Guild Wars 2

got myself a level 21 thief, just want to know if someone can explain to me how poison works. i mean im duel wielding daggers at the moment and when i move my mouse over skill slot 1, four different types of attack open up. Backstap, lotus strike, duel strike and slash or something along those lines. now when fighting something i want to keep poisons up on the target sometimes i poison the target and sometimes i don’t i just seem to keep bashing the “1” key is there any way to increase the chance of it doing lotus strike (think thats the poison one) more often then others, also can you stack poisons? make them more powerful? im kinda struggling to get this guy to do anything impressive in combat haha

1) No. There is no way short of “bashing #1” to trigger the 3rd swing in the auto attack sequence.

2) If you really just want to hit a mob with a Poison dot, there are other ways to do this. One simple way would be to run Spider Venom in one of your Utility slots. This would proc a Poison duration on any target hit (or extend existing durations) for the next 5 swings. (Missed attacks do still deplete your Poison procs.)

ah so the attacks that show up when i move my mouse over 1 key are the attacks that i use in sequence, basically i use all of them it just rotates through them?

That is correct. The sequence is run through in order no matter what you do.

As Musei answered above, the #1 weapon key on any Melee weapon has x3 attacks. If your auto attack is uninterrupted, then they’ll swing in order (and then recycle). Should the swing pattern get interupted by your casting something in the middle of the chain (or anything else that breaks this rythm), then the chain resets. However the chain does allow a couple of second delay for you to move into melee with your next target to continue the auto attack chain.

As a general rule, the 1st and 2nd swings are set up moves. Then the 3rd swing will do something special. It might cause a debuff on the enemy, a buff / heal on yourself, or simply more damage. The specifics of each 3rd swing attack are tied to each different weapon and how they interact with your class. For more information, the GW2 Wiki should listed all x3 swing buttons under the Class Skills link on the page for each character class.

You should note that for the thief, they have an additional skill listed on the tooltip that’s their stealth skill, which only appears when they’re in stealth. So you should see as many as four skills when you mouse over, but only the first three are the auto-attack chain.

In general, when a skill is capable of “changing” due to some condition, the alternate forms of the skill will be listed above the current one when out of combat. You’ll notice this under Cluster Bomb and Infiltrator’s Strike, too.

awsome cheers thanks

Also, to answer your other question, I believe poison only stacks in duration, so if you keep reapplying it you won’t be doing more damage, but the mob will be taking damage for longer.

You can find that info and tons more on the official GW2 Wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Poison

btw the backstab only come up when you go to stealth
so remember whenever you are in stealth press 1 first then other abilitys. backstab is your mean nuke