Guild Wars 2

Why does my fire skills do 5k damage, churnning earth does almost 6k crit damage, yet my meteor shower barely hits the 2.5k ~? goes 3k if im lucky. why is there such a huge differences between these two, and why is there even a difference in damage?
for stats, i have 90% crit damage, 1900 power.

Because damage is not the only measure of the effectiveness of a weapon set? Do I get a Stuffed Charr Backpack for first correct answer?

Staff has a bigger radius on most of its attacks, many of them pulse more than once (if someone stands in lava font for the full duration it’s going to hit them for at least 5k, same goes for them being hit by multiple meteors from meteor shower), and it has 1200 range on its attacks instead of 300. <_<

tl;dr: melee range attacks generally hit harder/faster than ranged options for the same profession (inb4 sniper warrior). Higher risk, higher reward.

AoE gives something a higher damage potential, so it must do less damage than single target.
Range also allows more safety than melee, and makes it easier to kite enemies, and to stay in range of kiting enemies. So, long range must do less than short range.
Since Staff is long range and almost entirely AoE, while D/D is short range and has much more single target, D/D will hurt a lot more.

“Base direct damage” is used in the formula for critical damage.

Per the wiki:
Base direct damage is given by the following equation:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

The “skill-specific coefficient” is the key here. It has to be lower for the staff skills. We do not know, at least I cannot find, this number for any of our skills.

That explains the math. The reasons the devs did this I think was to balance the staff because it does so many other things such as those mentioned above as wells as combo fields, six, and aoe crowd control to mention two more.

mostly because staff is a long range weapon while dagger are short range…
Difference should be even more…..considering light profession + low HP

But the reality is ele lacks damage…..compared to any other class.

As long as we’re on a similar topic, what’s with the disparity between dealing damage with dagger/x and with scepter/x and staff?

Seriously, I’m okay with doing less damage at range, but why does it have to be so much harder to actually hit things with ranged skills than with melee skills?
I suppose I can understand the staff’s situation because of its massive AoE and support capability, but what’s the reasoning behind the scepter’s state?

scepter deals lot of damage but cannot hit somehow… ._.

Both staff and scepter needs serious buffs.

Actually scepter is a PvE weapon (even if its really strong against slow targets).

staff and scepter are just plainly badly designed.

Staff is weak because 19 of the 20 skills are AOE and earth #1, the only single-target skill, is weak, which pidgeonholes staff into support or tower/zerg humping.

Scepter is weak because it’s really predictable and because Dragon’s Tooth is a spell that – bizarrely – has been designed to miss.

Metero Shower hits for less since it’s supposed to hit multiple targets in a very large radius. However, due to the 5-target limit of AoEs, you will almost always do less dps with it than just spamming Fireball.

I kinda wished AoEs have no limit on number of targets hit, but it will be too OP then especially in WvW.

Sometimes I realize every skill of every weapon set needs to be looked at again since the fact that they have been through many iterations, most of which have basically become useless due to unintended consequences of other changes to other aspects such as class stats, etc.

And it feels really awkward knowing that you are facing 10 or more enemies but your Lava Tomb only up to 5 targets assuming all of them are standing within the aoe radius, the rest are immune. I mean, WTF

Wow, you invested a lot in critical damage. My ele has 2657 power or something unbuffed and only 35% critical damage. With 15~ stacks of might because sigil of battle I get 7k churning earths. If I were you, I’d bump up your power. Critical damage gets calculated from that.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Metero Shower hits for less since it’s supposed to hit multiple targets in a very large radius. However, due to the 5-target limit of AoEs, you will almost always do less dps with it than just spamming Fireball.

You do realize that the hit cap is per pulse on Meteor Shower, not all of the pulses combined?

ThiBash.5634:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Metero Shower hits for less since it’s supposed to hit multiple targets in a very large radius. However, due to the 5-target limit of AoEs, you will almost always do less dps with it than just spamming Fireball.

You do realize that the hit cap is per pulse on Meteor Shower, not all of the pulses combined?

I’m not aware that Meteor Shower is a pulsating AOE like the Fire Glyph AOE and that the hit cap resets per pulse. The way I notice it works is otherwise. It’s like every Meteor is an individual FireBall and that only 5 targets get hit within the AOE radius. Correct me if I’m wrong, but still, I’m not a fan of how AOE works in this game. It feels so disengaging knowing that you have a 5-person limit on your AOE even if you want to nuke a large zerg. >.<

prepatch meteor shower seemed to work weird….

It wasn t that it had a cap on single meteors, but rarther than meteors could hit you maximum 2-3 times and then even if they hit they did no damage.

But seemed last patch fixed it somehow.

Issue with the skill is that is unreliable and too easy to evade..

Nobody will take more than a meteor and will easily evade.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

The way I notice it works is otherwise. It’s like every Meteor is an individual FireBall and that only 5 targets get hit within the AOE radius.

That is what I meant, yes, though I may have worded it confusingly. My apologies. To me, that means that it’s one of the few AoEs that actually packs a punch against large groups. But your mileage may vary.

The logic of the weapon damage seems to be risk vs. rewards. The melee dagger/dagger has a great deal of damage. The scepter/dagger when used in melee range also grants a good deal of damage because of the might it can effortlessly generate with Dragon Tooth and Phoenix used as blast finishers. When scepter is used at range those two finishers are lost because the blast finishers of those skills is outside the Ring of Fire.

In Pve the Scepter/Dagger is awesome. RTL to the boss,Ring of Fire, 4 blast finishers plus any arcana finishers plus dodges and the everyone in the group is primed with insane might. When are we going to stop talking about our class as if we were solo all the time and realize what we bring to a party in combo fields, finishers, crowd control, healing, boons, and condtion removal?

Baladir.2736:

The logic of the weapon damage seems to be risk vs. rewards. The melee dagger/dagger has a great deal of damage. The scepter/dagger when used in melee range also grants a good deal of damage because of the might it can effortlessly generate with Dragon Tooth and Phoenix used as blast finishers. When scepter is used at range those two finishers are lost because the blast finishers of those skills is outside the Ring of Fire.

In Pve the Scepter/Dagger is awesome. RTL to the boss,Ring of Fire, 4 blast finishers plus any arcana finishers plus dodges and the everyone in the group is primed with insane might. When are we going to stop talking about our class as if we were solo all the time and realize what we bring to a party in combo fields, finishers, crowd control, healing, boons, and condtion removal?

Can I haz option for dealing awesome damage from myself and get rid of the “I stack hefty Might for everyone, therefore I am amazingly powerful” kind of mindset? Should ele always rely on Might andcombos to deal enough damage?

Baladir.2736:

When are we going to stop talking about our class as if we were solo all the time and realize what we bring to a party in combo fields, finishers, crowd control, healing, boons, and condtion removal?

Seeing as I often am solo, I’d stop only if I ever quit the game. I do a lot of roaming in WvW, and I really dislike melee focused combat, so I take major issue with these problems.

I came into this game hoping scepter/dagger would support ranged combat with some melee (my preferred playstyle), and dagger/focus melee with some ranged. I still don’t see why it can’t be that way. (Maybe with a new offhand, though, as it seems pretty clear that the focus fills a defensive role.)

Each Meteor is an individual AoE with its own target cap. Thou I doubt that with 90 radius a meteor can hit more than 2 targets. Meteor Shower itself doesn’t have a target cap. In a large group of enemy, Meteor Shower is capable of hitting much more than just 5 targets.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Baladir.2736:

The logic of the weapon damage seems to be risk vs. rewards. The melee dagger/dagger has a great deal of damage. The scepter/dagger when used in melee range also grants a good deal of damage because of the might it can effortlessly generate with Dragon Tooth and Phoenix used as blast finishers. When scepter is used at range those two finishers are lost because the blast finishers of those skills is outside the Ring of Fire.

In Pve the Scepter/Dagger is awesome. RTL to the boss,Ring of Fire, 4 blast finishers plus any arcana finishers plus dodges and the everyone in the group is primed with insane might. When are we going to stop talking about our class as if we were solo all the time and realize what we bring to a party in combo fields, finishers, crowd control, healing, boons, and condtion removal?

Can I haz option for dealing awesome damage from myself and get rid of the “I stack hefty Might for everyone, therefore I am amazingly powerful” kind of mindset? Should ele always rely on Might andcombos to deal enough damage?

Might stacking with d/d and s/d is too powerful to ignore. Same goes for combo fields. It would be like saying, “Can’t a thief get away from stacking vulnerability?” I was in a mini boss fight in coe1 the other day and the thief in the party stacked vulnerability to 25. How is that not helpful? Rhetorical quesiton lol. The game designers when they eliminated the trinity roles replaced them with group roles. The group roles replaced the high dps clases, big healing classes, and tanking classes, which we all lost, with group synergies to increase group healing, dps, etc.

We don’t have to stack might, but it is a powerful option available to us. In the example above, I had never seen vulnerability stacked like that before and groups have done just fine. I don’t know if it was just the thief build or what, but it was certainly helpful. I don’t use arcana skills to stack might, btw. I often go staff in parties. We don’t have to go overboard and confine ourselves, but we shouldn’t ignore this kind of stuff either. imo

vinceftw.5086:

Wow, you invested a lot in critical damage. My ele has 2657 power or something unbuffed and only 35% critical damage. With 15~ stacks of might because sigil of battle I get 7k churning earths. If I were you, I’d bump up your power. Critical damage gets calculated from that.

Or stack precision and crit damage. Have a higher chance to do critical hits (I’m at 50% if I use daggers, which stack bloodlust, and 65% if I use my staff, which stacks precision) and do 50% more damage per crit than people who don’t understand modifiers.

Power is great for warriors, who need more than 3,000 power for precision to be worth it. Elementalists are quite different.

Running my build where I have 85% crit damage I hit for about what you do, vinceftw, but I do that without any stacks of might. I just went and tested how much I would do with around that amount of might you had. With 13 stacks in Orr (Shelter’s gate event) my churning earth did 8,500. Sorry if I don’t have a PvP example for you, I figured this was the quickest way.

And I haven’t even fully outfitted myself with ascended items. I have one thus far, about to get a second (by the end of the week). The daggers I have are rares, not exotics. I usually use my staff, which is exotic.

Has anyone noticed how the last couple of seconds of a fully channeled meteor shower seem to be visual only? I never seem to get any hits off in those last seconds even though there are still enemies visually being hit by the falling meteors.

Ray.2640:

Has anyone noticed how the last couple of seconds of a fully channeled meteor shower seem to be visual only? I never seem to get any hits off in those last seconds even though there are still enemies visually being hit by the falling meteors.

Yes, the last 5 sec deal no dmg It is supposed to deal dmg for 15 sec but I noticed the last 5 sec meteors doesn’t do dmg

The ele staff does need some tweaking. At the bare minimum the range and speed on the staff could be increased. 1 vs 1 with a staff is virtually impossible to survive if your facing a skilled player (unless he is having a bad day).

Meteor shower could take place within a smaller lapse of time because right now everyone has time to run out of it (there should be less time between the meteors). They could increase the reload time to compensate for the buff.

The first attack of water, earth and air are literally worthless (specially water, wtf?). I often find myself casting the second air spell when I am reloading my attunements, immediately thinking to myself that this kittening spell takes 3 second to cast and that Ill be dead by the time I’m done.

I guess when I get enough gold that is the next thing I will do, stop using the staff and go for daggers.

Another problem with staff is the range puts you too far out to receive might stacks. So you might as well get into melee range to do might stacks, and as such you might as well go daggers.

Another thing I forgot to mention… people are talking about meteor shower. It should be noted that meteor shower is most effective in contained areas (tunnels, etc.) because it actually increases the damage of the individual shots within the smaller area. Ergo, more shots hitting, more damage. Try to use it in a choke instead of across a wide portion of the battlefield.

D/D are mostly for people that cant handle a hardcore way to pvp mostly, i still use my staff build on wvw and im proud to say i own mostly all classes.

Still i remember at my first days of game and at my ele with D/D was good later i see all people with D/D and i was like wth, anyway the ele with daggers is overbuffed i just pik up today my ele and i fell inmotal , compared with my guardian<<(the most nerfed class)… now i see some of my mate makin some Q.Q cause the healing are going to be lower i personaly laugth at them….dagger are mostly for charge attak but the staff have much bunker and stuning combos ikittennow to use it =), also u can own mostly all.