Should scepter get changes?

I personally would love some changes of scepter to improve its buffs to compensate sacrificing the staff heal

What do you guys think?

@"Axl.8924" said:I personally would love some changes of scepter to improve its buffs to compensate sacrificing the staff heal

What do you guys think?

Yes! Compensate it's healing maybe, but even it's defense. It feels like a weapon stuck in pre-HoT. Never upgraded to combat elite specs. Especially since most of it's damage is reliant on "target needed", scepter needs some buffs that'll keep the Ele alive.

YES ... IT should ...

Wait ... maybe not in fact ... nope it's fine ...hmm ... maybe earth 3... no no it's fine !

Wait wait wait !!! Buff shatterstone ! yes that's it !

Definitely yes.

The elementalist's scepter is not a terrible weapon, but it is certainly an incomplete weapon. I say this because the weapon is mainly used for the Fresh Air build, a build that is using Arc Lightning (air auto attack) most of, if not all the time. Ice Shards (water auto attack) is alright and it can be useful for healing yourself with Signet of Restoration if you're not fighting enemies while waiting to get out of combat, but the main reason why the elementalist's scepter is an incomplete weapon is because of Flame Strike (fire auto attack) and Stone Shards (earth auto attack).

While the weapon has other underwhelming skills like Shatterstone and Dust Devil (which isn't instant cast as stated in the tooltip), the fire and earth auto attacks are by far the worst. Not only are they clunky, but they also scale poorly with both power and condition damage, so poorly that even Ice Shards scales better than both of them which doesn't make sense seeing as they are supposed to be part of the more damage focused attunements. In my opinion, Stone Shards should have its damage scale better and have the same cast time as Ice Shards and make Flame Strike the 2nd strongest auto attack that can attack enemies without the need for line of sight i.e. not having to face towards them to be able to attack them. Being able to attack enemies while kiting would make the scepter a much better weapon for the elementalist.

I wanted to get improvements in the buff areas to have scepter be the buff weapon and maybe make staff more desireable for straight healing, but I could see some improvement on other abilities as well.

Scepter needs some pretty fundamental changes.

First, they need to stop trying to make it both a medium range condi AND power-dps weapon. One or the other, hybrid doesn't really work. Being single-target, it only really works a power-burst dps weapon. With that in mind:

FIRE:

• Fire 1 needs a WAY SHORTER cast time. This should have a cast time of 3/4 or 1/2 second. Replace burning with instead giving ele a stack of might or 2 per hit.
• Dragon's tooth needs to have a shorter cast time (1/2 s with no aftercast) and maybe shorter fall-time. As it is, the windup is so huge and the time to fall so great you can't even effectively cleave downed players with it.
• Phoenix needs its cooldown reduced to like 15s.WATER:
• Water 1 needs to actually hit targets at 900 range rather than have projectiles that randomly fly off away from the target.
• Shatterstone should have a chill or something added before the explosion. The audio still badly needs to be fixed. Even better, shatterstone could be like a mark, and could take its time to arm then it persists for a short time or until detonated.AIR:
• Air 1 should have a shorter pre-cast, no after-cast, and should have the same dps but much less weighted towards the end (it currently goes 1x3hits, 2x3hits, 4x4hits, should be like 2x3hits, 2.5x3hits, 3.125x4hits)EARTH:
• Stone shards needs a much shorter wind-up and after-cast. Should have a cast-time similar to Water 1, shooting out 3 rocks. The 3rd rock should cripple for 2s. No more bleeding.
• Dust devil should have a wider cone, or block projectiles, or knockback targets.

I agree that the scepter needs to be buffed a tiny bit as long as we're not talking when you use it as a Weaver (cause its pretty awesome then IMO). Some of the skills are good IMO while others need to either be buffed or removed.

I think shatterstone is already the most buffed skill in all Tyria's history. Yet the least used. Big numbers are useless if they can't or take forever to hit anything that walks. But instant skills work pretty nicely for some builds. Ele's lack of innate defensive mechanisms/stats should be compensated by more reliable and useful skills.

In the case of scepter I think buffs alone won't help. The problem lies within the design of the skills. As mentioned shatterstone was buffed numerous times and is still terrible. No number buffs can fix this as the design is bad. What does high damage mean if you can never hit anything with it because of fuse times? The skill simply feels bad design wise, functionality and visually.

The fire auto attack feels of as well. It is simply so incredible slow, not to mention that it deals no damage. Dragon tooth has also the fuse time problem.