Guild Wars 2

So I just started playing a Guardian and I really like the staff because I want something totally different than my thief (incidentally I feel really at home with sword/focus). I get why they killed the range on the staff auto attack but 300 range on a range weapon is really awkward to play with.

Suggestion: Change the range back to 600 on the staff auto attack but invert the shape of the attack so that the wide part of the triangle is close to your character and the ‘point’ is at the far edge of the weapon’s range. See no more loot stick and I can AA at range with my range weapon.

Other suggestion:
Detonate Orb (staff 2) should be a blast finisher for even more support options.

Symbol of swiftness – visually you should somehow see that enemies are being harmed by standing on it (this goes for all symbols). I’m envisioning something like pulsing blue flames at their feet.

Empower – Really love this skill but can we up the range. What if it started off big then shrank each tick to 600 for the last pulse? Also since I can’t move while casting can I get stability on the 3rd or 4th pulse just so I can guarantee the final tick.

Line of Warding – Not sure if it affects breakbars but it should

Last thing… what the hell is up with guardian scepter. It’s gotta be the worse weapon in the game. Does anyone use it?

Scepter has been one of the highest dps weapons on guardian for a while. Honestly, it plays much better if you treat it like a melee weapon instead of a ranged one.

You’ll actually find that all of guardian’s weapons (besides longbow to a certain extent) feel like they were made for melee. Even though staff used to have a bit more range on it, it always rewarded the guardian for standing close to their targets due to the way symbols function and benefiting from your orb detonations.

I think Staff 1 is currently fine at it’s range, it just needs something added to it to make it’s reduced range justified and to make it competitive as a support or damage weapon vs weapons like mace (support) or sword (damage).

A spam-able heal would be a bit much, and if they did add a heal to it, it would have to be so weak as to be completely inconsequential. I think an increase in damage would be the most obvious change, perhaps add some play with the additional damage… say “Does additional damage if target is standing in a symbol” or something along those lines.

The Orb should be ground targeted, and I see nothing wrong with giving it a blast finisher too. It would definitely bring it up as a support weapon.

I think the damage ticks are enough of a tell that you’re doing something with your symbols, but I’m not opposed to the idea of a little bit more visual feedback… even if what you suggested probably wouldn’t be noticeable at all in more hectic situations.

I don’t think making empower grant stab to yourself is a very elegant solution. I think making empower pulse faster and allowing the guardian to move would make it infinitely more usable and fixes multiple problems with the skill at once; making it safer to use in melee and allowing the guardian to better capitalize on the heal and might personally.

Line of Warding does affect break bars, but you have to force the enemy to walk through it, which is easier said than done on a lot of champion enemies.

As I have said many times before on these forums, the following would make the staff so much better at being a real support weapon:

1. - Either a heal like Ele Water 1 or even grant a small barrier to each player you hit with it.
2. - Get ride of the flip part and just make it a 6s CD targetted blast. You shoot the orb towards the location healing those on the way then it detonates healing those in the area targetted.
3. - Make it cleanse 2 conditions on placement. All symbols currently give boons (axe is not but that might change in the updates come release, here’s hoping) and half of them have an additional effect. Scepter has extra hits, Sword blinds, Bow burns, Hammer is apart of the auto chain. So giving an extra effect on placement should be apart of the remaining symbols (healing for mace, condi cleanse for staff, bigger damage hit for greatsword).
4. - Anet already made it heal per pulse like I thought they should make it do, but I still think might should be removed and a damage buff added to the final tick (equivalent to 5 stacks of GotL but doesn’t stack with it). Usable on movement would also be nice.
5. - Should hit break bars in PvE on placement and should heal those who pass through it.

Those are changes to staff that would be nice and make it a more viable support weapon. And concerning scepter:

Scepter is love, scepter is life.

a.k.a. the thing hits like a ton of bricks and is really the only range weapon we have, though it does like to miss moving targets at range (though nothing beats torch for missing like a boss).

nopoet.2960:

Suggestion: Change the range back to 600 on the staff auto attack but invert the shape of the attack so that the wide part of the triangle is close to your character and the ‘point’ is at the far edge of the weapon’s range. See no more loot stick and I can AA at range with my range weapon.

Interesting suggestion.

The problem is that weeks after making this change, ArenaNet has left us guessing as to the reasoning for it.

For all certain people have been saying ‘bye bye lootstick’, lootsticking really didn’t hurt the game. Other professions also have ways of efficiently tagging multiple enemies, and as much as it might provoke jealousy on the part of players of some other professions that aren’t as good at tagging, the term ‘lootstick’ started as a derisive term from PvE guardian players who felt that was the only thing it was good for.

Plus, when PoF arrives, ‘lootsticking’ will be possible again using Tome of Justice with Radiance. This has lead to some conspiracy theories that the reason why ArenaNet hasn’t justified the nerf is that the real reason is to push people to get PoF and use Tome of Courage to get back what was taken away. In this case… they really might as well put a long-range auto on it and make it the standoff support weapon some people have asked for. I’ve resisted that myself because I liked the old staff, but if we can’t have that, we could at least have something useful in its place.

Another theory as to the reason was that it was a problem in WvW (which was the only place it was actually being used seriously before the nerf) due to the sustained pressure it could provide in a zerg versus zerg. Unlike lootsticking, this is somewhere where having people switch to using Firebrand for the same purpose actually might have a gameplay benefit (over just a financial one of getting people to buy the new content…) – Tome of Courage can only be used in bursts (unless its recharged by scoring a kill through Radiance, which a) requires taking a second traitline and b) getting kills is harder in WvW than it is in PvE loottrains) and it means that the capability can’t be combined with other elite specs such as dragonhunter or anything else that might come down the line. In that case… see my previous comment. Might as well turn it into the long-range support weapon some people have asked for.

A third theory is that it’s purely an issue of being able to attack through doors. In which case, the solution is programming in suitable collision detection so it no longer strikes through doors, after which we could have the old staff back.

nopoet.2960:

Last thing… what the hell is up with guardian scepter. It’s gotta be the worse weapon in the game. Does anyone use it?

It’s… possibly actually the most used guardian weapon, all things considered.

Even before Staff 1 was nerfed into the ground, it was regarded as the only viable ranged weapon for non-dragonhunters, and even dragonhunters often use it in preference to longbow due to its higher DPS – scepter is one of the highest DPS ranged power weapons in the game, particularly against large hitbox targets. The slow projectile velocity is a balancing factor for the fact that if all those orbs do hit, you’re doing damage that can outmatch some melee weapons.