Buffing/Re-working Staff

[Swagg.9236]

17 minutes ago, Bakeneko.5826 said:

Not going to happen, e-specs are one of the main features of expacs, even if Weaver gets hit like Tempest did after release of PoF, there still is Catalyst, that will break something and it will result in weapon and not e-spec nerf. It's kinda tradition of every expac to hit ele main weapons to balance elites 😄 Frostbow was first victim, then lava font, then meteor shover, then lava font again 😄

It is as I said:  especs (honestly, it's really just traits in general) messed up the game so badly by how it intertwined passive effects with active sets.  At this point, it's not even a developer thing--the playerbase itself can't live without being carried by trait passives.

Wait, also, all that said, you only complained about WvW and PvE.  PvE is just simon says; the enemies aren't going to care if you deal a gorillion damage with whatever weapon is """best."""  WvW is kind of always a bit of a mess.  It wouldn't be hard to just nerf the traits in a WvW-specific way and them keep them locked in for that single game mode.

Edited December 31, 2021 by Swagg.9236

[Jski.6180]

They need to at least change the propriety of the 1 staff skills they should not be "element" ball attks. Keep fire ball but make earth 1 into an impale like attk but at 1,200 ranged the water 1 skills into a ground target and the air still into an attk that starts at your target and bonces from there.

Every thing on staff should be far more spell like even the auto attk.

[Swagg.9236]

1 hour ago, Jski.6180 said:

They need to at least change the propriety of the 1 staff skills they should not be "element" ball attks. Keep fire ball but make earth 1 into an impale like attk but at 1,200 ranged the water 1 skills into a ground target and the air still into an attk that starts at your target and bonces from there.

Every thing on staff should be far more spell like even the auto attk.

Actually, turning staff's air auto into a stick-target attack kind of seems somewhat appealing.  The way it works now is pretty low-energy.  Gives a little bit of something to do if someone just sits inside of projectile counter too.

[Jski.6180]

9 hours ago, Swagg.9236 said:

Actually, turning staff's air auto into a stick-target attack kind of seems somewhat appealing.  The way it works now is pretty low-energy.  Gives a little bit of something to do if someone just sits inside of projectile counter too.

One of them will be true stick target attk earth 1 air 1 will just start the attk at the target after a slight delay. The ideal is to make the skills more then just an magic ball attk beyond a fire ball.

That and earth 1 on staff is so slow that it will never effectively hit any one who can move very slowly side to side its kind of silly that its a single target low dmg projectile and that slow.

Edited December 31, 2021 by Jski.6180

[Swagg.9236]

23 hours ago, Jski.6180 said:

One of them will be true stick target attk earth 1 air 1 will just start the attk at the target after a slight delay. The ideal is to make the skills more then just an magic ball attk beyond a fire ball.

That and earth 1 on staff is so slow that it will never effectively hit any one who can move very slowly side to side its kind of silly that its a single target low dmg projectile and that slow.

Those sorts of shortcomings is why I suggested the changes to the water and earth autoattacks respectively.  Water wouldn't so much be for consistently striking enemies, but rather support, while earth would have a melee component (which always has a super generous hit registry; and combined with the fact that it also sends out a projectile, it can help counter blind spam that would otherwise heavily negate its slower attack speed).  I still like Fireball the way that it is, though, because it has always been a really good minesweeping attack for stealth spam, rez pressure, and people skittering behind terrain and blind corners.

[Newholiday.8103]

Lots of interesting suggestions here.  That said, a little too op if they all got implemented.  The change to water auto alone would make ele the unquestioned king of support.  My favorites are the changes to windborne speed, burning retreat, and shockwave.  Staff ele currently has far too few escape options, and has to heavily rely on lightning flash and mist form to survive for any appreciable amount of time.

[Ace.1784]

13 hours ago, thepolishman.2348 said:

Lots of interesting suggestions here.  That said, a little too op if they all got implemented.  The change to water auto alone would make ele the unquestioned king of support.  

And funny enough, Staff Tempest is already the best healer in the game with what we have right now.

[Jski.6180]

34 minutes ago, Vinteros Asteano.1209 said:

And funny enough, Staff Tempest is already the best healer in the game with what we have right now.

In what game type and are we talking about raw healing or are we talking about over all support. I think staff tempest being the best healer in the game is a myth we tell our self to make the ele player base feel better about the classes and the real problems of it being out dated. Water Blast on staff needs a real update after they added in med kit for eng. The nerfs to the Healing Rain seems like they where for a different game balancing as well as the "stronger reg" dose not seem to work right and geyser feels too small to be an effect heal skill.

[Newholiday.8103]

44 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

In what game type and are we talking about raw healing or are we talking about over all support. I think staff tempest being the best healer in the game is a myth we tell our self to make the ele player base feel better about the classes and the real problems of it being out dated. Water Blast on staff needs a real update after they added in med kit for eng. The nerfs to the Healing Rain seems like they where for a different game balancing as well as the "stronger reg" dose not seem to work right and geyser feels too small to be an effect heal skill.

 

Speaking from the spvp perspective, staff tempest has the best overall raw heal output.  However, when you factor in the amount of damage denied by aegis, guardian likely comes out on top.  Add to that the significantly better might generation for allies, condition clears and resolution, utilities that improve the survivability of both the guardian and its allies (rather than just the guardian), and just better bunker potential, guardian is just a much better support overall. 

 

The only thing tempest has over the guardian is auras, and tempest has to put significant amounts of traits toward auras to make them worthwhile.  And staff in particular can only generate 1 aura in its weapon line.

[Jski.6180]

15 minutes ago, thepolishman.2348 said:

 

Speaking from the spvp perspective, staff tempest has the best overall raw heal output.  However, when you factor in the amount of damage denied by aegis, guardian likely comes out on top.  Add to that the significantly better might generation for allies, condition clears and resolution, utilities that improve the survivability of both the guardian and its allies (rather than just the guardian), and just better bunker potential, guardian is just a much better support overall. 

 

The only thing tempest has over the guardian is auras, and tempest has to put significant amounts of traits toward auras to make them worthwhile.  And staff in particular can only generate 1 aura in its weapon line.

But dose it i think scraper has the best raw healing in the game more so in 5 target game types then say pve 10 target game types.

Staff for guardian is a good example of just how out dated ele staff is Holy Strike is a good healing skill and dmg skill at the same time on a very low cd.

Sadly the updated auras dark and light are a bit more power creeped then say the old ele auras. Its a shame ele dose not have a way to get light/dark fields much like a guardian can get element fields.

[Newholiday.8103]

One thing I'd add to your list of suggestions is to reduce meteor shower cast time or to no longer require standing in place while casting it in spvp.  The skill is only strong when there are numerous targets in an area, like in WvW.  No reason to keep such a long cast time in spvp, where there will only ever be 5 targets max, each meteor does only 860 damage (with 1000 power), and each subsequent hit does reduced damage.

[Swagg.9236]

On 1/4/2022 at 7:10 PM, thepolishman.2348 said:

One thing I'd add to your list of suggestions is to reduce meteor shower cast time or to no longer require standing in place while casting it in spvp.  The skill is only strong when there are numerous targets in an area, like in WvW.  No reason to keep such a long cast time in spvp, where there will only ever be 5 targets max, each meteor does only 860 damage (with 1000 power), and each subsequent hit does reduced damage.

Meteor Shower can hit beyond 5k with the initial few strikes depending on circumstances, but the key thing is that it's an extremely powerful skill that, graciously, is one of the few (if possibly the only real) skill in the game that has an appropriate cast-time investment for the impact it can levy.  I'd rather keep that, because this game is pretty emptyheaded enough.

[Newholiday.8103]

On 1/7/2022 at 1:20 AM, Swagg.9236 said:

Meteor Shower can hit beyond 5k with the initial few strikes depending on circumstances, but the key thing is that it's an extremely powerful skill that, graciously, is one of the few (if possibly the only real) skill in the game that has an appropriate cast-time investment for the impact it can levy.  I'd rather keep that, because this game is pretty emptyheaded enough.

 

For one of the most powerful staff skills, its very unpowered.  While it can do up to 5k damage per hit, I was talking about its tooltip damage.  Compare the damage of meteor shower with 1000 power (0.85k tooltip damage on 3.75 cast time and 30s recast) to DH trueshot (1.5K tooltip damage on 0.75s cast time and 8s recast) or weaver plasma beam (1.65k tooltip damage on 1.25s cast and 18s recast).  The only place where meteor shower would have an advantage would be when there are multiple targets it can hit at the same time.  Even then, it only does as much damage as the other skills if it hits a target twice (it will rarely hit 3 times).  The counter to it is to move out of its radius.

 

I'm not even asking for a buff to its damage.  Just a comparable cast time, or no longer requiring to stand still on cast.

[Swagg.9236]

15 hours ago, thepolishman.2348 said:

 

For one of the most powerful staff skills, its very unpowered.  While it can do up to 5k damage per hit, I was talking about its tooltip damage.  Compare the damage of meteor shower with 1000 power (0.85k tooltip damage on 3.75 cast time and 30s recast) to DH trueshot (1.5K tooltip damage on 0.75s cast time and 8s recast) or weaver plasma beam (1.65k tooltip damage on 1.25s cast and 18s recast).  The only place where meteor shower would have an advantage would be when there are multiple targets it can hit at the same time.  Even then, it only does as much damage as the other skills if it hits a target twice (it will rarely hit 3 times).  The counter to it is to move out of its radius.

 

I'm not even asking for a buff to its damage.  Just a comparable cast time, or no longer requiring to stand still on cast.

I understand, but considering the AoE impact that it has, buffing it even with something as seemingly innocuous as an activation reduction is liable to render it as easy-mode as any other skill shoved in an overtuned weapon kit or build.  There's nothing wrong with relying on a team to hold an area, or chaining CC and positioning together in order to set-up for a high-risk finisher attack.  Moreover, getting 2 hits on a target with Meteor Shower is often enough to send somebody to the shadow realm if it's in the middle of a team fight (and if it goes off in a 1v1, it buys so much time by denying space or threatens to rapidly tilt the HP/cooldown advantage in the ele's favor).

I could maybe agree with a 0.5s activation reduction at the most, but I also still think that the strongest buff that it could get would be to shrink its overall target radius from 360 to 300 without reducing the actual meteor impact radius (currently 180).  You would get a whole lot more hit confirms within the target area with this set up, making the skill a much bigger threat to play around.

[Swagg.9236]

On 1/2/2022 at 1:52 PM, Vinteros Asteano.1209 said:

And funny enough, Staff Tempest is already the best healer in the game with what we have right now.

Tempest is good mainly because of a combination of aura passives and a really overtuned water overload.  It wouldn't be bad to nerf the overload and trait bonuses in exchange for having autoattacks that aren't completely trash and might actually promote/reward some protracted, single-element time investment.