Guild Wars 2

wasn’t sure if i should post this in suggestions or in the elementalist section of the forum: but i figured that it would get the most valid feedback in the elementalist section so placing it here, if that’s wrong a moderator is welcome to move it to suggestens

So i am an almost exclusively staff elementalist, been using staff for quite some time and its no doubt the weapon which i find most enjoyable of the elementalist(trying new builds when people post them etc. to keep me up to date with different styles and how effective each), BUT it does have some pretty big issue’s in comparison to other weapons and it got a few directly breaking issue’s making it useless in most pvp scenario’s and making it very hard to use in alot of pve scenario’s.
I will try to list some fixes which I would love to see to make this weapon move valid for both area’s.

One of the major issue’s with the staff is that its almost 100% based on placement fields(not to be confused with combo fields) which means that not only is aiming hard with it, but in most situations its kitten right impossible to apply the actual dmg and healing to the enemy/friends because of several things “first the targeting of these are quite badly made, and small objects makes it very hard to click the area you want to place the field at”, “secondly, the fields are crazily easy to avoid and get out of, considering the dmg of the fields isn’t higher then the direct dmg of most direct attacks which lands 100% of the time, this is a pretty big issue. And the healing is not very good because it forces people to stay within a very little area while its healing and the healing ratios no way makes up for this”.
Another issue is the time the projectiles takes to travel from a to b, the auto attacks are quite slow, dmg isn’t particularly impressive and they are VERY easily avoided, while in pve the travel time can become a issue.

Casting cc is very slow and takes a long time, so if you find yourself in a “kitten I need effect x to fix this” then it’s already too late because it will take up to a full 2 seconds before the attunement switch and the spell animation is cast and the actual spell effect is there, add to that the aiming and you got some bad/mediocra cc which continually need to be precast in a way where you “predict” that the enemy will be, so it becomes a matter of guessing instead of reacting to what Is happening which I don’t think is good.

Survive vs. dps.
Because of these issue’s the survivability of the staff compared to the actual effective dps is very bad and it takes not only perfect positioning, field placement and timing to make this work effectively but also a specific preset conditions which is 100% relying on things which you got 0 control over, meaning teammates doing some perfect cc on top of your fields(which because of the VERY high delay on all spells is oftend more luck then skills) of the enemy to be a stupid ai which is “permanently rooted/very slow” so that it stays within the fields and also allows for players to stand “still” within the small healing aoe area’s.

So this is the issue’s which I see and think needs a little help:
Now how would I like to see it solved.

Well lets start with the healing issue’s:
As it is now only healing rain got a large enough area to actually be reasonable to expect people to stay within it in a combat situation where they need the extra healing from other sources then themselves and need little change, only change I see needed is allow for movement while casting:

Geyser should be able to be targeted on an ally thereby allowing it to “stick” to an ally and be an aoe’ circle around that ally instead of a field locked to the ground, when it was targeted directly at the ally instead of the ground)

Water blast need to be targetable to a friendly or yourself target: meaning that you would be able to cast it directly at yourself or a friend for the healing ability as the main ability and the dmg as a small weak aoe to enemies within the blast radius.

That would take care of the healing issue’s which I see.

Dmg issue’s:
meteor shower: it shouldn’t lock you in place while casting, allow for movement while casting. And shorten the delay before the full amount of meteors starts raining down.

Lava font: as with geyser it needs to be targetable to an enemy (its dmg is not very high in comparison to other skills from other classes which have targeting and its duration is short enough to be mitigated completely by several skills/dodges/etc.)

Ice spike/eruption: these takes way too long time to go off, even with double cc you can still avoid them easily with a single dodge. The delay needs to be shortened by 25-33% (so they will take 75-66% time compared to the 100% now before applying dmg) (was considering having these stick to the target in the same manner as lava font should, but I am not sure if this wouldn’t become overpowered, granted you got two chances to avoid them, “when cast” and when the ability “explode/fall down” but I am not sure if this would allow for too many “garenteed aim” in comparison to other weapons)

Lightning surge: charge time is too high it gives too much time to react and it takes too long to go off compared to the dmg it does, so reduce the cast time slightly (20-25%).

That should take care of the dmg section.

CC:
Static field/frozen ground/unstready ground: the time it takes from you press to cast and until the field is actually casted is way too high it’s a full 1 sec then another 0,5 before the effect even start and that’s besides the casting time of 0,5-1sec.
All these needs to be cast instantly when you press the cast key, meaning as soon as the casting time is up the field and the effect should be applied, this would still give people time to react but not if they are asleep and it would allow you to react and use cc to the situation instead of guessing and using it “just in case”.
Static field needs tweaking so once people touch the circle they get stunned, not 1-2m out of it or into it.

gust/shockwave: cast time is too long, projectile speed is fine it gives people time to react to them when they see it coming, but the cast time need reducing so that one you click it, it fires.

Projectile speed of auto attacks:
Fireball/water blast/chain lightning/stoning: all of these projectiles are incredibly slow and need a speed increase to around the double of what they are right now. Their dmg is in no way high enough for people to need time to “avoid/dodge” them, neither will you see people wasting dodge on these, so increasing their projectile speed to double of what it is now and change their projectile angular so that they hit in a more straight line would only be good overall and not hurting the pvp aspect of the game.

I think that addresses my issues about the staff at this point
All valid critic or input are welcome, please keep the idiocy to a minimum though, and if you have critics try to explain why and in which situations this would be a bad change.

Best regards
Tjaranis

Good write up, but I don’t necessarily agree with all of it. (coming from a PvE perspective)

Here are some things I dislike about the staff:

Auto attacks either need a damage buff or have their projectile speed increased. All of them are pretty much awful.

Lava font needs a damage buff and needs to have its first tick immediately.

Ice spike needs to have its vulnerability stacks increased.

The blind on lightning surge needs to be instant. have the blind be applied when the channel starts, and the damage dealt when the channel ends. Blinds are used to cancel the next attack, they’re pretty much useless if the enemy can finish doing his attack before your blind is applied.

Gust misses way too often, even on walking targets. It needs to have its radius increased and be able to hit multiple targets.

Eruption needs to have its blast finisher at the beginning of the cast, not when it explodes. It’s pretty much impossible to blast anyone’s field with it, by the time it goes off, most fields will over.

Rest of the staff skills are fine the way they are imo. (Again, coming from a PvE perspective, I am not experienced enough to comment on the staffs effectiveness in PvP)

The only thing that really needs fixing is gust (make it instant like focus gale), aoe blinds shouldn’t be that easy to get.

Everything else you just need to learn timing to work with the delays.

the Auto attack should probably be twice as long with thrice the damage (and 33% faster travel time), just for more stylistic impact.

Staff is already very powerful in pvp if you’re good.

inb4 moved to suggestions

Having an ele as main i understand what the OP is talking about, having said that there are certain things that i think should be taken into account.

Staff is pretty much a nice balanced weapon that works very well in a group situation, we have mobility, cc, healing and damage. Keep in mind that ele as stated before is supposed to be harder to master. Personally i treat ele weapons as situational, when i need a weapon that can do good group play and support i like staff, using scepter with focus is great for single target damage and defense while scepter/dagger works nice if you want to get offensive. I see d/d as mostly a burst setup, more experienced eles feel free to correct me here.

The changes you are proposing to staff are indeed interesting but i honestly see them conflicting with the skills of the other weapons, i mean, why use the instant blind from Blinding flash if Lightning Surge could be instant, people tend to ignore the fact that lightning surge, at least in my build packs quite a bit of a punch on top of the blind.

You mentioned geyser and water blast. Geyser could certainly use a bit of a bigger aoe range, but correct me if i’m wrong, isn’t this affected by blasting staff? i recal that when i ran that trait it made geyser bigger. and Waterblast is especially nice as it is to autoattack a boss and if someone is in melee range they get a small heal, it’s not much but it should help them a bit. The way i would change this skill is in a similar way to chain lightning, the first (and only the first) hit is damage and then it bounces between the next 2 or maybe 3 allies and delivers it’s heal, add a slightly bigger ranger than the heal already has and limit the number of jumps. I think this is probably the only this you can change with this skill, the current version of it is situational but it works ok for it’s purpose.

Lava font and meteor shower. I would like to keep lava font as it is, perhaps bump the damage just a little bit, but as it’s stands it’s great for those moments when you wanna break yourself out of a cage fast (cliffside fractal for example) or adding a bit more damage on a stationary target. The meteor shower i perfectly agree with, you should me able to move, perhaps like in a swirly floating way to avoid breaking a nice animation (you gotta admit it’s kinda fun).

Ice spike and eruption. Well, if you make ice spike faster then it’s gonna be a mess in pvp, can you imagine the problems? would render most dodging mechanics useless, i’d see the same problem for making Dragon’s Tooth faster. Eruption is a sweet skill, i agree with Alilinke.7690 that it’s an issue and making it work as a blast finisher is hopeless the way the skill is currently designed.

Sorry if my post is too long, in my personal opinion staff is not as terrible as it first seems, autoattack speed does need a bit of a tweak for fireball it’s a bit slow but i think that for it’s purpose of a nice overall balanced weapon with just a few minor tweaks to make skills feel a bit more responsive we’d be in a really nice place. If we want more single target damage scepters and daggers are an ok option in most situations not to mention the unbelievable survival focus gives.

Meh, I get what you’re saying OP, but honestly I don’t see a huge issue with it. I’ve played Staff in PvP and WvW with hardly any issues, aside from the obvious(don’t try and 1v1 thiefs).

You just need to get a good feel for casting times, ranges, etc. I have zero issues setting up targeted spells with longer casting times, as I often use shield depending on the situation, or make use of terrain to give me those few seconds to cast it unmolested.

If you start messing with casting times or allowing us to move about while casting…meh, I think it would make some abilities op(and we would likely see a HUGE nerf due to it).

The biggest issue is the AOE cap, which I can understand is frustrating if you don’t get proper placement with your spells. Best advice is to keep trying it and work on perfecting it. There are a lot of ways to negate dmg while still casting our more powerful spells(play around with LOS, higher terrain, etc).

first off: thanks for the wonderfull feedback and thoughts, very nice to read
i will try to address them one at a time ^^

Alilinke.7690:
we basicly agree +- on auto attacks

i don’t fully agree with making lava font more damaging, while it’s dmg is quite “pethetic” in comparison to something like dragon tooth which takes less time to apply the full dmg and does almost 3 times the base dmg, we gotta remember its an instant cast, it’s like an aoe “dot” but without the sticky effect; so yer it either need as you suggest “more dmg” and stay the way it is right now, or it needs as i suggest to “work like an aoe dot hanging on the target” personally i think the dot would work better for balance (even though i would rather see a dmg increase due to the potential dps going up in the currect situations).

with ice spike one of the issue’s is that you can’t continually use it due to attunement switching having 10s cd, making the vulnerability more of a nitchi thing which won’t work, you could ofcouse increase the duration of the vulnerability to 20 sec, allowing you to stack 2 stacks with perfect rotations (which is 1 stack vs. bronze/silver and half vs gold+), which could be pretty nice. it would however need the delay decreased no matter what to actually work.
just making everything more powerfull wouldnt fix the issue’s that is there now, it would just make the effects very op under the perfect condisions which i kinda tried to avoid with my suggestions ^^.

i didn’t wanna buff gust, even though it should be an aoe pushback to ever really be usefull on a staff, i cant remember when i last used it for anything at all, simply the way you play the staff your dealing with groups not single target mobs.

eruption is the same as icespikes, dont think just making it more powerfull is the way to go, rather have the ability to calculated hit with it instead of depending on others and mobs making a mistake for it to ever hit.

you kindly skipped the whole healing section? which i perticularly in pve find to be quite a big issue as they are

emikochan.8504
not sure if you read the whole thing but, its not a matter of timing, as i mentioned i am a dedicated staff ele and i am using staff for everything from spvp,wvwvw, dungeons, fractiles(up to 40, havent done them over that yet, have had no incentive to do it.), and event pve.
i would mean i got almost perfect timing on every one of my spells (except maybe gust which i find almost useless in 99,9% of the situations i face.)
now i went into details of why the issue’s with the staff was there in my op, if you havent read them please go do so, if you have and still don’t agree i don’t think i can really convince you but i would love to hear how you apply geyser effectively in a frac 40 vs the shamen or other bosses which basicly destroy’s you if you keep still within a small area for too long (main issue as i stated is hitting its effect on allies and since its heal is soo low you need the full duration for it to do anything at all.)

the auto attack change you suggest would be quite terrible it would make it way to even get an auto attack of vs. the hard stuff where you kite,dodge,run alot. and it would add too much burst vs. players in a pvp inviroment if they don’t notice you(i wouldn’t mind one attunement auto attack being like this, maybe the lightning since it seems really weak as it is right now and could use help :P

and staff is not powerfull in pvp its actually the weakest of all weapons in the game for pvp. 1v1 it gets owned hardcore :/
hiding behind a zerg and casting aoe’s hardly kitten as a good pvp weapon, since its very weak in a fair pvp situation combared to the other weapons in the game ^^

Shadow.9418
since ele can’t switch weapons its pretty clear your suppose to handled everything you encounter with that one weapon type you choose to go with, not switch depending on the situation (you got attunement for that as people would say xD )
(s/d is the burst build of ele ^^)

about conflicting i don’t agree:
i didnt want lightning surge to be instant, but faster casted then it is
and blinding flash is for another weapon build which adds nice synergy with the rest of the skills in that build so it wouldn’t really be valid to switch to staff if you are originally using s/d build (we actually got a utility skills which aoe blind, so if it was so extremely powerfull you would even consider trading all the other skills for that, you would just take the blind signet instead ^^)
and dmg wise lightning surge do very mediocra dmg compared to time it takes to get off ^^

well i was talking about all the skills with the blasting staff trait, without it they are just streight out pethetic with their range :P
even with the upgrade its extremely hard to land the geyseer effectively in most pve situations, and the effect of it even when landed perfectly is subpar to most other healings.

well icespike/erupt in pvp is quite laugheble, you can literally walk from the middle and out of it before it comes down. so cutting the delay in half would in no way make it Hard to dodge, it would still be easy to dodge, but if you where cc’ed now it could actually hit people
/dragon tooth setups got instant cc to back it up, staff cc is extremely slow and easily avoideble, so dont think they can really be compared in that regard

My only wish for the staff is a second AoE spell for Air, preferably on #2. I don’t have any complaints about casting time, there are plenty of abilities that aren’t channeled.

Thanks for the reply Erebus.7568, i guess that the way i see d/d compared to s/d could probably be written off as either my own play style or my setup and gear, i agree s/d does a ton of damage

You make a very good point to the aoe range being kinda small without blasting staff as far as geyser goes i gave up trying to put down the kitten thing under my allies a long time ago, i do my best to use it while i run around, i place it in front of me to a point where i think i will reach and i’ll probably get it to tick once on me before it goes away, obviously this is terrible and far from ideal. In pve there are plenty of moments where it might help a few melee or something but in pvp when everyone keeps moving i wouldn’t even bother trying to cast the kitten thing.

I think you’re right about walking out of aoe, as it stands only people you can realistically hit with those skills in pvp are either players who are caught unaware or can’t dodge, are under some sort of cc, etc. Most you can get from such skills on a consistent basis is to scatter players.

The reason i was mentioning the weapon switching and i think i kinda expressed what i meant poorly, is that you switch weapons between fights, ofc that works better in pve than in pvp. I would never say to anyone “oh you have 4 attunements learn them” or anything along those lines, i understand the limitations of the current system. I think that for eles a nice solution would be borrowed from Guild Wars.

Create weapon sets but only allow eles to switch between them between fights, this way it will not break the whole ele has 1 weapon with 4 attunements thing we have going on but it saves allot of time searching your inventory or hero panel for the weapon you want to equip (on top of any loot i may have i always carry 2 daggers, 1 scepter, 1 focus and the staff). Just click the set icon or press the hotkey for one of the weapon sets when you get out of combat and you instantly have a new set, this isn’t perfect, but you have to agree it would be allot better than things currently are and it would not impact the mechanics since you can only switch out of combat.

As a class i don’t think that giving us the ability to handle everything with just the staff is a good thing, that’s just my personal opinion. Would there be any incentive left to even try the other weapons? The staff needs tweaks to skills but other than that making it awesome for every situation might get really really boring, not to mention make eles the new thief ( you know like omg thief owns so hard, let’s all run thieves ), let’s at least have this class with a bit of a learning curve.

I would agree with op. The problem is that Staff ele maybe THE best toon for zerg v zerg. I’m not talking about your 20 v 20 fight. I’m talking about 50+ v 50+. When there are that many ppl in a fight you can’t really target anything due to lag and culling. Ground AE just own. First ppl don’t even see the effect due to lag, second they can’t move out of it due to lag. On top of that ele can place them from max range which makes eles immue to return fire for the most part. Now unless you play in T1 T2 or T3 you will most likely never get into a giant fight like that. But when and if you do, staff ele just own.

Shadow.9418:

As a class i don’t think that giving us the ability to handle everything with just the staff is a good thing, that’s just my personal opinion. Would there be any incentive left to even try the other weapons? The staff needs tweaks to skills but other than that making it awesome for every situation might get really really boring, not to mention make eles the new thief ( you know like omg thief owns so hard, let’s all run thieves ), let’s at least have this class with a bit of a learning curve.

Uhm, since we are stuck with one weapon during combat, that weapon has to be able to handle everything that comes our way.

Some people like using the same weapon for everything. If you really love up close and personal, why would you want a staff over dagger/dagger? Or vice versa, if you enjoy the long range of staff, dagger/dagger won’t be your thing.

If you do like changing stuff up, or if you are extremely tactical in your thinking, you don’t need incentive to switch weapons because you are already doing so. A certain boss is always in your face? D/D might be the better choice over staff, and people will plan for it.

Elementalist would still have a harder learning curve, even if you made their weapons better.

I agree with you Erebus, I too have been using staff only for every occasion (PvE, sPvP, and WvW). I’ve done the whole d/d and such but I don’t find it as enjoyable as the staff weapon.

I agree with projectile of the auto attack, it is really slow, that it doesn’t make much of an impact on the enemy. The fire auto attack is ok, pretty strong overall. Water needs a speed and damage boost, and/or give it a projectile finisher. Earth’s auto attack is good but a speed boost would be good. Lightning I feel is a pretty balanced auto attack since it can hit up to 3 enemies, giving it a projectile finisher or speed boost would make it op(?).

As for the eruption skill, it takes way too long to explode, the person would have to stand perfectly still to hit. You can time it perfectly all you want but a good player will easily dodge it. Ice spike, water #2 skill is alright, the fall time could be reduced lower but damage-wise it’s ok. For lava pit, I like your idea of having the damage tick right away once it is placed on the ground at least it can do something xD

I have been trying my best to make the staff viable for close-quarter combat, like 1v1 situations or small skirmishes. I’ve been 50/50 successful, but against good players it is either stalemate or I lose xD I’ve got nothing against good players, awesome props to them, but staff just doesn’t have much in finishing a player from full to zero by themselves.

This is from a pvp/WvW perspective, in pve I do just fine since the monsters mainly stand in one place. Mmm…I know there are some more thoughts on my mind about staff elementalist, but I’m having a brain fart atm lowl, I’ll post them once I stop spacing out xD

Staff if you want to make more support and be muchs usefull for aoe is better, anyway i kill the d/d elementalist with my staff ele. i was one of the first on gw to use D/D later i see bunchs of randoms use it so i change again to staff and i can survive more.

D/D is for people that cant handle the staff , nothing more.

Tumbero.3945:

Staff if you want to make more support and be muchs usefull for aoe is better, anyway i kill the d/d elementalist with my staff ele. i was one of the first on gw to use D/D later i see bunchs of randoms use it so i change again to staff and i can survive more.

D/D is for people that cant handle the staff , nothing more.

Uhhm. No, just no, you’re trollin’.

Tumbero.3945:

Staff if you want to make more support and be muchs usefull for aoe is better, anyway i kill the d/d elementalist with my staff ele. i was one of the first on gw to use D/D later i see bunchs of randoms use it so i change again to staff and i can survive more.

D/D is for people that cant handle the staff , nothing more.

ye you are trolling for sure.

Staff needs more lovin. Thats for sure, esp when DnD ele can eat a staff ele for breakfast. Hell, even an engie could kill a staff ele with little effort

It is clear Anet wanted to create support based ele. Now if they were serious they should give them might stack casts as well.

I’m a pretty experienced d/d elementalist who has been regularly PvPing and WvWing.
I have around 1.5k hours logged on my ele. The first 500-700 hours were me playing with staff.

I have been doing more tPvP lately… whenever I saw a staff ele I would smile and feel bad for them as I wrecked them with my mobility.
There have been times though when a staff ele has completely worn me down and taken me out 1 v 1.

I would love to learn that build.

To be honest, while you do make some good points, the survivability you mention isn’t such a big issue to me. Between the water traits and the healing fields, it’s doable to stay alive.

The main thing that must be taken into account is that the staff isn’t a 1vs1 weapon. It’s a group weapon, and it should be used as such. Skills like Frozen Field may be weak on their own, but with a group spamming projectiles through it, it becomes insanely powerful. Also, if you use a skill like Glyph of Elemental Power, you’ll notice that your skills will become a lot better at hitting your targets. Keep them snared as best you can, and then subsequent fields will keep the snares going.

The trick with the casting times (both on the damage and the healing fields) is to plan ahead, and anticipate what your enemies (and your team) will likely do next. This is again where the teamplay aspect comes in again. It’s not about duelling and quick decisions. It’s about longtime strategies, planning ahead. Relatively speaking of course.

I also disagree with you wanting to make Meteor Shower castable on the move. It’s supposed to be an artillery style attack, and as such, you’ll have to expose yourself to danger for the massive damage to strike.

However, as far as the projectiles go, I agree. Speeding them up a little seems like a good thing to do.

OhhGasm.9604:

There have been times though when a staff ele has completely worn me down and taken me out 1 v 1.

I would love to learn that build.

Maybe it’s not so much their build. Maybe they were just better players.