for good reason. They are out-shined by other utility skills which bring more variability to the table in stunbreaks, condi removal, gap closing etc, etc. You get the idea. Venoms dont really bring much flavor apart from just having # of stacks and that’s it until CD is back and reapplied. Secondly if the enemy blocks or evades an attack a charge is used. I understand for basilisk venom, when balancing, we must avoid making it extremely powerful as it can break the fun for others (cough-Confounding Suggestions- cough).
Sadly i look at thief venoms, Ice Drake venom in particular, and i get a sad feeling that just like scorpion wire, its intentions are good, but its usage is vastly inferior.

Current issues with venoms:
Venoms are obsolete, and not consistent. Stacks are too quickly used and then nothing. Other classes have utility that span over a duration to prolong fights in their favor.

Suggestive solution:
You can only have 1 venom active but does not have any charges instead of a % chance coherent to the number of charges it used to have before to proc its affect triggering its venom. Example: Spider venom first strike has 100% chance to proc but then diminishes down over duration of 6 reoccurring procs to a a flat 15% chance. After that, if the venom is not refreshed or another is activated, it will have only have a 15-20% proc chance. (This is to avoid venom’s being too powerful when traiting into leeching venom or condition venom’s to apply way too many stacks in a short period.)
The venoms still has its original cd of 40 seconds but all venoms also now have 1/2 second activation timer.

This new mechanic for venoms should keep Basalisks elite where its at but also make it somewhat stronger and more dangerous towards the enemy e.g. Basalisk 1st proc chance is 100%, 2nd proc is 50%, procs after 2nd proc are 15% chance. (or less, 15% for basi is a bit high)
What it also allows is Ice Drake Venom and/or other venoms to play a role in chosing which venom’s you want to slot.
This in my opinion will allow venoms to be more utility wise and less of what we thought should have been a F1 ability.

These numbers are just examples and not final of course and should be tweaked regardless. But when looking at existing traits, utilities, from other classes i realize that the numbers arnt big and match what somewhat already exist.

What do you guys think?

The whole problem with venoms is that they have to balance them in two ways. First to be a good utility skill, worth of picking. Then they also need to keep in mind that venoms can be shared, meaning there is a chance of many more applications.

In the first aspect, venoms are rather sad (compare needle trap, 6k+ dmg with condi setup, vs a few hundred for spider venom).

In the second aspect, for an organised group, they are rather on the strong side. Some would claim OP, but you do need coordination if you wanna use them fully!

So the only way to make poisons actually viable is to either remove sharing and buff them. Or to somehow have a toggle option, share venoms and they are only 33% of their full potential.

They won’t remove sharing, being the only actual group thing we have aside stealth.. So let’s hope the second option is possible and will be implemented at some point.

An in between option might be to increase the leeching venoms trait, for only the thief. There you can add the missing damage perhaps.

Rather than a lessening proc chance each hit, which puts you into an rng ditch, they could work like guardians virtue of justice to proc after X number of hits, then use the active to proc a stronger potent venom with a cooldown. Thief and rng do not suit well, they are heavily dependent on quick action and getting out and lessening any part of that is no good which is what a diminishing venom would do in the current state of thieves. Maybe if they had the potential to recover a lot without being easy to focus fire it’d be one thing so they can stay in the fight and keep trying to proc the venom.

Sadly after the latest change to making residual venom baseline I honestly don’t think anet has any plan for venoms. Just throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks at this point.

Venoms are that thing you use in dungeons right?

What would make venoms worth taking outside of dungeons would be to just make the dmg worth losing a utility for. The might proc on activate trait helps, especially now that there are less might gaining traits than before, but the skill cd still holds it back. Perhaps roll into Venomous Aura something like “Venom Recharge is increased x seconds for each ally you share with”? Might make it more viable to use solo being able to do decent dps and recharge would increase since sharing it would increase DPS even more. Idk, maybe even like another thief said on a different thread, have Venom activate act as a stun break as well. I really want to like venoms.

In that aspect, they should not treat every venom equally and split the cooldowns up. Not all venoms are equal, plain and simple however some venoms are really out of place or were changed for no reason with the latest patch with one of the more laughable balance decisions that thief has been put through (making residual venom baseline but nerfing BV and DV).

I love venoms heaps, would a bit more sustain on venoms. Maybe when you use a venom skill it lowers cds on other venoms so staggering venoms is better sustain. Or maybe when we hit with the siphon effect on venoms that lowers cd on other venoms. As the siphon trait only procs once per attack even with stacked venoms it could work really well.

We could use spider, skale and basalisk as our burst venoms then use the frost and healing venoms to reset cds on our burst. This might be OP but would be sooo fun