Guild Wars 2

Seriously, I’ve played a character with a staff before in GW2, be it a mesmer or guardian or even elementalist. All which have epic cool looking skills/animations that are different from each other.

The necromancer on the other hand has 4 out of 5 skills that are ’’marks’’ and somewhat do the same, be it bleeding/chilling/whatever. Fact is that they just give a condition to the enemy if they are stupid enough to step on the seal, that is it. It’s just so boring, not creative and flat-out unfun to play.

I LOVE staffs though, they even look like nice scythes on my Necromancer so I fail to see why they gave them such boring skills to begin with.

Why not some cool wicked creepy attack with shadow/magic?? Or 1 attack where they use the scythe as a slashing attack?

Am I the only one who thinks the staff skills need a rework on the necromancer or do you actually enjoy putting 4 of the similar marks on the floor that nobody even sees in a fight?

Let me know. Maybe I am understanding it wrong.

Necromancer staff has some of the best skills in the game which you can combo off if you have enough experience.

Example: “Good” sword/dagger thieves with multiple teleports will try to be relentless against you. Get good at predicting thieves and you can make them teleport into reapers mark and combo from there.

I have 2500+ hours on my necromancer and I think that marks are actually too good because the opponent has no real chance to dodge them. I’ve always said that marks should have a 1/3 or 1/4 second delay before actually going off, starting from a dull colour to turning bright green when they activate. Would actually give them some counterplay lol.

Feels ridiculous being able to start any fight just casting mark of blood at the opponents feet and they have no way to dodge it.

Zefrost.3425:

Necromancer staff has some of the best skills in the game which you can combo off if you have enough experience.

Example: “Good” sword/dagger thieves with multiple teleports will try to be relentless against you. Get good at predicting thieves and you can make them teleport into reapers mark and combo from there.

I have 2500+ hours on my necromancer and I think that marks are actually too good because the opponent has no real chance to dodge them. I’ve always said that marks should have a 1/3 or 1/4 second delay before actually going off, starting from a dull colour to turning bright green when they activate. Would actually give them some counterplay lol.

Feels ridiculous being able to start any fight just casting mark of blood at the opponents feet and they have no way to dodge it.

That’s ridiculous..I dodge marks all the time. Your opponents either aren’t paying attention or just don’t care because the damage isn’t doing much to them. And since that most people are carrying condition cleansers or reducers…The staff IS VERY BORING. I have a necro and I just use the staff for tagging, but I can’t tell you for a fact that no matter which way I go (condi or power)…it has little affect on those that I am fighting. And I agree with the OP…it needs some changing.

Chill, fear and condition transfer have little effect on your opponents?

sure they have effects on my opponents but they are easy to dodge aren’t they?
Such a small radius too and the skills themselves are BORING. I don’t care if they are ‘’good or OP’‘, they are just plain and boring. No effects, no big AOE’s like I’d expect.

Compare how the skills -look- on the Ele, Mesmer or Guardian and then look at the skills the staff has on the Necromancer. See the difference?

What would be nice is having 1 ’’mark’’ skill that randomly creates an effect on the opponent and the rest of the 3 skills of the staff should be something cool/shadowy looking. Something that makes me go like ‘’Oh yea! Now THATS a necro skill!’’

Nah i dont find staff boring at all. There is a reason why i always have a staff equipped on my necro.

Well the projectile of staff 1 could be faster but the marks are amazing, i really dont know that someone could not like 4 marks in one weapon set.

Staff animations are boring, but the weapon itself is really powerful. It’s an utility weapon, with soft cc, condi transfer, and hard cc. What else do you want?

It is very useful.

But I agree it is little boring. The appearance is just disappointing. Staff 1 doesn’t look cool. And 2,3,4,5 look almost exactly the same although I’m sure pvper love it that way.

It’s very useful, but also very boring in visuals. :P

Marks are trivial to dodge but the cooldowns are so short (especially mark of blood) it doesn’t really matter that much; getting people to waste their dodges is good anyways. There’s also nothing to stop you from casting marks directly on people.

I think what brings the staff down is that lame looking and sounding autoattack. Yea, they tried changing it once to make it less lame, but it hasn’t really worked.

I think Staff absolutely suffers from readability issues, and that makes it extremely unsatisfying to play, especially compared to the level of power it actually has.

Personally I’d like to see Chilblains re-tuned to be more similar to its GW1 counterpart—targeted AOE chill with boon strip and poison field, 8-10 second cooldown. Mark of Blood’s effects should just become part of the remaining two marks (and the dodge trait), freeing up another slot for a new skill on a lowish (4-6s) cooldown.

On the other hand, Marks are good for area denial, but don’t feel as good as they actually are. You could leave the staff alone mechanically (and therein leave its identity as the Mark weapon intact), but you need to do some work to make it more fun to use without altering its effectiveness in either direction.

First Marks need to be more readable by both the user and the opponent. That means some major graphical changes to the indicators, so you know exactly which mark you’re looking at if you’re deciding to eat it or not, even without staring at the ground and consulting the wiki mid-combat.

Further, the traits need to be consolidated so that you don’t have to devote four different traits across multiple lines to maximize your weapon effectiveness. Compare that to the other staff users who only devote one trait to the staff—Guardian in particular even gets extra weapons in the same trait! Sure, that one trait doesn’t max staff effectiveness for the other professions either, but unlike Symbols, Clones, Phantasms, or element-specific skills, Marks are exclusively staff skills. The only other place they even appear is on the Lich elite. If you’re taking Mark traits, you’re actually taking staff traits, and so they need to be in the appropriate lines and pared down accordingly (the same thing really needs to be done for Minions as well). Personally I don’t think it would be out of line to ask that untraited Marks build life force, for instance, and that one trait alone enlarge their area, increase their damage, and make them unblockable, while another reduces recharge.

Finally, no matter what happens to Marks, the staff auto needs to feel more responsive, because it’s the only identity the staff has other than the black circle on the ground. The attack speed needs to go up while aftercast goes down, projectile speed needs to be faster, all while total DPS remains the same. Whenever I switch to my staff I feel like I have to wait for the minigun to wind up before I can actually start firing. This is the same thing that needs to happen to DS auto as well, by the way. No damage increase—just a QOL improvement (that would also have the effect of making it altogether harder in PVP/WVW for enemies to outright negate large chunks of damage just by dodging autos).

I realize Necros are supposed to feel paced and deliberative in their attacks, but right now by and large they feel sluggish (apart from dagger autos), and the Staff is a major culprit. I don’t have a problem with slow, hard hits, but they need to be somewhere other than the auto-attack if the auto-attack is the only direct attack I have on the weapon.

Yes, the DPS is totally fine.
I even understand how useful the marks are in PVP but the game is more than PVP too. Let’s not forget that.

The animations of the staff on Necro are so lame. You want to have the feeling you’re playing something epic/dark/powerful not some rune druid who places a few marks on the ground and hopes the enemy doesn’t move.

i find staff useful, boring, and completely out of place in a power build.

So how comes no change has been made to the staff?

Novalitus.7382:

So how comes no change has been made to the staff?

Because its the most usefull weapon, its boring but its the only real ranged option and it offers the most utility. What else should a bower build use? Main hand axe / Main hand dagger?

Thats what really anoys me about the necromancer. 10 skills of the necro are set in stone. DS and staff, you can only chose you second weapon set and utility spells. If you are not a minion master the chance is high that you use only 5 utility spells in all your builds. If you play a condi necro the only real choice is your offhand weapon.

Mayama.1854:

Novalitus.7382:

So how comes no change has been made to the staff?

Because its the most usefull weapon, its boring but its the only real ranged option and it offers the most utility. What else should a bower build use? Main hand axe / Main hand dagger?

Thats what really anoys me about the necromancer. 10 skills of the necro are set in stone. DS and staff, you can only chose you second weapon set and utility spells. If you are not a minion master the chance is high that you use only 5 utility spells in all your builds. If you play a condi necro the only real choice is your offhand weapon.

Exactly.. it makes the class very boring.

Mayama.1854:

Novalitus.7382:

So how comes no change has been made to the staff?

Because its the most usefull weapon, its boring but its the only real ranged option and it offers the most utility. What else should a bower build use? Main hand axe / Main hand dagger?

Thats what really anoys me about the necromancer. 10 skills of the necro are set in stone. DS and staff, you can only chose you second weapon set and utility spells. If you are not a minion master the chance is high that you use only 5 utility spells in all your builds. If you play a condi necro the only real choice is your offhand weapon.

Actually axe/offhand and dagger/offhand power builds work as fine as staff+ an other set. The staff range is nice to have but dont forget Ds also has 1200 range and necromancer have options like spetral grasp ans dark path as gap closers. So its not really needed.

Only condition builds have to take staff in order to not kitten themself.

I use staff on power builds.

NeXeD.3042:

I use staff on power builds.

Same, Putrid Mark is something I really love to have especially when you combine it with a quick placed Chillbains to remove Conditions and drop Weakness on them when you are Glass making them glance is very nice.

Not to mention how useful Chill and Poison can be on it’s own.

The marks have different center picture, so technically they are not all the same. I like the playstyle. It allows us to frontload damage before the battle even begins. Heck, I even run Greater marks, you want to NOT trigger them? Ok then I guess you are just handing me the point. Then again I PVP all the time.

Novalitus.7382:

So how comes no change has been made to the staff?

Because is awesome. If you spam marks in the ground you are doing it bad.

Read the skills and use it properly. Transfer condition is kitten great. Chill and Poison is a deadly combination, AOE Fear? hell yeah.

I think is a pretty smart weapon, and the fun is in that. The only thing i dislike is that the marks don’t trigger with downed enemies.

What I would love to have is a mark for autoattack for staff which deals respectable or good power damage, sort of like grenade engineers. It would solve so much about the weapon and be skillful to use.

As most of you agreed, I only use staff on power builds because its useful, even though its kinda tiring to use on every pvp build for this class.

Sometimes I use axe/dagger (and dagger/wh) when I don’t feel like being as efficient, and so I can show off marjory’s axe and dagger together! But yeah its kinda meh, as you’re basically forced to take axe training to make it work, which limits you to the 6/2/0/0/6 death shroud build, which is kinda tiring..

Anyway I’m hopeful for the future changes possibly making the axe a bit more useful and possibly less dependent on axe training… but until anet “makes utilities grant more survivability over time”, I don’t think I’ll use necro seriously for pvp, as I’m only really interested in a pvp build thats power oriented, survivable through utilites, and offers relatively frequent boon corruption.. and I while staff and dagger/x can generally do that, I do just wish axe wasn’t as kitten y of a weapon for pvp.

Staff seems designed mostly for PvE and WvW condition AoE kind of like scepter/dagger but with longer range and potential to cover more area so it is natural to expect lower dps than shorter range weapons. Maybe that is why it bores you. It is good for what it does.

Anchoku.8142:

Staff seems designed mostly for PvE and WvW condition AoE kind of like scepter/dagger but with longer range and potential to cover more area so it is natural to expect lower dps than shorter range weapons. Maybe that is why it bores you. It is good for what it does.

I would say staff is more often used in pvp then pve…