Guild Wars 2

I believe for the most part staff ele damage wise is fine (could use some improvements outside of fire but i guess it would be ok with these fixes) the issue is unreliability and easy-to-read-and-dodge-fully gameplay.

making attunements 10 secs baseline, and traiting into one attunement also reduces the CD of said attunement. ( not very substantially, lets say 1.5 seconds per 10 points) That would give us some options to deviate from arcana, same with Blasting staff (arcana VIII) , make that baseline AoE for staff.

Lastly, increase DPS and projectile speed across the board for all non-fire attunements autoattacks, make autoattacks worth using;

fire: 1 second cast and another to land, more than enough for a thief to appear and dodge and disappear and repeat.

Water; Im not sure what have an auto attack, but probably increasing what you want the skill to be used for, either healing or damage, but both are non existent and pointless to use. I read somewhere a suggestion to give combo AA to eles, that is, first attack is the same, second does a sall healing blast for larger AoE and the 3rd freezes the target for 2-3 secs.

Air; make projectile speed much, MUCH, MUCH faster, it is lighting, it should be scary, also, emphasize the single DPS character of it, make the first hit &way harder*, but successive hits have diminishing return, also, 4 bounces (that, with a 50% biminishing return, the 4th hit would hit for only 12.5% damage of the first one). Fulfills its overall damage and still has a single target purpose

earth is fine; could use some small projectile speed buff, but minimal.

Finally, the only other fixes would be, fire #2 lava font could apply damage on application, it is insane to have casting time and delay time, at least make them waste a CD or eat one tick, cuz right now just hitting once require them to be nearly afk.

Lastly, make air #3 actually hit something, make it like updraft, except that maybe homing or increase the radius of it, because hitting it is near impossible. While we are it, decrease air #2 casting time, by a whole second, the damage is not near worth the long casting and the blind radius isnt all that great even with blasting staff, either increase the radius of the blind (by a lot, enough to justify the casting time) or decrease casting time and let be as it is, lower CD would help too but that might be OP and too much to ask.

Please Anet give these changes a consideration, I dont want to impose but we all have to agree that right now staff ele is in a bad spot and that mayority of the player base that is on these forums asking for help with staff are not WvW heavy players. Personally Im more of a sPvP and tPvP person, i occasionally go to WvW and I know staff is relatively strong there, but that does not justify its tremendous weakness outside Zergs

Also, before an staff argument starts, let me say this: I keep hearing the same old argument; “dont play it”, “l2p” , “you suck” but I dont see any real good counter argument as to way we cant have a ranged DPS staff build. Yes you can argue that we have a lot of CC and AoE which is great in groups, but thing is, other professions have the same (if not more) CC and AoE and yet they can fulfill teamfights and solo fights purposes. Im looking at necros, mesmers, guardians, even a warrior can switch freely back and forth between these two. Now, you notice a pattern, all the mentioned classes share something in common; they can switch weapons and have different weapons with different purposes, some weapons even fulfilling both roles(!!!!!) therefore you can conclude (and if you dont arrive to the same conclusion then you are being stubborn) that they have versatility.

We are “supposedly” the kings of versatility, yet, when we go from a massive zerg to a branched 3v3 or 4v4 we get our smokey b|_|tts completely burnt because we lack the tools to adapt to those situations, therefore we lack versatility. Repeat with me;

We are supposed to the kings of versatility yet we lack it

Unlike other professions we cant decide to wear D/D mid fights from staff, or S/D. Therefore all points implying the switching to other weapons are invalid and you people should even feel ashamed to bring them up. Now, im not asking for weapon switching, that would defeat the purpose of the uniqueness of our profession, all Im asking is a little more attunement specialization, more versatility, being viable in all contexts or vast mayority at least, not JUST WvW raids.

You know, not everyone is a WvW player, some of us like to……play sPvP and tPvP ‘GASP’

I’m not seeing a lack of versatility when I play spvp but whatever, I agree the autoattacks could do with being a bit more impactful, the devs said they wanted some more low skill options for eles as they only really become useful when you’ve mastered the stance-dance – and imo the best way to do that is via some traits or buff that make the autoattacks stronger.

Baseline 10s switch, Would be nice.

Lightning AA, haha yes it is so slow, it should instantly hit all 3 targets, and if it hits the same target twice should get the graphic of a lightning strike. (a trait for multihit spells to gain a lightning bolt would be awesome)

Water AA should really use the beam channel like scepter air, would work with the toughness on channel trait since only meteor storm works with it now.

Agree on earth. Magic projectiles in gw2 really need to be faster, and non magic ones, make them faster too, people should just dodge on the animation, not seeing things slowly travelling 1200.

Just more trait synergy, to get that feeling of making a really synergistic build back from gw1 :p
I think an issue here is due to glyph of elemental power they have to balance the spells around the possibility of applying burn/weakness/chill/cripple.

I think if goep was changed/removed(or kept the same, it might not even be op) and those conditions added liberally to the spells in all attunements we’d end up in a nice place.

emikochan.8504:

I’m not seeing a lack of versatility when I play spvp but whatever, I agree the autoattacks could do with being a bit more impactful, the devs said they wanted some more low skill options for eles as they only really become useful when you’ve mastered the stance-dance – and imo the best way to do that is via some traits or buff that make the autoattacks stronger.

Baseline 10s switch, Would be nice.

Lightning AA, haha yes it is so slow, it should instantly hit all 3 targets, and if it hits the same target twice should get the graphic of a lightning strike. (a trait for multihit spells to gain a lightning bolt would be awesome)

Water AA should really use the beam channel like scepter air, would work with the toughness on channel trait since only meteor storm works with it now.

Agree on earth. Magic projectiles in gw2 really need to be faster, and non magic ones, make them faster too, people should just dodge on the animation, not seeing things slowly travelling 1200.

Just more trait synergy, to get that feeling of making a really synergistic build back from gw1 :p
I think an issue here is due to glyph of elemental power they have to balance the spells around the possibility of applying burn/weakness/chill/cripple.

I think if goep was changed/removed(or kept the same, it might not even be op) and those conditions added liberally to the spells in all attunements we’d end up in a nice place.

I do agree staff is good damage/CC wise, the proble is how unreliable it is, too unreliable, even with skills, because the moment someone with enough knowledge of knowing what the red circles mean, will kill you or give you a run for your money, where you will have to either:

a) run away in shame
b)stay and die
c) be a bunker, annoying, get ignored by everyone, be a drag in a tPvP where your team members will not call you again cuz they would want someone that Actually contributes to the game, not fill a much-needed spot.

Staff needs to lose some AOE skills for starters (or have traits that sacrifice some AOE for more versatility).

19/20 skills are AOE (earth #1 is the exception), it’s not a balanced, well-designed weapon at all.

The problem I see with a baseline of 10s on Attument cooldowns is this: Attunement swap is our weapon swap, so we already have twice the skills of other classes (how anyone feels about said skills you still cannot argue the fact). So everyone else has a 15s cooldown on their weapon swap and if we trait for it we can get as low as 9s. Giving all Eles a base 10s cooldown on swaps would just simply be OP.

blackgoat.5172:

The problem I see with a baseline of 10s on Attument cooldowns is this: Attunement swap is our weapon swap, so we already have twice the skills of other classes (how anyone feels about said skills you still cannot argue the fact). So everyone else has a 15s cooldown on their weapon swap and if we trait for it we can get as low as 9s. Giving all Eles a base 10s cooldown on swaps would just simply be OP.

“During combat, swapping has a cooldown of 10 seconds, but you can swap repeatedly out of combat.”

I stand corrected, Sorry