On Destruction Staves: Why a generic white Inferno Staff >> a Master's Lightning Staff

F7sus4

Kudos for massive research!

glavius

Lightning staff heavy cant be reflected. Very good for pvp

Joy_Division

glavius wrote: »

Lightning staff heavy cant be reflected. Very good for pvp

I thinks this needs to be analyzed because I do not feel in any way this mitigates the wide disparity between the staff performance nor should be used as a justification that the current inefficiency of lightning staves is ok.

• The actual channeling of the lightning staff cant be reflected, but the pulse, which does much of the actual damage (30%) on the attack, can be. So it is not "very good". In fact it's not good at all because you are stuck stopping your own low-damage channels, eating the global cooldown, and then restarting them periodically if you do not want 30% of the damage reflected back at you.
• Because of the start-stop mechanic required not to have the channel reflected back, the restoration staff is a better channeling weapon to use then a lightning staff.
• Heavy attack channels still do not critically hit, do not proc many things, and are too uncompetitive DPSwise to use the words "very good" in association with them.

Now this does not mean they are useless or can not be helpful in a situation. Just yesterday I used a channeled attack on a perma-dodge roller that trigger my Mage's Fury explosion for a very gratifying kill on a NB who tried to gank me. That one incident does not justify why the best lightning staff channel attack in the game is *significantly* lower than a generic no trait inferno staff I would not bother picking up off the ground. I think it is fair to say we want lightning staffs to be solid and competitive all around performers, not grossly inefficient weapons that once a week happen to do something an inferno staff could not.

Edit: I understand you are just trying to contribute to the discussion in raising up a legitimate point I did not really deal with in the OP. That is fine and should be encouraged as in the end considering all angles would make for a better more balanced game (if ZoS ever plans on acting on this information). If my replay was too harsh, and I think it was, I do apologize.

Snit

Fire, Lightning or Frost should be a difficult, or at least an interesting choice. Currently, it is neither. Some minor tweaks are merited.

Francescolg

Dude, no offense, but I think the best staff for pvp is the 'golden pvp staff' (with the "double dmg" proc/enchantment). Maybe I'm wrong

byrom101b16_ESO

Rylana wrote: »

Yeh, it had always been conventional wisdom that Sorc (disintegration, all the lightning related passives) would synergize with a Lightning staff

I regret completely switching to one. The only reason I havent switched back is because I keep forgetting to.

Just use a Lightning Enchant on your Fire staff and enjoy all the benefits with none of the drawbacks...

Stikato

Wow. I'm stamina now, but I used to swear by my Pact Lightning staff. Great research here pointing out obvious imbalances.

Xeven

Not sure this thread is painting the whole picture. I just did some light attack testing on small critters, white v14 staffs, no traits.

Lightning 1352
Fire 1290
Ice 1290

I should note that I am a Sorc, and lightning is doing almost exactly 5% more damage. However, our Energized Passive tooltip says it increases damage for "Storm Calling abilities", not all lightning attacks. I do not necessarily believe the tooltip, but its worth mentioning.

I rarely ever use heavy attacks so the differences there are a non issue for me.

TLDR
If you're a sorc and you don't use heavy attacks, Lightning does the most damage.

exiledtyrant

I think testing a giant vs an actual vr 14 boss with millions of hp is a bit disingenuous to the actual potential disintegration has. Lightning staff's wall of element's combined with liquid lightning, thundering presence, and the channel give a sorc 6 instances of lightning damage a second or 7 when the lightning glyph procs to disintegrate. During an execute phase there is a lot more time to pull of multiple disintegrates on a DPS sorc who should be doing 8-10k at the very least per proc. I'm not sure if the lightning based dots also proc it but quite frankly 6-7 is a lot on it's own.

Then you look at the CP trait in the atronach that give 10% damage against all enemies that are off-balanced. That's 10% damage to your entire raid group in trials, or raiding party in AVA for anyone who has the 75 CP invested. This is because lightning keeps every thing perma off-balance with wall of elements. I would think there is at least 1 or 2 spots open for a lightning staff sorcerer just for the sheer execution and group utility provided.

Joy_Division

I don't understand how a corner-case example invalidates a general principle? It's almost people are so biased in liking lightning staves that they grab onto anything that might suggest in a specific situation lightning might not be so bad and then claim all is well.

I never made any claim with light attacks because light attacks themselves are a loss of DPS and a significant one at that. The very reason why inferno staffs rule is because the user can weave a partial heavy attack in their rotation whereas a lightning user must use light attacks. You can say a light attack weaving sorc with a lightning staff will out DPS another if no heavy attacks are used, but that's nonsensical because you are just ignoring readily available options. Might as well say a Templar can out-DPS a sorc who doesn't use Crystal Frags.

As far as disintegration procs, a number of things:

• I'm pretty sure bosses can't be distingrated
• I'm pretty sure damage shields block disintegration procs
• How many gamers have 75 CPs invested in a single tree?
• If the boss had millions of health, the boss would have been dead before it reached low health had you been using a inferno staff
• I can disintegrate things just fine with an inferno staff (use a lightning glyph and the Crushing shock skill, to say nothing of using lightning based class skills)
• Wall of elements is one of the worst skills in the game, if not the worst
• In my OP, I already acknowledged the only viable use for a lightning staff was on it's off DPS bar.

The point of the post was to ask ZoS to implement changes that would make lightning, ice, and inferno staffs perform differently yet have a similar general level of effectiveness making them each viable as a main weapon if the many types of fights the game features.

Xeven

Joy_Division wrote: »

I never made any claim with light attacks because light attacks themselves are a loss of DPS and a significant one at that.

They most cerainly are not! Who told you this? With what skills? Show me your testing.

LA Crushing Shock weaving is a significant increase in DPS over Crushing Shock alone. Now youre just spreading misinformation.



That is your heavy attack weave. Thats nowhere near what a proper light attack weave will do.

Is this a l2p issue?

P3ZZL3

So what should a LA Crushing Shock/Force Pulse DPS look like?

Xeven

P3ZZL3 wrote: »

So what should a LA Crushing Shock/Force Pulse DPS look like?

It will very depending on build, class, CP, and critate, but it most certainly does not do any less than a heavy attack weave. When you weave with heavy attacks, you're not casting Crushing Shock as much as you are with light attacks.

Sensesfail13

Excellent post! And well thought out! Hopefully your upcoming posts are as insightful but I would like to see something more being addressed than just staves... although I dont see much coming from the posts Zeni is getting worse and worse with their "fixing" problems. This weeks patch was a patch to fix what they broke last patch ><, rather than skills that have been broken for months.

Joy_Division

Xeven wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

I never made any claim with light attacks because light attacks themselves are a loss of DPS and a significant one at that.

They most cerainly are not! Who told you this? With what skills? Show me your testing.

LA Crushing Shock weaving is a significant increase in DPS over Crushing Shock alone. Now youre just spreading misinformation.



That is your heavy attack weave. Thats nowhere near what a proper light attack weave will do.

Is this a l2p issue?

No, it's a l2read issue. From the OP:

Here is my sorcerer using a basic no trait white inferno staff against a VR10 Giant.



With a generic no trait lightning staff light attacking:



Here is my same sorcerer using light attacking with my legendary master's weapon with the precise trait.



And again because I can't believe that trash white weapon blew my Master's staff away:

Xeven

You said light attack weaving was a dps loss, I pointed out that it's not, and you havent proven otherwise or even posted anything relevant in that context. Stop spreading misinformation. The rest of your thread I quite frankly dont care about because your ”testing" is garbage. Your crushing shock crit rates are skewed, which is a monumental derp, especially when testing on such low hit points with so few crushing shocks.

You have no idea how to conduct a proper test.

Joy_Division

If you insist on embarrassing yourself, I will oblige.

Xeven wrote: »

You said light attack weaving was a dps loss

No I didn't.

I pointed out that it's not

No you didn't. You think you did because you set up a strawman.

you havent proven otherwise or even posted anything relevant in that context.

I didn't claim to have proven anything. I did, however, post actual data linked from an independent source with respect to lightning staffs, inferno staffs, light attacks, heavy attacks, and weaving, which is the very topic the thread is discussing. You need to look up this word relevant .

Your crushing shock crit rates are skewed

They do not matter as what was being commented on and contrasted was the weaved attack. What I posted, which every other poster saw but you, clearly showed Inferno "medium" weaves in-themselves are significantly greater DPS than Lightning light weaves.

When you weave with heavy attacks, you're not casting Crushing Shock as much as you are with light attacks.

Wrong. No matter what type of weave you use, the Global Cooldowns between skills does not change.

a LA Crushing Shock/Force Pulse DPS most certainly does not do any less than a heavy attack weave.

@P3ZZL3 - He is wrong. There is a reason he has not posted any DPS data. He says (wrongly) that I have no provided any data to back up my argument and yet has have not posed ANYTHING other than stuff typed after light attacking a critter [!]. He said my posted heavy attack weave does "nowhere near what a proper light attack weave will do" - yet where is his evidence?

Here's more data: This is from a sorcerer - who has bonus damage with lightning attacks.- with the same stats, same set bonuses, same spellpower, same magicka (actually, the lightning test had more bc/ of a master's staff), Vs. the same target, same everything except her weapons.





- Yes, my so-called "Master's Weapon"





Anyone who know anything about 1.6 DPS knows this, though I do not think people realize the extent of how disadvantageous lightning staves are (which is why I made this thread to begin with).

Stop spreading misinformation.

Sharee

Joy_Division wrote: »

You underlined the DPS of light attacks. But that is only part of the picture, and thus potentially misleading.

Thanks to light attacks being faster, the crushing shock in the second image has higher DPS than in the first, and that is despite the crushing shocks in the second image having less than half the crit rate.

Only if you normalize the crushing shock DPS in the two pictures to eliminate the effect of two different crit rates will we get the complete picture of which of the two does more DPS overall.

Joy_Division

I don't know what else there is to say. Fine, go ahead and use a lightning staff and light weave your crushing shock attacks. Disregard everything I posted and believe what you want to believe. If you want to ignore fact that the inferno staff medium weave provided more than double the DPS than the lightning staff light and focus on what would be deemed statistically insignificant of the crushing shock hit disparity (the 0.1 second difference per hit) that could not possibly have happened because I am trying to solo a World Boss with inefficient DPS without healing myself, by all means be my guest as this is a competitive game.

Alcast

Joy_Division wrote: »

If you insist on embarrassing yourself, I will oblige.

Xeven wrote: »

You said light attack weaving was a dps loss

No I didn't.

I pointed out that it's not

No you didn't. You think you did because you set up a strawman.

you havent proven otherwise or even posted anything relevant in that context.

I didn't claim to have proven anything. I did, however, post actual data linked from an independent source with respect to lightning staffs, inferno staffs, light attacks, heavy attacks, and weaving, which is the very topic the thread is discussing. You need to look up this word relevant .

Your crushing shock crit rates are skewed

They do not matter as what was being commented on and contrasted was the weaved attack. What I posted, which every other poster saw but you, clearly showed Inferno "medium" weaves in-themselves are significantly greater DPS than Lightning light weaves.

When you weave with heavy attacks, you're not casting Crushing Shock as much as you are with light attacks.

Wrong. No matter what type of weave you use, the Global Cooldowns between skills does not change.

a LA Crushing Shock/Force Pulse DPS most certainly does not do any less than a heavy attack weave.

@P3ZZL3 - He is wrong. Zeven is the only person on these forums who believes that. He says (wrongly) that I have no provided any data to back up my argument and yet has have not posed ANYTHING other than stuff typed after light attacking a critter [!]. He said my posted heavy attack weave does "nowhere near what a proper light attack weave will do" - yet where is his evidence?

Here's more data: This is from a sorcerer - who has bonus damage with lightning attacks.- with the same stats, same set bonuses, same spellpower, same magicka (actually, the lightning test had more bc/ of a master's staff), Vs. the same target, same everything except her weapons.





- Yes, my so-called "Master's Weapon"





Anyone who know anything about 1.6 DPS knows this, though I do not think people realize the extent of how disadvantageous lightning staves are (which is why I made this thread to begin with).

Stop spreading misinformation.

The only weapons that work with Medium attack weaving propperly is Fire + Frost staff

ALL the other weapons(shock,2h,dw,) gain either NOTHING or only a LITTLE bit or even LOOSE dmg gg

ZOS balancing works out LoL

Dracane

Good topic. It annoys me since release, that the lightning staff is by far the weakest staff and the fire staff simply superior in everything. They force us to use a fire staff, because everything else results in a loss of damage and also a massive loss in effectinvess, if taking destructive touch into account.

Didn't they say something about 'Play however you like' ? Hm.... must have been imagination.

Xeven

Sharee wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

You underlined the DPS of light attacks. But that is only part of the picture, and thus potentially misleading.

Thanks to light attacks being faster, the crushing shock in the second image has higher DPS than in the first, and that is despite the crushing shocks in the second image having less than half the crit rate.

Only if you normalize the crushing shock DPS in the two pictures to eliminate the effect of two different crit rates will we get the complete picture of which of the two does more DPS overall.

Pretty much this. The weapon damage, crit rate and enchants are set up to favor the heavy attacking inferno staff. If you equalized those numbers the light attacking lightning staff would win every time. Im also not convinced this dude can even weave properly enough.

I've not the time or the will to refute this bullsh*t, but hey, if you want to do less damage, weave heavy attacks with crushing shock. I don't care.

Dracane

Xeven wrote: »

You said light attack weaving was a dps loss, I pointed out that it's not, and you havent proven otherwise or even posted anything relevant in that context. Stop spreading misinformation. The rest of your thread I quite frankly dont care about because your ”testing" is garbage. Your crushing shock crit rates are skewed, which is a monumental derp, especially when testing on such low hit points with so few crushing shocks.

You have no idea how to conduct a proper test.

Excuse me ? You really should stop talking like that. His research is correct. Okay, he has some wrong informations, for example bosses being not able to proc desintgration (they do) lightning staff heavy attack bolt being reflectable (it's not) and lightning heavy attacks restoring more Magicka (they don't anymore)

But using an inferno staff with heavy attack weaving DOES more damage and everyone knows it. I as well wish to view lightning staff as better, but it's not and not even the additional Sorcerer shock damage can compensate this.

Xeven

Dracane wrote: »

Xeven wrote: »

You said light attack weaving was a dps loss, I pointed out that it's not, and you havent proven otherwise or even posted anything relevant in that context. Stop spreading misinformation. The rest of your thread I quite frankly dont care about because your ”testing" is garbage. Your crushing shock crit rates are skewed, which is a monumental derp, especially when testing on such low hit points with so few crushing shocks.

You have no idea how to conduct a proper test.

Excuse me ? You really should stop talking like that. His research is correct. Okay, he has some wrong informations, for example bosses being not able to proc desintgration (they do) lightning staff heavy attack bolt being reflectable (it's not) and lightning heavy attacks restoring more Magicka (they don't anymore)

But using an inferno staff with heavy attack weaving DOES more damage and everyone knows it. I as well wish to view lightning staff as better, but it's not and not even the additional Sorcerer shock damage can compensate this.

Show me.

C0pp3rhead

@Joy_Division In your damage recaps, you are using fire staff heavy attacks (probably 'medium' attack weaves), yet with the lightning staff, you use only light attacks. If you were to compare light attack/crushing shock weaves with both fire and lightning staves, you would have a much stronger argument.

However, your points concerning the benefits of fire destructive touch and wall of elements still stands. The inferno staff clearly provides better benefits in terms of 2ndary effects when using certain abilities. Knockback > Slow.

Moreover, DK's in particular benefit greatly from using an inferno staff due to their class passives. A templar (with many abilities dealing fire damage) using Robes of the Sun and set items would also benefit from an inferno staff. Meanwhile, ightning staves only (marginally) benefit sorcs, and frost staves benefit no class.

Joy_Division

@Copperhead - The whole point of this thread is to point out that it is precisely because an inferno staff can weave a medium attack whereas a lightning staff cannot, the current game mechanics and actual gameplay so heavily biases inferno staffs that they are the only viable choice for DPS. So of course I am going to use the inferno staff to its maximum capabilities; doing otherwise would be setting up an artificial and biased test that does not reflect the game's mechanics or the current meta.

OutlandishMachine

mwobey wrote: »

See, I suspect I'm largely the minority here, but I actually prefer lightning. It does less damage, sure, but with wall of elements and channeled attacks I can end up stunlocking most mobs and bad players -- the channeled attack quickly causes concussion and the wall of elements turns the concussion to off balance, and then the completed channel causes knockdown on the final burst. Just by cycling those two skills with encase, I can generally keep things in the kill zone long enough to get them in execute range.

Obviously this is less useful against players who CC break and get the immunity, but there's definitely a place for lightning staves in my opinion.

I completely agree. I'm sorta a lightning purist (don't judge me), and I really want lightning (and especially Shock Reach) to actually become good and worthwhile. I'm not really enjoying playing my sorc at the moment, simply because his build is so incredibly bad, but it's the only thing that my brain will let me use. I can't stand Crushing Shock or Force Pulse because of the mixed elements, but it's pretty much the only option.

kendellking_chaosb14_ESO

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

The elements should function like they did in traditional TES games:

• Fire- Damage plus DoT
• Lighting- Damage plus magicka drain
• Frost- Damage plus stamina drain

No idea why they abandoned that model.

Because Sorc class Lighting would kill all other classes magic like a spammable negate and anyone with an Ice staff would with it's lock downs the makes you have to roll to move again on top of a stamina drain would make the game for to unbalanced

BalgusFlinn

That was a great post op . Definitely should do a model for elemental damage DoT, Magicka drain, and Stamina drain. But thing with the drains, do mobs have these stats, or do they just have hp ?

Love_Chunks

If only that extra damage on the master staff applied to the dot... It would give me reason to use destructive touch in my rotation.