Guild Wars 2

Has this been this way since the dawn of time?

Kinda renders staff being nearly useless against downed enemies unless someone is next to them.

Do other classes have something similar to this where their weapon skills or utilities don’t work on downed enemies?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Why-don-t-marks-trigger-on-downed-players/
Yes, it has always been like this and it doesn’t make any sense.
Traps also don’t work on downed players.

It has been always like this. I think I submitted some bug reports to ANet during BWE about this. Either ANet is too lazy to fix it or it is working as intended (like ANet’s view on DS weapon swap. My money is on the latter.

Most other classes with AoE skills do hit downed characters (like Ele’s Meteorshower, Dragon’s Tooth for a couple of examples.)

I don’t care if marks don’t trigger on downed players.
But I’d really like to see marks not being wasted when someone dodges in them.

It’s always been like this, and no one knows why.

A.Net will probably tell you that marks are “working as intended”. Pity that doesn’t translate to actually working in practice.