Einlanzer.1627

The main problem with staff is that fire is the only attunement that deals respectable damage, and damage is 80% of what matters when talking about general/solo play, or basically anything other than dedicated group support. So, despite all the fun skills staff has in theory, in practice, you'll rarely find yourself leaving Fire because doing so gimps your damage too much, which means at all times you're choosing between starving yourself of either damage or utility with very limited potential synergy between the two - a problem compounded by the fact that elementalist lacks weapon swap. It's also boring because who wants to be exclusively a fire mage when you could dance around and do cooler things with other weapons? It really doesn't reflect well on Anet devs that they either don't know or don't care about this problem and actually made it worse after the last round of major staff changes. Pretty dumb since "elementalist with staff" is the most magey character you can have thematically and tons of people like the mage with a staff theme, causing this to be a pretty big hole in the game.

Honestly, GW2 struggles with content challenge. A large chunk of the game is overly easy, while you randomly hit walls of super difficult content. In general, I agree with the notion that many of the LW story instances are over-tuned for solo players and should not be. There were times I broke into maniacal laughter about how over the top some boss encounters were to the point of being a slog and not fun at all.

It maybe needed a nerf, but they massively overdid it. It should probably be tuned around 6% normal and 10% with fury.

It's still a widely held belief that Soldier's gear is terrible. It isn't. In fact, Power, Toughness, and Vitality happen to be the three stats that carry the most weight with regard to TTK and TTL metrics. Toughness and Vitality both have roughtly the same impact on TTL individually that Precision and Ferocity combined do on TTK. There was a spreadsheet someone put out doing mechancial comparisions of the different stat combos. If you follow the math, you'll see that Soldier's gear does about 65% of the damage that Berserker's gear does, while Berserker's has about 35% of the survivability of Soldier's (depending a little on class/base health). Soldier's is mathematically nearly twice as good as Berserkers. Active defense and offense are both generally more important than passive defense, of course, but acting like it's possible to avoid all damage in the game is nonsensical, so passive defense absolutely makes a signficant difference most of the time - especially since it reduces the frequency that you need to perfectly evade to stay alive, generally allowing you to compense for a portion of the DPS loss. In practice, this means Soldier's and Berserkers are quite well balanced with one another overall, and Soldiers is unquestionably better unless and until you become very, very skilled with a purely offensive build. Even then, it depends, and it's not a bad approach to mix some Soldier's into your build to gain a bit of defense and a comparitively minor DPS loss.

Yeah this is stupidly great. So happy they added it.

The fundamental problem is deceptively simple. You can't balance support and damage as though they are equivalent when they aren't, and that's what they have tried to do with staff. All weapons and attunements need to deal at least decent damage on their own, period. Utility & support bolster damage, they don't replace it. Water having about 1/5 the damage output of fire is absurd nonsense that's made even worse when you realize that damage and healing don't use the same stats so it's impossible to be great at both anyway. Earth is only a bit better, and Air is okay-ish but still undertuned for general play. Thief pistol used to be another good example of this problem until they fixed it (compounded by the necessity of good damage output on the #1 skill due to how energy works on thief.) The whole methodology of having each attunement built around 1 or 2 types of support and only letting Fire have respectable damage output is fundamentally broken. It will keep staff trapped as a clunky, highly situational weapon only suitable for certain very specific builds in specific game modes. And that's a shame because "wizard with a staff" is the most iconic and reasonable-to-expect expression of magic user archetypes in all of fantasy. It means GW2 is missing something extremely core to its identity. I really don't know who keeps making (or failing to make) these decisions, but it seems they are stuck in an ideological bubble and not thinking critically about the situation.

The norn always were the worst looking race. They did the opposite of what they should have done - they gave them weirdly proportioned, non-human builds with human-looking skin. They should have given them roughly human proportions (just maybe a little more built) but a very diffferent superficial appearance, like paler, winter-torn skin, larger noses, battle scars, etc. I really wish they'd go back and redo them.

I... honestly think this is something the game really needs. One of the biggest things that hurts GW2 (IMO) is how aimless it can feel at level 80, and that's because the existing achievement system doesn't do a great job of creating rails, concentrating the population, or generating interest in completing or revisiting content, and therefore the game just feels both listless and overwhelming with all of its endgame content. It's similar to starting up netflix with the intention of watching something, but you just scroll through it forever because you are presented with too many choices to make any decision easy, and you therefore avoid making a decision. I'll take some additional rails with a fun new reward system.

Here's feedback. Fix staff. It doesn't work because damage is 10,000x more important than utility and support in generalized play, and fire is the only attunement with reasonable damage output. Water, Air, and Earth are all over-specialized around different kinds of utility/support and give up too much damage to feel good playing 99% of the time, effectively becoming trap options. Because each attunement is over-specialized and designed with a very specific build in mind, and 3 out of 4 of them only have the potential to work well in large, organized group play, Staff ele ends up with much less versatility than weapon swapping provides to other classes. It's astonishing how poorly thought out and executed it is. Like, why is it even necessary to gut the damage so much for a healing spec? The use different stats and traits so it's not like you can be great at both at the same time anyway. Water should do 75-80% of Fire's damage, not 20-25%. It's astonishingly bad design.

I've said it one million times and will say it one million more. Staff doesn't work because, outside of Fire, it gives up too much damage for too much emphasis on support. In generalized play, utility will never compete with damage on equal terms. You fundamentally need to deal significant damage at all times, while utility and support are just bonuses. For that reason, most weapons in the game only give up a bit of damage for stronger utility. Meanwhile, Staff Water does like 1/4 the damage of most weapons, Earth about 1/2, and about Air 3/4. This makes all three of them near-useless outside of dedicated builds in large, organized group play, which for most players is only a tiny part of the game, or nonexistent. On top of that, because each attunement on staff is hyper specialized around utility gimmicks that have minimal synergy across the attunements, you're really only ever good in one attunement at a time based on your build, and it's usually Fire. Because of this, despite the fact that attunement swapping is designed to give Elementalists more versatility compared with weapon swapping, they actually get less versatility than weapon swap provides. So they basically end up with a bloat of mediocre to bad skills. Literally the only thing Staff has going for it is that it has 1200 range, so you're never really range locked the way you are with other weapons. But that isn't enough to compensate for its deficiencies. It's seriously mind-blowing how obviously bad the design is and how it's gone unaddressed for over a decade. I don't even understand the point, because it's not like you can be elite and pumping out damage and elite at healing at the same time anyway. They use different stats and traits. The rework that it got last year doubled down on this approach when it clearly needed to be pulled back. Just astounding, really.

Maybe they'll do something unusual and give it 1200 range. Maybe they were trying to offer this on a single-handed weapon instead of a two-handed weapon so that it could have a more flexible playstyle based on the OH selection.

Did you actually read the post? This doesn't have much to do with what the specific number is, but what the distribution of damage is across the attunements, which has a really huge impact on actual (as opposed to theoretical) play, and is the main reason why people complain about Staff incessantly and are right to do so. Fire's DPS is reasonable, maybe even slightly on the high side. Water, Earth, and Air all have atrocious DPS. Like, swap-to-them-and-die DPS unless you are in a full group providing dedicated support. And that's just bad design. It's fine for them to be lower than Fire, but the gap shouldn't be anywhere near as big as it is. The rhythm of maintaining a healthy baseline DPS needs to be spread across all attunements regardless of the nature of the weapon.

It's pretty amazing that they've never caved on bringing Ricohcet back to Pistol. That was one of the worst small changes in the history of the game and has spent years needing to be reversed.

Staff is a "support weapon". We get it. But the long-standing status quo of fire being the only decent damage attunement is not healthy. Elementalists desperately need to be able to swap attunements without absolutely cratering their DPS. Staff is the most iconic weapon wielded by magic users in fantasy, and it is not effective in solo or small group play, which dominantes most peoples' playtime, simply because it does not do anywhere near enough damage outside of Fire. Even though the other attunements are more support focused, they need to be able to provide a reasonable enough DPS baseline that you can afford to spend a little time in them. To that end, the #1 skills need to be substantially beefed up and some damage really should be added to some or all of the support-focused skills. I'm not sure why this would be perceived as a balance issue, since stat combos disproportinately determine how effective a given set of effects is. Because of this, you'll never be able to be an elite healer while also being an elite damage dealer, for instance. Hence why water skills should have reasonable (not optimal) damage add ons. What am I missing?

MH Focus could be fun 🙂 Make it a real spellslinger.