Destruction Staff Imbalance and Ancient Knowledge

LeonAkando · September 2021

It's continually frustrating that inferno staff dominance has led to such one dimensional gameplay. Currently, there is almost no situation you would ever use Lightning Staves, and Frost Staves provide Minor Brittle which will have reduced effectiveness with the 7.2 Crit Cap as well as doing substantially less DPS than Inferno Staves.

There's a lot of factors to what makes inferno staff superior:

1. Ancient Knowledge provides 10% increased single target damage, which is the majority of damage and the most valuable damage. While Lightning Staff gains AOE damage, and Frost gains defensive benefit.
2. Engulfing Flames provides 10% increased fire damage. This already tips balance in favor of inferno as no other staff has that type of debuff.
3. Encratis' Behemoth provides 5% increased fire damage. Adds onto Engulfing Flame.
4. Burning is the strongest status effect. This certainly provides a good benefit to using Wall of Elements with inferno staves, but there are other sources of burning and it is the weakest advantage listed.

I propose addressing the first benefit by reworking the passive "Ancient Knowledge". Currently it reads:

Equipping an Inferno Staff increases your damage done with single target abilities by 10%.
Equipping a Lightning Staff increases your damage done with area of effect abilities by 10%.
Equipping an Ice Staff reduces the cost of blocking by 36% and increases the amount of damage you block by 20%.

I think it would be balanced better if it read:

Equipping a Destruction Staff increases your damage done by X%.
Equipping an Inferno Staff increases your damage done with damage over time abilities by X%.
Equipping a Lightning Staff increases your damage done with direct damage abilities by X%.
Equipping an Ice Staff reduces the cost of blocking by 36% and increases the amount of damage you block by 20%.

Explanation:
The values would have to be tuned to be relatively power neutral. The goal is to shift a lot of the power from Inferno and Lightning bonuses into a flat damage increase for all three staves, thus making other options more viable.
Frost staves should remain the most defensive option to keep their fantasy but not be a significant deterrence to wear for classes that specialize in frost damage like Warden.
Lightning staves would provide a small amount of direct bonus damage, similar to the champion point system, to to become appealing builds that focus on direct hits such as the class that gains bonus lightning damage, Sorceror.
Inferno staves would provide a medium amount of DOT bonus damage, similar to the champion point system, and would appeal to builds that focus on stacking DOTs such as the class that gains bonus fire damage (in 7.2), Dragonknight.

Ideally, classes that favor a certain magic type should be incentivized to use their preferred magic staff.
Wardens gain +10% Frost Damage.
Sorcerors gain +5% Lightning Damage.
Dragonknights gain +5% Fire Damage (7.2 Patch).

The remaining classes, Nightblade, Templar, and Necromancer should be able to pick any of the three staves depending on how their build is designed, rather than every class all going inferno no matter what.

BXR_Lonestar · September 2021

Honestly, I would like to see "arcing" being a desto staff passive for lightning staff. It should make all your lightning aoe attacks and heavy attacks arc between targets for a flat, unvariable amount of damage so that lightning staves become WAY more effective the more foes you face.

Example? You drop a lightning wall (Wall of elements) and 2 targets wander into the AoE. They take the normal AoE damage, adjusted for any critical damage you do, and then on top of it, BOTH targets receive an additional flat rate 500 dmg/sec for every second they stand in the electric aoe.

Additional lightning aoe's should further increase arcing damage. So if you have lightning wall and lightning flood stacked on top of each other, those same two targets now take an extra 1000 dmg / second.

So just for demonstrative purposes, lets say you are now facing 10 targets standing in double-stacked AOE. All of the targets are now going to take an extra 10,000 dmg per tick. In normal, that won't matter much, but on some vet encounters, it will definitely make a difference.

This will make lightning staves super desirable for certain builds (sorcs) that will become invaluable for trial groups to burn down trash mobs. And that would also seem to bring lightning staves roughly in balance with Inferno staves that give you ~ 12% extra damage when using single target abilities.

jaws343 · September 2021

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Honestly, I would like to see "arcing" being a desto staff passive for lightning staff. It should make all your lightning aoe attacks and heavy attacks arc between targets for a flat, unvariable amount of damage so that lightning staves become WAY more effective the more foes you face.

Example? You drop a lightning wall (Wall of elements) and 2 targets wander into the AoE. They take the normal AoE damage, adjusted for any critical damage you do, and then on top of it, BOTH targets receive an additional flat rate 500 dmg/sec for every second they stand in the electric aoe.

Additional lightning aoe's should further increase arcing damage. So if you have lightning wall and lightning flood stacked on top of each other, those same two targets now take an extra 1000 dmg / second.

So just for demonstrative purposes, lets say you are now facing 10 targets standing in double-stacked AOE. All of the targets are now going to take an extra 10,000 dmg per tick. In normal, that won't matter much, but on some vet encounters, it will definitely make a difference.

This will make lightning staves super desirable for certain builds (sorcs) that will become invaluable for trial groups to burn down trash mobs. And that would also seem to bring lightning staves roughly in balance with Inferno staves that give you ~ 12% extra damage when using single target abilities.

I like the arcing idea, but that seems super over-tuned.

Maybe something that expands the range of your lightning AOEs and heavy/light attacks.

So if you drop lightning wall, enemies inside the wall take normal damage. Enemies outside the wall, within X meters take a flat damage amount of arcing damage from the AOE. So they don't take the full amount of damage from the AOE but they take damage being close.

And for Heavy attacks, the heavy arcs to nearby enemies within a certain range, losing power the further from the initial target. So target 1 takes 100% damage and the closest to them takes 75%, and so on, down to like 15% damage or something for whoever is still within range.

And then light attacks would just be a splash on hit. Hitting all targets within a certain range for like 25% of the damage to the initial target.

I think something like that would work better for a splash type AOE boost for lightning staves.

But really, I just think that the damage boost to AOE damage likely needs to be increased. Something to match it in power with flame staves for single target.

Bergzorn · September 2021

As a PvP only player who has basically no DOTs, hates using the boring (altough undodgeable) lightning heavy attack channel, and already gets melted by MagDK DOTs on a regular basis - please no.

LeonAkando · September 2021

Bergzorn wrote: »

As a PvP only player who has basically no DOTs, hates using the boring (altough undodgeable) lightning heavy attack channel, and already gets melted by MagDK DOTs on a regular basis - please no.

ZOS can do whatever it takes to tune it for PVP, but we already give up so much in the grand scheme of the game for the sake of better pvp balance. Just separate the balancing and be done with it.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Honestly, I would like to see "arcing" being a desto staff passive for lightning staff. It should make all your lightning aoe attacks and heavy attacks arc between targets for a flat, unvariable amount of damage so that lightning staves become WAY more effective the more foes you face.

That's a neat thematic but a large focal point of my suggestion was also ease of change on ZOS' end. This theme would take A LOT more work tuning, coding, bug fixing, and not to mention server side calculations.
My suggestion is less exciting, but its much easier to throw on a bunch of damage auras as an ability change.

snipezor · September 2021

I've always thought it would be cool if the ice staves channeled their heavy attacks like lightning, but apply a single target scaling snare.

And since we're all already dreaming, a conjuration weapon skill line would be pretty amazing. Although I'm sure they would somehow make it favor stamina, because ZOS.