3 hours ago, Papaj.9035 said:
I only recently came back after like 10+ years and have been slowly catching up on content having skipped half of LW S1 and only playing HoT to do the story with a few friends who still played. In fact, you can't even see my old post history from the Betas and 1st year of launch it's been that long since I visited this game or the forums. That aside, this clip perfectly sums up what my last 3-4 months of frustration doing story stuff and the occasional WvW dailies as a Celestial Staff Tempest has been like. Seems literally the best defense is to just go full offense. That champion took like 10 minutes for me to kill and you ripped it a new one in 30 seconds. I never felt threatened like I was going to die at any point soloing content (until WvW and I found roamer Harbingers, Reapers, Holosmiths, Mechanists, Deadeyes, and Renegades running their perma every buff specs that spam 3x conditions every cast) but I noticed tagging random rifts with other people grinding marks that it clearly was not me killing mobs in 3 seconds and it was very disparaging. On the plus side, I could pull whole camps of Forged in the Elonian deserts and not worry about dying, even to sharpshooters cause I played mag aura smartly, but things with time limits just did not jive anymore (like certain achievements in story modes).
I suppose I should expect a lot of change coming back after 10+ years, but it seems like there is no more capability to whittle away at anything. It's either full send hope your target dies before you do, or you need to be full defense condition cleanse specs and then you can't even whittle someone away through attrition because of game pace (and you still die anyway cause the pressure applied is just too great in some cases). I remember my days as a Water/Earth/Arcane Soldier stats Staff in WvW tanking 3-5 people endlessly back when Evasive Arcana was god tier. I couldn't kill anything in groups due to ressing, but 1v1 I could at least slowly kill someone over the course of a couple minutes simply due to the way the game was designed - aka condition removal wasn't as prevalent on all classes, there were fewer and better telegraphed hard hitting abilities, the amount of stat combinations was far less.
Maybe Ele power level sucks more than back in the day, maybe my play style and the game direction over the past decade don't jive right, maybe I suck more than I thought I did - it's probably a combination of all 3 to a degree. Either way, this is enlightening and I now know what I was doing wrong these last 3-4 months, I was playing a 2012 version of the game when I should've been playing the 202X version.
The build I used in that clip is full offense except for one notable exception. I'm using Trailblazer stats (toughness/condi/vitality/expertise). This gives me the full offensive power of Viper stats for conditions, but replaces the power and precision with toughness and vitality.
One thing about weaver for solo play is that it has very poor boon access. This really hurts your power damage output in particular. A typical damage breakdown in Viper stats in solo play is still only around 20% power damage, while in Trailblazer it's 10%. Trailblazer having toughness as a primary stat also has great synergy with the Strength of Stone trait, which converts 10% toughness to condition damage. This gives me 2152 condition damage stat vs. 2021 in Viper stats. This helps to make up for the lost power stats, making the difference pretty negligible. For comparison, here is a clip of the same boss using the same full offense build but with Viper stats. It's actually a little bit slower probably because I used my healing signet when my health dipped below 5k, which turned out to be unnecessary (panic!).
In either case, the strategy is the same, however: As much offense as possible. As you may have noticed, that's often the best play and this champion is a perfect example. He hits very hard and also gains enrage stacks when you kill his dogs. But you may also notice killing his dogs puts him into an animation lock for 5 seconds where he laughs and threatens you (this is when he gains the enrage). Then he has another 5 second animation lock when his health crosses the 50% threshold, where he raises his sword and prepares to burn the entire room. But you can then CC him for a 5 second stun to prevent the attack. If you look closely at the Trailblazer video, there's actually a period of about 17 seconds between his last attack before the first animation locks and his next attack (from 88% down to 6% health)!
Consider what that means for the slow, tanky strategy. If you took "10 minutes" to kill this guy, the animation lock time is negligible and instead of having no chance to attack during the enrage, he's going to spend a considerable amount of time in that phase. This likely means you'll be forced to play very defensively in order to survive, further reducing your damage and prolonging the fight. Not ideal.
Also, unfortunately, staff is not ideal. For the reasons mentioned above, the ranged kiting strategy isn't the best. Even if staff were the strongest weapon (it's the weakest, unfortunately), you'd want to spend a lot of time at melee range rather than kiting at range in order to maximize damage. It doesn't mean you can't play it that way, just that it isn't going to produce the best results.
The good news is your celestial stats can still be useful! You just need to make sure your build focuses on condition damage. Fire/earth like the builds in these clips is probably the best way to go, although fire/arcane works, too. Here's a clip of fire/arcane celestial for comparison (Sorry! No staff clips!). Somewhat slower than Viper or Trailblazer fire/earth builds, but still pretty quick.
