Guild Wars 2

So recently I was looking at this particular build that someone suggest to me in this forum:
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/venom-healer-venom-heal-support-thief-condition-overkill-5304.html

Mainly this seems to be a condition damage based support build, but I was wondering if anyone who plays this build or is familiar with it can clarify certain things for me.

I get that it is a support build but, how do I kill people exactly? Where is my primary source of damage coming from? (I figure since I’m spreading all this poison and have all this poison at my disposal I might as well be doing something offensively… but what am I doing?? haha).

Also it seems like the primary source of heals are coming from Leeching Venom (correct me if I am wrong). Can you explain how that trait works? Do I gain health only when I trigger the venom skills, or do I gain health each time I hit someone while I have a venom on? And if it is the latter, suppose I have all 4 venoms on, will one hit trigger 4 heals, or just 1 heal? How much am I healing per hit?

And on a very basic level, what’s so great about venoms really, esp in terms of PvE or in dungeons? None of them apply bleeds, which does significantly more damage than poisons. Most monsters don’t heal so the 66% reduced healing (or whatever the number is) seems ineffective. Further, you cannot stack poisons just elongate the duration, which, again, doesn’t do much in terms of direct damage. The other conditions you rack up, vulnarability, weakness and chill, I can see how if you have a high DPS ally (or allies) this can help, but… I dunno from a purely theory crafting standpoint (i never played this build or seen anyone use it), I don’t see where the big advantage of this build is coming from.

Maybe I’m viewing this from a selfish solo-ing thief lens, which is why I’m not seeing the appeal. Can someone with a better understanding of this build explain?

Let me try to answer a few of those questions:

If you have the trait ‘Leeching Venoms’ and the stats of a typical venom thief (high power, low crit) your damage is fairly evenly split across your lifesteal and your raw physical damage. Lifesteal damage occurs each time you successfully apply a charge of venom on an enemy target and this damage is usually around 320. So if you activate Spider Venom and hit a target 5 times with a #1 attack, you will deal you regular attack damage plus 5×320.

There is no bleed venom, but you can get nice stacks of bleed through pistol auto attack and pistol sneak attack (pistol/dagger) or AoE bleeds with dagger/dagger equipped. Finally equipping Caltrops also applies bleeding in a nice AoE pulse. A thief with a mainhand pistol will easily apply 3x the damage in bleeds as he will physical or poison damage.

I personally wouldn’t run a venom thief unless I was using pistol/dagger or dagger/dagger. Shortbow can be good too, though for poison, not bleeds.

Best thing to do is to try the build in the mists on a few dummies.

Advantages:
1. Innate tankiness through Vitality from gear/stats
2. Good healing through Leeching Venoms and Signet of Malice (I would use this over Hide in Shadows for a heal)
3. Good group support if you share venoms
4. Good sustained damage, especially if there aren’t many other condition damage types in your group

note: I couldn’t open attached build

Thanks for the reply Sarrow!

The link above is exactly as you described, its a p/d main with a SB offset. It runs 30/0/30/0/10 in terms of traits (also as you predicted, full power and vitality with some trickery). All the traits picked boosts venom, i.e. venom strikes last 1 hit longer, venom grants 2 stacks of might when applied, recharges 20% faster, heals per hit and applies venoms to allies when you trigger a venom.

Only non venom boosting trait in the build is thrill of the crime and allies regenerate when stealthed.

I see, so I get heals from each charge of venom dispersed. However, does it stack? Currently I wont be able to access the game until Monday afternoon so I can’t check how it works in the mists, but I am wondering if I trigger skale venom (3 charges and an additional 1 from traits) Ice drake venom (3 + 1), spider venom (5 +1) and basilik venom (1 + 1) all at once, and I fire the #1 skill in p/d, am I going to get the benefit of only once charge of venom (1×320) or, since all 4 venoms are active at once does that shot count as 4×320 per shot?

So if I understand you correctly, basically I stack the venoms and just spam the 1 attack on the P/D to stack bleeds and venoms? None of the other skills have any utility?

I believe that if you trigger all your venoms at once, your next attack will inflict your enemy with all those conditions, but you will only receive one ‘dose’ of lifesteal. It’s optimal to space out your venoms so that:
1. Your team are close if you have the sharing trait (solid teamwork required for this to work effectively)
2. A new venom is applied after all charges of the last venom have been used up.

Also, the optimal way to play Pistol/Dagger is to stealth with #5 (a melee strike), unload your sneak attack (5 quick shots stacking 5 short bleeds), #1, #1 and repeat beginning with your #5. So it’s 5, 1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 1, 1, 5 etc

So I just started trying this build (With Venomous Aura, mostly dungeons), and thought I should share a cool thing I noticed. If your group is all standing around waiting for something before a fight, dose them with every venom you’ve got. The venoms last for 30 seconds and have recharges around 36 seconds after the venom recharge trait. So now your group is starting off the next fight with poison / weakness / chill / immobilize on their attacks, and you can start reapplying poisons within 15 seconds.

cond removal=~0
vennom share radius is a bit on the LOL side
NO utility (like smoke screen)
the lava boss shaman would like to laugh in your face…

Venoms are badly designed at the moment. They are too weak and generally not worth a slot when untraited. All skills should be worth a slot without traiting. On the other hand, venemous aura has this massive potential that is hardly ever realized in game play, which again must give balance problems. Not a great piece of design.

Your main question was where the damage comes from? Weapons give damage. If a dungeon is easy enough that you only want dps then any vaguely sensible set of skills and traits will get you through, some faster than others . If a dungeon is hard then you generally need to survive and control a fight. The group will provide enough damage together to kill things as long as you have control of a fight. This is where venoms have a role. Hit a small group of mobs with ice venom, they all stay grouped together, and your warrior steams in and flattens them. That’s group work.

i have been using this build allot in spvp i’m R 39 and used it from R 15 i find it to have a bit higher skill cap then any other thief build because position and keeping an eye on your cool downs is very important. as for the damage, it is not as great as a backstabber but the 5x 340 dmg from sneak attack + normal damage + condition + awesome control + sigil air/fire damage makes this build awesome against any class in my opinion.
and you can roflstomp ele’s/warrior’s/ backstab thief with it . also perm stun when shared with 5 persons in your team + team heals.

i believe this is a very underrated build.
also: i do not believe that the range is to small, it is to small to pop venoms anywhere. you just got to know where to stand with who to share and when to share. i would suggest anyone to try this build, work through the learning curve and pwn the hell out of anything.

if you want to buff this build increase the life steal and not the range to share, otherwise this build is yet another press 1 button to win build.

The venom sharing isn’t very reliable at all due to a small radius and that a few of the conditions don’t stack. Also, I’ve personally never been in a group capable of adequately coordinating to make the sharing of the venom’s worthwhile. Even if you could find such a group you’re now asking each member of the group to withhold attacking in order to time the application. If we add a one second delay per member to apply that means you’re wasting nearly 14 seconds of whatever the group could have already been doing. This means that the venom they would apply needs to outweigh whatever else they could do in that time frame which I doubt is possible.

The premise of applying these conditions is still valuable but we need to rethink how to utilize them.

Hey guys -

I’ve got a question for you that’s related to this topic.

Last I checked (a few months back), a Thief condition build wasn’t really viable at all. I feel like it was always outdone by straight damage builds. Is that not the case anymore?

I’ve always loved the medium Nightmare armor from TA, and I definitely would love to get my hands on it. But with the +condition damage, I’m hesitant.

Are there good condition damage builds for thief now (which would make the Nightmare armor more useful)? Bleed/poison builds for D/D?

Thanks for the help. Definitely interested in getting the mechanics of a condition dmg. Thief down.

Jowiso.8602:

Hey guys -

I’ve got a question for you that’s related to this topic.

Last I checked (a few months back), a Thief condition build wasn’t really viable at all. I feel like it was always outdone by straight damage builds. Is that not the case anymore?

I’ve always loved the medium Nightmare armor from TA, and I definitely would love to get my hands on it. But with the +condition damage, I’m hesitant.

Are there good condition damage builds for thief now (which would make the Nightmare armor more useful)? Bleed/poison builds for D/D?

Thanks for the help. Definitely interested in getting the mechanics of a condition dmg. Thief down.

ofc there is : stack condition dmg and go a death blossom + caltrops build the dps is pretty good .

Jowiso.8602:

Hey guys -

I’ve got a question for you that’s related to this topic.

Last I checked (a few months back), a Thief condition build wasn’t really viable at all. I feel like it was always outdone by straight damage builds. Is that not the case anymore?

I’ve always loved the medium Nightmare armor from TA, and I definitely would love to get my hands on it. But with the +condition damage, I’m hesitant.

Are there good condition damage builds for thief now (which would make the Nightmare armor more useful)? Bleed/poison builds for D/D?

Thanks for the help. Definitely interested in getting the mechanics of a condition dmg. Thief down.

In my experience the condition damage build has a hell of a lot easier time in PvE than does backstab, and I’ll be first to admit that it might be because condition builds are more user friendly and more “intuitive.” Also they are generally traited and geared to have more toughness and vitality so they are a lot less squishy and a lot more forgiving than glass cannon BS builds or pure dps builds.

What I mean by that is, with a condition build that uses DB and caltrops to stack bleeds as the main damage output, my thought process is “well, I have full initiative and my steal is off of cooldown, and so is my caltrops. And look there is a mob of 8 right ahead of me… sweet!”
1. Run to enemy
2. DB 2x to make sure I’m getting off optimal hits, and if I am:
a. Drop caltrops, but if I am not
b. Dodge into the mob to drop caltrops from uncatchable trait (which will also stack might from power of inertia trait), then drop caltrops
3. DB a 3rd time
4. Steal to get initiative back/ go into stealth (and gain stealth buffs)
5. DB a 4th time, ideally away from the mob
6. Kite, with your best troll face on and watch enemies bleed to death. Unless they are elite enemies, in which case you rinse and repeat.

See? Intuitive. BS thieves on the other hand, good ones anyway, can’t go on autopilot, they need to pick their fights, they require a higher skill cap in my opinion.

Also, in addition to the nightmare armor, CoF also offers condition gear (power/vit/condition is what I am using), I never did TA dungeon but I can tell you for a fact that path 1 of CoF is easier than even AC dungeon. Much easier to collect your gear.

Back to the original topic of the thread, I’ll defn give this build a try, the only complaint I have with my current bleed thief is that, literally, he has 2 party utilities: stealth res and bountiful theft boons, which cycles once every what 30-40 secs? And throwing down a poison field with SB 4 skill which I rarely ever use unless I HAVVE to range. These are ok for support but this venom thief seems to have some potential.

Although I’ll be honest… it sounds very fragile and based on this thread the condition sharing/buffs seem to be inconsistent. But, I wont knock it unless I try it!

Venoms is the only way to add conditions onto shortbow skill #1. That’s your bread and butter. Basilisk Venom is OP when used in the right situation. Laying down shortbow #4 into a zerg pile while standing off to the side is OP if your traited to add weakness to poison (lotus poison).

Lacking condition removal.

I was actually thinking of the condition removal thing, instead of going balls to the wall with all utilities being poison would this build be better replacing the weakest poison (i think that’s the one with x5 charge, skale venom?) with shadow return (stun break + remove 3 conditions upon return).

That could work. The problem is I hate giving up the 25% movement speed from the signet. What I’d probably do is run two utility venoms, basilisk venom, and then flip the signet on when I’m running around and hopefully flip to the condition removal when I’m going to fight. One more utility slot would sure be nice.