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Is sword weaver too strong or staff ele need a buff?


crepuscular.9047

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I been playing staff tempest because of my laziness of sticking to vanilla days of playing staff ele, finally got into playing sword weaver because wanting to get the PvP's year of ascension ranked class APs done (was the only class never played in pvp)

while I waiting i ran around maps gathering nodes, I was utterly shocked at how ridiculously strong sword/dagger weaver is, killing any regular mobs in 2 seconds with fire sword skill 2 or fire/lightning skill 3 follow by auto attacks, and vet and elites barely hits for anything even without knowing the proper rotations and proper trait setup (planning switching back to staff, hence just left the 2 regular trait to fire and arcane as it was, and weaver trait just anything)while if I used staff it would kill same mob nowhere as fast, not to mention sustain, pretty much running around in circles kiting to not get hit

anyone else feel staff ele needs a serious buff for PvE?

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Staff needs a buff badly but sword weaver has way too much staying power for sure.

But dagger scpter and foces even WH for tempest need massive updates too.

Sword the odd ball in the bunch because it dose not act like an ele wepon it acts like a normal wepon with combos auto attks. It also not a one task tool wepon like all of eles other weapons. Weaver sword has real flexibility unlike all of the weapons on ele. Its weird for a class that cant wepon swap it lacks a lot of flexibility in its attk types and the roll of that one chosen wepon.

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Staff has a delayed burst so pretty much any weapon in the game will take down foes faster than it. In squads, it's easier to play staff because you don't have to move a lot. Also, it's highly boon reliant, especially Quickness and Alacrity, so that the delayed burst is sooner and the main damaging skills are shorter on cooldowns.

Regarding Sword being strong, it would be in a fine/bit op spot if Ele can play offensive while still maintaining good sustain and defense, but that's not the case, as the weaknesses of Ele are too many that sword can't cover it.

However, say we were speaking of a class made for PvP, then surely staff needs a buff. It's like a glass cannon build - low hp, low armor, almost no defensive skills, low sustain. In WvW, I run full berserk except the amulet, and do I feel rewarded enough/at all for that? No. The skills are too slow given that they provide almost the same damage unless the enemy makes mistakes and then you will be top damage, but the thing in WvW is that mistakes are made most of the times, so that juicy damage is always there, but try going against an organized guild or a melee ball. The weapon lacks any defensive capabilities to temporarily protect itself. Not to mention the 0 utility it provides to the squad (well, it used to, because arcane line was capable of capping 1-2 boons if weavers were stacked in PvE).

It's an all-in-one weapon, so being below sword is fine, but it's below by a lot, especially that Ele doesn't build on all sides. I would go for a buff, not just in PvE, however, everyone is scared of staff reigning over raids/fractals again and I understand that, just like how I wasn't able to be as effective as a DH or DD in raids.

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@"Auburner.6945" said:Staff has a delayed burst so pretty much any weapon in the game will take down foes faster than it. In squads, it's easier to play staff because you don't have to move a lot. Also, it's highly boon reliant, especially Quickness and Alacrity, so that the delayed burst is sooner and the main damaging skills are shorter on cooldowns.

Regarding Sword being strong, it would be in a fine/bit op spot if Ele can play offensive while still maintaining good sustain and defense, but that's not the case, as the weaknesses of Ele are too many that sword can't cover it.

However, say we were speaking of a class made for PvP, then surely staff needs a buff. It's like a glass cannon build - low hp, low armor, almost no defensive skills, low sustain. In WvW, I run full berserk except the amulet, and do I feel rewarded enough/at all for that? No. The skills are too slow given that they provide almost the same damage unless the enemy makes mistakes and then you will be top damage, but the thing in WvW is that mistakes are made most of the times, so that juicy damage is always there, but try going against an organized guild or a melee ball. The weapon lacks any defensive capabilities to temporarily protect itself. Not to mention the 0 utility it provides to the squad (well, it used to, because arcane line was capable of capping 1-2 boons if weavers were stacked in PvE).

It's an all-in-one weapon, so being below sword is fine, but it's below by a lot, especially that Ele doesn't build on all sides. I would go for a buff, not just in PvE, however, everyone is scared of staff reigning over raids/fractals again and I understand that, just like how I wasn't able to be as effective as a DH or DD in raids.

yeah, I played staff ele in WvW, is a totally different gameplay from PvE and PvP, people just stack in groups and bunker down at a points, which makes staff extremely effctive against zerg groups; yes, it is strong, but how i feel is Anet dealt with the complaints, they should just indicate "get adjusted, shift your position around and dont run in straight lines. if you see giant red circle, you should quickly dodge out and run around it", not nerf ele staff... I'm just leave wvw out of this

while in PvP, other than point fights, they are just an easy moving target

in pretty much of all rpgs, a 2-handed weapon's baseline dps damage is generally around1.5x greater than a single 1-handed weapon (primary 100%, offhand scaled to ~60-75%)while 2nd may be slow, but will hit much much harder through modifiers to compensate against dual wielding's quick attack speed... if looking at the basic fire auto, a fireball's 404 may need to be increased to 550 against fire strike's 242? (dont know how update the wiki is, my maths' probably wrong)

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Like Auburner said, staff's burst is usually delayed. Not always though. On staff weaver vs a raid golem you can get close to the sw/d DPS if you're doing the rotation right. Not directing this next statement at OP or anyone here, nor am I meaning to sound smug, but, in my experience most staff eles in t4 fractals have NO idea what they're doing and usually are the lowest DPS in the entire party. But it really doesn't need to be that way.

I'm too lazy to type/explain the rotation in detail but there are combos on weaver which serve as excellent bursts, i.e. air 2, arcane wave, earth/air dual skill, fireball and lava font are often underrated in effectiveness (9000 damage auto attacks with self-generated might ...), even ice spike and eruption are worth including in a rotation vs open world mobs.

If you're running the right build, pretty much everything you do on staff should hurt a lot. One might argue that if you go too glassy you'll die to a lot of mobs and, well, twist of fate, using burning retreat off cooldown as an evade, dodge, arcane shield, chilling/crippling/stunning/immobing/knockdown your foes (all things you can do with staff), etc all do a pretty great job of solving that.

I'm gonna link part of a video that demonstrates one way you can use staff in PVE, but this is not the rotation. This rotation was intentionally done in a very bursty manner because the lord was going down very quickly.

This link should play the video at the correct time, it's just a very short clip, but if it doesn't just skip to 9:55

..... that being said, if you're in pve land I'd recommend running sw/d anyway. It is objectively better. My point is just that staff, in the right hands, is still quite good

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@"SoulSlavocracy.4902" said:Like Auburner said, staff's burst is usually delayed. Not always though. On staff weaver vs a raid golem you can get close to the sw/d DPS if you're doing the rotation right. Not directing this next statement at OP or anyone here, nor am I meaning to sound smug, but, in my experience most staff eles in t4 fractals have NO idea what they're doing and usually are the lowest DPS in the entire party. But it really doesn't need to be that way.

I'm too lazy to type/explain the rotation in detail but there are combos on weaver which serve as excellent bursts, i.e. air 2, arcane wave, earth/air dual skill, fireball and lava font are often underrated in effectiveness (9000 damage auto attacks with self-generated might ...), even ice spike and eruption are worth including in a rotation vs open world mobs.

If you're running the right build, pretty much everything you do on staff should hurt a lot. One might argue that if you go too glassy you'll die to a lot of mobs and, well, twist of fate, using burning retreat off cooldown as an evade, dodge, arcane shield, chilling/crippling/stunning/immobing/knockdown your foes (all things you can do with staff), etc all do a pretty great job of solving that.

I'm gonna link part of a video that demonstrates one way you can use staff in PVE, but this is not the rotation. This rotation was intentionally done in a very bursty manner because the lord was going down very quickly.

This link should play the video at the correct time, it's just a very short clip, but if it doesn't just skip to 9:55

..... that being said, if you're in pve land I'd recommend running sw/d anyway. It is objectively better. My point is just that staff, in the right hands, is still quite good

you're right actually, totally forgot about the dmg potential of staff weaver of the dual element skill 3, i was only looking at the core staff

perhaps lower the dmg of the dual elemental ones and buff the core ones?

being glassy is totally fine, just need greater dmg in return, not high sustain high dmg like mirage, which is brokenly imbalanced (in PvP and WvW anyway, havent played after rebalance, not sure if that is still the case)

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It might depend on what you’re using it for - e.g. in open world, most trash mobs have on average ~20k hp, which the ‘aoe stacking’ nature of staff (2+4+2+4+6+2) is surpassed by the more ‘sequential’ sword + dagger which deals meatier packets of dmg (8+8+6). This is further exaggerated on warhorn tempest which deals a bunch of 1.5-2.5k crits, but at least does it significantly faster than staff.

Most core weapons are weak in comparison to espec weapons, and the PvE dmg the class brings itself is mostly carried by conjures or the espec mechanic - tempest is a better option than core, not only because warhorn, but the fresh air + overload interaction. Weaver removes the need to attune into ‘useless’ elements whilst also reducing the drawback of reattuning with its 4s global cd. The new weapons make attuning into air actually desirable and is a significant dps increase opposed to camping fire, making fresh air builds a thing (a core trait that’s largely useless for core builds).

All the weapons appear to have finally received actual updates with weaver in the form of dual skills, but sadly this is completely inaccessible by core builds. Weaver staff is undeniably better dmg-wise than core staff, who would gladly trade their some of their #3’s for dual skills since attunement dancing to use high dmg skills means jacksquat when you’re still locked out fire by the end of it. Tempest ignores most of this since it has the fresh air + overload interaction, but the period of time it spends before overloading is painful w/o conjures since air skills are sad to use.

Reusing one of my ideas, it would interesting if (weaver) staff and sword dealt close dmg, with staff being slightly under but with a noticeably burstier dps. Otherwise, core staff could get some buffs to some of their non-fire 3-5 skills, because currently they are 9/20 of staff skills a dps build will rarely touch.

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@Noodle Ant.1605 said:It might depend on what you’re using it for - e.g. in open world, most trash mobs have on average ~20k hp, which the ‘aoe stacking’ nature of staff (2+4+2+4+6+2) is surpassed by the more ‘sequential’ sword + dagger which deals meatier packets of dmg (8+8+6). This is further exaggerated on warhorn tempest which deals a bunch of 1.5-2.5k crits, but at least does it significantly faster than staff.

Most core weapons are weak in comparison to espec weapons, and the PvE dmg the class brings itself is mostly carried by conjures or the espec mechanic - tempest is a better option than core, not only because warhorn, but the fresh air + overload interaction. Weaver removes the need to attune into ‘useless’ elements whilst also reducing the drawback of reattuning with its 4s global cd. The new weapons make attuning into air actually desirable and is a significant dps increase opposed to camping fire, making fresh air builds a thing (a core trait that’s largely useless for core builds).

All the weapons appear to have finally received actual updates with weaver in the form of dual skills, but sadly this is completely inaccessible by core builds. Weaver staff is undeniably better dmg-wise than core staff, who would gladly trade their some of their #3’s for dual skills since attunement dancing to use high dmg skills means jacksquat when you’re still locked out fire by the end of it. Tempest ignores most of this since it has the fresh air + overload interaction, but the period of time it spends before overloading is painful w/o conjures since air skills are sad to use.

Reusing one of my ideas, it would interesting if (weaver) staff and sword dealt close dmg, with staff being slightly under but with a noticeably burstier dps. Otherwise, core staff could get some buffs to some of their non-fire 3-5 skills, because currently they are 9/20 of staff skills a dps build will rarely touch.

Staff just needs better air and earth skills. That would be enough to make it good for core and especially tempest. I hate that you are forced to use clunky conjures.

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Core staff ele is great in both WvW and open world. Many folks over complicate it though, which weakens their damage. Its actually an exceedingly braindead minimalistic playstyle, which people avoid because they expect the game to not reward literally autoattacking and using skill 2 to do the majority of your damage. But that’s how you do it optimally. Serious.

Fireball autoattack twice, lava font, meteor shower off cooldown, back to fireball autos and lava font, more fireball autos and lava font, meteor off cooldown... when you have a few seconds to spare you can do a quick chain cast through attunements I.e. cast: earth 2+5, air 2+5, water 2+4 (+possibly 3/5 for sustain) then right back into fire attunement to spam fireball.

Sadly I’m pretty sure that if you do it any other way you will be wasting your damage potential.

Also core staff ele should be running fire 2(or 1)/1/2, air 3/3/1, arcane 2/3/3. I recommend ether renewal, arcane wave, lightning flash and Armour of earth (or whatever the name of the stability+protection cantrip skill is)

this is soulslavocracy.#### from above btw, just posting on my alt

Edit: I’d like to add that I do feel like both core staff ele and staff weaver, and sw/d weaver are all functioning as intended. It’s TOO easy to complain about things that are difficult, especially the younger you are. No instant gratification = this build sux. I am sincerely not mocking anyone by saying this, just making a general observation of the state of affairs. Ele needs some improvements ... but not many, not many at all.

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Staff dmg was nerfed due to over-performing in raids/fotm with weaver.Its a complicated issue, as staff relies on slow-cast long lasting effects (dmg fields, pulsating effects) with long CD hidden behind attunement CD. A elite spec that reduce those attunement CD and gives you extra skills between those attunements will therefore improve the use of the weapon.

Right now staff is in a complicated spot.

In open-world is ok due to open-world being completely easy and you can even do fine without any weapons and using just conjures or whatever... Other than that, the AoE, range and CC of staff is great to kill groups of weak easy mobs.In WvW staff is good due to the zergy nature of fights, as long as you build your utilities with all mobility skills and defense you can (LF, ToF, Mist Form, Arcane Shield, FGS) to avoid being rolled over by enemy zerg. Its overshadowed by the sheer power of revs and scourges, but that is more due to those classes OPness than to the lack of dmg on staff itself.In FoTM/raids staff does poorly as you need to be in melee (so the range is of no benefit) and in melee sword out-dps staff. As a healing tempest is good, but the lack of auras makes Sc/W or D/W a better choice for auramancer support/healing.In PvP (at least against not braindead opponents) staff is a death-wish. Sure its great to hit people in points with all your area skills, but staff lacks defense and mobility, making you very vulnerable to any class with teleports (basically mesmers, thiefs, revs, guards, sw weavers) or any class with a strong ranged burst (basically everyone else). And sure, you can go air/arcane/weaver and pack in some superspeed, ToF, arcane shields, and try to run and dodge anyone that chases you, but that will make you useless to your team by being constantly chased (and most rev/war/ranger burst will get through your arcane shield and kill you).

Imo, staff needs more condi dmg in fire and earth and more burst in air.Fireball, Lava font and meteor shower needs to apply short burns. Flame burst needs to copy the burns from the target to 5 targets around it (like a burn epi)Lightening surge needs to be a fast channeling multi-hit, or hit much, much harderStoning needs to pulse cripple before it explodes in bleeds.Then the core traitlines need to be improved so that core staff is viable in PvE and at least worth the risk in PvP. Elemental lines and arcane need more synergy to make it a viable alternative to weaver.

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They should bring back lava font's damage and buff meteor shower--but instead of front loading MS's damage, make the harder hits at the end of the channel.

And then maybe nerf either weaver modifiers slightly, or fire/earth 3 and fire/air 3 for staff, so staff weeb's aren't out of control again... It made no sense to nerf staff so hard when they could have adjusted the weaver only aspects of it.

I do remember WvW people crying about Meteor Shower before the nerfs too, but making the harder hits at the end of the channel instead of the beginning would help balance it for pvp vs pve... Since like, if you stand in an entire MS channel you deserve to die.

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@narcx.3570 said:They should bring back lava font's damage and buff meteor shower--but instead of front loading MS's damage, make the harder hits at the end of the channel.

And then maybe nerf either weaver modifiers slightly, or fire/earth 3 and fire/air 3 for staff, so staff weeb's aren't out of control again... It made no sense to nerf staff so hard when they could have adjusted the weaver only aspects of it.

I do remember WvW people crying about Meteor Shower before the nerfs too, but making the harder hits at the end of the channel instead of the beginning would help balance it for pvp vs pve... Since like, if you stand in an entire MS channel you deserve to die.

I agree with everything you said, but the only reason why people cried about Meteor Shower was because it was bugged for like a week or so, doing crazy amounts of unjustified damage, which was capable of one-shotting people with ease. Standing in one of those back then was suicide, unlike now.

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@"crepuscular.9047" said:

in pretty much of all rpgs, a 2-handed weapon's baseline dps damage is generally around1.5x greater than a single 1-handed weapon (primary 100%, offhand scaled to ~60-75%)while 2nd may be slow, but will hit much much harder through modifiers to compensate against dual wielding's quick attack speed... if looking at the basic fire auto, a fireball's 404 may need to be increased to 550 against fire strike's 242? (dont know how update the wiki is, my maths' probably wrong)

This isn't how Guild Wars 2 behaves, though. In other RPGs, the increased damage of two-handed weapons is offset through having faster attacks due to dual-wielding (as you note yourself) or the improved tankiness of having a shield. In Guild Wars 2, though, this is reflected through weapon stats: a two-handed weapon usually has roughly the same weapon stats as the combined weapon stats of dual-wielding (while shields have slightly lower weapon strength in exchange for providing a small armour boost). So as a rule, weapon choice is more about skills than a simple "two handed weapons do more damage at the expense of attack speed and/or defensive benefits".

With that said, though... I think staff ele is a bit weak at the moment.

The reason being that staff ele, especially fire, is optimised for fighting enemies with predictable movements (or entirely stationary), large health pools, and ideally large hitboxes to fully realise the potential DPS of the elementalist's fire fields. In practice, this translates to staff elementalist being optimised for raid bosses, which often have these characteristics. There are other situations where we see these characteristics (such as stationary world event bosses), but it's raids that we'll focus on.

The problem is that ArenaNet balances PvE based on raid performance. Unsurprisingly, since staff elementalist is essentially optimised for fighting raid bosses more than other professions, it dominated in the raid DPS role, and got nerfed as a result. However, the other DPS builds that staff elementalist was being compared to do not require such specific conditions to maximise their DPS, and can therefore still maximise their DPS in most other situations as well, while staff elementalist can't. As a result, balancing staff elementalist for raid conditions means it underperforms in most scenarios that aren't raid-like.

I think the solution is to buff the skills on other attunements, so the staff elementalist can still have options in situations where fire is less useful. So camping fire might still be the best option in raid-like conditions, but they actually have practical options for situations where laying down fire fields is less useful. One possible start, for instance, could be to make it so that if Chain Lightning has no other valid bounces, it can bounce back to the elementalist (even if this bounce provides no benefit to the elementalist) - this would effectively double the DPS from Chain Lightning against single targets.

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@"lLobo.7960" said:Staff dmg was nerfed due to over-performing in raids/fotm with weaver.Its a complicated issue, as staff relies on slow-cast long lasting effects (dmg fields, pulsating effects) with long CD hidden behind attunement CD. A elite spec that reduce those attunement CD and gives you extra skills between those attunements will therefore improve the use of the weapon.

Right now staff is in a complicated spot.

In open-world is ok due to open-world being completely easy and you can even do fine without any weapons and using just conjures or whatever... Other than that, the AoE, range and CC of staff is great to kill groups of weak easy mobs.In WvW staff is good due to the zergy nature of fights, as long as you build your utilities with all mobility skills and defense you can (LF, ToF, Mist Form, Arcane Shield, FGS) to avoid being rolled over by enemy zerg. Its overshadowed by the sheer power of revs and scourges, but that is more due to those classes OPness than to the lack of dmg on staff itself.In FoTM/raids staff does poorly as you need to be in melee (so the range is of no benefit) and in melee sword out-dps staff. As a healing tempest is good, but the lack of auras makes Sc/W or D/W a better choice for auramancer support/healing.In PvP (at least against not braindead opponents) staff is a death-wish. Sure its great to hit people in points with all your area skills, but staff lacks defense and mobility, making you very vulnerable to any class with teleports (basically mesmers, thiefs, revs, guards, sw weavers) or any class with a strong ranged burst (basically everyone else). And sure, you can go air/arcane/weaver and pack in some superspeed, ToF, arcane shields, and try to run and dodge anyone that chases you, but that will make you useless to your team by being constantly chased (and most rev/war/ranger burst will get through your arcane shield and kill you).

Imo, staff needs more condi dmg in fire and earth and more burst in air.Fireball, Lava font and meteor shower needs to apply short burns. Flame burst needs to copy the burns from the target to 5 targets around it (like a burn epi)Lightening surge needs to be a fast channeling multi-hit, or hit much, much harderStoning needs to pulse cripple before it explodes in bleeds.Then the core traitlines need to be improved so that core staff is viable in PvE and at least worth the risk in PvP. Elemental lines and arcane need more synergy to make it a viable alternative to weaver.

Its not complected at all gw2 raid devs do not know how to balancing there content so they make the class balance devs mutate classes that where not made for a 3 class system into a 3 class system. That and we lost out ele dev so its a zombly class that is comply at the wims of every given game type of the week balancing.

Staff is badly underpowerd for its effect and is worthless for most of the game types.

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