Guild Wars 2

And again and hopefully not again. :/

Lol I won’t lie, I went my first 40 levels going back and forth with weapons, and spent most of the time with Scepter/Pistol. However once I tried Staff, I haven’t gone back out yet with a clone spamming build and condition damage. You get solid damage, good mitigation due to clones, and an AoE and using GS as a secondary can really help you wreck a mob if you need to.

this is what I do:

- lazy PvE combat:
staff, clone on dodge trait, additional bounce trait. Open with skill 2, dodge once to make a clone, alternate between chaos storm and armor between mobs, so one is always off CD. Kills decently fast and you can just stand there most of the time, which is important when being lazy.

- motivated PvE combat:
open with pistol clone that has bleed on crit trait, spawn skill 3 hop-in clone to slow mob running to pistol phantasm, use Blurred Frenzy, switch to staff etc.

IMO the key to solid damage is the bleed on crit trait for illusions with enough precision (I use 51% crit in PvP) and condition damage, resulting in bleed stacks of 6-8 with 110~ ticks. My pistol phantasm can kill a heavy target golem in 3 damage cycles, the focus phantasm can do it in 2 cycles if he’s feeling kitten, but he’s not moving even when I yell at him, so I won’t use him.

PS: GS with enough crit is very strong as well. There is a vigor on crit trait that procs all the time thanks to the channeled GS attack, feeding new dodge clones, and the clones often apply more than one stack of bleeding per autoattack channel

No problem with multiple mobs 2, +3, even +4 and +5, if I’m really lucky (Staff/SwordFocus mostly). Yes, it takes a bit more time overall than some other classes, but it’s far from “weak” and it’s also highly survivable. It’s a fast, busy playstyle, which I love. It’s also very forgiving of taking risks (pushing the envelope sometimes reaps great rewards in terms of L2P better). It’s a tremendously deep class with a lot of versatility.

I CRINGE whenever I read someone say you should be kiting with the staff.

Staff is for chaos armor tanking. You WANT to get hit. I guarantee you will get enough procs of regen and aegis to make up the damage, especially if you’re chaos armored inside of a chaos storm.

It also helps you burn your foes down faster if they proc more conditions from hitting you with chaos armor up.

Also if you are trying to kite while using a condition damage build, the mobs will waste your confusion stacks. You WANT them to swing at you. Between chaos armor (the skill, and comboing with staff 2 through various fields) and dodges you should have NO REASON to kite with staff out.