Guild Wars 2

So as a venom sharer since a veeeeeeeery long time and one of the bigger defenders of the support style around (despite the Lotus Poison ultra nerf), I decided to take Skale Venom around in PvE dungeons and PvP and see how it works…

The results: Devourer is again on my build and I don’t plan to try Skale again.

Why? Well, Devourer does Skale role much better. Even on a sharer build you don’t see enough damage from it on PvE or PvP, and if what you want is opponents that don’t move, Devourer does that job 1000000000(hundred more 0s)00000 times better.

The difference on charges isn’t that big for leeching venoms to give Skale an edge.

At the end it didn’t feel like making a difference at all in any of my tries in dungeons and PvP. Then I returned to Devourer and everything was way better and smoother.

Conclussion: Thanks for the try, but Skale Venom was our worst skill before and it still is incredibly bad, at least bad enough to not pick it even as a sharer. If it had 5 charges at least I would take it for the leeching damage.

If anyone though this was a buff to support Thief, it was wrong, and we received an incredibly big hit with the other changes (specially our inability to protect our team now).

Torment was a great opportunity to make pistols better, specially P/P that urgently needs a way to control opponent movement, but what they implemented with Skale Venom is very innefective.

One could say it’s because they wanted to be careful with the introduction of the condition, but you compare it with how Mesmer can apply it when supposedly this was meant specially for Necros, and you see how badly this condition is implemented for us.

lotus poison nerf was really uncalled for. thief had basically no utility for PvE, and now it really has none.

Old skale venom had the potential to be powerful with new weakness – they made a conscious decision to keep it as a POS by changing weakness to torment – who thought 3 stacks of “Bleed+” on a 45 second CD even constituted an “idea”?

Something like this?

stinkypants.8419:

Something like this?

LOL it hits de bull´s eye perfectly.

Like a Venom sharer myself i call this change a nerf, if anet was concerned about de new weakness be too OP they can just cut duration to a 50%. It coul be a hugh buff to support thieves, but the chance was missed.

evilapprentice.6379:

Old skale venom had the potential to be powerful with new weakness – they made a conscious decision to keep it as a POS by changing weakness to torment – who thought 3 stacks of “Bleed+” on a 45 second CD even constituted an “idea”?

according to this sneak shot should be on a 90 sec cooldown :P lol. anet is just silly most of the time. idk what they think.

Torment is garbage as implemented. Without a reliable way to apply it regularly, it neither does appreciable damage or push your target to stop moving.

Since patch day, I’ve had 3-5 stacks on me at various times, and I never noticed it.

What they should do, is some sort of conversion for condition users that translates vulnerability (useless to a condition user) into a way to generate stacks of torment (e.g. every time a bleed is applied while vulnerability is up, one stack of torment is applied, duration to be determined by how strong this would be, perhaps a % of the bleed’s duration, perhaps 50%) This would give thieves a reason to use #2.

In addition, Skale Venom should be reverted to weakness/vulnerability with that change. Of course, it would have to be tweaked so it’s not overpowered, or abused, as well as the conversion process.