Guild Wars 2

I´n my opinion venoms have way to long cd to be real choice!
For example if you choose “spider venom” which is not bad on paper because you can poisen your enemy for a long time.
The problem is: a decent enemy will use condition removal and the result is that my skill is on 45sec cd and i cannot use it again in this fight…which is stupid for a skill which just applies conditions

Easy fix could be reduce the cd down to 20sec but in the same turn reduce the duration of the condition effect!
so change for example from: 45sec cd — 6s poison per strike --—> to 20sec cd and 3s poison per strike.

You can use a venom about 20 seconds before fight, so it will have like 25 seconds left on cooldown. Same with traps – plant them before fight, so you can use them twice in a very short time for a “trap combo”.

What Dagins said. You could make it even shorter but using the DA trait that gives venoms 20% less cd, giving them a 36 sec cd. What they really need is to buff the range on Venamous Aura. Tired of having to go hugging distance from my allies just to share venoms.

Yes, Venoms indeed need to be made more appealing. The 45 seconds CD really limits them. Somewhere between 30 and 40 seconds would be reasonable considering most condition removal CDs are about 30 seconds.

Honestly if I were A-net. I would have made Steal F1 like it is, Shadow return (requiring steal to be used) as F2, and F3+ just be our venoms. Bam our class mechanic, and to make it balanced they would ALL share a global except shadow return

No, I disagree with this. Like said above, you can spec into venoms and get them at 36 second cooldowns which is significantly less time. You can apply the venoms preemptively to get a shorter cooldown and to have venoms ready. Venoms are very effective if you understand when and how to use them.