i suggest making staff/wand base damage on par with all the other weapons, so they can be used as melee weapons for damage.
…and scaling down the rune damage.
this would enable a whole load of fun with close-quarter combat staves and wands.
at least the staves. wands i kind of get it.
Staffs will still go unused because their damage advantage over wands is marginal while being significantly slower with longer animation commit times on characters that are likely running cloth, which is lethal. Staves also lack built in projectiles into their sequences outside Endless Winter, while several wands have built in elemental projectiles and attack components.
And honestly, it’s already bad enough that caster gameplay feels exactly like any melee, if anything wands and especially staves need their own ranged attack sequences instead of being glorified maces/2H clubs.
There is absolutely no reason to use a staff when I can run my wand that does about the same damage, attacks much faster, and can be paired with a shield which gives me the ability to block with significantly higher poise, and a slightly longer parry window. And to top it off, the extra shield affixes that give me %health back and increase my damage on parry, so my parries make me pump even harder.
Yeah staves have horrible DPS and the stance damage is not so high to justify. Caster gameplay is also overrated? It’s not nearly as good as people make it out to be unless you use specific wands. I actually found melee much more reliable considering how much stamina the rune attacks from wands cost and the slow animations meaning bosses close the gap too soon.
The stamina runes are garbage anyways, they do less damage than the melee wand attacks themselves while having longer animations (that is, you’re stuck in place and vulnerable for way longer) and these stamina runes eat around half a stamina bar to do 1/4-1/5 of an average minion’s health.
I’m running a 50%+ lightning damage + 50% crit build and using a stamina rune is an absolute waste of stamina, it does pitiful damage, generates less focus, and for how long it takes to kill regular mobs you might as well play melee since those mobs are going to get in your face immediately with all the gap closers they have and how slow the stamina rune animations are.
It’s not only bad damage wise, but a total waste of an otherwise decent rune slot.
You’re better off running X focus on fatality/kill affixes and just getting big focus refunds off a 50 focus cost rune to keep a caster playstyle. And you’re still going to have to melee some elites and bosses.
There is no true caster playstyle unless you’re abusing gimmick enchantment power builds, and the problem is that then you just one shot everything just like the melee and bow builds that use enchantment power too, so it’s homogenized gameplay.
We need caster main players doing design work. Knight/paladin/warrior/rogue mains don’t appreciate how bad of a fantasy current “caster” gameplay is when caster weapons don’t have ranged attack sequences and have to pay a rune slot to spam a bad stamina rune as a band aid fix for not giving them a proper ranged attack sequence.
Agree. There’s a lot of balancing that needs to be done. Even in melee some weapons are overtuned and others have been over adjusted like Rapiers that have much slower movesets now but still do abysmal damage and stance damage.
Casters really suck especially Plague since the element is highly resisted. As you said, Stamina Runes are worse than bows and the reliance on Focus Runes means you melee bosses. Half the players saying casters are OP never played them post last update and even before that only some Runes were good and the whole style involved farming focus to pray that the Rune attack hit and didn’t miss it’s crazy hitbox.
You can even see it in their latest Q&A stream.
The guy doing all of the damage and absorbing all of the pressure and staggering mobs was the guy running a scythe while the guy running cloth and a lightning wand was tickling mobs and getting 1-2 shot.
Most people saying caster is OP are only saying so because they’re playing endgame caster builds with stacked affixes.
For the actual leveling campaign and early levels caster is pretty terrible.
it’s true that the base damage is abysmal and stamina runes are really bad.
but if you use a wand/staff focus rune AKA nuke, after building up focus, you can OBLITERATE the living daylight out of entire rooms with a few spells
i’m saying staff/wand runes are overtuned like crazy. you don’t even need gear.
all my casters have to melee to build focus, true, but then they nuke from orbit.
i get what you mean though that there is currently no pure caster
the enemy AI also doesn’t handle ranged players well, so maybe the emphasis is on melee because of that
i personally like melee casters. i love ranged builds too and i wish i could play them without feeling OP
but my initial fantasy here was for a staff build, like Donatello from TMNT
So would it be better if there was a few staff only runes and a rune that would conjure a wall/barrier that would shield you for a short duration? Maybe not..
Lets hope staves gets better over time!
I don’t want to pay a rune slot to fix a native issue with the weapon, that makes the weapon a non-starter. If you need a specific rune to fix the performance of the weapon, you need to rethink how you design that weapon.
The weapon needs to work out of the box competitively with the alternatives.
One of the fixes is to give 2H weapons the same amount of affixes as 1h+shield setups.
The other fix comes down to actually fulfilling a caster fantasy, and there is no way around the fact that a caster fantasy involves having a ranged attack sequence.
Same reason ranger fantasy players would never accept a melee bow is the same reason caster mains won’t accept a melee staff or wand.
so instead a Utility Rune maybe?
I mean conjure Earth Armor or an Earth Wall? (maybe sounds too much like an Earth Bender in Avatar)
Anyways i hear you 