Guild Wars 2

I still think staff is not balanced correctly, and think the following would improve its balance, purpose, and play.
- Please reduce the duration of chaos storm rather than saddle it with an insanely high cooldown and compensate with a bit of upfront direct damage on the spell. This will result in fewer conditions/boons applied in pvp, and some much needed help in aoe-heavy dynamic events in ORR.
- Staff’s bounces need to be returned to their launch numbers, but tweak upward slightly the odds of vulnerability to compensate (maybe even replace burning with weakness and up the odds of bleeding). It’s too slow with only a couple targets already, removing it’s “return on investment” on large groups where it shines is not the solution to this issue. Adjusting up the odds of non-damaging effects and lowering its ability to be used for single-target burst is.

The end result would be a more defensive and aoe focused weapon with less potency in smaller-scale encounters, more balance in large scale encounters, and better performance in dynamic events and dungeons.

I think returning to the concept of Defensive AE weapon with the staff is a good idea.
It was a much better concept to begin with. And now that the GS offers AE, there’s little reason to try push the Staff into an all-rounder weapon.

All i want them to do is completely remove vulnerability or replace it with 3-5sec poison. Every single other staff skill is perfectly fine by me but winds of chaos.

Staff only needs one nerf. Nerf Phase Retreat to the ground. Make the teleport not work when you couldn’t leap or dodge either. Remove the finisher. When the skill is equivalent to a dodge that also spawns a clone, go hog wild with buffing Chaos Storm because it doesn’t give you a 5-second Chaos Armor as a bonus anymore.

I believe the reason why the WoC is so weak untraited is that staff clones are absurd compared to other clones. So why not take their conditions down too and give WoC back a bounce or two. Not really necessary but hey, in the name of fun and balance.

I would argue that in order to balance Clones (as a concept, versus other mechanics), one of two things need to happen. Either they need an extra function on the Scepter and Spear clones (extremely unlikely to be fully balanced), or Clones simply need to lose all damage and extended effects.

In other words, they should no longer apply DoTs or debuffs or anything special at all. They shouldn’t cleave, either. And Sharper Images would just need to scale with your personal DPS and crit chance, normalized over a time slice, instead of depend on the attack speed of the clone.

Because, then clones become a completely different thing as they no longer factor into the damage balance of the weapon they originate from, making each weapon depending on them much less susceptible to AE fire.

Nothing should be changed to suit the needs of DE’s in Orr. Staff is lovely as is everywhere else. Fix the events, clearly they are the problem.

-Chaos Storm is not primarily for damage, adding more damage to staff would make it too good unless you reduce it’s function – applying conditions and boons.
- What is wrong with Winds of Chaos? It’s already good at taking down singles quickly, and groups safely. You want it changed, but for what purpose?

Counter-Suggestion:

Make the Scepter our AoE weapon. Its niche is confusion, and that’s great. But we have all our other weapons filling a real role in many builds whereas the scepter (from my perspective) is barely used.

Suggestion: Remove the clone-spawning mechanic from Ether Bolt. Change Confusing Images to either a targeted AoE or PBAoe that does a pulse of damage to all targets, then another pulse of confusion, with a final pulse that does significantly less damage and spawns a clone. Then change Illusionary Counter to Illusionary Weaponry, which will cause your scepter’s next five attacks to bounce their damage to five nearby foes before expiring.

The numbers and things can all be adjusted, but these changes would make the scepter a nice damage output tool instead of being only marginally useful in Confusion builds (PvP).