Guild Wars 2

With the upcoming change to Diamond Skin I’ve been mulling about new builds. For staff, the main thing I kept running into was that for staff, condition damage is basically a wasted stat. The main culprit seems to be Eruption not being able to damage players reliably. So I was wondering what the other players would think about the following suggestion:

Current Eruption:
Damage: 462 (1.25 modifier)
6 stack bleeding: 12 s (3060 damage)
Radius: 240
Combo Finisher: Blast
Range: 1,200

New Eruption:
Duration: 3 seconds
Damage: 154 per second (0.417 modifier)
2 stack bleeding per second: 12 s (3060 damage total)
Radius: 240
Combo Finisher: Blast after 3 seconds
Range: 1,200

(basically spread the effect over 3 seconds, with just 1 blast finisher of course)

So once the skill is cast the effects start but the blast finisher is at the end. I like it and seems balanced. It is the one thing with eruption that you have to lock the targets down first then hope they don’t get out of it. It requires a setup to hit which can be frustrating. I like this suggestion.

I really like this suggestion! +1
It fixes the problem, and it’s fair. You should totally bring this up with the Devs in the other thread.

One thing that I’ve been noticing is that elementalist’s staff fields delays too long to hit, giving time to foes to escape. This is a brilliant idea and Devs MUST look at it.

So basically it’s a condi version of lava font with a usable untraited radius. The condition ele would still suffer from the same problems that it currently does in pvp.

Adastra.9821:

The condition ele would still suffer from the same problems that it currently does in pvp.

True, but at least it would make condition damage not totally worthless on staff. I fear it’s intentional design that the ele cannot do everything quite as well as another profession when specializing though. The devs seem to want you do to everything rather than focus on a specific thing. However, when it comes to damage conditions, the staff falls short atm and I feel this change would mend that somewhat. Your concern however is valid: full condition spec still wouldn’t do as well as other professions. But it’d be better than what it is now.

It could work I think but I Eruption is very special because the animation starts before the cast time has even ended. So does your sugestion make the power an almost instant use ability or does the cast time remains the same, delaying the damage spread over a longer period of time?

Ambrecombe.4398:

It could work I think but I Eruption is very special because the animation starts before the cast time has even ended. So does your sugestion make the power an almost instant use ability or does the cast time remains the same, delaying the damage spread over a longer period of time?

Good question. What I intended to say was to make the 3rd tick trigger as it triggers now, and then the 2nd and 1st ticks trigger 1 and 2 seconds before the third respectively. Basically it should trigger earlier, and then tick its damage until it ‘pops’, which is then a blast finisher.

I wouldn’t object to making the first ticks weaker, and the final tick stronger though (say 25%,30%,45%).

In general, I just think eruption would be more useful if the damage started earlier but the exact implementation doesn’t concern me as much. Note that I have no issues with delayed triggers in general (Ice Spike is fine imho), it’s just that this particular skill being delayed pretty much destroys all the staff condition damage plans.