Boon Daredevil

February 2023

Condition Boon Daredevil plays similarly to Condition Daredevil damage-wise, build owes its existence purely to the usage of Detonate Plasma stolen skill, which you acquire by using Steal.

While there are more places where Detonate Plasma exists, this build should only be used on bosses such as Matthias Gabrel, Mursaat Overseer, Statues of Grenth, Cardinal Adina, and in some cases on Twin Largos, where you can steal plasma only from Kenut.

The primary reason why you run so much boon duration is an ability to provide permanent Quickness uptime, high Resistance uptime, Stability stacks, Aegis spam, and maintain 25 stacks of Might with help of pre-stealing.

Other boons provided by Detonate Plasma, like Protection,  Resolution,  Regeneration,  Swiftness,  Fury,  Vigor have much higher uptime and you’ll be able to keep them up permanently even with much lower boon duration.

Build fundamentals

The ramp-up of your skills is not that fast, but it is carried with burst skills like Venoms, paired with spamming of Death Blossom and auto-attacks, but note that spamming any weapon skill (apart from auto-attacks) may make your character cast it twice or more, which will result in you being stuck in animations, lowering your dps.

Always ensure to use Detonate Plasma and Venoms after the boon strip that happens when you enter combat with the boss and don’t steal from Invulnerable enemies, as using Steal will result in stealing nothing.

Let Detonate Plasma fully cast, as it is easily interruptible. Interrupted Detonate Plasma, whilst not giving boons, still gets consumed.

Be aware of the range of your Detonate Plasma (600 units around you) and Venoms (240 units around you) when applying them to your allies. Always position yourself, so you cover every one of them within the range of the aforementioned skills.

After your opener, keep using your initiative, try to maintain 15 stacks of Lead Attacks, when conditions from your Venoms and Preparation are active on the enemy.

Maintain Lotus Training uptime as highest as possible, and keep in mind that the buff does not stack.

If given occasions, you can use your Whirl Finishers, like Dagger Storm, Death Blossom, and Lotus Training on:

• Ethereal Fields: Confusion
• Fire Field: Burning
• Poison Field: Poisoned
• Dark Field: life-steal damage

Crowd Control

• Impact Strike
• Basilisk Venom
• Head Shot
• Choking Gas
• Sleight of Hand

Alternatives

Gear

Ritualist’s and Celestial gear is exchangeable, Ritualist will increase your damage slightly, and Celestial is just more hybridized (you also have to keep in mind, that by taking Celestial, you’ll have high toughness, so communicate with your tank to take more if you are not tanking.

Your second weapon set is situational as you won’t be using it for damage, you can pick whatever will suit your needs at a given moment:

• Main-hand pistol for teleport backward and more range damage possibilities.
• Off-Hand pistol enables fast crowd-control spam via Head Shot and smoke field via Black Powder.
• Short-bow for better movement potential via Infiltrator's Arrow and more range damage possibilities, as well as poison field and crowd-control skill with Choking Gas.
• Superior Sigil of Paralyzation, for higher crowd-control damage

Food and Infusions

If you struggle maintaining boons on allies, you can take Concentration WvW Infusion or some sort of concentration food/utility like Peppercorn-Spiced Eggs Benedict or Toxic Maintenance Oil.

Skills and Traits

Your healing and elite skill are interchangeable, the best choices are Skelk Venom, Impact Strike and for bosses without breakbars Thieves Guild.

Devourer Venom can be better than Prepare Thousand Needles if you cannot ensure that boss will not move away from your Preparation. For example, in unorganized groups on Matthias.

If you desire a boon removal on bosses like Adina, you can take Bountiful Theft instead of Pressure Striking.

For the Eye of Judgement and the Eye of Fate from Statues of Grenth, you should swap out Sleight of Hand, in order to not overwrite the stun from Light Orbs.

Dagger Storm is a potential damage option choice, especially, when you need to Dodge mechanics and while combined with Combo Fields, which you provide to yourself via Choking Gas.

Pre-stealing

In order to pre-steal on Adina, you can either trigger the boss and /gg, or you can use Steal on the Earth Elemental that is blocking the passage to Adina’s area. If you have one stack of Detonate Plasma saved, when you are in the Arm phase in the encounter, by using Steal on the Arm, you can get a second stack of Detonate Plasma, which helps to manage boons in the encounter.

In order to pre-steal on Mursaat Overseer, you can only politely ask your friendly squad to trigger the boss and write /gg.

In order to pre-steal on Matthias you can either trigger the boss and /gg, or take off your Sleight of Hand and the whole Deadly Arts (due to Serpent's Touch), then Stealth yourself, use Steal on the boss, and quickly leave his range to not trigger the encounter.

On Twin Largos, you can either trigger the encounter, phase Nikare to get to Kenut’s platform, steal from her, and /gg, or you can use Steal on the Dreg Shark that is blocking the portal to Twin Largos’ area.