Please please please just make Staff worth it

[Knote.2904]

I'm so sad after 10 years Ele staff is one of the only weapons in the game in such an awkward spot. I love my Ele and the dagger/melee battle mage thing has grown on me but as dumb as it sounds, I want to have some magey build/wardrobe themes with staff and have the slow powerful mage archetype playstyle so badly. I only do spvp and wvw roaming at this point and occasionally I'll keep giving it a try only to be extremely disappointed. 

The healing and CC/utility is there, it's 100% just that the dmg is completely non-existent on top of how slow it is, if that alone could be fixed, it'd probably be alright. The last patch notes damage boost for Water/Lightning #2 is laughable. They're still a legit long spell cast time that amounts to a mild slap on someone.

The slow speed and setup nature of staff is fantastic and I don't want it to be faster or easier to use, I just want it to be worth it. Watch someone running sceptre setting up damage spikes that are slow and it has actual pay off.  It's really bizarre that Fire/Lightning both don't hit very hard, and the autos in general are weak. Lightning is basically just packed with no damage utilities.

I don't care about PvE target dummy DPS balance, so consider these for pvp/wvw at least.

Easiest/Realistic Changes I care about most: 
 

- Lava Font now applies 2 seconds of burn per interval

- Flame Burst now applies 2 extra stacks of burn if the target has no burn

- Meteor Shower cast time takes half the time it normally needs to achieve the max duration

- Lightning Surge (#2 skill) now has a beam to the target, and target up to 3 additional enemies within 300 radius (forked lightning like Mirage Greatsword Ambush). Base damage and coefficient is doubled.

- Ice Spike base damage and coefficient increase by 50% 
- Eruption now applies 1 bleed and 1/2 seconds of cripple every 1/2 second during its 3 second delay, strike damage and blast finisher at the end remains the same. Same net damage with 6 stacks of bleed, but makes a condi reliant build more reliable, as well as gives a lacking cripple condition in the earth skill set.

Optional changes to make autos decent (awkward for pve/pvp splitting): 

- Double all cast speeds for auto attacks

- Fire auto attack now applies 1 second of burn and does -25% less strike damage.

- Earth auto attack now applies 2 seconds of weakness instead of 3

- Water auto attack applies 2 stacks of vulnerability for 6s and the heal now applies in a 360 radius along with 1 second of regeneration

Fun/unrealistic changes that would require a rework (includes the above changes):

- Meteor Shower has half the cast time and now brings down 1 massive meteor after channeling, dealing massive damage and leaving a fire field on the ground.
- Gust removed
- Windbourne Speed now knocks back enemies 400 distance within 300 radius, and launches enemies 400 distance within 180 radius.
- New Lightning Skill:
--- Lightning Strike. 1.5 second cast time to instantly strike targeted area with a massive damage lightning strike in a 240 radius. Nothing fancy, just massive strike damage.

In the end though, I don't care about my ideas, please just make staff a usable weapon. It doesn't make sense to make staff the "support but no damage" weapon when you also pigeonhole elements into those categories already where water is "support but no damage". Staff is almost usable, but in the end I always end up doing zero damage pressure with it in realistic scenarios, and the healing/cc isn't any better (or worse) than the alternatives from my experience. 

Edited September 9, 2022 by Knote.2904

[the krytan assassin.9235]

For strikes & raids staff is actually pretty decent on some encounters. Due to the nature of the staff skills i dont see any future for spvp builds.

For WvW i agree that staff is in an incredibly awkward spot right now. Wvw balance has always been balanced by giving every class 1-2 broken mechanics giving them a unique function within the zerg. Unfortunately due to excess amount of stability, reflection and Burst dps reduction some classes are practically useless now. Unfortunately staff got destroyed on all 3 aspects. The main feature of ele was always its ability to deal massive amounts of aoe Burst dps, but unfortunately nowadays it gets  easily beaten by Guardian and rev. Although boosting the staff's damage potential would be a step in the right direction, the entire wvw balance needs an overhaul. Ele, thief and ranger are unfortunately just worthless nowadays. 

[Zunki.3916]

Would really love staff fire 1 getting a projectile finisher to at least make it a bit better on cata. Nothing ground breaking, but also thematically a good thing Id say.

Earth auto could give bleed without being op too.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Zunki.3916
earth auto

[draxynnic.3719]

Kinda surprised that you didn't propose a change to air auto. Personally, I'd like to see Chain Lightning deal extra damage to the first target if there's nothing to bounce to. Air is traditionally the single-target attunement, although on staff this is moderated by staff being more AoE-focused - but it would be nice if having two targets rather than one wasn't quadrupling CL's total output.

Not sure about removing Gust altogether, but realistically Gust ain't getting a worthwhile damage coefficient in competitive. What I'd like to see, though, is that in prerelease there used to be an air skill on the weapon that functioned like scepter* that created a damage field with a graphic of lightning emanating outwards from a single point (somewhat similar to Chaos Storm, except not purple and a lot more lightning). Be nice to see that come back, especially since it would combo nicely with Static Field.

*There was a period really early on when scepter was a PBAOE weapon while dagger was the midrange single-target weapon, but they were swapped around. Interestingly, fire 1 remained on the original weapon - Dragon's Claw had its range reduced, while Flame Burst was given range rather than being a PBAOE.

[Sporks.4395]

I think staff suffers from a lack of identity in each attunement. 
 

I think it would be huge for staff attunements in competitive game modes to go much further in a specific direction. Rather than just be the kind of does everything but does this one thing a little bit better or worse philosophy that it is right now.

I want to see all the AOE damage go to fire. Big pumping. S3 in fire needs the pve rework with the strike damage. S1 needs to be fast enough to actually hit something that moves. S2 needs some damage. S3 needs some damage. If you do that, you can get rid of the damage in the other attunements and make them worth taking for there supportive qualities or single target damage.

Water s1 can give out vuln. S2 can be reworked into a aoe blast skill, with a 1 second cast time and no delay, that gives your allies vigor, res, and regen. That will combo nicely with your s3, s5, and f5 (catalyst) fields to give spike healing, cleanse, or more boons. This can enable you to help your group with cleanse, cover boons, or healing when you are getting pressured hard. You could add vuln to s4 due to losing it on s2 to make that skill fun. S5 is good, but it needs more pulses to me. Every 2 seconds would make it really good. Balancing the range of the fields to 360 each would also be good.

Air needs to be the single target bomb Attunement. Make s2 hit really hard on a single target with a 1.5 second cast time and get rid of the blind. S3 should be a single target short cast time daze or knockdown. 

Earth needs to be more about support and conditions to me. It would be nice to see S1 give out a stack of bleed as well as weakness. S2 is trash. In wvw you use it to blast stealth. That's it. It's to slow and does not do enough, if it does hit, to make it worth casting. It would be nice to see the strike damage reduced, cast faster, activate way faster, and give out blind instead of air s2. S3 needs a party wide boon as well as the user getting the aura. Stability? please? eh?  30 second cd giving out 2 stacks of stability for 5 seconds would be huge. S5 is also just to slow. The projectile needs to move so much faster to actually be worth going for. 
The auto attacks are also very slow, clunky, and for the most part completely worthless. All you have to do to avoid 100% of the fire auto attack is just strafe at range. That is abysmal. Make the weapon faster for these faster game modes. 

 

[Knote.2904]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Kinda surprised that you didn't propose a change to air auto. Personally, I'd like to see Chain Lightning deal extra damage to the first target if there's nothing to bounce to. Air is traditionally the single-target attunement, although on staff this is moderated by staff being more AoE-focused - but it would be nice if having two targets rather than one wasn't quadrupling CL's total output.

Not sure about removing Gust altogether, but realistically Gust ain't getting a worthwhile damage coefficient in competitive. What I'd like to see, though, is that in prerelease there used to be an air skill on the weapon that functioned like scepter* that created a damage field with a graphic of lightning emanating outwards from a single point (somewhat similar to Chaos Storm, except not purple and a lot more lightning). Be nice to see that come back, especially since it would combo nicely with Static Field.

*There was a period really early on when scepter was a PBAOE weapon while dagger was the midrange single-target weapon, but they were swapped around. Interestingly, fire 1 remained on the original weapon - Dragon's Claw had its range reduced, while Flame Burst was given range rather than being a PBAOE.

I just care more that it gets something enough to make it worth it overall really. 

Only reason I want to bake Gust into Windbourne Speed is to free up a slot for another attack, because it's weird for Lightning to be nothing but utility and cc.

[Infusion.7149]

Ele staff is used in WVW and in PVE as a support weapon. It used to be more relevant in PVP as a support weapon as well but healing power changes altered that heavily and most people run dagger. I don't know people are asking for changes again when they just changed it in PVE. Also keep in mind air is the CC , blindness, and single target damage attunement.

[Knote.2904]

3 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Ele staff is used in WVW and in PVE as a support weapon. It used to be more relevant in PVP as a support weapon as well but healing power changes altered that heavily and most people run dagger. I don't know people are asking for changes again when they just changed it in PVE. Also keep in mind air is the CC , blindness, and single target damage attunement.

Ah yes, that scary staff air damage.

[Emberheart.8426]

I would say that these are the main problems with staff:

1. Very slow weapon that is stuck in 2012 design. It makes sense to be slower than average since it needs to have the spellcaster feel, but with the power creep over the years it has fallen so far behind as to be outdated, making it far far far slower than other options. You can see this with the cleave very easily. By the time you start cleaving your reaper friend has already killed everything.
2. Power damage is too low, like most other weapons in the game.
3. Air damage is awful, which means that if you want to swap out of fire for utility your damage is trash for 10 seconds.
4. CC is very awful and this is supposed to be a decent CC weapon. Essentially 2 of the CC skills in the kit are dead skills that don't even exist against PvE bosses.
5. People sometimes call it a "utility" weapon but in truth the utility is only ever relevant in healer builds. Outside that, it's utility is outdated as other classes have gained tons of utility over the years.

Fixing all of this will require some work but I do have a few suggestions to start with. It may end up needing more than this though. This list does not talk much about pure number buffs. It's more about mechanical changes.

 

Fire

• Fireball: Make the projectile a little bit quicker, though it doesn't have to be the quickest thing out there.
• Lava Font: Start by adding an additional tick of damage that begins instantly. That way you increase power damage by a bit and make it a little more reliable. 
• Flame Burst: Seems okay 
• Burning Retreat: Seems okay
• Meteor Shower: It needs to be more reliable, but it also still needs to be a bit slow to maintain the spellcaster feel. I feel like a good solution would be to simply make the meteors fall quicker while still maintaining the long cast time. So maybe reduce the duration from 9 seconds to somewhere around 5 and maintain the same amount of meteors. That would make it more reliable for actually hitting something, less reliant on static target dummies, more bursty which ele needs, and it would probably make it look really awesome and powerful.  Also consider making the damage reduction per impact more lenient. If mirage is allowed to have really good situational damage with confusion, elementalist should be able to abuse the small amount of large hitboxes in the game. I do understand that there should be a damage reduction since the damage gap can get ridiculous, but I think it's too punishing right now.

 

Water

• Water Blast: While I don't want to generally talk about damage scaling too much, I have to point out that the damage scaling is absolutely abysmal for no reason. It should be lower than other autos in staff, but this is massively undertuned. Also, it should use the ally targeting tech from specter, as healing with this is very clunky.
• Ice Spike: The delay on this skill is too long. Not reliable enough.
• Geyser: Seems okay.
• Frozen Ground: Seems rather underwhelming in PvE. The nice part is that you can blast it for frost aura, but the duration is pretty low. I almost want to say that blasting frost fields in PvE should give frost aura for longer, or that duration should stack instead.
• Healing Rain: You increased the number of conditions cleansed per pulse to 2 in PvP and WvW only. I have to ask... would this change break PvE? Also, this skill needs to actually heal per pulse as well, instead of only granting regeneration. Regeneration is basically a useless boon for dps builds as your healer will override it. In addition, giving heal tempest that extra healing as compensation for their loss of elemental bastion would not be broken by any means. 

 

Air

• Chain Lightning: If the chain lightning does not pass into any other foes it should electrify the enemy for additional damage after 0.5 seconds
• Lightning Surge: Seems okay, except maybe the damage.
• Gust: Seems okay.
• Windborne Speed: Seems okay. 
• Static Field: This skill is often useless against bosses as most of the time they will not be moving much when the breakbar is up, or they will do something like teleport.. Ideally the field should daze everyone inside upon casting, and some pulsing damage could be added as well to give air another source of dps. You can leave the stun while crossing as a bonus.

 

Earth

• Stoning: Projectile needs to be a bit quicker. It's almost as slow as fireball.
• Eruption: The delay on this skill is too long, similar to Ice spike. It does not need to be this long.
• Magnetic Aura/Transmute Earth: Seems okay.
• Unsteady Ground: Quite useless against bosses most of the time. This and guardian's line of warding need something, but I am not sure how to handle them. 
• Shock Wave: Seems okay.

 

 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Emberheart.8426

[kurosy.1384]

You...literally wrote about the only two situations where staff isn't a thing. And i don't think a weapon is meant to be relevant in any game mode :c
Don't get me wrong, i love staff and i'd love it being more relevant but right now it's good enough in open pve, instanced pve and zerg wvw also thanks to all the recents little buffs. Could use more love tho!

[Downstate.4697]

A bit faster animations across the board and I think staff could be alright. I think the autos have too little impact for how slow they are.

[Knote.2904]

7 hours ago, kurosy.1384 said:

You...literally wrote about the only two situations where staff isn't a thing. And i don't think a weapon is meant to be relevant in any game mode :c
Don't get me wrong, i love staff and i'd love it being more relevant but right now it's good enough in open pve, instanced pve and zerg wvw also thanks to all the recents little buffs. Could use more love tho!

Well yeah the dmg isnt completely destroyed in pve split.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Knote.2904