A staff ele has potentially 4 heals. His ranged heals are healing rain and geyser. Geyser heals 800hp. Healing rain heals 2080 and cures 2 conditions if they are in the rain for the duration. The other heals are from changing attunements and dodging to allies during combat. This is where the problem sets in. An ele gets his survivability from movement, which staff has the least. For a staff ele to be the most effective healer, he has to be next to his teammates. And if he’s in the thick of the battle, he’s going to get caught in enemy AoE’s. If he’s playing ranged and AoE’ing enemies, the heals are wasted.
The necro takes advantage of both situations because he is effective at close ranged and long range because he does not rely on movement. Being able to place wells at his feet along with death shroud gives him his tanky ability. His minions also absorb damage for his allies.
In terms of DPS, staff ele’s mainly deal pure damage along with some fire condi. Where as necros stack bleeds, poisons, chills, etc. Condition damage is far superior in controlling fights.
Does the ele bring things to the table, yes. But in a 5v5 tPvP match with 8 classes, you need to prioritize. And a necro is simply worth more than a few heals and a couple condi. removes.
Mentioning minions on the necro (none of which are weapon skills, I don’t think?) while discounting the non-weapon-skills and traits of the ele for their heals or other points is a bit silly, so let’s go back to the healing ability but including other skills and traits.
You have your two ranged heals, which are water fields. You can combo one blast finisher (eruption) into those really very easily, and target this near yourself or an ally or both. So that’s one more heal on staff already.
With arcane wave, you have another blast finisher that’s incredibly easy to pull off – you can do this while casting another skill, if you so wish. Then there’s switching to earth attunement from water, rather than from – if you do that, you can use evasive arcana to land a blast finisher (so an AoE heal) anywhere in the water fields. Or just dodge in water for a different AoE heal with that trait specced. Staff eles certainly have more than four heals available, due to their ability to create many combos.
And re: minions, there’s the fun of the ele’s summons, which will provide some dps and support and about the same level of distraction as minions to any reasonable opponent – and they all have pretty useful skills for management of the battlefield, even though these skills aren’t player-controlled. The water one even gives you another heal! Smart use of these can really turn a battle, and though they’re not at all necessary to play a decent staff, they really do help in skirmishes and 1v1s to keep things fairer.
(On the subject of non-weapon-skills, there’re also, uh, the summoned weapons. Which give entirely different ways to deal with foes, and mean that you’re /not/ limited to just staff-range attacks)
If your ele is out of the thick of the battle, they presumably don’t need as many heals as whoever’s, say, fighting within a capture point – so why is their inability to target heals both at an ally and themself important? Staying out of the brawl and staying mobile means that you’re probably not taking nearly as much damage as whoever’s actually inside the capture point, so you should be focusing heals on them and not needing to worry about yourself.
sPvP is all about where you are and controlling an area, so while DPS is really important in many ways, managing the space around you and staying alive is much more necessary – being able to keep people out of a point for long enough to neutralise it means that the enemy stops gaining points from it. We have chill, (now very slightly more) cripple, immobilise, stun, knockback. All on our staff. All now AoE. That’s a lot of moving about that we can negate or delay, keeping capture points to ourselves or our teammates, and allowing us to kite about even more.
And as for the damage output itself: yes, it’s bad. I’ve said already, the staff is an AoE weapon. so while it has hella good damage output against a large group, it’s just not for killing single targets with. It is a control weapon, with some minor but non-negligible pressure damage and as much support as you can shake a staff at.
