Guild Wars 2

In an attempt to avoid power creep, I’ll have suggest some nerfs in compensation for my proposed buffs.

What the staff is

• A support weapon;
  Should remain as it is.
• Specialized at AoE;
  Should remain as it is.
• Slow casting skills;
  That is a good thing to balance its offensive power versus the amount of support and AoE effects available, however, the same disadvantage should not apply to defensive skills, or at least not to as many as it currently does, for it is making it nigh impossible to survive in solo. I don’t think a staff ele should be specialized at solo surviving, neither, but it should certainly be at a better state than it currently is.
• The functionality behind some skills is ineffective;
  Will need to be improved upon.
• Most of the damage comes from the fire attunement;
  Not that bad of a idea, but it makes the playstyle awfully boring in PvE. I’m going to take a look into the air attunement, and spread its damage a little bit more between both.
• Ineffective air attunement, and auto-attacks in general;
  Auto-attacks are a well-known problem with the elementalist class.

Faster or more effective self survival
Should offer a relevant boost at surviving, without making the weapon way too strong at this. Some babysitting should still be required.

• Water Blast (auto-attack) – This skill should self-heal in addition to the healing blast radius.
  The healing radius is unreliable, and sometimes party support must come at the cost of own healing. And yes, both effects are meant to stack when applied to self. Keep in mind that this is still a slow auto-attack – an elementalist shouldn’t still be able to depend on this to survive against focused damage.
• Stoning (auto-attack) – 1 extra second of weakness.
  Although weakness is a very strong condition to be put on an auto-attack, the elementalist needs to maintain it with very slow and underwhelming damage. By giving 1 extra second, and thus making weakness last slightly longer when stacked after 2-3 auto-attacks, the staff elementalist will get a precious 2-3 extra seconds to pull off another combo sequence before being bursted to death. Not too strong, I hope?

Making air attunement more effective, in adittion to enhancing self survival

• Gust and Shockwave – Increase the line width.
  This will make those skills a bit more reliable to hit, which is crucial for self survival, and also a support boost to your party. The increase shouldn’t be too high, so that players can still move out of it.

Further improvements in air attunement

• Chain Lightning – Make the first hit deal 50% more damage, and the following two hits 25% less. Have them pierce.
  This will make this skill stronger versus single targets, which is what air attunement usually specializes at. Piercing damage inbetween hits would also lead to some fun, chaotic damage values in a crowded battlefield, with everyone in the middle getting splash damage if they don’t avoid the slow-moving, piercing lightning waves.
• Lightning Surge – Make it unblockable.
  This will add more depth to this skill. Timed right, it can bypass a guardian’s shelter or any other profession’s block, making it a more reliable “head shot” sniping skill. The high casting time will still demand skillful use from the elementalist to acchieve this.
• Give it a 5 second cooldown.
  This would make it more appealing to Fresh Air builds using staff.

Tweaks, and slight nerfs to compensate – no one likes it, but it needs to be done

• Lava Font – Increase radius from 120 to 180. Increase the cooldown from 6 to 8 seconds.
  Currently, this skill depends too much on Blasting Staff to be useful. An increased radius is needed. Blasting Staff would still be a worth trait picking up, but staff players would no longer feel “forced” to it. However, so that players switch attunements more often, instead of spending all their time spamming 1 and 2 in PvE for maximum damage input, and so that this already useful skill doesn’t becomes too strong with the radius buff neither, I suggest the CD increase.
• Tornado – Have it double power instead of tripling it. Have it double toughness instead of doing nothing to it.
  This change will not only make the Tornado + Meteor Shower combo weaker, but it’ll also make Tornado a more worthwhile elite by itself, due to the higher survivability. Double win.

Further trait support

• Fresh Fire
  DPS staff builds would greatly benefit from lower fire attunement cooldowns.

Good touches also +9001 for Fresh Fire

There’s a thread in my signature which includes most of your ideas (if not more). It’s ~8 months old and some ideas actually made it into the game.

I don’t think they will buff/change the staff soon. Back then the staff was considered weak and it took months until they finally fixed some problems.

I think the Lightning Surge proposal is the best part of your post. Unblockable fits perfectly. And it has such a long cast time that you still won’t be able to react and use it to punish your enemy for using a blocking skill.

I also like the general idea of making Chain Lightning more single target focused. Air is indeed supposed to be about single target damage. But here’s what I would do instead:

leave the damage on the first hit as is
make damage fall off by ~25% per bounce
reduce the cast time (and after cast delay) by ~25%

air should also feel fast imo

and Gust definitely needs to be wider. I don’t have issues landing Shockwave, however.

I like the proposal. However it’s missing something from my wish list which is:

- faster single-target auto-attack skill

I was hoping the earth auto-attack would be a good single-target DPS skill. It’s a great skill but the damage is a bit too low for my tastes. Chain lightning would be better with a faster cast and maybe conversion to a “beam” weapon instead of a “projectile”.

reikken.4961:

I think the Lightning Surge proposal is the best part of your post. Unblockable fits perfectly. And it has such a long cast time that you still won’t be able to react and use it to punish your enemy for using a blocking skill.

The idea for an unblockable Lightning Surge was the main reason for why I wrote this thread. The moment I brainstormed that idea, I thought the same as you. It fits the skill so well, that it motivated me to make a staff suggestion thread.

I like the ideas about changing the staff skill; especially to the Earth and Air skill trees. Furthermore, Blackhat’s post has great improvements to the Air Attunement skills.

The Lava Font skill can probably be reworked to deal a high amount of damage on the first tick and then exponentially decay with more ticks such that the total damage does not change if the enemy stays in the field for the entire duration. That way the damage hits the enemy first and deals lower damage with consecutive ticks.

I agree that the Earth attunement’s Stoning skill needs a rework such that it deals vulnerability more consistently. As it stands right now, it barely hits players at a distance, and its vulnerability is too low. It needs to become faster to cast and fly, or have a small chance to daze, weaken, or apply another condition on the target upon a critical hit. Another possible change, is to make a new Master, Grandmaster, or higher Major Trait, that causes Eruption to push or pull enemies into or away from it. This could effectively change the way the Staff plays for an elementalist. Maybe even make a new utility that does this.

The water tree is in a relatively great situation right now.

Ultimately the staff needs new major traits, skill reworks, and new arcane utilities that make it more synergistic to use in a wider variety of situations, or for specific purposes if geared and traited appropriately.

I agree that the air attunement on staff needs better DPS. Currently, it has too much CC (which are wasted in PvE). Water is in good standing I’d say and Fire needs a little something.

AIR:
Auto-attack needs to be faster, and maybe more single target focused.
Lightning Surge idea : approved!
Gust needs some damage to make it worthwhile in PvE
Static Field should damage when the foe cross the field (even with stability). Stability should only help on the stun part.

EARTH:
Auto-attack needs a buff to make it worthwhile. Currently nobody use this auto-attack as it is BAD. More vulnerability, more range and/or simply more damage is needed.

Alternatively, Stoning could apply 1 stack of bleeding for 8 seconds in addition to the current weakness, to make condi-elementalists more appealing.

GoddessOfTheWinds.2937:

I agree that the air attunement on staff needs better DPS. Currently, it has too much CC (which are wasted in PvE). Water is in good standing I’d say and Fire needs a little something.

AIR:
Auto-attack needs to be faster, and maybe more single target focused.
Lightning Surge idea : approved!
Gust needs some damage to make it worthwhile in PvE
Static Field should damage when the foe cross the field (even with stability). Stability should only help on the stun part.

EARTH:
Auto-attack needs a buff to make it worthwhile. Currently nobody use this auto-attack as it is BAD. More vulnerability, more range and/or simply more damage is needed.

The CC is epic in WvW — hands off!

Remove it and the staff’s value drops substantially.

EDIT: Also the weakness on the Earth auto-attack is the real value of the skill (not the vulnerability). I would be extremely disappointed if the weakness was removed.

Stoning doesn’t even apply vulnerability. dunno what people are talking about.
and idk why Static Field doesn’t do damage to targets that are immune to stun. That shouldn’t be happening.

Bolded stuff is for dev clarity.

It’s mostly Air Attunement now that has some (minor) issues. The increase in radius on Fireball made Chain Lightning somewhat obsolete, so a change/damage buff would be nice. Gust would probaly benefit from (even) faster casting, because as it stands now, the thing you want to push/interrupt is long gone by the time it triggers.

As for water blast and stoning, I think they’re ok right now. The problem with water blast is that it can potentially lead to a very strong bunker healer build when combined with Signet of Restoration, Soothing Mist and regeneration. Adding more healing to that is probably unwise. The same goes for damage, though I’d rather see more damage on it and less healing. Stoning doesn’t last quite long enough, but I think the idea is that Anet wants you to take some condition duration if you want it to last outside of Earth. I’m ok with that personally, and we do have other sources of weakness too.

I like your suggestions, especially the tornado change. Big numbers are good, but staying alive is better.
+1

Wow! Your proposed nerfs are somehow all buffy. Increasing rang on Lava font and adding toughness to Tornado. Don’t go all overboard on the nerfing…

havoc.6814:

Wow! Your proposed nerfs are somehow all buffy. Increasing rang on Lava font and adding toughness to Tornado. Don’t go all overboard on the nerfing…

You are probably right, but making tornado a better elite by itself won’t directly buff the staff’s skillset. Its power nerf, however, directly tones down the meteor shower + tornado damage combo. So for staff builds specifically, the nerf in tornado’s proposal is more significant than the buff.

The two extra second cooldown for Lava Font is also very impactful for dps builds. It’ll make it easier to hit in more complex scenarios, where I can understand it would be more of a buff than a nerf, but otherwise, dps builds that spam fireballs and lava fonts while stacked (pve) or from afar (wvw or pvp) will take a serious hit at effectively killing a single target. The higher cooldown will further incentivate to switch attunements, which can also tone down the dps rate even more.

If my proposal is somehow too powerful, fireball, lava font and meteor shower can always get a 5-10% damage nerf, and maybe skills like shockwave get higher cooldowns.

Great suggestions, although I would renaming Fresh Fire to Scorching Flames or something more fitting of fire, since when although I think of air as refreshing, I dont think the same thing about fire.

As for suggestions of my own, I still believe one of the core issues underlying the ele’s is the long CDs and cast times. If there is something I dont agree with you is that staff ele is in a good spot. Your proposed changes include nerfs t “compensate” when in reality we need buffs to compensate for the steady overbuffing and powercreep of all classes around us.

My changes would be as follow;

-Autoatatcks more reactive, that is, less animation, more connections.

-Fire damage is relatively ok, but every other element has a complete lack of damage that can be reliably out onto the enemy

-I like making surge unblockable, but I highly doubt they will make this change. I believe what this skill needs is a slight CD reduction, less animation and very small if not at all damage change.

-Gust needs to be fixed, no more stalling. This skill misses even if the enemy isnt actively paying attention to it, basically any small strafe or sudden stop of movement will make it fail, it has worse targetting AI than guardian’s scepter autoattack, and thats a bad enough offense already for such a crucial skill on such a long CD.

-I believe once we fix the problem with the ele innate lack of survival mechanism staf will be in a better place, but as it is, eles tend to die too quickly before they get to do anything, if not, then they are forced to spend EVERY SINGLE CD in order to buy themselves a few more seconds before their almost imminent death. CDs need to be halved for more skills. Yes, and I mean it, halved. 40 seconds CD for a skill that is a do or die and that doesnt work as an “maybe I should use it” but rather “I use it or I certainly die again” then you need to make the ele rewarded for using it, and using it as often as other normal skills on classes behave, which have anywhere between 10-20 secs CD.

-I think most players have already grow away from their ignorance and learned that eles do NOT have any real advantage by having “20 skills”, but rather are inhibited by them at times, perhaps we can start working towards normalizing them to allow them to be on par with other classes’ CD.

I don’t think staff is in a good spot (wvw and pve fire spamming aside), that’s why my suggested nerfs are situational, and specifically hit harder the fire spamming tactic.

While I stated that I felt that the nerfs seemed almost as if they were buffs, I do think the general trend of the suggestions is good – just in need of some fine tuning.

Staff -ele’s are in a bad spot right now and need some loving. This coming, not from an ele, but from a warrior….

I think that staff autoattacks in general need a rework. The targeting on staff autoattacks are terrible.

Basically, our autoattack should be something similar to the guardian staff autoattack. make it kind of melee. It’ll give us a lot more survivability than you think. Damage doesn’t even need to be raised. I feel that a staff ele’s damage is at a very good place right now, but with poor targeting on our autoattacks, it makes it hard to apply any kind of pressure once we’ve casted our main dps skills.

The only reason we use autoattacks on staff is because our AoE skills are on cooldown and we’re waiting for our cooldowns for the next rotation. That’s how useless the autoattacks are. I don’t even target anything anymore with the autoattacks. I just wait until Lava Font is off cooldown while in earth attunement so I can keep might stacks up.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Auto-attacks are a well-known problem with the elementalist class.

• Staff autoattacks are (potentially) very good compared to other ele weapon autos, it’s just that the projectiles are so slow, and their aftercasts are so long, which makes autoattacking feel slow and cumbersome.

• If anything, some autoattacks like Chain Lightning and Stoning could have their cast time increased and their aftercasts decreased. Overall projectile speed should be increased – Fireball, in particular, is easily sidestepped.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Making air attunement more effective, in adittion to enhancing self survival

• Gust and Shockwave – Increase the line width.

• I think that either Gust OR Shockwave should be reworked into a cone AOE like Mesmer’s Illusionary Wave . Keeping Gust as a projectile is clearly not working. The Piercing attribute addition on June 2013 did absolutely nothing – it’s still easily missed. Making Gust a Cone AOE would also justify its 1/2 second cast time (Despite what tooltips say, frame data suggests Gust is closer to half-second casting; not the 1/4 second cast it would seem to be)
• For aiming purposes and visibility for counterplay, a wavy “air cone” particle effect should be added. Right now you don’t see anything come out, which makes aiming Gust intransparent until you hit.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Further trait support

• Fresh Fire
  DPS staff builds would greatly benefit from lower fire attunement cooldowns.

• If Fresh Air taught me anything, it’s that S/D Zerker one shot Ele is hilariously dumb. Pressing 11 buttons every 40 seconds to delete someone is probably not what Ele should be about, and although I like the idea behind it, Fresh (element) doesn’t address Elementalist’s limiting factor, which has always been that you need all 4 elements to be combat effective. I’ve yet to see a build that emphasises 2-3 or even just 1 element with trait support to match.

• Trait lines for Elementalist are too specialised at one thing or another. Water holds nearly all condition removal and regen, for example. Earth holds all Bleeds and condition duration mitigation. Air holds all the DPS boosts. Fire holds all the Conjures and Burning procs. There’s no “in-between”, which is why the Water trait nerfs have been so crippling for Elementalist survival. Nearly all survivability is in Water and nothing much else.

What Fire traits are missing is something instead of Burning Fire for condition mitigation; and a bunch of other stuff like proper zoning. How about this to start:

• Cleanse 1 condition when you Blast a Combo Field. Executing a Blast finisher in a Combo Field inflicts Burning in an 180 unit radius for 2 seconds.

I don’t think “Fresh (Attunement)” traits address our core problems, however, they do offer an interesting playstyle, and more importantly, staff dps builds would greatly benefit from a “fresh fire” trait because of how reliant they are on fire attunement to deal damage.

It would allow an elementalist to switch between support/ control and damage more efficiently. And of course, it would probably come at the cost of Persisting Flames.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I don’t think “Fresh (Attunement)” traits address our core problems, however, they do offer an interesting playstyle, and more importantly, staff dps builds would greatly benefit from a “fresh fire” trait because of how reliant they are on fire attunement to deal damage.

It would allow an elementalist to switch between support/ control and damage more efficiently. And of course, it would probably come at the cost of Persisting Flames.

Eh, I’ve always felt that while something like Fresh Air was interesting, the weapon skills made available were boring; limiting you to Lightning Strike procs for something like S/X, or making Lightning Whip more available for D/X. I like the idea behind it, but until Elementalist weapon skills are strong enough independantly in each individual attunement, the non-attunement dancing playstyle will ever remain suboptimal . Unless you’re running Staff Fire 1 autos, but even then, you’re missing out on a lot of potential damage not running your Ice Spikes and Eruptions.

I see where you’re coming from in terms of switching from Support/Control to DPS more efficiently, certainly. But I do feel that Fire traits are weak not because of a lack of efficient ability to switch, but that there is too little Utility loaded into the Fire trait line. Water has both Offensive (Bountiful Power, Vital Striking) and defensive (Cleansing Water, Cleansing Wave) loaded as options in the same trait line, whilst Fire is practically entirely offensive. With Water, you could get your damage agnostic of Attunement or meeting certain conditions like “enemy is Burning”. It’s this more niche application and more boring DPS boost setup for Fire that has left it weak and largely ignored outside of Lightning Hammer DPS Conjure builds, for example.

I also feel that Burning could also be better interacted with. Not just as a DPS condition or DPS boost , but also as a method of Boon Hate – stripping Boons from Burning foes. For a class that literally swims in Boons with just a few points in Arcana, there is surprisingly little interaction with enemy Boons

Can’t really have more than one “fresh” trait as it would create a scenario where you could spam as fast as the global cooldown allows. Example would be air-fire-air-fire-etc…

That would create a pile of attunement boons (if traited) as well as addition attunment effects (i..e sun-spot in the scenario above).

It works for air right now because you get only swiftness from the attunement spam.

I guess ANet could always add a cooldown on the Elemental Attunment trait.

Only Fresh Earth and Fresh Water would come at the risk of being too strong because of Healing Ripple and Elemental Attunement.

I’ve edited my Lightning Surge suggestion to inlude a 5 CD cooldown. This would make it more appealing to Fresh Air builds.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I’ve edited my Lightning Surge suggestion to inlude a 5 CD cooldown. This would make it more appealing to Fresh Air builds.

Would you consider proposing Lightning Surge to be a Charge Skill as it was again back in the day? The problem I have with the 1.5 second casting time is that I can’t use it as a clutch Blind when I need to; yet its damage is pretty underwhelming. Making it a Charge Skill would make it the “Headshot!” skill at full charge, while retaining the clutch Blind aspect. Damage scaling at minimum and at full charge could be adjusted to compensate; while maximum channeling time could be up to 2 seconds for maximum charge for that high-risk high-reward aspect. It would justify the current cooldown of 10 seconds.

Either that, or keep everything as is with the option of casting Surge instantly.