Guild Wars 2

Venomous Strength:
When applied, venoms grant 2 stacks of might for 20 seconds.

Change to:

When applied, venoms grant might, fury, swiftness for 10 seconds.

This allows Venom’s to be useful to everyone in your group if heavilly traited into, and offer thieves more offensive boons, currently our “Boon Duration” barely does anything and we rely too much on stealth.

I also suggest moving Venomous Aura out of the Toughness Tree and into the Vitality Tree, It seems more like a boon thing with all the buffs around boons to it, and stealth thieves don’t need anymore help.

Trade: Fleet Shadow (33% Movement Speed in Stealth.) in Acrobatics Tree for Venomous Aura. (its kind of silly that a stealth trait is in the acrobatics tree when its mostly a stealth trait, acrobatics thieves do not have a lot of stealth. (of course bump it up to a tier 3 trait, tier 1 venomous aura would be overpowered.)

This would give us a lot of room for more builds then just backstab builds and allow us a more passive DPS tree, and offers us group utility as well, this also means you couldn’t take mug because you need -20% venom reduction to keep the buffs going.

This would allow a 20/0/0/30/0 (20 points left to spend.) a viable option.

No comments on this?

Could be pushed down to 8 seconds.

The problem with venom related traits aren’t just the traits themselves, venom skills are just sub-par.

Let me ask you this: What good is 1.5 seconds of petrifying someone in PvP? What good will 1.5 seconds do in PvE? What use is there for skills that apply poison other than to reduce healing and how useful is condition damage in general in PvE/PvP?

Daecollo.9578:

Venomous Strength:
When applied, venoms grant 2 stacks of might for 20 seconds.

Change to:

When applied, venoms grant might, fury, swiftness for 10 seconds.

Isn’t this the exact same thing that Thrill of Crime does with Steal?

From a “this is seems logical” perspective, how does applying a venom to your blade making you quicker? You’re not eating the venom for crack speed or anything like that. It applying Might can e logical as some venoms can be corrosive allowing you to penetrate harder defenses, but Swiftness on Venom application would mostly be used to map travel maintaining Swiftness with your venoms.

Thrill of Crime is balanced because it only affects Steal, making every Venom use a Thrill of Crime would be an insanely OP trait (you’re basically maintaining constant Fury and Swiftness on a whole team, simply brutality).

Venom Sharing could get some help, but I don’t think this one is the way it should be fixed.

DanteZero.3569:

The problem with venom related traits aren’t just the traits themselves, venom skills are just sub-par.

Let me ask you this: What good is 1.5 seconds of petrifying someone in PvP? What good will 1.5 seconds do in PvE? What use is there for skills that apply poison other than to reduce healing and how useful is condition damage in general in PvE/PvP?

From my experience as Venom Sharer in both Dungeons and PvP, the real problem with Venom is that there are only 2 good utility venoms:

- Spider Venom allows for 2k+ heals on you and your teammates, and in PvP/WvW it decreases healing efficency from human opponents. Aditionally, if you (as you SHOULD do with this one) invest just a bit in Deadly Arts, it also applies 15 seconds of Weakness, effectively reducting by 25% (on average, except against very high critics builds) the damage done by an enemy, be it a dungeon boss or a human player.

- Devourer Venom: I really like it because it’s a Paralisys you can shoot. On a team fight you can stop an opponent for about 8 seconds (specially useful for gunsline groups against hard hitting monsters), and against purely melee players it’s as good or better than Basilisk Venom (except he will be able to heal or use anti conditions, but if you’re using a high condition build, he will need them for other means).

Then you get Skale Venom, applying 3 Vulnerability for very short time, and some Weakness… that you already get from the traited Spider Venom! And Ice Drake Venom which doesn’t offers too much over Devourer Venom.

For some reason Venoms are designed to all have the same cooldown, when in my opinion this is a mistake. There isn’t a rule that states that utilities of the same family must share their CD number. Skale Venom would be acceptable at 20 or 25 seconds recharge as much, making it a bit more useful for synergy with Venom application traits to compensate for it being so weak in comparison.

About Basilisk Venom… I don’t like it at all because outside the correct build is complete crap, but on the correct build becomes so powerful that a lot of people is crying for Thief nerfings. This one shouldn’t have existed from the beginning IMO, as the curve between crap and OP is dramatical and nearly impossible to balance.

Venomous Aura has a cap of 5 targets. (This includes yourself as well!)

Giving 5 people (who have to be standing very much on top of you.) Fury/Swiftness/1 Stack of Might is not overpowered.

The Thief has to sacrifice stealth (Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder…)
The Thief has to sacrifice Mug (The ability to do a lot of damage when stealing.)
The Thief has to sacrifice the Initative Trait to add extra initative in Trickery.
The Thief has to sacrifice his stun breakers and ability to run away. (Shadowstep.)
The Thief has to sacrifice half his damage. (30 Precision.) (Otherwise he could not get the buff in the first place, you need so many points in other things to make it work…)

To give 5 people, all of which have to be standing near you so its more like 2-3 in a real situation.

10 Seconds of Fury/Might/Swiftness, per venom used.

This means the Thief also has to sacrifice UTILITY slots. (which means no crazy stealthing, getting away, initative regeneration, damage buffs.)

You say its overpowered, but the Thief has to sacrifice pretty much “BEING A THIEF” to get the traits to make it last forever.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mck9ooMhwooMxwoG0xG0mRmsbos

20% Boon Duration (36 Seconds when you use all 3 Venoms.)
-20% Venom Duration. (So Recast is 36 Seconds.)
Trait that does it in the first place.

With all the things the thief HAS to sacrifice, HOW is this overpowered? Hes not going to be backstabbing people down, hes not even going to be doing that much damage.

Venoms are terrible in this game. Not sure why we are beating this dead horse.

Daecollo.9578:

Venomous Aura has a cap of 5 targets. (This includes yourself as well!)

Giving 5 people (who have to be standing very much on top of you.) Fury/Swiftness/1 Stack of Might is not overpowered.

The Thief has to sacrifice stealth (Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder…)
The Thief has to sacrifice Mug (The ability to do a lot of damage when stealing.)
The Thief has to sacrifice the Initative Trait to add extra initative in Trickery.
The Thief has to sacrifice his stun breakers and ability to run away. (Shadowstep.)
The Thief has to sacrifice half his damage. (30 Precision.) (Otherwise he could not get the buff in the first place, you need so many points in other things to make it work…)

To give 5 people, all of which have to be standing near you so its more like 2-3 in a real situation.

10 Seconds of Fury/Might/Swiftness, per venom used.

This means the Thief also has to sacrifice UTILITY slots. (which means no crazy stealthing, getting away, initative regeneration, damage buffs.)

You say its overpowered, but the Thief has to sacrifice pretty much “BEING A THIEF” to get the traits to make it last forever.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mck9ooMhwooMxwoG0xG0mRmsbos

20% Boon Duration (36 Seconds when you use all 3 Venoms.)
-20% Venom Duration. (So Recast is 36 Seconds.)
Trait that does it in the first place.

With all the things the thief HAS to sacrifice, HOW is this overpowered? Hes not going to be backstabbing people down, hes not even going to be doing that much damage.

I’m a venom sharer, I use Venomous Strength already (I don’t want to get used to Mug because I know the nerbat will hit it soon), aswell as Thrill of Crime. I’m not sacrificing utilities for this because in the first place, if you were going to be a venom sharer, you’re going to pick at least 2 of them no matter what, it isn’t like you’re completly destroying your build. In fact most cons you mentioned, I use them on my build (including the 15 initiative trait).

Just with 2 of them I’m giving all my teammates (with practice you can affect at least other 3 members of your party plus your summoned Thieves) 20 seconds of 33% movement increase and 20% critical chance increase (with 0 investment on criticals and precission, that’s mean a +10% damage increase, more with investment on critical damage).

And if you invest a bit more, you can basically maintain it. Maintainable swiftness with a tier 1 trait is too much by itself, not to mention the 20% critical chance.

I’m all in for Venoms upgrades, I’m a Venom sharer and it would benefit me. But we need to give realistic sugestions if we want them to hear us. This one hardly will cuts it into the game for the huge potential it has without needing to change your build too much.

Aditionally, this wouldn’t change the main problem: the Venoms effects. This just solves it the same way Steal is solved: You add aditional powerful effects that end up being more important than the skill itself.

What we need is a rework on half of the venoms we have and the cooldowns on all of them so all of them are worthy of your skillbar. Right now only Spider Venom (because of synergy with traits) and Devourer Venom are worth, and even them could get some help.

DanteZero.3569:

The problem with venom related traits aren’t just the traits themselves, venom skills are just sub-par.

This. The OP isn’t a bad idea, but strong venom traits are the problem with venom, not the solution. Venoms are balanced around builds that trait for them heavily to make them worthwhile, and as a result are terrible for anyone not running those builds. The base skills should be made more viable for all thieves, but that is tough to do without breaking venom thieves.

It not like you couldn’t change it into a tier 2 trait, and move the -20% Venom Duration to a Tier 1 Trait.

Venom Thief should be group utility.
10 seconds of Fury/Might/Swiftness to the Thief.
5 seconds of Fury/Might/Swiftness to the Thief’s Allies.

OOOR.. Thrill of the Crime could be buffed to be 30 seconds of Swiftness/Fury/Might.

OOOR.. Thrill of the Crime could be buffed to be 30 seconds of Swiftness/Fury/Might.We need more Fury/Swiftness some how…

Yeah, it doesn’t take masterful analytical skills to see that Venoms just have a terrible implementation. I like them conceptually, but their mechanics need a total overhaul.

i feel venoms should be like signets, they give a passive effect while in the utility bar and have an active compnent, aura would of course only work on the active side, like spider venom would have a passive 1 second poison buff but activating it maybe give it a longer duration + bleed or something?

Daecollo.9578:

OOOR.. Thrill of the Crime could be buffed to be 30 seconds of Swiftness/Fury/Might.

That’d definitely allow permanent uptime of Fury/Swiftness without much effort, for what its worth.

I agree thieves should get more access to boons, but they ought to come from weapon skills.