Comparing the Performance of Sceptre to other professions [WvW-PvP]

[Sahne.6950]

Sceptre needs some serious reworks / straight buffs.

Just take a look at Dragonstooth (Fire2)!

This skill is the hardest skill to hit in this entire universe. It used to be a reliable way of bursting someone if you succesfully "Galed" someone. But nowadays everyone and their dog has some sort of teleport that they can use while they are CCed, to just conveniantly blink out of the burst. If you are playing Freshairweaver for a week straight you will hit 3 Pheonixtooths AT BEST. Lets look at the Damage.. For this example we are using the Damagenumbers from Pvp and the possible Damageoutput of the classes if they are using Berserkeramulet and Rune of Divinity. If you hit a dragonstooth on someone and have all your buffs from Freshair and Arcanepower you are looking at a hit between 5k-7.5k Damage. 

MEANWHILE: Dragonhunter pressing 2 -> 1500 Range hit that does between 8k-12k Damage... DH using Bow5 -> EVERYONE in the area gets 7k-9k damage and is Caged....   A Juvenileriverdrake approaches you... Tailswipe -> 7k Damage.  A Garbinger drops a flippin Elixir on the ground -> 7k Damage. Harbinger using Voracious arc -> 7k-9k Damage Ranger using Rapidfire+OWP -> upwards of 35k Damage. Ranger using Maul -> upwards of 7k-8K Damage. Keep in mind that most of these skills are Targeted and dont require you to set them up with one of your only Hard CC´s like you have to do with Dragonstooth.

Those skills are significantly easier to land, are doing more damage, and some even have extra utilitys like a Cage or boons ontop. How is that fair?

I am well aware that not every profession should do equal damage, be able to do everything exactly the same way as other professions can do... but i think there is a HUUUUGE performance gap if we are looking at Sceptre/Staff and weapons/skills of newer professions.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[Exzen.2976]

As a Fresh air weaver main, and scepter enthusiast, I am not convinced about this. I do agree some other classes have way easier bursts and some do more dmg and need to be brought in line (I'm looking at you grenades), but any buff to scepter would need to be subtle or risk making the weapon OP. Maybe some of the underperforming skills, like earth auto + 3 and water auto + 3 could use some love, but the rest are decent. 

 

29 minutes ago, Sahne.6950 said:

If you are playing Freshairweaver for a week straight you will hit 3 Pheonixtooths AT BEST.

 

Haha, nah. I land them ALL the time. Dragonstooth is especially great to punish rezzers and it has a low enough cooldown that if you don't get them on the first CC, you usually will by the second or third. 

 

I do agree that staff needs some attention though.

[Dadnir.5038]

A buff to Shatterstone please! 😉

[Sahne.6950]

Agreed. you can use it to cleave downed targets. You must be REALL REALL REALLY bad to miss it on a downed target! xD  But even then landing a Dragonstooth only for it to deal 4k Damage, should the enemy have protection and even the slightest bit of Toughness just doesnt feel right. Just take a look at grenadescrapper as comparison. NADE NADE NADE NADE NADE -> every nade is doing potentially 10k+ damage. His flippin🐬 AA´s deal double the damage of the Dragonstooth!

"Nadescrapper is throwing his 5. set of grenades on you"... "Meanwhile in Dragonstoothtown your first cast did finally land after the almost 3 second casting."

The Damage is simply not in line with what the newer specs have brought to the table. When a Dragonstooth has the same Tooltip as a Elixir from Harbinger... there miight be something off with the balancing... just saying.

In my books the damage of skills should be tied to how hard it is to land them, how telegraphed they are, and the Cooldown of the skill.

Phoenixtooth is insanely hard to hit on a living, moving target, Is one of the most telegraphed skills there is, and yet its tooltip is less then that of a Rangermaul. Its just sad!

 

Shatterstone is bae!

Edited April 21, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[Sahne.6950]

1 hour ago, Exzen.2976 said:

but any buff to scepter would need to be subtle or risk making the weapon OP. Maybe some of the underperforming skills, like earth auto + 3 and water auto + 3 could use some love, but the rest are decent

i am not talking about some insane buffs. What sceptre needs is QoL things to make it relevant in this mobilitycreeped game.

I am just jerking around with some ideas, let me know what you think about them or how it could be done diffrently.

i wish that they would update the Phoenixtooth, because right now it is near impossible to land on someone. Most people run 2+ Stunbreaks and or a teleport. You sadly just have 2 HardCC´s on a FA, in other words... you VERY rarely will find a window where he cant break the Gale / or teleport right out of the Dragonstooth. Thus making landing the Dragonstooth near impossible.

I see 2 ways of fixing this.

a) Dragonstooth Casttime should be halved and Damage +10%. This will essentially make it easier and more rewarding to land.

or b) They lower the damage of Dragonstooth by approx 30% ,increase the cooldown to about 20+ seconds, it  can no longer be casted over the shoulder and make it a targeted skill.

The skill will follow the enemy and be visible over his head, so the enemy knows for sure that its coming. The skill will take 5 full seconds to land. In other words... You kinda have to dodge it when it lands, or tank the 3.5k Damage or whatever it will do after the 30% nerf. You can then use this Dragonstooth that is "ticking" on the enemy to line it up with a plasmabeam/whatever, to Burst the opponent.  This would make FA not that much reliant on CC, give FA a new way to burst and maybe make it viable in competetive gamemodes again.

 

Do you think this is to much? i think it is just about what Freshair needs to finally secure PowerElementalist a Place in the "Great" section for spvp and WvW on metabattle, because right now.. there is non!

Edited April 21, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

The core skills #3 really lack impact.

 

Blinding Flash hasn't got any review since GW2 release date ...
Blindness is cool, but in 2022 with so much "multi hits" "second hit" skills and effects, strike velocity increased and the overal powercreep ... only blindness on this skill without any hit is too weak. They should totally merg it with Lightning Strike.

Same with earth 3, water 3 ... Water AA could inflict vulnerability to not be totally useless.

 

[AliamRationem.5172]

2 hours ago, Sahne.6950 said:

Agreed. you can use it to cleave downed targets. You must be REALL REALL REALLY bad to miss it on a downed target! xD  But even then landing a Dragonstooth only for it to deal 4k Damage, should the enemy have protection and even the slightest bit of Toughness just doesnt feel right. Just take a look at grenadescrapper as comparison. NADE NADE NADE NADE NADE -> every nade is doing potentially 10k+ damage. His flippin🐬 AA´s deal double the damage of the Dragonstooth!

"Nadescrapper is throwing his 5. set of grenades on you"... "Meanwhile in Dragonstoothtown your first cast did finally land after the almost 3 second casting."

The Damage is simply not in line with what the newer specs have brought to the table. When a Dragonstooth has the same Tooltip as a Elixir from Harbinger... there miight be something off with the balancing... just saying.

In my books the damage of skills should be tied to how hard it is to land them, how telegraphed they are, and the Cooldown of the skill.

Phoenixtooth is insanely hard to hit on a living, moving target, Is one of the most telegraphed skills there is, and yet its tooltip is less then that of a Rangermaul. Its just sad!

 

Shatterstone is bae!

Some things are overtuned.  Grenades definitely make the list.  However, comparing dragon's tooth to nade auto spam in a vacuum is comparing apples to oranges.  If we're talking about the way scepter is typically used, we need to also take into account the easy damage you can chain with it.  Scepter FA has some beastly combos that it can pull off on basically no cooldown by rotating back and forth between fire and air.  It's not as safe or easy as nade spamming, but it's disingenuous to compare dragon's tooth as if it's some sort of one-trick-pony skill that should kill automatically by itself if it manages to land.

[Infinity.2876]

Not to mention that scepter has almost no mobility

Edited April 21, 2022 by Infinity.2876

[Sahne.6950]

17 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Some things are overtuned.  Grenades definitely make the list.  However, comparing dragon's tooth to nade auto spam in a vacuum is comparing apples to oranges.  If we're talking about the way scepter is typically used, we need to also take into account the easy damage you can chain with it.  Scepter FA has some beastly combos that it can pull off on basically no cooldown by rotating back and forth between fire and air.  It's not as safe or easy as nade spamming, but it's disingenuous to compare dragon's tooth as if it's some sort of one-trick-pony skill that should kill automatically by itself if it manages to land.

i am well aware that its not as easy as just comparing damagenumbers. But even if we consider the bigger picture...  The risk,reward for using a dragonstooth is no comparison to anything else in the game right now. I am playig a shitton of FA.. and casting your dragonstooth is mostly a waste of time.  except for downstatecleaving.

sceptre desperatly needs... SOMETHING. only the top 10% eles can make it work consistently. And even then they would be better of with playing Swordweaver most of the time.

After 2020 dmg nerf and 2021 change to element of range sceptre is just a shadow of its former self. FA was not dominant before, neither was it considerd meta or anything else... Then it got nerfed...twice... for... reasons...

 

Edited April 22, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[AliamRationem.5172]

Just now, Infinity.2876 said:

Not to mention that scepter has almost no mobility

Not built in, but if you're playing Scepter FA you'd be crazy not to take super speed on demand.

[Dadnir.5038]

1 hour ago, Sahne.6950 said:

a) Dragonstooth Casttime should be halved and Damage +10%. This will essentially make it easier and more rewarding to land.

The issue of dragontooth isn't it's cast time but it's the time it take to form and land, it's delay. The cast time itself is pretty quick and don't need any buff.

There is 2 problems in your thread:

- The first is that you focus on dragontooth as it is far from being the worst skill of the scepter.

- The second is that you compare the elementalist's scepter to other profession's scepter by seemingly narowing your point of view to fire attunment alone. Elementalist's scepter is 12 skills that can all be used within 10s while other professions' scepter are just 3 skills that you are "forced" to live with for 10s (it's not entirely true for all professions but that's still something important in the balance of scepter).

 

Now, what do elementalist's scepter need? Personally, I think:

- Fire: Dragontooth radius increased to 240.

- Water: Increase overall damage by a lot. Water trident isn't good enough to justify low damage on water scepter (The heal isn't exceptional, the CD is sky high and the skill itself is horrendous to use).

- Air: Put some damage onto blinding flash. It's a single target skill that merely prevent a single attack, just give it a bit of appeal.

- Earth: Good enough.

 

[Sahne.6950]

3 minutes ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

The issue of dragontooth isn't it's cast time but it's the time it take to form and land, it's delay. The cast time itself is pretty quick and don't need any buff.

There is 2 problems in your thread:

- The first is that you focus on dragontooth as it is far from being the worst skill of the scepter.

- The second is that you compare the elementalist's scepter to other profession's scepter by seemingly narowing your point of view to fire attunment alone. Elementalist's scepter is 12 skills that can all be used within 10s while other professions' scepter are just 3 skills that you are "forced" to live with for 10s (it's not entirely true for all professions but that's still something important in the balance of scepter).

 

Now, what do elementalist's scepter need? Personally, I think:

- Fire: Dragontooth radius increased to 240.

- Water: Increase overall damage by a lot. Water trident isn't good enough to justify low damage on water scepter (The heal isn't exceptional, the CD is sky high and the skill itself is horrendous to use).

- Air: Put some damage onto blinding flash. It's a single target skill that merely prevent a single attack, just give it a bit of appeal.

- Earth: Good enough.

 

i was focusing on Dragonstooth, because it is the skil that suffered the most from all the Stabi/stunbreak/teleport inflation that we are having since the last 2 expansions. You are just hitting a fraction of the Dragonstooths that you would have hit 8 years ago. I remember my FA from Core days and Dragonstooth was a big part of you burst... nowadays... it is not. Some things need updating for sure and most notable it is Dragonstooth imo.

you have some nice ideas there! i like it. But simply increasing the radius of Dragonstooth wont help a tiny bit sadly. Everyone and their dog can teleport while CCed... this is whats screwing Dragonstooth the most.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[Infinity.2876]

10 minutes ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

 

- Air: Put some damage onto blinding flash. It's a single target skill that merely prevent a single attack, just give it a bit of appeal.

 

 

Or just change the entire skill because you already have dust devil (you would need to make it aoe of course),

Personally dragons tooth is like maul on ranger great sword except a longer cast time and you don't have an on demand cc which instantly refreshes it and it does roughly the same damage

Edit: very very roughly and ok that might have been a stretch but whatever

Edited April 21, 2022 by Infinity.2876

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

3 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Some things are overtuned.  Grenades definitely make the list.  However, comparing dragon's tooth to nade auto spam in a vacuum is comparing apples to oranges.  If we're talking about the way scepter is typically used, we need to also take into account the easy damage you can chain with it.  Scepter FA has some beastly combos that it can pull off on basically no cooldown by rotating back and forth between fire and air.  It's not as safe or easy as nade spamming, but it's disingenuous to compare dragon's tooth as if it's some sort of one-trick-pony skill that should kill automatically by itself if it manages to land.

 

But  you're talking about weaver, dual attunement and dual attacks from scepter in reality. You learn to chain dual attacks first (air/earth <> fire/air, or fire/earth > air etc) because your pressure, your damage, come from here . Then it's also  easier to hit with dragon's tooth, may be Phoenix, when you have Gale nearby on your skillbar, or when you have 3.5-4sec CD on fire attunement, or Unravel, or Weaveself.
But core scepter in itself has no "beastly combos", all mechanics and skills arround disguise it. Like you put a grenade-launcher on your NERF pistol.

 

Core scepter doesn't exist, catalyst scepter won't exist, tempest scepter exists ... on SC benchmark, and scepter weaver is a niche with really high learning curve but clearly not sustained by a cheesy weapon.

[Dadnir.5038]

17 minutes ago, Infinity.2876 said:

Or just change the entire skill because you already have dust devil (you would need to make it aoe of course),

I think it would be fine with a bit of damage. It's an instant skill with basically no tell, so a bit of damage would simply complement a bit the single target burst of Fresh air builds.

[Einlanzer.1627]

It's definitely too reliant on Fresh Air and could use some improvements, but, to be fair, Scepter/x is infinitely more playable than Staff is. 

Edited April 21, 2022 by Einlanzer.1627

[Infinity.2876]

19 minutes ago, Einlanzer.1627 said:

It's definitely too reliant on Fresh Air and could use some improvements, but, to be fair, Scepter/x is infinitely more playable than Staff is. 

 

I like staff better but I am a biased opinion and I have played staff core so much it's almost second nature. (I like wizards alot)

To be fair staff fire five is only helpful if you have an elemental in ow with and another player distracting adds and is even worse than Dragon tooth

Edited April 21, 2022 by Infinity.2876