Staff Weaver viability?

[TheJmandude.1548]

So I've been playing staff Weaver for a while now, and I've begun to notice people in fractals telling me that staff is dead. A lot of groups I've been in they've told me my dps was fine, but they were most likely casual groups. Should I change to a different weapon setup or should I stay on staff?P.S. Would definitely suck if staff was that bad since it's my only ascended weapon and I spent 200+ gold on the ley staff skin.

[Auburner.6945]

While it's not listed on snowcrows for raids, it still can hit up to 30k vs sword's ~35k.

Regarding staff, the problem is the delayed burst damage compared to sword. There was a post close to this but WvW; sword's damage is like 4+3+4+5+6+4+4+5+3 which shows close numbers and thus consistent damage, and burst (from utilities). Staff on the other hand has a pattern of 1+1+2+8+9+9+5+3+1, which shows how it's not the best to clear things quickly or burst down/phase bosses in the same manner; shattered observatory is a good example when the boss phases. Yet if you can ensure staying on the boss for a little while for the burst to come off, it's the only reason to bring it as the burst of staff is quite high.

Shetsa - a snowcrows member - had a video where they played condi weaver on Soulless Horror with pugs and was leading the DPS over mirages and scourges, hitting 30k+ DPS at the end of the fight and came on top in bursting. Although it's not recommended to play condi weaver as it's probably the build that requires boons the most, but if you can play it with great success, I don't see any problem with staff. Unfortunately, some parties in LFG might ask you to switch to sword or leave if they only follow the 5/5 meta, or if they asked for it in the description, thus, sword will remove this type of struggle.

To not try to sugar-coat things, it is no longer meta since the meteor shower and lava font nerfs as they were the bread and butter of the damage output, so you will probably get comments on your weapon choice unless you can prove them wrong if they gave you a chance.

[lLobo.7960]

The issue with staff for most fractals is the delayed burst and wasting dps at boss phases with your fields (like having only part of your lava fount or MS tick before the boss goes invul). Both of this issues can be overcome if the player is really good at pre-casting and knows the fight perfectly to not waste dps on phase changes.

Staff can actually be better in some PUGs where the fights get out of hand (like MAMA not phasing at the right time and staying longer on the acid pool, making sword unable to dps, while staff can keep going).

Staff is not dead and is not crap, it just has better alternative on most of the current fights and group compositions.That being said, if you can still do decent dps with staff on fractals without compromising your group, there should be no reason for you to not use it.As mentioned above, if your are polite to the group and can pull your weight any decent group will not have issues with it.

[TheJmandude.1548]

Wow, that's a lot of info in two posts. Thanks for taking the time to relay it to me!

[LazySummer.2568]

why would you use a lower dps weapon that actually provides 0 cc and requires every single boon from fb to even get good dps? it's pretty dead aside from ranging deimos and tryhard precasting MS before fight starts then switching to sword or messing around in open world pve.