Guild Wars 2

I completely love staff ele. I feel that it has some of the most unique play of any of the classes in game. However, I feel that the class is currently pigeonholed by a mix of trait and skill issues as well as a few minor bugs.

After spending around 1500 hours in tpvp, dueling, and roaming in WvW on my staff ele, I’ve come up with what I think is a minimal set of changes that would work to balance staff eles, increase their build diversity (in particular, make arcane builds start to become viable), and prevent them from having as many battles that are direct hard counters, i.e. d/p thief, shatter mesmer, power ranger.

Trait Line Changes:
- Remove blasting staff and make blasting staff size default
This gives eles room to experiment with much more build diversity due to the power of the now available adept traits in the arcana line. Eles can either forgo this line entirely, which now makes investment into the earth line for something like rock solid feasible. Or it allows them to invest more heavily in arcane builds by running Final Shielding or Arcane Mastery. Or it allows them to have a source of vigor uptime if they are not running a cantrip build.

- Fix the blast location on arcane brilliance, lower arcane brilliance cd to 20s
This heal fails to be viable because the cooldown is too long. Therefore, the hps is weak compared to Signet of Restoration, and it fails to have the condition removal of Ether Renewal. Lowering the cast time and fixing it so that it blasts at the caster’s location rather than the targeted enemy’s location would provide reason to run this heal in situations where the blast will provide good group utility.

Ability Changes:
Air:
- Change gust to a launch + knockdown, remove the precast time entirely (so thieves can’t headshot it, for example)
Gust is a weak utility outside of Lightning Rod builds. It fails to adequately lock down an opponent long enough to provide a good followup due to the fast recovery time, and it fails to create distance between classes that try to gap close, such as d/p thief, because the precast is long enough to be readily interruptible. Changing this to a launch will give an ele more counterplay options in down fights as well as point control ability. Removing the precast time will give eles a viable ability to create space for matches that unreasonably dominate a staff ele such as d/p thief.

- Lower lightning surge cast time to 1s
This ability simply doesn’t have enough power to warrant the long channel time. This certainly doesn’t warrant a longer cast time than Kill Shot. Lowering the cast time will actually allow the blind to be used as a counterplay rather than an additional bonus on top of landing the attack.

Earth:
- Fix earth 1 so it doesn’t obstruct / miss at any range of more than ~300 units; increase projectile speed; change weakness on hit to cripple on hit
Earth autoattack is currently useless because it is broken. It will almost always be strafed at any sort of range, and even when it is not it usually registers as “Obstructed” rather than hitting the target. Increasing projectile velocity and actually fixing the code that is causing unwarranted obstructions would resolve this. However, once this is done, the weakness application will be unacceptably high. Changing this from weakness to cripple allows an Elementalist to create space when needed in earth.

- Lower magnetic aura cd to 25s; lower magnetic aura duration to 4s
Staff Elementalists are currently dominated by builds that can apply sustained projectile pressure such as rangers. Slightly lowering the magnetic aura cast time allows an Elementalist to more readily use it as counterplay.

Utility:
- Increase Signet of Earth and Signet of Fire cast times from 1/2s to 3/4s
These abilities are too strong to be mostly unavoidable. Increasing the cast time allows players to more readily evade them.

- Make lightning rod hit through evade so evading into unsteady ground still triggers damage
Currently dodging into an earth wall registers a lightning rod attack as an evade, whereas static field still registers a hit. This behavior should be made consistent by forcing evades into an earth wall to trigger a lightning rod proc.

Overall, some of these may be minor points of contention, but I think all of them would give eles better build diversity and give them more options for interesting counterplays. However, if I had to reduce this list to only what I thought was critical, it would be, in the following order of importance:

- Fix earth autoattack
- Make blasting staff size default with no traits invested
- Fix Gust
- Lower Lightning Surge cast time

I would be interested in hearing how any other staff ele players feel about these changes, or if there are any other areas that you all find to be too strong or too weak.

Hello, I am also a big fan of Staff. I currently play a Diamond Skin condition. I agree with the Blasting Staff idea. I used to play a Fresh Air / One with Air Staff build for very long too.

I’ll start with that I do not agree with the list:

Utility:
-Do not increase Signet of Earth and Signet of Fire cast time.
“Currently, Signet of Earth can be casted during the Elementalist Gust, Earth wall, Static field. It feels good right now; and it’s the best way to punish someone who has been stunned.

-Earth Auto-attack: Keep the Weakness debuff.
“Cripple is shamefully bad. Instead, give eruption the cripple (I’ll explain later)

What I agree with:
-Fix the horible state of the earth auto-attack, and perhaps fire auto too. (It is not balanced as a “hard-to-hit” or “slow moving” projectile)
-Rod of lightning bug fix
-Give gust a bigger hitbox at point blank.
-Magnetic Aura could get some love too. I agree with your proposition to reduce its cooldown while reducing the duration. But, I feel like the focus variation of the reflect aura is obscenely superior and should be put back in line.
-Lightning Surge; the cast time is indeed weak.

My wishlist:

-Earth 1. Keep the Weakness debuff; it is very good. But,

-Earth 2, Eruption. Give cripple back to staff elementalists (The Earth line used to give a fair amount of it.) Eruptions now applies cripple in the area. Reduce the cast time to 2,5 seconds from 3,50 seconds.
OR, give eruption the same crippling wave of Churning Earth that cripples.

-Fix the aftercast bug where Eruption fails to cast if a dodge roll or any other action is initiated during the aftercast.

-Magnetic Aura; now applies cripple and deals a very small amount of damage around the caster on cast. 300 Radius.
“It will give a source of instant damage on earth that is an already very slow source of damage for the staff. Also, it will give a sense of parity between the amazingly good Magnetic Wave (Focus 4). One of the two atunements I call -The Dead-Zone Atunements- ; in Fresh Air, chances are that you’ll get stuck in Water or Earth because you cannot deal any damage to the moving and blocking enemy.”

Notes: The balance should be aimed at making the Staff Elementalist better as a fighter, and not a better at being hard-to-kill.

As a retired staff ele, now playing s/f, the only wish i have for staff is faster combat. faster cooldowns. and more single target skills that actually do damage according to those cooldowns.

If Anet listens to one thing it should be to make Blasting Staff the default radius so staff eles don’t have to go all the way into Arcane and have traits they don’t want just to have decent sized fields.

This way people can spec into arcane for the OP traits at times, but not be forced to when they don’t want to.

Biggest problems with the Ele Staff in descending order:

Earth Auto
Lightning Surge
Gust
Water Auto

It’s pretty ridiculous how slow and conservative their balance iterations are. The above skills are so egregiously underpowered they should have been fixed a month after launch. The same is true with various skills on other professions’ weapons.