Rhyse.8179

Staff is great for a Chill Of Death condi build. Scepter is better for sustained DPS, but you can open with staff for a condi burst and it's also good for emergency LF generation, condi cleanse or cc. Not the primary weapon but still an important part of the build. If you have good timing with your shroud bombs, you can get the condi burst and CC without having to wait 10s to swap by using shroud during the CD time. In other builds it's dreadfully weak as others have said, and is only good for skill 4 and 5 and for LF generation.

Did it with Firebrand. Took 3 tries to get the block/blind timing down, but otherwise was trivial. He dies in about 10 seconds once you get past both break bars. Liadri was much harder, although even that was mostly due to lag caused by the boss fights below ruining my dodge timing. If you guys want a real challenge, do it on a Core Necro :P

IMO, Necro and Firebrand/Guardian rule solo encounters. Everything has viable builds, but these are top of the heap. Guard (Firebrand in particular)- Lots of active mitigation (aegis), self healing, and toughness, all while pumping out plenty of damage to solo champs in record time. Whether it's AOE'ing 10 trash mobs or dropping a champ solo the same build can do both. Necro- Soaks hits like a boss. Reaper can burst like crazy while soaking the needed hits, or you can do MM necro is basically faceroll and the top choice for lazy PVE.

My buddy gets this bug on his laptop (wireless) and I've literally never heard of or seen it (corded) - and it went away when he swapped to a corded connection. So it may be related to packet loss.

It's unsatisfying because it's a zero-counterplay weapon. Autoattack. DPS circle. Root target in DPS circle if no defiance bar. That's it. No blocks, aegis, boons, boon strip, conditional skills, mobility, combos, no setup and payoff. It's fundamentally boring to use. The graphics don't help, they are boring as well. That said, that's ok. Every class should have at least one low skill floor, brainless weapon. That's fine. So my preferred fix is to overhaul staff into a ranged support weapon (similar to trident). Don't need to change scepter if it's not the only choice anymore.

I tried dagger recently with a Power/Core build and it was not bad. It actually works really well if you consider it as a companion to Life Blast. I do wish it got better synergy with Vampiric Presence, The ICD hurt dagger quite a bit. If only axe had an AOE, or if focus 4 didn't bounce, it'd be a strong setup.

No. GW2 has been such a perpetual break it/fix it cycle of love and hate that I will never trust another game from Anet ever again.

That's right, this issue is 12 years old, it was never fixed, GW2 inherited when it used a modified GW1 engine, the design team 5 years ago decided to make an entire class based on it anyway, and today they are covering up the problem by selectively breaking certain pets that would show otherwise off the flaw. This is why people don't trust your game design.