PleaseRecycle

I find it hard to believe that anyone actually cares about this change in light of that thread about badges the other week. I don't recall a single person arguing that individual badges were truly meaningful to them as anything but an indicator of some specific bit of progress. What is believable is that people are opposed to any change at all, but after some reflection they may find that this doesn't mean much for either their gameplay or their roleplay experiences.

I would totes comment here but you only posted mids chunks, not the actual plaintext build blocks. The only reason I mention this is to muse as to whether anyone else at all still does things the old fashioned way. Come on! Where's the rigor?

Ha, as of today Hybrid's mode of operation has changed. No more large endurance cost, no longer permanent. No real impact on my staff stance, either. Where I'd have run assault other toggles will fit, and I still say any damage increase would have an impact elsewhere in the set. A little disappointing, but then again assault was looking kind of unbalanced itself.

That's kind of what I like about it. The reason I don't want to see the damage adjusted upward is that I don't believe the powers guys would agree that staff should keep everything it has right now and also get more damage. Frankly, form of the soul is a little bit too good and I suspect it is the first thing that would be "looked at."

Well all I can say is that I hope those other meleers don't want to use rebirth or barrier. If they choose to do so they're going to have some hard choices to make about the feasibility of continuing to run either assault or tough and weave, possibly more. Ageless does a lot of heavy lifting. If you can agree with me on that point, and we can also agree that staff doesn't need ageless, then we've just agreed that there's something good about staff beyond the damage numbers alone.

Of course, and what I'm saying is that staff's tradeoff is different. It's much easier to justify taking those offensive tools since it already covers the gaps that we're so used to covering in other ways. Musculature is basically bundled free with staff fighting as far as I'm concerned, and soon the same will be true of assault. At this point you'd have to tell me with a straight face that getting almost 300 DPS isn't anything special in and of itself because it isn't just that staff can get there, it's that it can do it while still keeping all of this other stuff.

I don't care about pylon times in a vacuum and if you look at staff in that light you may well be disappointed, what I care about is that it can do very good damage in single target as well as aoe with amazing endurance management and a gaggle of other little tricks for those blue moon situations. You don't get to say musculature and assault don't count for staff unless I get to say that ageless and cardiac don't count for other sets. The truth is they do count and reaching your ideal build is all about balancing the myriad factors available. Staff does this in a novel way, that doesn't mean it doesn't do it.

You did hit upon my conceit in this thread: yes, the forms besides soul are essentially worthless in my opinion. They might be good for a laugh and the +tohit bonus in particular has some real applications, but for my money it's soul all the way. I don't count that against staff's diversity because that's my perspective alone.

I can't agree that mace is really competitive with staff for aoe given the fact that its only power that ticks as many boxes as all of staff's powers is crowd control. Having recently played and purpled out an elec stalker, I also dispute that its aoe is all that. It's a great set but it is mediocre at aoe, particularly given the fact that lightning rod has the pseudopet damage cap and cannot critical. SS is better at aoe if you count the fact that rage's buff turns patron aoes into real killers. That it does, fair point. TW is better at aoe because TW is broken and should be severely nerfed. Spines is an odd set to bring up since you already used it as an example of a set with much worse single target, which it is. Claws is great at aoe, I won't deny that. Fire melee is in my view one of the absolute worst aoe sets along with energy melee: breath of fire is not just slow, it also requires you to do the bunnyhop shuffle to get anywhere close to its target cap. FSC is bog standard. So, in my view there are three sets that are arguably better than staff for aoe. I can live with that.

Combat, why is it that you have yet again elected to ignore the level three perfection bonus for eye of the storm? Is it because you feel that it's an impossible goal for a staff fighter to achieve three stacks of it, or is it because you're still pretending the forms don't exist?

Staff is also the only melee set for any AT with a baked-in method of guaranteeing one's ability to run Assault Hybrid. If you think a permanent 75% damage buff for scrappers is insignificant I can see how that wouldn't sway you.

Well of course, but I suspect most people who have issues with staff's damage are big on incarnate activities. I know DreadShinobi is. I'm just saying that with Hybrid it becomes impossible to argue that the forms have no value because soul will easily pay for Assault which will give staff fantastic damage that many other sets won't be able to take advantage of due to endurance problems.

Sure doesn't. The only ice power that has that option is Hide. Your only recourse is dark colored ice which may or may not be minimal enough for your tastes. I just realized you may mean the graphics option rather than the power customization option, but same answer. It isn't a particle effect so it won't be disabled.

I'm pretty sure Zwill asked people not to talk about those things.

Regarding staff's performance, I don't need to prove anything. I'm not the one asking for changes. It's great how it is and in this game as in life it is up to those who wanted to alter the status quo to justify their position. Who else besides you has done any numerical argument for staff buffs? Combat suggests new numbers he feels would be better yet makes no effort to explain why change is necessary or desirable in the first place. You can't just say "Hmmm, this single target seems kind of low to me plus I didn't like my pylon time. Obviously the set needs to be overhauled." Not only do you guys continually ignore staff's aoe potential in thread after thread, you dismiss offhand every other thing about it.

By the way, as I've said elsewhere, once Hybrid is out the real value of staff will be incredibly obvious. I don't think that point has escaped you, but it certainly doesn't help your case.

Yeah but what if you call your courier just before going in on an AV and it gets ganked? Your team will be furious with you for feeding.

Even ignoring everything else that could be corrected about your stance, Shubbie, once the Hybrid slot is out the value of Form of the Soul will be blindingly obvious even to SF's most vitriolic haters. I guess we shouldn't let that stop us in the mean time, eh?

Actually one difference that I personally find very significant is that unlike previous combo sets, staff's finishers are also builders depending on context. In practical terms this means that if you use a finisher with less than three perfection, you'll get to keep on trucking for a while with the level three buffs so the combo points aren't wasted as they are with previous sets. You also have the option of simply not using finishers if you want to maintain level three perfection buffs intentionally. Just in terms of the combo sets, staff is as far as anything has been from dual blades' restrictive system. You have a huge amount of leeway to use the system as you choose to (if you're not playing a stalker).

That you think Staff's aoe could be called comparable to axe and mace, let alone worse, leads me to believe that you either don't know what you're talking about or are intentionally obfuscating in this silly crusade for buffs. Fortunately, the devs can probably tell that the anti-staff echo chamber is primarily composed of about six people.

I've barely had a chance to play with the set given the simultaneous release of a certain other game. Shazbot! Shazbot! No. I am the greatest! Shazbot!

Ahem. From what I have played, it seems like a blast. The animations are something else, the forms give you something to think about at a point when most sets' main decision is whether to fire tier 1 -> tier 2 -> cone or tier 1 -> cone -> tier 2, and the relative endurance lightness of it even without the forms is a relief early on. My one complaint about staff is that if you use the new battle fury aura with it, whenever your left hand lets go of the staff a little bit of your battle fury remains stuck to it. One might say that this simply demonstrates the extent to which your staff means business, but I find it alarming that it implies that one of your bones is in the staff.