Guild Wars 2

Yesterday was the first day in at least 6-8 months that I didn’t log in. I quit day of feature patch after finding out how neutered by power necro was and tried again the next day in sPvP and was welcomed by condi cheese and nothing else, then promptly logged back out. I didn’t log in at all yesterday and felt no desire to. I’ve been running with the same 5-6 people in WvW for the past 6 or 7 months and it sucks to have to leave them but there is really no point in playing anymore if you don’t enjoy spamming conditions.

pretty sure guardian has longest cooldowns. our longest c/d that isn’t an elite is signet of undeath and nobody even uses that.

grifflyman.8102:

McWolfy.5924:

CrazyDuck.4610:

Azreell.1568:

There is little feeling of victory or progression in Wvw.

That is a big reason in addition to what the OP said that people are loosing interest.

I can spend 1hr In PvE content and get 10x’s the rewards of spending 1 day in wvw.

Blob fighting is another issue. The current system in place promotes zerg play to much as well.

There are my personal issues but as I said I have been much less active in the forums and games lately.

Because all you have to do is spam #1 with 150 people and destroy smaller coordinated groups because of the AOE caps/skill lag. There is no victory feeling because it takes 0 skill to win a fight in WvW. God I miss Dark Age of Camelot, you think with all the new technology coming out MMOs would be getting better not worse. Instead of adding new maps for WvW maybe fix the current maps we already have cough skill lag cough zerging cough

No skill? Once try with an organized 20 men team against the 100 zergball red sea. You will win within 20 seconds if you all have skills.

Highly unlikely, unless you’re playing vs a very disorganized zerg with a ton of up leveled people, but the reality is that these huge zergs are usually very organized.

They run proper builds and know when to use correct skills. It’s a numbers game, whoever has more numbers wins.

CrazyDuck shares a delusion common amongst so-called hardcore/zerg-busting guilds. In reality, the numbers are almost always equal and if the enemy really does have 3x or more your numbers, no amount of buildcraft circlejerking will win you that fight.

Shufflepants.9785:

Are there really people out there who believe that berzerker gear is no longer the best for pure DPS? All these people asking for a refund on their gear, if they got one, what would they replace it with given a total refund?

Dire/rabid.

Peoples’ complaints about this ferocity thing have nothing to do with zerk not being the best for DPS. It is, that, comparable to the defensive abilities to players using condi builds in wvw (a la dire and rabid gear) the damage is abysmal and completely unbalanced. It is not even enough to compete anymore. The effectiveness of zerker gear in PvE is totally irrelevant.

You know what? This is a pretty reasonable request but knowing ANet it will either a) never happen or b) happen weeks/months down the line when it is too late. Stop playing and come back in a few months and maybe things will have changed.

50% is bad. Interrupts aren’t really all that plentiful. Should be 100% with reduced stacks.

Anyway, it seems funny to me how messed up PvP and PvE are in terms of balance. It is like having to maintain old code and jerry-rigging everything and hoping it doesn’t fall over when the wind blows.

You will get nothing but hate from apologists on these forums for posting a thread like this. If you do not enjoy the game, don’t play it. I, too, quit after the feature pack but like to read the forums to see how other people are coping with it.

The condition cheese will eventually wipe out any PvP or WvW population and it will seem almost surreal the number of people running condition builds.

Necromancer’s Parasitic Contagion is just as pitiful.

Besides your points it should also be apparent that conditions are ruling small man/solo roaming. Everyone is running tanky condi cheese builds and it is disgusting. There is really no point in even playing anymore. Unlucky for us WvW ANet has managed to sate the PvE crowd with wardrobe and account bound dyes.

There were a bunch of possible builds for power based classes but now its nothing but runes of strength and people abusing sigil of energy and battle.

The damage of this nerf is done IMO and the condipocalypse will become more apparent in the coming weeks when the apologists wake up.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

@ Those saying condition builds require no skill.. Lol.
What, kiting doesn’t take effort but standing eye to eye and mashing away at people does? It’s two sides of the same coin… Neither are particularly skillful, end of story. It’s a flaw with the games design in that player versus player combat is very hazy when it comes to defining what’s skilled and what isn’t.
Either way I stand by my previous statement. Crit damage nerf = well deserved. You probably rolled a zerk in the first place because conditions weren’t as good, now you’re going to roll a condition build because zerk isn’t as good… Adapt and stop crying nerf or we’ll all eventually be wearing foam helmets and throwing bubblewrap at each other.

some ppl prefer in your face gameplay (zerk/dps/whatever) and some prefer attrition. i don’t think that people would choose zerk over condition because conditions aren’t as good. anyway in GW2 there is no skill – it is all people cheesing it up with meta builds and abusing class mechanics (stealth, healing signet, etc) for an advantage. ANet doesn’t seem to care. Nerfing critical damage will make conditions increasingly popular. It is only a matter of time before the majority is on board with nerfing conditions.

Flytrap.8075:

Spicyhash.7605:

Condi cheese is in full effect and it is hilarious. Hambow warriors and nade spamming engineers everywhere in PvP. Game has changed for the worse.

Nothing in this game takes any real “skill” to use. It consists solely of players using meta builds that abuse class mechanics and are totally ridiculous. It doesn’t take any skill to rely on RNG procs and spamming unclearable conditions. Ferocity change should never have happened, instead, they should have nerfed condition damage.

For some reason, the majority of the player-base is of the opinion that conditions are either fine or need to be buffed even more.

I understand that they’re weak in PvE, but they’ve been wreaking havoc in WvW and sPvP for a while and now it’s even worse.

The only people who think they are fine are people who are abusing the current state of things. The ferocity change is even bad for condi players in PvE because the condition cap still exists and less damage means slower kills. Completely lost all desire to play this game, ANet totally dropped the ball with this “feature” pack

Wonderly.1324:

You can purchase upgrade extractors from the gem store.

Funny because you would have to buy the gems with real money for this to even be worth it, unless you’re extracting a Sigil of Generosity. No other sigils are worth more than the ~30g in gems you would have to buy to extract it.

I’m sure it will be patched out and they’ll ban anyone who “abused” this.

If both servers are as bad as you claim then BG should be stomping. 2v1 happens in all matchups and it is usually because one of the two servers engaging in the 2v1 shouldn’t be in that tier.

There really is no point in playing a power build after this patch. Complete waste of time. The ferocity change is not even about how thieves get nerfed it’s that all power classes did. I played a pretty uncommon power necro and now there is no point in playing that anymore. Lost all desire to play this game.

Condi cheese is in full effect and it is hilarious. Hambow warriors and nade spamming engineers everywhere in PvP. Game has changed for the worse.

Nothing in this game takes any real “skill” to use. It consists solely of players using meta builds that abuse class mechanics and are totally ridiculous. It doesn’t take any skill to rely on RNG procs and spamming unclearable conditions. Ferocity change should never have happened, instead, they should have nerfed condition damage.

It seems almost surreal how terrible this game has become since the feature patch. I think they relied on the new wardrobe and dye feature to quell the impending kitty storm that the new condition meta will bring.

Is that the spawned weapon? Does ANet even have the letters Q and A in their alphabet?

Don’t get mad (not a troll), get even. Play a tanky condition build and show Arena Net the horror they hath spawned.

Srolo.5208:

Running a powermancer in WvW so I’m keeping my melandru runes. Sigils however I have Bloodlust + Fire on my Staff and Fire + Air on my Dagger/WH. Combining Fire/Air is allowing me to regain some of the heavy damage I lost with this Ferocity change but it doesn’t cover it completely.

30/10/x/x/30 with Zerk weapons, Knight armor, Cav trinkets. Most of my damage came from crit damage so I’m going to have to play around and see if I’m going to change anything. Losing 1k-2k+ damage per lifeblast is hurting…

Wouldn’t bother trying to fix it. I was full zerk with your traits, ascended zerk trinkets and weapons with exotic armor and scholar runes – the highest possible dps short of ascended armor, and my damage has been nerfed into the ground. It is not even worth playing necro anymore at this point. The new parasitic contagion is a complete joke and I would say it is even an insult to a grandmaster trait. If you have a bleed that is ticking for 500 that is only a 25 heal. ANet and their pitifully low % bonuses have always enraged me. When you have a health pool of 20k and are getting wrecked by condition and direct damage the heal is just laughable.

Ya, I have quit entirely. Played a power necro and it isn’t viable anymore. Can’t go back to dhuumfire because that’s nerfed and doesn’t work underwater. Have 7/8 classes at 80 and there’s just no point to playing unless you’re spamming conditions. Completely gutted.

Anything condition-based.

I imagine condi ele with that new earth grandmaster will be quite a joke.

The reason why is far too exhaustive, but it has to do with no rewards being difficult to obtain and that has to do with no content being difficult and that has to do with the DPS-only limitation that this game has. Rewards in GW2 will always be bad because content is trivially easy. Even if the content is not “easy” (i.e. tequatl requires a large amount of people and some organization), the rewards will be bad because of the sheer number of people participating in the event.

If the chance at an expensive/rare drop was like 1/5 when doing a world boss like teq you soon have a bunch of people getting expensive things which 1) floods the market and reduces the price and 2) affects ANets bottom line of gem sales. The game is fundamentally flawed in that it will never be rewarding as long as no trinity exists. If a trinity exists, content is not trivialized and requires coordination and actual build diversity, not pure DPS spam and berating players who would dare use a support/healing build.

If we are talking about the WvW side of things there simply is no player skill. In this game, people theorycraft and all use min/max builds or cheesy builds that abuse class mechanics and have few to no counters. It takes no skill to abuse stealth and spam backstab, takes no skill to run Prismatic Understanding and spam confusion, takes no skill to play a warrior in general, and so on.

Meteor shower should have always had a red circle. The whole point of telegraphing skills is so you can avoid the damage since there are no real healer classes in this game.

I do agree though, the ferocity change removed my desire to play. You may as well just buy a full dire set and use the new earth grandmaster trait to be invincible to physical damage classes. What is funny is that if you thought conditions were bad before you’re gonna cry every time you go in WvW now.

used to enjoy playing my uncommon power necro but after this update i plan on going back to my perplex spamming engi

this nerf has really just taken away my desire to play the game. i started out as a thief hwen the game first came out and bailed to a necro a few months ago. i played condi at first and then found power to be incredibly rewarding. now, it’s not even worth it. i lost over 40% crit damage. to make matters worse i can’t fall back on conditions because of the dhuumfire nerf yet engis are allowed to keep incendiary power which is the same thing and in a lower tier. makes no sense. so, yeah. re-roll a condition class that isn’t a necro or quit. i think i know my choice.

It makes absolutely no sense why a thief can steal in, say, SR for 12-16 seconds and run around spamming choking gas on the short bow and keep you poisoned for the entire duration of their stealth without revealing themselves. Why does this even exist? You can only dodge it twice and the amount of times it can be used while having increased initiative regen in stealth and infiltrators signet is just dumb. No amount of condition clear can keep the point off of you and the duration compounds meaning you have 30+ seconds of poison. I know that it is getting nerfed from 5 to 3 seconds in the feature patch, but it needs to reveal the thief. It’s total bs that they can run around while stealthed and land attacks.

Instead of having to spend thousands of gold to use incinerators on all your characters, you’re getting it for free. Nothing more really needs to be said. Beyond dyes, you don’t deserve compensation and I hope you don’t get it.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

the sober ninja.6539:

When theives steal they get skills based on the profession that they’re stealing from. If a thief steals to an NPC (like a vet ogre), they have a chance to get other skills. One of these skills is Bone Crack. It STUNS (not daze like thieves from guards) for 3 seconds, which is a long time. I play thief and I think this is way too OP for an environment where PvP happens.

To put it into perspective, this stun has twice as long a duration (and a 1/4 sec cast) as Basilisk Venom, which is an elite skill.

TBH I’m suprised it has lasted this long. I think the best solution would be to make it so you can only steal certain skills in WvW (only the ones we get from players), even from ogres and other PvE.

Thoughts?

You could always bring along a stun breaker to deal with it.

A single-use, 3-second stun attack is nowhere near as powerful as the many spammable and stackable immobilizes/conditions or chainable hard cc you’ll run into frequently in WvW.

I love when people say ‘bring a stun breaker’ or ‘get some stability’. Yeah man, cause CC is few and far between and surely one stun breaker/a few seconds of stability will put an end to the never-ending CC spam that is GW2.. Not.

The only issue with conditions is the rate at which they can be applied. All the cleansing in the world isn’t going to save you from some cheesy necro using signet of spite.

I don’t think healing signet should be reduced by 33%. Seems too much. 8% might be fine, but they should also make it so that healing signet stops working when you’re blocking, invulnerable, or dodging.

Also, how about making it so you can only use one stance at a time? Warriors are already so over the top and then added with 8s (utility + trait) of full damage invulnerability and 8s of fully condition immunity is just so ridiculous. Then you also get 8s of stability with balanced stance and then another 8s if traited for it. It’s just too much. All stances should overwrite each other so you have to strategically use them and not just spam them with GS5 (which should also require a target) and have a 100% chance of escaping.

Warriors cannot have the best everything, it’s just lame. The best CC, damage, armor, health, and mobility/survivability/sustain/whatever in the game.

The biggest problem with Evasive Shot or whatever it’s called (shortbow 3) is that it can be used when the thief is immobilized. Um, what? This should not be possible at all.

what’s really sad is that nothing in this game is sacred. there are no rare weapons that nobody can get, and it will continue to be that way. so what if your server doesn’t get a mistforged weapon? why even have them cost anything at all if everyone gets one so they can feel good about themselves. this is everything that’s wrong with gw2.

Falcon.8713:

If you want to go condimancer, the best thing to get is:
Armor+Weapons : Rabid Stats
Runes: Superior Rune of Undead
Weapons: Scepter+Dagger / Staff
Utilities: Consume Conditions – Blood is power – Signet of spite/Corrupt boon – Epidemic/Signet of the locust (running)
Build: 30/30/10/0/0
Spite: III-IV-XI/XII
Curses: II-IX-VII
DM: VI
Tactic: Bleed kitten bleeeeed ! (Eminem: ‘Kim’)

I hope you understand what I mean and what uses things got, if not just ask !

man once they get rid of dhuumfire it will be interesting to see how condi necros change, if at all. since you already have decent crit chance from 30 in curses you can transfer that 30 in spite into vitality and then put the 10 from DM into spite. that + full dire cheese/undead runes and all that woudl be so over the top.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

DejaVu.9825:

OK, then reduce the duration of stability and the duration of CC, eg. A maximum of 2 seconds?

No. You don’t go and nerf something because a select few has TOO much access to it. Rather than nerfing the Boons you should be nerfing the access some classes has to it.

i just think its crazy how warrior, class with most mobility, damage, cc, regen, sustain, blah blah blah, has the second highest amount of stability. like, what is even the counter to warriors? it’s so cheesy. they are like thieves in that they can run away and reset the fight and troll you forever. the balance/zerk stance need to have their durations cut in half and then put a 50% duration increase trait in some crappy trait line that hammer cheese warriors don’t use.

armor: full zerker with scholars

weapons: dagger (precision sigil)/warhorn(accuracy sigil) – these are your stacking weapons
weapons2: dagger (sigil of fire)/focus (accuracy sigil or whatever else it doesn’t matter) – main dps set

traits:
30 in spite: life blast grants might, chill of death, and close to death
10 in curses: 33% chance to gain life force on crit or alternatively groundtargeted wells for zergs
30 in soul reaping: movement speed increased in DS, life blast causes vulnerability, and death perception

trinkets: full zerker

food: 6/4 precision nourishment and the other food can be whatever. i usually use dragon breath buns, bowl of seaweed salad, truffle steak frittes or whatever 100 pow/70 prec food is, or, if i’m feeling rich, curry butternut squash soup or whatever the 100 power 10% crit dmg is.

utilities: well of suffering, signet of locust, signet of spite. i frequently switch out well of suffering for whatever the situation requires. i.e. vs guardians/warriors ill use corrupt boon. well of suffering is incredible against d/d thieves. once you see them stealth or you get cloak and daggered you drop well of suffering and auto attack to burst them down. stealth usually means a backstab is coming so you can be sure they’ll be up close to you.

Your main rotation will be something like this:

Warhorn 5, swap to d/f, immobilize with dagger3, focus4, switch to death shroud, fear (to interrupt/prevent healing), then spam life blasts. if you haven’t killed them by now (tanky ele, warrior, guardian) or no Lf, exit out of DS and start your rotation over.

you will probably never use dagger 2 because the siphon is lame sauce healing and channeled skills are generally lame. they are nice for going after classes that stealth because it doesn’t break the channel. additionally, warhorn 4 is mostly useless 1 v1 because the aftercast or whatever will only allow you to get off like one attack before the daze wears off. in groups its awesome because, well, it’s an aoe daze.

here it is in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhVfupyJ7U

i always hit myself at the fact that i accidentally used signet of spite when going after the first person, but it worked out in the end anyway.

sidenotes: build is obviously glassy. DS can provide only so much sustain before the damage is too much. you will absolutely wreck if gone unchecked and have team mates that aren’t in stealth 90% of the time a.k.a avoid running with PU mesmers or perma stealth thieves, cuz you gon get focused.

Stability isn’t OP. Chain CCing/hammer trains are OP. Players should get temporary 1s Defiant on being hit with CC. This seems totally reasonable. If it weren’t for the fact that there are literally dozens of skills/utilities that are crowd control abilities and they can all be used on the same person at once, I would say that it is fine.

What’s worse is that some classes don’t even have access to reliable stability. Necros have a terrible trait that gives 3 seconds of it when you enter death shroud on a 9s cooldown. Thief only has stability in dagger storm and you can’t really do anything when you’re using that.

Guard, warrior, mesmer, ele, etc, all have access to long duration stability. It is not the frequency in which you gain stability, but the duration. To have a 20s stability on rampage as one means 20 seconds of immunity to control effects which is insane. Then there is warrior balanced stance which can be activated via a trait for 8 seconds on CC and then as a utility for another 8 seconds. assuming no boon duration. again, insane.

So, yes, stability is overpowered in the sense that some classes should not have access to 15+ seconds of stability while others are left with barely anything.

any wvw function that can be controlled by players will be exploited by players. i.e. structure upgrades, siege trolls that kill golems and build tons of useless siege, this, etc..

No thanks.

PU mesmers are already strong enough and even more condition application on clone death (debilitating dissipation) would just be over the top.

deceptive evasion is in the master tier in the name of balance. It’s there on purpose so that in order to get an incredible strong trait you need to sacrifice other aspects of your build. that is to say you can’t have prismatic understand AND illusionary persona while still having deceptive evasion. must choose one or the other. it’s fine as is.

wouldn’t use second build and u should never use flesh golem.. its just bad.

here is the build i use:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vQAQRBIhhu1IHNt0WZjjN83mQgeAAAgzEVAZoeYOrzHC-z0yAY/IjtCIFBgsARECdyrIasF3ioxqYwUlwK3ho6NysogwI-w

while yes as a power necro most of ur damage comes from death shroud, u won’t always have it up, so your other attack should be able to crit frequently. with 25 stacks of perception you’re sitting at 66% crit chance and 105% crit dmg with 3500 atk which is still really good. i think the distribution of stats is good enough. there’s no point in having 3800 atk if all your skills aren’t critting.

I’m a GC necro that uses dagger/wh + dagger/focus.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m07asKI8VE

Take Mark of Blood from staff.

3 stacks, 8s duration.

With 90% (30% spite, 40% food, 20% hemo) bleeding, mark of blood lasts for 15.25 seconds

with 1780 condition damage, over 15.25 seconds, that’s 5918 dmg.

change staff to givers..

condition damage drops to 1591, and now mark of blood lasts for 16 seconds and does 5858 damage. 60 less damage. not only are you doing less damage, but conditions are cleansed pretty often now. i think it’s always better to have high condition damage than it is to have higher duration.

I have come to use Speed of Shadows after countless times of being outrun by classes that have 25% signet or are using 25% runes. It is really a must have in a power build. Condition? Not so much.

Healing power is great and all (I love min/maxing builds), but unless you’re using Magi’s gear to get it, the low health won’t do anyone any good :/

This build is not fun to play at all. I geared my thief in the same gear as you, played it for a few days, and ended up salvaging everything. It is total cheese and wrecks people who don’t see it coming.

The worst part about this build is that it isn’t very good at all. You get like bleeding, torment, confusion, and that’s it. Only three conditions to clear means you aren’t doing jack to someone who has any condi removal.

Ya.

I have like two videos or so..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhVfupyJ7U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m07asKI8VE

I play this build all the time. It is pretty squishy (full zerk everything, scholars, 30/10/0/30). There is a decent amount of sustainability to be had in deathshroud with curses 5 or 6, whichever gives the 33% chance for 1% life force. My utilities are consume condi, plague form (to escape) cuz golem is bad, locust signet, signet of spite (for added power) and a third utility which is usually well of suffering but i rotate out frequently between plague signet (against condi), spectral grasp (for pulling off of walls), corrupt boon (guardian), etc..

I can also flip camps with this build in ~10 seconds solo, or before swords pop, whichever comes first. It’s great in small groups but falls apart in zerg fights unless you stay strictly back line. I also carry a staff for aoe in zerg fights.

My guardian uses clerics and is completely useless outside of clearing condis and healing, which doesn’t contribute to winning the fight at all. The short cooldown stability on hallowed ground and stand your ground is nice, but that’s really it. With clerics, you lose all precision and crit damage, which you have to make up for with zerker trinkets, which lessens your healing power even more (since the biggest stat boosts from come trinkets), which means you’re even more worthless. Would not recommend. We need to get rid of skills scaling with healing power by 5%, it is ridiculous. Skills that are 1.0 coefficient with healing are fine, but could maybe be boosted because they are usually on long cooldowns (ele dagger 5 being one) .

Timers were added because all content in GW2 is trivially easy and it is trivially easy because there is no trinity. Everybody runs full zerk in PvE and since so many people (often 50+) are doing one event, hardly anyone is at risk of actually dying.

Paul Kay.4891:

Carpboy.7145:

Dont use this in PVE at all

Why though? Wouldn’t Torment-based damage omit the issues with condition damage builds?

At a (very high) 2100 condition damage (assumes 25 corruption stacks, 0 might):

1 stack – Standing still: 110.625 – Moving: 221.25
2 stacks – Standing still: 221.25 – Moving: 442.5
3 stacks – Standing still: 331.875 – Moving: 663.75
4 stacks – Standing still: 442.5 – Moving: 885
5 stacks – Standing still: 553.125 – Moving: 1106.25
6 stacks – Standing still: 663.75 – Moving: 1327.5
7 stacks – Standing still: 774.375 – Moving: 1548.75
8 stacks – Standing still: 885 – Moving: 1770
9 stacks – Standing still: 995.625 – Moving: 1991.25
10 stacks – Standing still: 1106.25 – Moving: 2212.5
11 stacks – Standing still: 1216.875 – Moving: 2433.75
12 stacks – Standing still: 1327.5 – Moving: 2655
13 stacks – Standing still: 1438.125 – Moving: 2876.25
14 stacks – Standing still: 1548.75 – Moving: 3097.5
15 stacks – Standing still: 1659.375 – Moving: 3318.75
16 stacks – Standing still: 1770 – Moving: 3540
17 stacks – Standing still: 1880.625 – Moving: 3761.25
18 stacks – Standing still: 1991.25 – Moving: 3982.5
19 stacks – Standing still: 2101.875 – Moving: 4203.75
20 stacks – Standing still: 2212.5 – Moving: 4425
21 stacks – Standing still: 2323.125 – Moving: 4646.25
22 stacks – Standing still: 2433.75 – Moving: 4867.5
23 stacks – Standing still: 2544.375 – Moving: 5088.75
24 stacks – Standing still: 2655 – Moving: 5310
25 stacks – Standing still: 2765.625 – Moving: 5531.25

How many NPCs do you know that actually move around a lot in big zergy events? The above table is assuming 1 second. I don’t know how durations factor in, but let’s assume the average. Rune = 10 seconds, venom = 5 seconds, shadow strike = 5 seconds. Avg = 6.66 seconds. With toxic tuning crystal (10%), koi cakes (40%) and runes (+45%), that comes to 13 seconds. If you have 30 in deadly arts, that’s a total of 15 seconds. So, assuming that (rune 2, 3x shadow strikes, 3x skale venom) your total of 8 stacks ticks for 15 whole seconds (it won’t) and the enemy is moving, that’s 26.5k damage over a 15 second period. I think it’s definitely possible to do more than 26.5k damage with the usual backstab build or even with pistol whip. You can get off 3 pistol whips in like 6 seconds or less and that is already over 26k damage.

Also, you aren’t rendered totally useless when your initiative is recharging because you can still auto-attack for higher sustained DPS than a few pistol shots and minimal bleed stacks.

For reference, 8 stacks of (relatively) easily attainable confusion ticks for 1780 on skill use with 2100 condition damage.

I dunno, it’s up to you. Torment runes aren’t really all that cheap so I guess it’s really your choice if you want to test it.

Condition builds aren’t fun to me anymore. I recently salvaged my thieves full dire gear with perplexity because it just gets boring. Spam pistol 1, p/d 3, steal, p/d 3, maybe a venom, daze, etc. it’s just boring.

Torment alone is useless because if you have 10 stacks of torment and nothing else it won’t matter when it is cleared instantly, and your ability to get that many stacks of torment is on a decent length cooldown. p/d 3 skill 2 or 3 times, stealth and then the torment venom, then heal for aoe 2 more stacks and you’re up to ~9 stacks. 45 sec cd on venom, 30 cd on heal, p/d 3 skill takes like 4-5 initiative, etc. it just isn’t sustainable and i think with 30 in trickery you are better off just running perplexity for that daze on steal and bas. venom.