Guild Wars 2

I’m referring to one thing specifically – that only Fire does respectable DPS. I don’t understand why it’s designed this way. The utility offered by the other attunements can be useful, but is typically very situational. This means you are all but forced to spend most of your time in Fire, and because you can’t freely switch between attunements without your DPS tanking, you are left without what is supposed to be the primary strength of the Elemenatlist – versatility. It’s also just boring.

It’s just.. not a good design. The DPS on the other three attunements – particularly Air and Water, needs to be improved so that you can fight effectively in them rather than having to swap out of them as quickly as possible to keep your DPS from cratering.

You have the right intentions but the wrong perspective: the weapon skill set is not too bad, but what is ridiculously poorly designed is the PvE content

Darox.8069:

You have the right intentions but the wrong perspective: the weapon skill set is not too bad, but what is ridiculously poorly designed is the PvE content

^ I must agree with this (though maybe not ridiculously)

But you still use the Water attunement for healing and the Air attunement for swiftness stacking.

Axelwarrior.9084:

Darox.8069:

You have the right intentions but the wrong perspective: the weapon skill set is not too bad, but what is ridiculously poorly designed is the PvE content

^ I must agree with this (though maybe not ridiculously)

But you still use the Water attunement for healing and the Air attunement for swiftness stacking.

Well, PvE design is certainly not ideal, but I don’t entirely agree that that’s the only problem. Keep in mind that most players spend a significant amount of time solo. No matter what, when you’re solo you need to be doing damage to be effective. The way the staff is designed makes it unplayable when solo unless you sit in fire all the time, which is a.) boring, and b.) still suboptimal since the Elementalist specializes in versatility and you can’t access that versatility without crippling your DPS.

There is no reason why Water’s DPS has to be so incredibly bad just because it heals. Weaker than Fire, sure, but not nearly as much weaker as it is. The utility from Air is even more situational, so it makes no sense that Fire so much stronger most of the time. Earth’s autoattack also sacrifices a bit too much damage for the Vulnerability it applies.

I wonder which solo content you are talking about

The entire video is pretty interesting but you’ll probably want to see the colossus rumblus fight.

Remove the stupid attunement cooldown (and move it to those passive effects you get from attunement swapping) and all problems are fixed.

petyr baelish.9675:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDp7dr-Kn9Y

The entire video is pretty interesting but you’ll probably want to see the colossus rumblus fight.

I have told everyone!

It took me almost 4 hours to complete soloing this path. But then I’m a convert. Playing staff really requires some strategic moves ^.^

Edit: The safe spot at Queen Spider doesn’t work anymore.

The thing is, isn’t that what balances the staff? Fire has the highest potential DPs an ele can do, water has some of the most powerful heals, whilst earth and air provides very strong control. But the catch is that unlike other weapons, you have to choose one at a time.

If you remove that limitation, wouldn’t it just make staff downright the strongest weapon for everything?

It’s already arguably overpowered as it does the highest potential DPS, whilst being ranged, which is against the one consistent rule used for balancing throughout the game: melee DPS is higher than ranged in any circumstance.

Zel is right. Staff seems to be balanced around the idea that in PvE, you will need everything, so you would have to decide what you want to focus on with a staff. However, in reality, almost always, you go for DPS above all because nothing else is worth sacrificing it that much for, and we got our current problem of staff being even more boring that camping GS on a warrior.

What they could do to make it a more viable weapon for PvE (I think PvE content-wise is just beyond saving right now unless Anet pulls out the stops and makes some massive changes like an AI rework) is to tone down fire DPS, and buff the others.

@Curse wouldn’t that just be the same thing as giving you all your 20 skills at once?

cursE.1794:

Remove the stupid attunement cooldown (and move it to those passive effects you get from attunement swapping) and all problems are fixed.

ugh the stupid forum search function is useless and I can’t be kitten d looking through pages of stuff to find the posts I’ve made previously about this

Basically, think about the staff #2 skills: Fire is high dps, Water is damage + vuln, Air is high damage and minor utility, Earth is blast finisher and a bit of bleeding.
Even just chaining Earth, Fire and Water #2s on cooldown would give huge damage output on a capture point while stacking up a lot of might for allies and a good deal of vuln on foes.
To make them at all balanced, if all were available at once, they’d need either:
- much longer cooldowns (because we need longer cooldowns, yeah)
- significantly weakened, to the point of being almost useless (wooooo, another good choice)

The weapon set has been balanced around not having all skills available instantly, and there’s no way that the attunement cooldowns can now be removed without completely breaking it.

Fun fact, Staff is used in more than just pve.
In WvW/sPvP staff ele builds, all 4 attunements get near-equal use because staff brings so much awesomeness in all attunements. If all but fire was to get a damage boost , then staff ele would probably become rather OP in non-pve situations.

Xae Isareth.1364:

What they could do to make it a more viable weapon for PvE (I think PvE content-wise is just beyond saving right now unless Anet pulls out the stops and makes some massive changes like an AI rework) is to tone down fire DPS, and buff the others.

@Curse wouldn’t that just be the same thing as giving you all your 20 skills at once?

That’s pretty much exactly what I was suggesting, because the problem in PvE is that you rarely benefit from staying in anything but Fire for any length of time because DPS is king 90% of the time. I didn’t suggest nerfing Fire’s DPS, though, because on the surface it doesn’t appear warranted. If it does more DPS than Dagger or Scepter can then that is kind of silly and I agree with you – I’ve never very thoroughly tested it.

OliT.7945:

Fun fact, Staff is used in more than just pve.
In WvW/sPvP staff ele builds, all 4 attunements get near-equal use because staff brings so much awesomeness in all attunements. If all but fire was to get a damage boost , then staff ele would probably become rather OP in non-pve situations.

That doesn’t really matter. It’s still designed rather poorly from a PvE perspective, which is still a problem.

Einlanzer.1627:

Xae Isareth.1364:

What they could do to make it a more viable weapon for PvE (I think PvE content-wise is just beyond saving right now unless Anet pulls out the stops and makes some massive changes like an AI rework) is to tone down fire DPS, and buff the others.

@Curse wouldn’t that just be the same thing as giving you all your 20 skills at once?

That’s pretty much exactly what I was suggesting, because the problem in PvE is that you rarely benefit from staying in anything but Fire for any length of time because DPS is king 90% of the time. I didn’t suggest nerfing Fire’s DPS, though, because on the surface it doesn’t appear warranted. If it does more DPS than Dagger or Scepter can then that is kind of silly and I agree with you – I’ve never very thoroughly tested it.

It does more damage than dagger, and a buttload more than scepter. In fact, staff ele has the highest possible personal DPS in the game besides perhaps mesmers, and we know why mesmer isn’t really a contender for viable highest DPS.

The only thing holding staff back is that you need to pretty much completely trade away utility to have that damage, so if you get rid of that restriction whilst letting it keep the damage high, you got a ridiculously overpowered weapon without any weaknesses: it would be highest DPS, great utility, and also ranged.

It’s damage goes down a lot if your target moves, which is why staff is a terrible 1v1 weapon but in group PvE, that’s not a problem.

They can fix it as it is, but it’d require doing stuff they really don’t want to do because either it’ll require a lot of work (redesigning AI and encounters), or make content in a way they don’t want to make them (e.g. requiring healers).

Staff does have the highest potential DPS against immobile targets, which is why it works in PvE where things don’t really care if you spam 2 on them all day.
The reason people don’t tend to run it too often in PvE is because your group wants you to stack, and you have exactly one defensive weapon skill in fire, which makes you stupidly squishy. LH is next in line, but brings stuns, mobility, blinds, and blast finishers making it a vastly better PvE weapon overall.

Really the only things I would have changed on staff would be slightly higher water damage (it should be low but not that low), a bit of air improvement (Gust is painful, the blind is okay but needs lower cast time to be effective), and less overlap between earth and air, which seem to both be control focused.

Id like to see stronger skills in Earth and Air but I like Water pretty much how it is.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Staff does have the highest potential DPS against immobile targets, which is why it works in PvE where things don’t really care if you spam 2 on them all day.
The reason people don’t tend to run it too often in PvE is because your group wants you to stack, and you have exactly one defensive weapon skill in fire, which makes you stupidly squishy. LH is next in line, but brings stuns, mobility, blinds, and blast finishers making it a vastly better PvE weapon overall.

Really the only things I would have changed on staff would be slightly higher water damage (it should be low but not that low), a bit of air improvement (Gust is painful, the blind is okay but needs lower cast time to be effective), and less overlap between earth and air, which seem to both be control focused.

Hit the nail on the head with this one.

Sauzo.6821:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Staff does have the highest potential DPS against immobile targets, which is why it works in PvE where things don’t really care if you spam 2 on them all day.
The reason people don’t tend to run it too often in PvE is because your group wants you to stack, and you have exactly one defensive weapon skill in fire, which makes you stupidly squishy. LH is next in line, but brings stuns, mobility, blinds, and blast finishers making it a vastly better PvE weapon overall.

Really the only things I would have changed on staff would be slightly higher water damage (it should be low but not that low), a bit of air improvement (Gust is painful, the blind is okay but needs lower cast time to be effective), and less overlap between earth and air, which seem to both be control focused.

Hit the nail on the head with this one.

Yeah I agree here. I do also feel like Earth’s autoattack is similar to Water’s in that it gives up too much damage for the utility it has.

Einlanzer.1627:

Sauzo.6821:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Staff does have the highest potential DPS against immobile targets, which is why it works in PvE where things don’t really care if you spam 2 on them all day.
The reason people don’t tend to run it too often in PvE is because your group wants you to stack, and you have exactly one defensive weapon skill in fire, which makes you stupidly squishy. LH is next in line, but brings stuns, mobility, blinds, and blast finishers making it a vastly better PvE weapon overall.

Really the only things I would have changed on staff would be slightly higher water damage (it should be low but not that low), a bit of air improvement (Gust is painful, the blind is okay but needs lower cast time to be effective), and less overlap between earth and air, which seem to both be control focused.

Hit the nail on the head with this one.

Yeah I agree here. I do also feel like Earth’s autoattack is similar to Water’s in that it gives up too much damage for the utility it has.

Stacking isn’t really a problem, the reason why people don’t run staff is because it doesn’t stack might, and to get the most out of it, you need to sacrifice Weak Spot.

But what’s special here is that the staff in this respect was designed to be one half of the key. It doesn’t have many accessible finishers, but it has every field at it’s disposal. The devs probably tried to encourage teamwork when they made it like that.

It’s also probably the most boring to use out of the metabuilds, I’d guess that somewhat contributes to it.

I think the design is fine in concept. If you look at staff vs other weapons, when it does what it does, it’s the best of it. Unlike the others, it just doesn’t do a bit of everything at once and instead having each element having an extreme focus on one aspect.

In other words, conceptually, you’d transform from full DPS to full healer to full support depending on what the fight needs. If we had content which played into that concept, it’d be ok. The problem like many things gone wrong in GW2, is that the content doesn’t play along with the design.

The elementalist has a much better design in Guild Wars 1. The current design is the result of the choice of having no dedicated healer class.

Just posted about the slow speed of the elementalist skills in another thread so I won’t mention it again here.

It rather depend on the situation. For WvW zerk fights staff is awesome and a group of 15-25 need at least 3 staff eles. Waterfields for healing, great damage and awesome cc. Staff ele is just one of the harderst class to play, you need the cc to stick the enemys together and fire to nuke it them down, so even for farming in pve staff ele is awesome.

It’s not a good fit for PvE. It’s slow and cumbersome. I agree with a previous poster that it’s the fault of PvE design.

Totally agree that staff is epic in WvW zergs, and even in a good 5 man. However in solo WvW it totally blows (you might as well be carrying a stick). That’s a weird dichotomy.

Outside of wvw/pve it is not a great fit as DPS is still king.

Just one thing to mention first:
Mostly 1 weapon cant be awesome at everything. With staff yes your not as good as other classes for single enemys in pve. But when you doing bigger events with tons of enfemys, youre one of the best classes. Fire 1 small splash, 2, 3 and 5 aoe. Water 2 aoe, 4 ae chill to get them in place for damage, also some aoe heals. Air 1=3 bounches, 5 stun to get them in place for dammage. Earth 2 aoe, 3reflect=dmg to ranged enemys, 4 get them in place for dmg, 5 piercing bleed.

Thou I think staff guard and thief shortbow is better. But it place us on third place.

It works great for me when roaming alone in WvW too.

I’m surprised you use staff in wvw for solo roaming. No one in their right mind would be dumb enough to stand in a meteor or lava font and those are the 2 biggest dps hitters for staff. I would imagine a FA D/D build would be much better as the AA from air does good dmg and having FA would allow you hop attunements pretty fast while also having the 6 points in Arcane Power tree. Of course I don’t PVP, so my thoughts are just a guess.

Sauzo.6821:

I’m surprised you use staff in wvw for solo roaming. No one in their right mind would be dumb enough to stand in a meteor or lava font and those are the 2 biggest dps hitters for staff. I would imagine a FA D/D build would be much better as the AA from air does good dmg and having FA would allow you hop attunements pretty fast while also having the 6 points in Arcane Power tree. Of course I don’t PVP, so my thoughts are just a guess.

Solo roaming, maybe not – unless you bring a lot of immobilise with you. In small groups, the AoE CC and threat of high AoE damage gives you pretty great area control, as long as your allies don’t pull the battle away from your fields.