Guild Wars 2

Note: this is a Daredevil build tried to do a condition dmg build for using death blossong and impaling lotus, the result was decent but the survavility was hideous, tried using full dire gear and a double set of daggers and the result was quite impresive

so after some tweak i present the double d/d set Dancing death lotus build

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQRAsY4Yn8MB9OhdmCONB0PhFqiy7C+gBoLCCgGYO77+wH-T1xHABzeSAYT/giq/UnSQAeCAfs/QRK/CAcAwv/+7v/+bpAgZaE-w

pros:
-very high endurance and initiative regeneration thanks to sigil of energy, kleptomaniac, quick pockets, endless stamina, feline grace and endurance thief
- very high aoe bleed and torment application via death blossom, impaling lotus and uncatchable
-massive survavility thanks to dire stats and very fast passive healing with signet of malice, driven fortitude, assassin reward
-decent swift uptime with expeditious dodger

cons

-heavy CC
-heavy conditions
- condi inmmune enemies (90% of your dmg comes from torment and bleed)
- lack of range weapon (because death bloosom is needed to do 50% of the dmg, so double dagger is mandatory, swapping only to trigger sigil of energy)

the gameplay is extremely easy and fun: the main damage source comes from “dancing”, in other words massive aoe apply of torment and bleeding trough impaling lotus, death blossom and uncatchable, applying very high stacks of both (specially bleeding) on multiple enemies, it shines specially on long battles where the stacks of bleeds can easily go above the 30 stacks (36 was my biggest count agaisnt the mordrem rider at the end of the story mission)

starting a battle by simple burning your endurance and innitiative with both skills, stealing and swaping weapons on CD will make sure you will always have initiative or endurance to “dance”

since you are dodgeing 90% of the time is very hard to get hit unless CCed and even if a few hits do land on you your high armor/hp and the very fast healing ticks from signet of malice/assassin reward while “dancing” will quickly fill your health back up

i havent tried this build in wvw, but it might have some place in zerg battles (i killed all the mordrem waves in the story mission just by “dancing” and recived very little to no dmg at all while killing all the mobs extremely fast) or agaisnt non heavy cc power builds

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAV4Yn8MB9OhFmCePB0PhlWCzrM0GiCzlwV4LULAcAWAA-TFyHABCq+zY7PA9BBwgnAQZ6GKS5HAXAgnUCGA4AY+5T+yHM/8zP/8z38zP/8zPfpAgZaE-w

This is my version of the build, same gear I’ve been using in live, but updated for HoT and the recent poison buff. I originally ran it (in the live game, before HoT) and had many of the same issues. Here is my version of the build after playing it for years, having addressed many of the issues you have.

Important differences:

Mad King Runes – These are a must have for any build using Signet of Malice. The bird summons proc SoM, letting you turn any elite in to a solid burst heal. You can activate these on CD if you need to get in to solo fights where Daggerstorm is less good, but they extend the stream of healing you get from DS.

Poison – With the recent buff to potent poison, deadly arts with a blight sigil and dagger training is significant damage, it allows you much better auto damage, the ability to proc weakness while deathblossoming, and in general helps to up your damage output even though the mad king runes don’t support it much. The build originally used a flame sigil to proc aoe heals from signet of malice, but I quickly swapped it to blight when SW came out.

Defenses – This prioritizes endurance differently, losing endurance for more resilience against conditions in the form of proc sigils (which have a high activation rate due to the multi-hit nature of the build) and having steal do double duty as an end source and interrupt. Bandit’s defense is taken for again more defense, as the block/cc nature and low CD makes it a very good “filler” skill.

Intelligent sustain – I never liked using swap sigils as a resource pool, as it removes my option to go ranged to refill HP. In Signet of Malice builds you sometimes find yourself in a position where your burst heal (elite) is down and you need HP. Shortbow is your go-to for this as you can proc heal up while still spreading bleeds by bursting SB2 at range, and the init you gain while doing so given you the emergency option if you can’t keep range after a pit of either GTFO with SB5, dropping Shadow refuge and stealthing out, or dropping shadow refuge and quick spamming dancing dagger through it for the lifesteal combo on top of a bunch of SOM procs for a big burst.

Middle of the Road you’ll notice I only take enough prec to get about a 10% crit. This is because my only real need for crit is a sigil with an 8s ICD. Combined with the high hit volume of the build and lots of testing, I determined that 10% was just the right amount to keep the sigil running just about on colldown. Carrion was selected because the vit that it provides gives me a nice buffer against conditions, and the power it provides makes the overall damage hit a nicer spot, and takes most of the glaring weaknesses (like condition immunities and heavy cleanse) out of the equation. The toughness, again, was done to increase the total EHP without seriously gimping the build. Most of my build decisions were made as a result of playing all the content in the game, and building something that could adapt to whatever situation I threw at it, and tested/tweaked each patch. As a result I lost some of the damage, but gained a lot more sustain and utility than I lost in damage.

Variants The only important variations I ever need to do are swapping bandit’s defense out for caltrops when I don’t need the extra CC (packs of trash places like graveling zergs, etc.) and swapping daggerstorm for BV when I need to fight solo players or bosses (for the heals and because daggerstorm sucks against single targets)

PopeUrban.2578:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAV4Yn8MB9OhFmCePB0PhlWCzrM0GiCzlwV4LULAcAWAA-TFyHABCq+zY7PA9BBwgnAQZ6GKS5HAXAgnUCGA4AY+5T+yHM/8zP/8z38zP/8zPfpAgZaE-w

This is my version of the build, same gear I’ve been using in live, but updated for HoT and the recent poison buff. I originally ran it (in the live game, before HoT) and had many of the same issues. Here is my version of the build after playing it for years, having addressed many of the issues you have.

Important differences:

Mad King Runes – These are a must have for any build using Signet of Malice. The bird summons proc SoM, letting you turn any elite in to a solid burst heal. You can activate these on CD if you need to get in to solo fights where Daggerstorm is less good, but they extend the stream of healing you get from DS.

Poison – With the recent buff to potent poison, deadly arts with a blight sigil and dagger training is significant damage, it allows you much better auto damage, the ability to proc weakness while deathblossoming, and in general helps to up your damage output even though the mad king runes don’t support it much. The build originally used a flame sigil to proc aoe heals from signet of malice, but I quickly swapped it to blight when SW came out.

Defenses – This prioritizes endurance differently, losing endurance for more resilience against conditions in the form of proc sigils (which have a high activation rate due to the multi-hit nature of the build) and having steal do double duty as an end source and interrupt. Bandit’s defense is taken for again more defense, as the block/cc nature and low CD makes it a very good “filler” skill.

Intelligent sustain – I never liked using swap sigils as a resource pool, as it removes my option to go ranged to refill HP. In Signet of Malice builds you sometimes find yourself in a position where your burst heal (elite) is down and you need HP. Shortbow is your go-to for this as you can proc heal up while still spreading bleeds by bursting SB2 at range, and the init you gain while doing so given you the emergency option if you can’t keep range after a pit of either GTFO with SB5, dropping Shadow refuge and stealthing out, or dropping shadow refuge and quick spamming dancing dagger through it for the lifesteal combo on top of a bunch of SOM procs for a big burst.

Middle of the Road you’ll notice I only take enough prec to get about a 10% crit. This is because my only real need for crit is a sigil with an 8s ICD. Combined with the high hit volume of the build and lots of testing, I determined that 10% was just the right amount to keep the sigil running just about on colldown. Carrion was selected because the vit that it provides gives me a nice buffer against conditions, and the power it provides makes the overall damage hit a nicer spot, and takes most of the glaring weaknesses (like condition immunities and heavy cleanse) out of the equation. The toughness, again, was done to increase the total EHP without seriously gimping the build. Most of my build decisions were made as a result of playing all the content in the game, and building something that could adapt to whatever situation I threw at it, and tested/tweaked each patch. As a result I lost some of the damage, but gained a lot more sustain and utility than I lost in damage.

Variants The only important variations I ever need to do are swapping bandit’s defense out for caltrops when I don’t need the extra CC (packs of trash places like graveling zergs, etc.) and swapping daggerstorm for BV when I need to fight solo players or bosses (for the heals and because daggerstorm sucks against single targets)

Your build almost identical to mine albeit I plugged in Shamans gear over carrion. This brings my heal on hit procs on SOM to 180 per meaning of course I less reliant on getting a daggerstrom heal to keep health up. (in WvW medics bonus usually gets 192 per proc)

You can really load the poison on if you set up choking gas over the target than switch weapons and get your whirls. If you do this with the dodge it works as well.

Smoke field also works good as a utility. You set up your field on top of an enemy and whirl over. Of course this raises a question. If a target blinded can you still proc an evade ?

I know condition duration food pretty well a staple in condition builds but with poison at 33 percent if you use a sigil of venom it gets into a decent range. Bleeds already have good duration with d/d as a set. This opens the door to using other foods. The food that adds might on dodge is something I might try or the food that adds health per tick.

I am finding less a need for bountiful theft given vigor is rather weak. I have tried out pressure strike using distracting daggers and basi loaded up as the elite. It a little hard to pull off but you can load torment in this way. It would be really nice if crippling dagger was an interrupt.

I prefer spider venom over the skale as it has more strikes and is in fact enhanced by the poison mastery. You can easily get ticks from poison higher than your bleeds.

tried testing the build in spvp, unfortunally since there arent dire stats in spvp i had to try with carrion stats

even with the lack of toughness i ended up quite impressed with the results, i used your suggestion pope and try using runes of mad king but for some reason i found the crows not spawing many ticks of SoM and know the reason of your selection of deadly arts and poison over bleed but i decided to stick with acrobatic since i wanted to retain the vigor enhancement and extra healing since the survavility and damage of the build comes mostly from the combination of dire and your ability to keep perma evasion and SoM ticks

said that, tried the build in sPvP but using carrion stats because of the lack of dire and honestly i was quite surprised, i had very nice results on 1v1 combat, in fact the only one i lost was because i failed to notice the cannon attack in skyhammer wich took most of my hp in a single hit. its gameplay is very similar to d/d elementalist because you are dancing around your enemy while doing dmg at the same time, the stacking is huge, even agaisnt cleanse you still reapply the conditions way faster than they can cleanse it, managed to beat 1v1 a celestial ele and pu condi mesmer and something i actually didnt foreseen, the condi removal is actually very decent thanks to escapist absolution

the main counters i could see were heavy range spikes with cc, and heavy aoe dmg, getting caught in a heavy spike with inmobilize is specially dangerous.

outside pvp i tried to use it vs several HoT enemies, found a pretty nice spot that spawns several veteran spiders and a single elite one and manage without problems to condi down the whole of them

here is a small SS of the condi dmg on the spider and thats without food buff

The biggest thing with the mad king birds is that they scale with number of targets, similar to Daggerstorm. The heal is better the more targets you have, and it you’ve got to keep an eye out for white mobs that the birds may oneshot, thus wasting your heal potential.

I rather tenjoy the more hybrid approach, and the stats on the mad king runes also sort of play in to that so they’re generally a better pick the way I have it set up than the way you have it set up

The spike issue you have is why I went buck wild with two stunbreaks when I traded acro for DD, hard to Catch was a godsend in the pre-HoT version of the build, and I looked at it and went “well, I gave up a 30s ICD stunbreak, can I sacrifice a utility for this 15s active stunbreak?”

I did, and I loved it, not to mention I just like the animation and revenge nature of bandit’s defense. It’s hilarious to actually down someone with the kick in a close fight after they think they got that last stun they needed to finish you off.

As for an sPvP version, I’m still playing with it. I don’t really like conquest on thief any more, but I love stronghold, so I’ll probably be setting up the sPvP version specifically for playing stronghold.