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Sleight of Hand over Bewildering Ambush


NorthernRedStar.3054

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Has anyone else tried this? With the increasing thief hate in the form of elementalists and core necros, how was it?

The CD reduction works really nice with the vigor of Bountiful Theft - assuming it doesn't get corrupted/stolen. You also apply the poison burst from Steal more often. Also makes landing Cloak n Dagger easier for follow-up daze, setting for more condi application, boon steal, or autos for the finish.

EDIT: I think venom skills should have an active portion, after which the passive part is applied. Not only would this increase the skill cap and ways to apply these skills in combat (particularly outside party share), but it'd look cooler thematics-wise, too. Back in Guild Wars, assassin had Falling Spider, Horns of the Ox - all these fancy animal-themed skill names, with looks and animations to boast. I personally think that'd be a wicked way to rework them in the future.

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If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

I favor the added mobility DD has over DE. The aftercast on rifle skills feels clunky, to boot.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

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@NorthernRedStar.3054 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

I favor the added mobility DD has over DE. The aftercast on rifle skills feels clunky, to boot.

I don't use Rifle in my DE condition build. Rifle is counter intuitive in condition builds. SA grants stealth on Withdraw and DE grants stealth on stolen item use...don't need Silent Scope, besides Premed is better for condition build.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Oh and just as a BTW the OP was talking about s/d condition from what I read which I do not think benefits from being in SA over TR. His query was to whether BA was a better choice then SOH in said build and from my perspective it is. As far as QP goes, there has to be specific reasons other then "i need three more INI" to swap over your weapons. That added ini will not do a heck of a lot of good if you now locked in a weaponset that is sub par for the given situation.

Now to P/d in a DE condition spec. I think the choices are betten DA and TR and not SA and TR. That is going DA/SA/DE vs TR/SA/DE. If WvW sees the same changes applied to PVP I would take TR over DA in a heartbeat.

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

On P/d thief I use Hide in Shadows along with shadowstep. That generally enough cleanses and comes with the add of the lower cooldown on deception. I find the added stealths from hidden thief invaluable and the best way to set up your burst once the DE has malice stacks high enough to garner the full torment add on of malicious. I do not like using a shadow meld up here.

I use shadow meld stealths for the I am in trouble moments and the CnD/steal and stolen item stealths for weaving stealth.

As to my picking out a foe for that Condition dump with confusion. No I do not base it on someone near death. Generally the people I tag are full health. The ones I pick are those I get a gut feel after observing that are going to go through a rotation without considering the consequences. IE Rangers will sit on a fringe and pick out a target to use their LRS /knockback barrage RF on. Given I am stealthed they are generally unaware of that condition bomb until it too late.

As to necro my bad. I meant bleed not poison :)

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

On P/d thief I use Hide in Shadows along with shadowstep. That generally enough cleanses and comes with the add of the lower cooldown on deception. I find the added stealths from hidden thief invaluable and the best way to set up your burst once the DE has malice stacks high enough to garner the full torment add on of malicious. I do not like using a shadow meld up here.

I use shadow meld stealths for the I am in trouble moments and the CnD/steal and stolen item stealths for weaving stealth.

How would you rate p/d condi in this meta?

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@NorthernRedStar.3054 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

On P/d thief I use Hide in Shadows along with shadowstep. That generally enough cleanses and comes with the add of the lower cooldown on deception. I find the added stealths from hidden thief invaluable and the best way to set up your burst once the DE has malice stacks high enough to garner the full torment add on of malicious. I do not like using a shadow meld up here.

I use shadow meld stealths for the I am in trouble moments and the CnD/steal and stolen item stealths for weaving stealth.

How would you rate p/d condi in this meta?

PvP or WvW? I do not PvP.

In WvW while more will likely play s/d condition, I find P/d superior. P/d is harder to play. I think people drawn to S/d because they need to only focus on using a couple of skills. The reason I prefer p/d is it has a wider variety of conditions and ways to apply them. S/d once you figure it out is easier to counter and especially by certain classes. As example if I am on my s/p power thief I would much rather face an s/d condition build then a p/d condition build.

With p/d you will use everyone of the 5 weapon skills and have good reason to. S/D condition you are not using half the set at all.

If going p/d I think one needs to focus on Torment. Confusion, bleeds and poison are all thereand you can do considerable damage with them but the torment is the backbone.

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

On P/d thief I use Hide in Shadows along with shadowstep. That generally enough cleanses and comes with the add of the lower cooldown on deception. I find the added stealths from hidden thief invaluable and the best way to set up your burst once the DE has malice stacks high enough to garner the full torment add on of malicious. I do not like using a shadow meld up here.

I see. But you said that you don't stay in stealth for long, so isn't it a waste to use Hide in Shadows since the stealth from the heal will stack with the stealth from Concealing?

I don't know, ever since I got interrupted when I used to take Hide in Shadows, I never used it in WvW. With Shadow's Embrace, it doesn't matter how I stealthed, I get the cleanse. It's just more options for me and Withdraw cannot be interrupted. Withdraw + Embrace + Concealing...it's the best combination in terms of healing, cleansing, evade, and stealth. I stopped taking Trickster because of this. Also, I don't think Hidden Thief is good enough compared to that combo when Embrace is taken.

In addition, Hidden Thief is on a 25s CD while Withdraw is on 18s. If you wanted added stealth, Hidden Thief makes less sense since it doesn't bring anything else on the table other than lowering the CD of a couple of skills that you won't even need if you take Embrace. But even with the CDR, those skills still have long CDs. It really doesn't make sense.

I use shadow meld stealths for the I am in trouble moments and the CnD/steal and stolen item stealths for weaving stealth.

As to my picking out a foe for that Condition dump with confusion. No I do not base it on someone near death. Generally the people I tag are full health. The ones I pick are those I get a gut feel after observing that are going to go through a rotation without considering the consequences. IE Rangers will sit on a fringe and pick out a target to use their LRS /knockback barrage RF on. Given I am stealthed they are generally unaware of that condition bomb until it too late.

lol, I guess our difference is the approach since I tend to be more noble and tactical, so my build do not start from stealth rather from interaction by building up Malice, then spiking with loads of conditions. I find it more satisfying to at least give them a fighting chance, though it's futile.

The thing is, my build can also approach from stealth and condition bomb if I want to.

As to necro my bad. I meant bleed not poison :)

Yeah, but in my experience, I am very cautious dumping conditions on either Necro or Guardian. Rangers are free loot.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:If you're running Condition Damage build, why would you take Trickery over Shadow Arts? Assuming you've already picked DA and one of the Elite spec.

With the free Poison Venom on stealth from Shadow Arts, it gives you more condition damage when you stealth attack than what Bewildering Ambush can offer. The pathetic 3s duration of 6 stacks of confusion is trash.

Sure Sleight of Hand can lower the Steal cooldown and can apply poison on steal, but you can stealth more often than you can steal, especially when using Deadeye, thus you can apply more poison damage over time.

In other words, if you're running condition damage build, you're only crippling yourself by taking Trickery. However if you want Trickery, you're better off using Quick Pockets -- at least this way you can have extra shots out of your Shortbow.

There a number of reasons I would take the Trickery line in an s/d build for conditions. While I do not play s/d I do play a d/d daredevil build and aspects of the two are similar.

Added INI. You allude to this when suggesting taking quickpockets over BA as an advantage but the same holds true of TR over Shadowarts. You are not goind to stealth a lot in an s/d build (just as you do not in d/d condition) and with Prepardness and ini on steal 5 more INI is very useful.

I have to disagree. The added +3 init from Preparedness is no different from staying in stealth for 3 seconds thanks to Shadow Rejuv. While you are in stealth for 3s, you are also stacking up Spider Venom, which means in your next Malicious Sneak Attack, you are applying Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

Also, waiting for +2 init on steal has a cooldown of 17s while you can get +3 init every 10s with Quick Pockets -- this is why Quick Pockets is better at giving initiatives than waiting for Steal CD.

Uncatchable. In a build where you rely on dodges to apply added conditions via Impaling lotus , uncatchable can be a significant add as to number of conditions applied. In my d/d build this made a significant difference in condition stacks applied overall and there no immob in that build. With the build in Immob of s/d uncatchables 3 second duration on the field will see two ticks applied more often then not as long as you dodge directly over the foe. Add this to the impaling lotus and that a significant add including much needed cover conditions.

This is dodge vs stealth and DD vs DE. As DD, I agree with you since you have no access to Malicious Sneak Attack. But as DE, you can save your dodges for evading attacks rather than stacking conditions. Not to mention, as DE, you can easily overload with Poison using both 1k Needle and Binding Shadow -- not only they both apply poison but they also trigger Panic Strike. Then you add Leeching Venom to that from SA -- you got a plethora of options to apply poison.

Trickster. I would take trickster over BT myself here just to get that added Condition cleanse and couple it with scorpion wire and withdraw. Chances are the s/d build uses dagger strorm meaning that an added cleanse. Very flexible.

Not necessary ever since Concealing Restoration. My Withdraw can also cleanse using SA when Shadow's Embrace is taken. Of course, SA will not work well with S/D, but with P/D -- DA/SA/DE is great.

Lead attacks. A 15 percent damage add to ALL conditions is nice. If in the DA line the combo of this and Potent poison is close to 40 percent which is like 10 stacks of poison acting as 15 but the add applies to all other damaging conditions as well.

You have to spend 15 initiatives to get the max 15% bonus -- not ideal. I can get extra condition damage from Leeching Venom, Malicious Sneak Attack, and Malice without spending that much Initiatives.

BA. This is in no way a trash skill. Trust me on this. While I do not know if the OP speaks to PvP or WvW in most WvW builds a condition build will have 50+ percent durations on conditions. This means BA closer to 6 stacks for 5 seconds then it is 6 stacks at three. With lead attacks factored in you are getting closer to 7 stacks for 5.

In order for BA to shine, your Steal CD has to be low enough for it to matter. Since you have to sacrifice Sleight for BA, it becomes an unnecessary GM trait. The amount of damage BA offer can be gained from Leeching Venom in SA. The only real advantage of BA is it applies a different kind of condition so it can survive a cleanse or acts as a cover. However, due to the high Steal CD, this wouldn't matter at all.

Quick Pockets on the other hand will give you 6 initiatives before Steal goes out of cooldown, this is the reason why they want to nerf this. It just gives a lot of fuel for the Thief condition damage build.

In a 30s time frame, you can Steal twice with Sleight (net 4 initiatives), apply 6 stacks of Confusion for 3s with BA (WvW), or have net 11 initiatives from Quick Pockets (9 from swapping and 2 from steal). You can see the advantage right away when you put them side by side. BA is the weakest of the 3 GMs.

This is significant and I have tagged targets where this ticks for 4k. If they do not have a ready cleanse (and condition builds are about burning those cleanses off with a steady application of conditions) they are basically shut down for those 5 seconds and will try and run in circles over using a skill. This especially good if you encounter those people that stick to their rotations. Like rangers. Tag them right before they use their Rapid fire and they in for a world of hurt. That said they key here is to use in conjunction with mercy. (assuming you have taken DE over DD)You can tag them with confusion and your poison on steal and after they cleanse mercy and reapply immediately. While you can get 12 confusion on even 6 in conjunction with poisons and bleeds will do a lot of damage in that 5 second period.

I am not discounting the front load capability of BA but in comparison to other GM traits, it is indeed trash. If we're talking about the PvE version, I would undoubtedly agreed with you, but the nerfed version in PvP and WvW is designed to discourage players from taking it. Consider me discouraged.

Again in my d/d daredevil bid I did try taking quick pockets over BA and BA was just better. and this in a build that burns ini faster then would a s/d build.

I'm not sure why would you go D/D daredevil when you can use something better -- P/D Deadeye (DA/SA/DE)? Burning Initiatives to stack bleed makes no sense when you can do so through Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks Poison, Bleed, and Torment practically for free.

You should not limit yourself to one build. I have p/d DE as well. My take on the TRickery line is totally different then your own. You talk about staying in stealth for 4 seconds for INI. I do not stay in stealth that long. It not worth it. The SA i take is not rejuv. It is Rending for the boon theft. I do not take shadows embrace in my p/d build for cleanses. I take Hidden thief.

Well, I don't like staying in stealth that long either but that is what ArenaNet designed SA for. In order to stack Leeching, you have to stay in stealth at least for 3s. I don't stay in stealth longer than 3s though since I use the last second for Malicious Sneak Attacks.

I'm still not a believer in Rending because whether they have boon or not, they still die due to Poison and Vulnerability. The only boon that I would like to strip is Resistance, but that is very rare. I am yet to get in a fight that boon strip in necessary. In PvE, I would take boons strip right away since bosses spams boons.

If you don't take Shadow's Embrace, what is your cleanse? There's so many ways to stealth which means many opportunities to cleanse.

Again I think you wrong on BA. i have compared all of the traits over and over again and BA outputs more damage. In my d/d build i even used quickpockets coupled with d/d in off hand with energy sigils for oodles more of those deathblossoms. BA was still outputting more damage. The reason being they can rarely cleanse it when they need to and it shuts skill use down.

I believe that it is rarely cleanse and I mentioned that as the advantage of BA is it can act as a cover. However, the way they nerfed Confusion makes it not worth it. It used to be that Condition Damage factors into the damage over time, but that is not the case anymore. The damage over time is flat 10dmg/s per stack at level 80 and the bulk of the damage is when skill is used. So if they don't use any skills, you'll only deal the base damage -- that's not very convincing.

After some experimentation with other build variants where I dropped BA i went back to it again in WvW. The difference is night and day in the amount of damage you can put out in short order and especially in mixed groups where you use your stealth to carefully select targets and then pick a victim for the burst. You can drop a whole lot of people just with the steal at a range of 1500. In many ways it more reliable then a DJ shot from rifle.

Any target that is in a brink of dying will die to anything, even from Malicious Sneak Attack that stacks 3 different DOTs. Even if they don't use any skills, the DOTs will kill them. I think that is my problem with Confusion, it requires an action from your target and if they didn't do anything, you get nothing from your investment.

Don't get me wrong, the damage from Confusion is massive, but it is unreliable against competent targets. Confusion doesn't even work on me and I'm not even as skilled as you. The way I look at the trait is; will it work on me? My answer to that is obviously no. In WvW you have to expect to have all kinds of condition on you if you are in a fight. With SA, I don't have to care what conditions I have on me, I'll just cleanse it away.

Try a necro as example in your DE spec with mercy. 20 stacks poison just from the stolen skill , 12 stacks confusion . You are not getting anything near that out of SA or taking quickpockets or SOH. When I am in p/d I do not do a lot of weapon swapping and if I am in TR and DE I do not need quickpockets ini. The daze from SOH is tied to the same steal cooldown as BA is and in no way shape or form can someone convince me a daze every 20 seconds will outdo that confusion .

I think you mean Guardian. Necro's stolen item is bleed. Either way, both Necro and Guardian has a lot of ways of dealing with conditions so even if you overload them with conditions, it will either be easily cleansed or transferred to you. So I would hesitate at overloading those professions with conditions, especially the Necro since it can backfire.

Also, I disagree. Sleight reduces the Steal CD further down to 17s, thus it is superior to BA which it has to deal with a 22s Steal CD. But I was not arguing that Sleight is better than BA, rather that Quick Pockets is better than both.

As for your point, yes that is an impressive amount of conditions, however we are not fighting unresponsive targets and most of those who roam in WvW are very competent. This is why I don't front load my conditions rather I spread them out, thus I pick SA over Trick.

As for SA, I can do a back to back Malicious Sneak Attack using Shadow Meld that stacks Poison, Bleed and Torment for an extended amount of time.

We can agree to disagree here.

That seems to be the case.

EDIT: typo

On P/d thief I use Hide in Shadows along with shadowstep. That generally enough cleanses and comes with the add of the lower cooldown on deception. I find the added stealths from hidden thief invaluable and the best way to set up your burst once the DE has malice stacks high enough to garner the full torment add on of malicious. I do not like using a shadow meld up here.

I see. But you said that you don't stay in stealth for long, so isn't it a waste to use Hide in Shadows since the stealth from the heal will stack with the stealth from Concealing?

I don't know, ever since I got interrupted when I used to take Hide in Shadows, I never used it in WvW. With Shadow's Embrace, it doesn't matter how I stealthed, I get the cleanse. It's just more options for me and Withdraw cannot be interrupted. Withdraw + Embrace + Concealing...it's the best combination in terms of healing, cleansing, evade, and stealth. I stopped taking Trickster because of this. Also, I don't think Hidden Thief is good enough compared to that combo when Embrace is taken.

In addition, Hidden Thief is on a 25s CD while Withdraw is on 18s. If you wanted added stealth, Hidden Thief makes less sense since it doesn't bring anything else on the table other than lowering the CD of a couple of skills that you won't even need if you take Embrace. But even with the CDR, those skills still have long CDs. It really doesn't make sense.

I use shadow meld stealths for the I am in trouble moments and the CnD/steal and stolen item stealths for weaving stealth.

As to my picking out a foe for that Condition dump with confusion. No I do not base it on someone near death. Generally the people I tag are full health. The ones I pick are those I get a gut feel after observing that are going to go through a rotation without considering the consequences. IE Rangers will sit on a fringe and pick out a target to use their LRS /knockback barrage RF on. Given I am stealthed they are generally unaware of that condition bomb until it too late.

lol, I guess our difference is the approach since I tend to be more noble and tactical, so my build do not start from stealth rather from interaction by building up Malice, then spiking with loads of conditions. I find it more satisfying to at least give them a fighting chance, though it's futile.

The thing is, my build can also approach from stealth and condition bomb if I want to.

As to necro my bad. I meant bleed not poison :)

Yeah, but in my experience, I am very cautious dumping conditions on either Necro or Guardian. Rangers are free loot.

Hide in shadows is the heal and condition cleanse. HIS is a great condition cleanse . Shadowstep is my other cleanse so hidden thief gives the stealth on steal and a lower cooldown on both HIS and Shadowstep. Now while I do not normally stay in stealth when fighting there are occasions where I need to chain stealths for escape. As example I got pulled into a middle of a zerg so immediately popped Smeld, chained with HIS while stealthed (my health was low after the pull) swapped to SB and got out of there.

For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one. Usually you can bait it out early or avoid it entirely on the poorer necroes.

I do like withdraw. In fact most other thief builds i use it. on P/D i just like HIS better.

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@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This is a valid reason, however, just as how I play my Necro, I interrupt heals with Fear. In my experience, getting loaded with conditions and having my HIS interrupted is a no go. As you said, the conditions will tick for 3s before it cleanses again, that's true but you can mitigate the damage by using Sneak Attack due to Flickering and Siphoning. Instead of taking 100% condition damage while in stealth, you can reduce that by 33% while revealed and a small top-off heal from siphoning. With HIS, I don't have this kind of flexibility.

I agree that HIS has fatter heals, but it is more riskier than Withdraw with Embrace. Also, the CD on HIS is not very appealing against a Necro that can apply conditions almost effortlessly. With that kind of CD, HIS should be instant cast. If that happens, I'd take HIS any time of the day.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

As I mentioned above, you have to utilized the whole combination of traits and skills to make it work. Looking at HIS vs SE will not do since the reason why Withdraw and SE works is because it allows me to be tactical by using Sneak Attack as a counterattack and let Flickering mitigate some of the damage. The idea is, if I am also applying the same amount of pressure to my target, they will stop the pressure in order to cleanse their own conditions, which gives an opportunity for my skills to get out of CD. If you get pressured by the conditions, then it wouldn't really matter what skills or traits you picked...you're dead. My build always have an exit strategy which make me more flexible. HIS is simply unreliable to me.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This is a valid reason, however, just as how I play my Necro, I interrupt heals with Fear. In my experience, getting loaded with conditions and having my HIS interrupted is a no go. As you said, the conditions will tick for 3s before it cleanses again, that's true but you can mitigate the damage by using Sneak Attack due to Flickering and Siphoning. Instead of taking 100% condition damage while in stealth, you can reduce that by 33% while revealed and a small top-off heal from siphoning. With HIS, I don't have this kind of flexibility.

I agree that HIS has fatter heals, but it is more riskier than Withdraw with Embrace. Also, the CD on HIS is not very appealing against a Necro that can apply conditions almost effortlessly. With that kind of CD, HIS should be instant cast. If that happens, I'd take HIS any time of the day.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

As I mentioned above, you have to utilized the whole combination of traits and skills to make it work. Looking at HIS vs SE will not do since the reason why Withdraw and SE works is because it allows me to be tactical by using Sneak Attack as a counterattack and let Flickering mitigate some of the damage. The idea is, if I am also applying the same amount of pressure to my target, they will stop the pressure in order to cleanse their own conditions, which gives an opportunity for my skills to get out of CD. If you get pressured by the conditions, then it wouldn't really matter what skills or traits you picked...you're dead. My build always have an exit strategy which make me more flexible. HIS is simply unreliable to me.

Well I do not have as much a problem with being interrupted on an HIS heal as you seem to. Granted it happens but it not a heck of a lot longer cast time then is the daredevil heal and lots use that. In P/d I tend to be at range as often as I am close up and the number of interrupts that happen at range drop considerably. Some of those fears you mention as example only go out 600 units. Added to that HIS against Condition necro is much more useful against feast of Corruption. As to the cooldown, it 6 seconds longer. I can deal with that. Added to that as it relates to the DE spec directly, a typical thief has so many sources of stealth s/he can easily cast the HIS while stealthed if it imperative that it gets cast.

The big kicker though is the nature of poison. It more likely you have poison on you then you do a fear and HIS flushes poison before the heal itself meaning you get full value for the heal PLUS that regen. I suggest over the course of a battle even accounting for those times you are interrupted and that lower cooldown, you draw in way more health via an HIS and I find this important against other condition builds when P/d. You will get tagged hard and if you do have poison on you , the heal on the Withdraw is barely enough to cancle out a single attack or condition bomb tick. I much prefer the HIS in the p/d de build.

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This is a valid reason, however, just as how I play my Necro, I interrupt heals with Fear. In my experience, getting loaded with conditions and having my HIS interrupted is a no go. As you said, the conditions will tick for 3s before it cleanses again, that's true but you can mitigate the damage by using Sneak Attack due to Flickering and Siphoning. Instead of taking 100% condition damage while in stealth, you can reduce that by 33% while revealed and a small top-off heal from siphoning. With HIS, I don't have this kind of flexibility.

I agree that HIS has fatter heals, but it is more riskier than Withdraw with Embrace. Also, the CD on HIS is not very appealing against a Necro that can apply conditions almost effortlessly. With that kind of CD, HIS should be instant cast. If that happens, I'd take HIS any time of the day.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

As I mentioned above, you have to utilized the whole combination of traits and skills to make it work. Looking at HIS vs SE will not do since the reason why Withdraw and SE works is because it allows me to be tactical by using Sneak Attack as a counterattack and let Flickering mitigate some of the damage. The idea is, if I am also applying the same amount of pressure to my target, they will stop the pressure in order to cleanse their own conditions, which gives an opportunity for my skills to get out of CD. If you get pressured by the conditions, then it wouldn't really matter what skills or traits you picked...you're dead. My build always have an exit strategy which make me more flexible. HIS is simply unreliable to me.

Well I do not have as much a problem with being interrupted on an HIS heal as you seem to. Granted it happens but it not a heck of a lot longer cast time then is the daredevil heal and lots use that. In P/d I tend to be at range as often as I am close up and the number of interrupts that happen at range drop considerably. Some of those fears you mention as example only go out 600 units. Added to that HIS against Condition necro is much more useful against feast of Corruption. As to the cooldown, it 6 seconds longer. I can deal with that. Added to that as it relates to the DE spec directly, a typical thief has so many sources of stealth s/he can easily cast the HIS while stealthed if it imperative that it gets cast.

The big kicker though is the nature of poison. It more likely you have poison on you then you do a fear and HIS flushes poison before the heal itself meaning you get full value for the heal PLUS that regen. I suggest over the course of a battle even accounting for those times you are interrupted and that lower cooldown, you draw in way more health via an HIS and I find this important against other condition builds when P/d. You will get tagged hard and if you do have poison on you , the heal on the Withdraw is barely enough to cancle out a single attack or condition bomb tick. I much prefer the HIS in the p/d de build.

The problem I have with fear is it forces you to run around for 2-3 seconds which triggers the high damage capability from Torment and as a Necro, I can fear using my staff or shade which is easy to chain. When you recover from fear, you're practically dead. This is why its important to me that my heal or cleanse is not interrupted.

I know the potential of HIS, don't get me wrong, but experience forced me to adapt.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This is a valid reason, however, just as how I play my Necro, I interrupt heals with Fear. In my experience, getting loaded with conditions and having my HIS interrupted is a no go. As you said, the conditions will tick for 3s before it cleanses again, that's true but you can mitigate the damage by using Sneak Attack due to Flickering and Siphoning. Instead of taking 100% condition damage while in stealth, you can reduce that by 33% while revealed and a small top-off heal from siphoning. With HIS, I don't have this kind of flexibility.

I agree that HIS has fatter heals, but it is more riskier than Withdraw with Embrace. Also, the CD on HIS is not very appealing against a Necro that can apply conditions almost effortlessly. With that kind of CD, HIS should be instant cast. If that happens, I'd take HIS any time of the day.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

As I mentioned above, you have to utilized the whole combination of traits and skills to make it work. Looking at HIS vs SE will not do since the reason why Withdraw and SE works is because it allows me to be tactical by using Sneak Attack as a counterattack and let Flickering mitigate some of the damage. The idea is, if I am also applying the same amount of pressure to my target, they will stop the pressure in order to cleanse their own conditions, which gives an opportunity for my skills to get out of CD. If you get pressured by the conditions, then it wouldn't really matter what skills or traits you picked...you're dead. My build always have an exit strategy which make me more flexible. HIS is simply unreliable to me.

Well I do not have as much a problem with being interrupted on an HIS heal as you seem to. Granted it happens but it not a heck of a lot longer cast time then is the daredevil heal and lots use that. In P/d I tend to be at range as often as I am close up and the number of interrupts that happen at range drop considerably. Some of those fears you mention as example only go out 600 units. Added to that HIS against Condition necro is much more useful against feast of Corruption. As to the cooldown, it 6 seconds longer. I can deal with that. Added to that as it relates to the DE spec directly, a typical thief has so many sources of stealth s/he can easily cast the HIS while stealthed if it imperative that it gets cast.

The big kicker though is the nature of poison. It more likely you have poison on you then you do a fear and HIS flushes poison before the heal itself meaning you get full value for the heal PLUS that regen. I suggest over the course of a battle even accounting for those times you are interrupted and that lower cooldown, you draw in way more health via an HIS and I find this important against other condition builds when P/d. You will get tagged hard and if you do have poison on you , the heal on the Withdraw is barely enough to cancle out a single attack or condition bomb tick. I much prefer the HIS in the p/d de build.

The problem I have with fear is it forces you to run around for 2-3 seconds which triggers the high damage capability from Torment and as a Necro, I can fear using my staff or shade which is easy to chain. When you recover from fear, you're practically dead. This is why its important to me that my heal or cleanse is not interrupted.

I know the potential of HIS, don't get me wrong, but experience forced me to adapt.

And MY experience pushed me in the other direction. I used to use withdraw in the p/d DE build and went to HIS instead. I use range and stealth not dodges in this build and find HIS works better. I rarely get feared. There only one class with ready access and it hardly something I am overly concerned about. Immob is much more dangerous to the build then is fear and the reason I was taking withdraw before was for the immobs.

Withdraw is much better in my dodge and melee builds (staff/s/d etc)

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@babazhook.6805 said:

@babazhook.6805 said:For Necro you have to watch that one mark (Putrid?) as that the nasty one.

Yeah, I use that with my Scourge. In my Reaper, I use both Plague Signet and Plague Sending. Plague sending is enough most of the time since I go in and out of Reaper Shroud. It's really difficult as a Condi Thief fighting against the similar build as my Necros.

Plaque sending, Putrid mark and that signet is exactly why I prefer HIS as my heal. I found if I relied on withdraw with Shadows embrace as the cleanse/heal the amount of damage taken when you drop to stealth to cleanse after a condition bomb landed on you was too much . You get the only one cleanse on a damaging condition but then the others get three seconds of ticks. Shadows rejuv was just not doing enough in that 2-4 second period to stay on top of your health so often you have to use that withdraw while stealthed anyways.

I found that after a bomb from a Necro HIS flushes away pretty well every damaging condition and the heal being much fatter meaning you can get right back in battle.

This is a valid reason, however, just as how I play my Necro, I interrupt heals with Fear. In my experience, getting loaded with conditions and having my HIS interrupted is a no go. As you said, the conditions will tick for 3s before it cleanses again, that's true but you can mitigate the damage by using Sneak Attack due to Flickering and Siphoning. Instead of taking 100% condition damage while in stealth, you can reduce that by 33% while revealed and a small top-off heal from siphoning. With HIS, I don't have this kind of flexibility.

I agree that HIS has fatter heals, but it is more riskier than Withdraw with Embrace. Also, the CD on HIS is not very appealing against a Necro that can apply conditions almost effortlessly. With that kind of CD, HIS should be instant cast. If that happens, I'd take HIS any time of the day.

This very much like that debate we have with the Revenant where he suggests EA too powerful. EA is very good if there only one damaging condition applied but starts to fail when an enemy can apply more then one more frequently. SE works much the same way. Great if you face a guy with just burn or some such not so much so if he has burn poison and bleed.

As I mentioned above, you have to utilized the whole combination of traits and skills to make it work. Looking at HIS vs SE will not do since the reason why Withdraw and SE works is because it allows me to be tactical by using Sneak Attack as a counterattack and let Flickering mitigate some of the damage. The idea is, if I am also applying the same amount of pressure to my target, they will stop the pressure in order to cleanse their own conditions, which gives an opportunity for my skills to get out of CD. If you get pressured by the conditions, then it wouldn't really matter what skills or traits you picked...you're dead. My build always have an exit strategy which make me more flexible. HIS is simply unreliable to me.

Well I do not have as much a problem with being interrupted on an HIS heal as you seem to. Granted it happens but it not a heck of a lot longer cast time then is the daredevil heal and lots use that. In P/d I tend to be at range as often as I am close up and the number of interrupts that happen at range drop considerably. Some of those fears you mention as example only go out 600 units. Added to that HIS against Condition necro is much more useful against feast of Corruption. As to the cooldown, it 6 seconds longer. I can deal with that. Added to that as it relates to the DE spec directly, a typical thief has so many sources of stealth s/he can easily cast the HIS while stealthed if it imperative that it gets cast.

The big kicker though is the nature of poison. It more likely you have poison on you then you do a fear and HIS flushes poison before the heal itself meaning you get full value for the heal PLUS that regen. I suggest over the course of a battle even accounting for those times you are interrupted and that lower cooldown, you draw in way more health via an HIS and I find this important against other condition builds when P/d. You will get tagged hard and if you do have poison on you , the heal on the Withdraw is barely enough to cancle out a single attack or condition bomb tick. I much prefer the HIS in the p/d de build.

The problem I have with fear is it forces you to run around for 2-3 seconds which triggers the high damage capability from Torment and as a Necro, I can fear using my staff or shade which is easy to chain. When you recover from fear, you're practically dead. This is why its important to me that my heal or cleanse is not interrupted.

I know the potential of HIS, don't get me wrong, but experience forced me to adapt.

And MY experience pushed me in the other direction. I used to use withdraw in the p/d DE build and went to HIS instead. I use range and stealth not dodges in this build and find HIS works better. I rarely get feared. There only one class with ready access and it hardly something I am overly concerned about. Immob is much more dangerous to the build then is fear and the reason I was taking withdraw before was for the immobs.

Withdraw is much better in my dodge and melee builds (staff/s/d etc)

Fair enough. It would depends on the player's experience which path to take. Which is great compared to before when everyone is running the same cookie cutter build. We're finally starting to see viable build diversity.

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