Guild Wars 2

This new patch has a lot of interesting new quirks and rather than focusing on the nerfs (I will remember my stun breaking shadow return fondly) I’m thinking about re-visiting the power/condi thief.

Unfortunately gw2buildcraft.com did not update the new traits, so this is not reflecting the new changes in skale venom or body shot or richochet. But here’s what I was thinking:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|a.1g.h1.8.1g.h17|8.0.h1j.a.0.h1|1o.7i.1o.7i.1o.7i.1o.7i.1o.7i.1o.7i|41n.0.21n.0.31n.0.2v.0.3v.0.2v.0|k48.0.u49b.0.k3a|0.0|57.5s.5q.5b.5u|e

-THE PREMISE-
Idea is to use pistol/dagger main hand, dagger/pistol off hand. On the average target, ideally standing near allies if using venom share trait, we do this:
CnD —> activate skale venom, (get 2 stacks of might) --> Sneak attack (just healed for 3 ticks, inflicted 5 stacks of bleed, 3 stacks of vulnarability, 3 stacks of torment) —> Devourer Venom (4 total stacks of might) --> body shot (target is now immobalized, 13 stacks of weakness) —> CnD (healed for 2 more ticks)--> Swap to dagger/pistol —> Backstab the immobilized target!

Follow up by HS-ing target down if low health, or doing some autoattacking, kiting, whatever, until we can swap back to P/D, inflict some more bleeds and wait until poisons come off cool down, and do it again!

-What prompted this craziness-
1. We got a new condi, torment. It happens to be in Skale venom. Power trait line has venom buffs and also improves base damage.

2. Shadow arts has venom share in addition to giving you stealth buffs, so we get our defense AND spread the venom love (particularly, skale venom which gives torment and vulnarability) around. Alternatively one can play selfishly and take shadow rejuvination instead if solo-ing, increase one’s own survivability.

3. There are only 2 useful venoms in my view, skale venom and devour venom (spider and ice drake venom are pretty useless).

4. Going 20 into trickery allows us to increase our initiative pool to 15, and gives us access to richochet which bounces off half the shots that we fire, giving the pistol/dagger weapon set a minor degree of AoE.

5. Off set I picked Dagger/Pistol for the on demand stealth from BP + HS, and the tremendous spike damage from Back Stab.

What do you guys think? Viable?

Looks interesting. Gonna test this out as soon as I’m back from vacation! For more AoE (and a ton of both physical and condition damage) you could swap D/P for short bow. Just a thought.

By the way, I forgot to mention why I picked the Lyssa runes. Since Basilik Venom is on a relatively short cooldown (36 seconds with the venom cool down trait), this means we can cleanse all conditions and get all the boons for 5s every 36 seconds. Also Lyssa gives us 10% extra condition duration to give us a total of 30% (20 from deadly arts), and Lyssa ups precision to improve our critical strike chances.

@ Geiir, I was thinking of the SB as well, esp since the P/D has such limited mobility, so whatever the off hand weaponset is MUST have mobility or ready access to stealth. But I wanted to take advantage of the 10 stacks of vulnerability body shot now has, and since it has a short cooldown (only 3s, ~4s with the condi durations) the thing with the most spike damage I could think of was backstab. And the on demand stealth from D/P synergizes well with sneak attack in case CnD doesn’t go off for whatever reason, or maybe you don’t want to initiate with CnD.

That being said, I didn’t test this yet but if we go SB instead we can activate devour venom, fire off 2 body shots with P/D to immobalize and stack ~23 vulnarability, steal to target to get to point blank range and fire CB’s at the enemy’s feet. That should rack up some substantial burst damage and about 9 bleeds too. I’ll have to test and see