Guild Wars 2

My Thief is currently level 64, and I’ve never kept a venom on my bar. I’ve tested them out before, but never used them again once I found out how crappy they are. The suggestion I’m about to provide is basically what would make me want to use venoms over other utility skills.

Here is my suggestion: All venom skills gain a passive effect of it’s active effect, but with a small chance to apply. 20% sounds good to me, but some may argue that it’s too much. Perhaps 10% or 15%. Basically what that means is just by having the venom on your bar, you’ll have a chance to apply the effect without having to activate it. It would still have an active effect that has a 100% chance to apply, but for only a limited number of attacks. The passive would be inactive while on cooldown, just like signets.

Also, I suggest that Spider Venom be changed to a condition that actually stacks for more damage, like bleed, since Thieves already have some poison attacks, and increased duration isn’t exactly something to write home about.

Here is a tooltip example:
(Don’t pay attention too much to the numbers, they can change)
Spider Venom
Venom Passive: Grants a 10% chance to apply bleed(5s).
Venom Active: Bleed your foes with your next five attacks.
Bleed(5s): 100 Damage

I know it’s a long shot, but I hope something is changed with venoms, especially the horrendous basilisk venom (it’s an elite skill, it shouldn’t be so incredibly useless).

I’m all for giving them a passive chance to apply an effect (could even be a different effect as something like random immobilizes might be OP) . I totally ignore the venom skills currently. Too little payoff and too long of a cooldown for devoting a utility slot to them.

People use them in spvp constantly, every single fight nearly.

The Weakness one is pretty good.. otherwise yeah, not worth it in my opinion.

Though I’m only level 15 so maybe the tier 3 and elite ones are better!

My Thief is still only around 15 but I agree there should be a passive apply chance. The CD is way too long for the short use of the venom. When I think of a thief I think poison and such, but I don’t use it due to its long CD.

Also yeah the way Spider Venom works is kinda flawed, 5 next hits apply poison? Sure okay, you end up with some crazy duration but poison damage is extremely weak and if the monster ain’t a champion this duration is most definitely wasted (and if he’s a champion chance is there will be another player stacking poison on him).

I’m against giving players too many passive effects. Singets are bad enough and I’ve seen quite a number of players who will stack all their Singets just so they can button mash their 6 remaining abilities.

I agree that the CD on Venoms is a little high and that they aren’t particularly exciting to use but I wouldn’t call them weak.

Maybe every Venom should have a Dot effect along with it’s specific utility component and have the CD lowered to 30 seconds. But I’m not sure if this is really the right time to talk about quality of life changes.