A ranged weapon should never do more single target damage than a melee one.

[Zenith.7301]

@Solori.6025 said:

@Zenith.7301 said:I about choked when he said you needed to be in melee for the fire fields to hit, as if those wide kitten ranged aoe had a range limitation LOL

...... fire fields that ele has on staff have a 180radius....you can literally walk out of them before you take a tone of damage, and for them to do decent damage your opponent needs to either be stunned for 3s ,immobilized, or sleep. ( and in PvE you just kite a mob to stay in fire fields anyway, and you do in fact do that in melee or 240-300u range)

Good thing this is a team game and you have static field and all those guardians pinballing opponents with lines/circles of warding/pulls into your fire fields. I mean, what idiots run staff for solo/roaming play?

[Erebus.7568]

I have a very different feel of it, and when running in WvW I saw very few ele's using staff compared to other weapons. (either that or there is just VERY few ele's overall in wvw).I feel like the insane difficulty of keeping anything at distance makes, making things stand still the minimum 2-3 seconds to apply base damage, makes it impossible to take advantage of the long range of the staff; staff becomes more of a zoning weapon and a support dps weapon to throw onto huge zergs running ignoring it with TONS of defensive buffs.against anyone with half a clue I find the staff to be one of the weaker weapon setups as it leaves you with very little defensive capability as well as almost no real movability, little reliable dmg and very high skill cap needed to be even efficient compared to other weapon setups (especially compared to other classes).

if there is a Specific problem you are looking at please be very specific "situation, use, combo/buff/etc that puts it over the edge, and ofc why is it a problem compared to every other class and build setup".if you just find it "too strong" you obviously haven't used much time testing it and you really wouldn't know but you simply just believe with little to no evidence of your belief.

edit: as for it being a team game; if your opponents can't manage to put down some stability while your team 2-3 people combo multiple synergy skills together, well then you should easy mode win; yet even with this it is only just "competitive". so you want a gigantic difference in rl skills to just be compared with people who can't even manage to drop down blocks, stability, dr, CC, etc.. that just really doesn't sound like you are arguing for "balance", more like you just want staff users to disappear permanently.