Guild Wars 2

Softspoken.2410:

Adrian Umbra.9105:

Softspoken.2410:

Double venom burst build. 30/0/10/0/30. Venomous Strength, Improvisation, Residual Venoms, Cloaked in Shadow, Thrill of the Crime, Bountiful Theft, Sleight of Hand.

Weapon sets could be D/D & SB, but I’m indecisive on that just now. Stats would be Berserker for the Brave. Bar would include HiS, Spider / Skale / Ice Drake, Basilisk

Probably best in WvW, but could possibly see use in PvP as a way to quickly kill a single target.

Strategy is:
Pre-load all venoms. Close distance to target (HS without hitting, infiltrator’s arrow maybe) use C&D -> BS, then an auto chain for conditions / venom uses and HS a bit (once or twice?) as desired.
Continue combat as normal. If your enemy manages to cleanse off the conditions you’ve applied, and especially if they start booning up, steal + C&D, then reapply your venoms and backstab them again. You’re now sitting at 17 stacks of might, fury, vigor, swiftness, 2 boons from your enemy (if applicable) and your enemy should be floundering under intense condition pressure (chill, poison, torment, some weakness, a little vulnerability) and a lot of damage, while also being periodically stunned for 5 of the last 10 seconds.

You could also run a variation of this for more group-oriented play using Venomous Aura, but that’s more related to Venomous Aura and group coordination than improvisation, I think.

Alrighty. First question: Do you have enough time to apply these venoms while stealthed by CnD? Second: How do we prevent this? Because with a lucky proc, (1/5 chance) a thief specced out with the exact build you described could easily pull this off. Your suggestion that it recharge utility skills only could limit abuse, but you’d still get a similar situation with 3 venoms instead of 5 or another similarly bad situation. It’s still a step though. Any other suggestions (build or solutions)?

Given that it takes exactly 1s to apply all venoms (Basilisk venom has a 1s casting time, all others are instant and can easily be used while basilisk is being prepared. The stealth from C&D is more for the surprise element of your enemy not necessarily knowing you’re going to blast them with a full regiment of venoms again.
The 1/5 is the prevention. Running this with an 80% chance of the strategy coming to a grinding halt is enough of a discourager to prevent this from being considered seriously. As well, my suggestion was such that one of the utilities refreshes at random, not one category on your utility bar. In this case, you’d get either spider, skale, or ice drake venom, but only one of them.

In which case, (IMO) the trait really just wouldn’t be worth it. I’d rather have some of the adept traits rather than rely on one of my utility skills randomly recharging. Maybe it’s just me being dumb or narrow minded, but it just seems weak to get a 45 second cooldown refresh of a random utility skill (maybe not random if you play it right, but still…).

Softspoken.2410:

Double venom burst build. 30/0/10/0/30. Venomous Strength, Improvisation, Residual Venoms, Cloaked in Shadow, Thrill of the Crime, Bountiful Theft, Sleight of Hand.

Weapon sets could be D/D & SB, but I’m indecisive on that just now. Stats would be Berserker for the Brave. Bar would include HiS, Spider / Skale / Ice Drake, Basilisk

Probably best in WvW, but could possibly see use in PvP as a way to quickly kill a single target.

Strategy is:
Pre-load all venoms. Close distance to target (HS without hitting, infiltrator’s arrow maybe) use C&D -> BS, then an auto chain for conditions / venom uses and HS a bit (once or twice?) as desired.
Continue combat as normal. If your enemy manages to cleanse off the conditions you’ve applied, and especially if they start booning up, steal + C&D, then reapply your venoms and backstab them again. You’re now sitting at 17 stacks of might, fury, vigor, swiftness, 2 boons from your enemy (if applicable) and your enemy should be floundering under intense condition pressure (chill, poison, torment, some weakness, a little vulnerability) and a lot of damage, while also being periodically stunned for 5 of the last 10 seconds.

You could also run a variation of this for more group-oriented play using Venomous Aura, but that’s more related to Venomous Aura and group coordination than improvisation, I think.

Alrighty. First question: Do you have enough time to apply these venoms while stealthed by CnD? Second: How do we prevent this? Because with a lucky proc, (1/5 chance) a thief specced out with the exact build you described could easily pull this off. Your suggestion that it recharge utility skills only could limit abuse, but you’d still get a similar situation with 3 venoms instead of 5 or another similarly bad situation. It’s still a step though. Any other suggestions (build or solutions)?

Softspoken.2410:

Adrian Umbra.9105:

Softspoken.2410:

Personally I’d like it if the trait just always recharged one utility on your bar. Which one of the three chosen would be at random, so if you have unused utilites, it might fizzle by just refreshing the one that’s already ready. But if you use all three of your utilities, steal with improvise is guaranteed to give something back.

If you restrict the trait to always picking a type that’s on your bar, the trait can easily be abused to get a full compliment of skills back immediately after using them, which just seems too strong.

But with how random and weak the skill is right now, it’s pretty much unusable. Thanks, but I’ll take “possibly abusable” (likely balanced by recharge of steal) double use of a highly restricted utility set over nothing.

If you turn something into ‘possibly abuseable’ then a week later it’s ‘thoroughly abused’ and a month after that it turns into ‘removed from game’.

Alright. Let’s fix this trait up to its maximum abusability status and have at it. This trait now recharges the maximum number of skills possible that have a kind in common. If you have 2 of two different kinds of skills (4 in total) on cooldown, the trait will recharge the maximum number of seconds worth of skills. Cooldown will be restricted to steal’s cooldown (if steal fizzles, no recharge), this can be an area of balance if need be.

Your challenge (and one for everyone else in this thread): make the most broken skill bar that you can out of this for PvE, WvW, or tPvP. Have at it. Most abusable case you can think of. I personally think that it wouldn’t be that bad, maybe used in niche builds (signets?), but go ahead and prove me wrong.

dakotahkid.2685:

This is actually a great trait to run in WvW because it increases the damage output of arrow carts and other siege equipment.

Ooh, didn’t think of that, actually. Good point to make.

Softspoken.2410:

Personally I’d like it if the trait just always recharged one utility on your bar. Which one of the three chosen would be at random, so if you have unused utilites, it might fizzle by just refreshing the one that’s already ready. But if you use all three of your utilities, steal with improvise is guaranteed to give something back.

If you restrict the trait to always picking a type that’s on your bar, the trait can easily be abused to get a full compliment of skills back immediately after using them, which just seems too strong.

But with how random and weak the skill is right now, it’s pretty much unusable. Thanks, but I’ll take “possibly abusable” (likely balanced by recharge of steal) double use of a highly restricted utility set over nothing. There’s a lot wrong with the skill right now even outside the unusably nasty RNG factor, but simply fixing the RNG up might be enough to bring the trait into viability.

So ensoriki, how do you pick? That seems to be the big question to me on this. I’d agree that the way Oraith went about this was haphazard, random, and probably does not showcase this trait to its full potential, but there does seem to be a lot of ambiguity in how the trait presents itself.

Ex: If I have a signet, a trap, a trick, and an elite venom, what should be recharged when I steal? The elite? The longest recharge? The first skill in the bar? Random? Whichever one is on CD? It kind of makes it difficult to deal with these things consistently if we have no clue.

Hey there, first post on these forums.

I’m a longtime GW player and linked my accounts together from the start of the pre-release, however, when I looked at my HoM rewards, nothing was there. No titles in the Hero menu, no weapon/pet skins at all. I’m well aware that support has their hands full, so I’m asking the forums: any solutions or ideas?