making staff pvp viable

Staff on paper is a solid weapon oriented around heavy melee damage, cleave and evasion, however in practice it is clunky and easy to avoid. But that can change with a few relatively simple changes on anets part:

-Make the aa chain faster: decrease after cast of staff strike and staff bash and speed up punishing strikes (while reducing the reflect duration to match the new animation duration). Reason for this is that thief needs to be quick, get in do damage get out of harms way, and staff aa is simply to slow and in its current state seams more like a warrior auto attack than a thief one.-Increase the role back distance of debilitating arc: this is the defensive skill of the weapon and yet it makes you flop in place like a fish out of water. Make it move the thief 300 units back at the least, 400 units at the most, so that you actually move away from immediate melee danger. For reference 300 distance is how much a regular dodge moves you and 450 is how much dash moves you.-Reduce the initiative cost of dust strike to 3: out of all the blind applying skills across all thief sets this is the worst as it offers the least utility and as such its cost should reflect this. At 3 ini you will be able to weave it in much more often during fights.

I believe these 3 changes would make staff a good choice and open up more builds for teef, however i would like to propose one last slightly more drastic change:-Increase the initiative cost of vault to 6 in wvw (keep it at 6 in pvp as is) and increase the leap range to 700: this would discourage brainless vault spam while giving staff a good way to gap close a greater distance. This would mend the biggest issue with staff, having to open with steal to get in melee range, and give the weapon a way to keep on top of opponents who are kiting / trying to disengage.

I don't even play anymore but everytime I played staff thief I easily got top 10 in NA, it's still a solid set. It does a lot of damage and can be pretty annoying to fight against.I don't see any reason why they should buff it, every skill in the staff weapon set has its use but if you're just spamming vaults and dodges then yes it's trash.

• AA is already good as it is, making it faster will make it op and would make people spam it instead of using the actual skills of the weapon set, see what happened to d/p, its AA was the best for years and now it's a joke.

• ?? Debilitating arc is probably one of the best skills in the game, its use isn't even close to be "defensive" it's actually your best dps source, low initiative cost, evade frame, good damage, can be used while jump to avoid animation... seriously I always said that the problem with staff thief was this skill (when acro staff was a thing) Also it's the ultimate steal bait.

• Dust strike is fine, I wouldn't mind a % damage increase though.

With a decent player any weapon set on thief works. Compared to some other classes saying staff in not viable is an insult....

Anyways staff is fine. I play it time to time. Get a lot of rage because of it. Vault spamming noob. Hehe. I guess my vault spamming noob ass is better than them.

Staff 3 and 4 are tbh the most usefull :p blind has low ciast time which makes it rly good. IMO staff is the most balanced set of thief