Staff feels weak in later stages

[TrickTimer]

From my group experiences with physical dealers (Ripers, bow, boomrang), I feel like Staff doesn't scale much. Even in the run where I had the item allowed me to stack 1% spell damage when killing enemies with spells, I arrived at the last boss in normal run with 600+% spell, which is insane already but the damage doesn't feel that good compared to autos from physical dealers.
Going to Endless and arrived on the last boss with 850+%, I feel like weaker and weaker. Well one can say, I wasn't able to kill that much during the endless because the group was killing way too fast.

Was wondering why staff normals could not scale with spell power instead of basic damage.

[Toxi The Vagrant]

Spells definitely scale worse in damage than normals can scale, especially if you can't get the relic that allows spells other than chakram to crit. You could feasibly build for spell utility with stuff like decayed sceptor and anything that conditionals off of poison, or picking up Knight's Charge and Arlan's dice since utility spells can't be outscaled in their utilities, but without something like Otherworld Legends' item astrology, where you determine what types of items you'd like to see more commonly before the run starts, I think staff might be in the worst position it's ever been in a while. It's not bad for normal clearing, just bad for loop though.

[awanderingswordsman]

Spells aren't bad, but spell power kind of is. Spells have been somewhat nerfed by the freeze nerf. Can no longer perma freeze enemies with an ice turret perfect skill cast.

[HoneyDrake]

Spell Dmg doesn't scale as well from my experience. It's still a decent stat to go for.
Recharging spells is generally more important.

The best damaging spells by far is the bomb and the dice and the drill feels decent at least (considering it can hit multiply times with a decent AoE so it can trigger effects and debuffs quite good).
You can even one shot bosses with an meteorite dice roll.

[Dendi Defendi]

In my opinion, staff is one of the best weapons. The trick is to pick up crit and not skill damage, just get your skill damage from the artifact. When you max upgrade the staff, you can use the additional 2 orbs on your third attack and extra orb when casting a skill to basically turn yourself into a machine gun of orbs if you fire off your skills as soon as they refresh, the staff allows for the most attacks in the smallest amount of time so you just end up shooting out skills like crazy, which if you stacked crit and get the artifact that allows skills to crit, makes you proc artifact effects like crazy and melt pretty much anything in the game.

[TrickTimer]

You are basically saying building Staff like boomrang and Bow...
But is it better than these or not?

In that aspect, Staff has low scaling with autos and low ranges, plus you are stuck on ground when attacking.

I am sure you are able to do all you described and make it work, just saying it's pain in the A** to not being able to play like a real mage.

[Zogtar]

They could definitely give a minor buff to spell damage, and no one would complain.

[awanderingswordsman]

Ok in looping staff is actually the strongest IMO because the strongest build is supreme ambition, spell crit, refresh on crit level 2. With that you literally never need to use a basic attack again and can just shotgun everything to death with arcane barrage. Throw on barrier pendant and you are immortal. Since it's looping you can also get an on crit build going too. I hate infested mind, poison on skill hit level 2, extra stack of poison, lightning on crit level 2, double lightning. double crit damage. So each arcane barrage that I could fire as fast as I can perfect charge it did 3 infested mind procs, and 10 lightning bolt procs and did triple damage with over 1k spell damage. Bosses disappeared in about 2 seconds. I killed the first miniboss within 1 second. I killed glacial brauma on loop 3 before he could finish his opening double ice shockwave attack.

Staff grants spells orbs and increased perfect cast time and is thus the best weapon with this build which I think is the best build.

[Zogtar]

Idk man, if you compare the crit damage and the safety of the bow... your damage doesn't keep up late game.

[awanderingswordsman]

Lol, you haven't tried the spell crit build then. Literally melt bosses in 1 second flat before they can do a move. Just requires like a loop and a half to get going. As for safety, you have perma barrier pendant. Can also use knights charge with enough crit refresh which makes you actually permanently invincible because you can perfect cast it again before the i-frames end. Was able to just mash it against bosses.

It's actually the opposite of what you said. The staff is weak early before you have the scaling to kick in and the build for infinite casting set up. Once you have it set up late game though, you instantly kill everything while being invincible and moving at full speed all the time unlike weapons that need to use weapon attacks.

You have stuff like chakram hitting for over 2k damage on each hit and it hits like 5 times in quick succession and thats only counting the direct damage, not the on crit stuff like lightning, poison, etc. You literally do not use basic attacks at all at this point so everything about the weapon that doesn't boost spells is pointless, which makes staff the clear winner.

[awanderingswordsman]

Just to put it into perspective, I've been looping to find the damn 4th hidden room (still hasn't shown up after like 10 loops) and I've gotten world 1s time down to 90 seconds, world 2 down to 93 seconds, world 3 down to 116 seconds, and world 4 down 213 seconds. This is on doom difficulty with 200% hp active.

I think sub 2 is possible on world 4 but it will require the non variant version of the boss as the both variants hard gate you twice to spawn minions for like 10 seconds. I'm also a bit slower cause I'm making sure I don't miss the hidden room.

Still I'm at a total of 8 minutes and 32 seconds for worlds 1-4 together. I'm pretty sure my world 5 is about 90 seconds as well mostly because of the unskippable stuff. I had one run with 3 miniboss rooms which take about 4 seconds and the boss takes about 15 seconds.

So yeah, staff on a good run late into loops can get a 10 minute loop. Definitely not underpowered.

[doot doot]

Originally posted by awanderingswordsman:

Lol, you haven't tried the spell crit build then. Literally melt bosses in 1 second flat before they can do a move. Just requires like a loop and a half to get going. As for safety, you have perma barrier pendant. Can also use knights charge with enough crit refresh which makes you actually permanently invincible because you can perfect cast it again before the i-frames end. Was able to just mash it against bosses.

It's actually the opposite of what you said. The staff is weak early before you have the scaling to kick in and the build for infinite casting set up. Once you have it set up late game though, you instantly kill everything while being invincible and moving at full speed all the time unlike weapons that need to use weapon attacks.

You have stuff like chakram hitting for over 2k damage on each hit and it hits like 5 times in quick succession and thats only counting the direct damage, not the on crit stuff like lightning, poison, etc. You literally do not use basic attacks at all at this point so everything about the weapon that doesn't boost spells is pointless, which makes staff the clear winner.

yup I managed to construct pretty much this exact build and eventually just quit. Supreme Ambition continues to scale as a percentage instead of as a set number into infinity, so it has mathematically better scaling than Titan after like 5 rooms. The main problem isn't damage it's that you basically may as well give up if you don't find at least 2 if not 3 relics to help you refresh spells faster by the end of world one which can be frustrating, the weapon really isn't that good at refreshing skills for how skill focused it's supposed to be

[awanderingswordsman]

OR you can just refresh the ember shop before the run and start with skill crit, crit refresh, and supreme ambition and be guaranteed an overpowered looping build.

Although I think you might have it wrong. I believe supreme ambition just gives 1 flat spell power per kill. Wargear gives 1% of power as it's own separate multiplier. My final spell power of a run and my total enemies killed is usually quite close. The scaling power of spells is the same crit as everything else plus torment scythe for an extra 2.5 multiplier plus skill surge for a stacking +50/100% multiplier plus the similar one from the staff tree plus what is effectively attack speed by getting infinite refresh and of course supreme ambition just scaling up much faster.

I'm betting you can actually reach similar levels of damage with scythe by stacking wargear since scythe gets so much flat power by turning all the apples into +1 powers. It's just, you still have to stop to attack and aim and you aren't invincible and you can't fire off 3 attacks per second so it's still going to be weaker.

[Toxi The Vagrant]

Originally posted by awanderingswordsman:

OR you can just refresh the ember shop before the run and start with skill crit, crit refresh, and supreme ambition and be guaranteed an overpowered looping build.

Although I think you might have it wrong. I believe supreme ambition just gives 1 flat spell power per kill. Wargear gives 1% of power as it's own separate multiplier. My final spell power of a run and my total enemies killed is usually quite close. The scaling power of spells is the same crit as everything else plus torment scythe for an extra 2.5 multiplier plus skill surge for a stacking +50/100% multiplier plus the similar one from the staff tree plus what is effectively attack speed by getting infinite refresh and of course supreme ambition just scaling up much faster.

I'm betting you can actually reach similar levels of damage with scythe by stacking wargear since scythe gets so much flat power by turning all the apples into +1 powers. It's just, you still have to stop to attack and aim and you aren't invincible and you can't fire off 3 attacks per second so it's still going to be weaker.

At least a few folks don't particularly like using the Ember shop unnecessarily, with myself among them, and that doesn't resolve the issue of staff's loop viability being dependent on three to four epic rarity items with one serving more as a bonus win condition. That's just not a healthy condition for the weapon as a whole. The scythe also isn't necessarily in a healthy position right now either, due to it sharing a niche with a weapon that innately has a better starting position as well as stronger close range burst damage and better area control. (Which is a bit rough for me, I like a lot of it's tools on paper, but it's mods and starting statblock give it a rough time)

[awanderingswordsman]

So just did a looping run to test and scythe with wargear can indeed hit similar levels of deleting power as staff with spells, it's just much less safe cause melee and no barrier pendant. Was up to a bit over 1300 power when I finished the 3rd loop and stopped. Absolutely everything died in one hit except champions and bosses but they died in a few seconds.

So right now the real niche scythe has is that it can slice apples to get another 10-30 power per loop.

I do very much agree that staff isn't in a very healthy spot, but my point about it being insanely strong late game stands. The only relic you truly need is supreme ambition which is just epic. Crit spell and refresh is fantastic but there are other refreshes like the one for killing statused enemies combined with any status on spell move. It's still "strong" without the infinite spell refresh build as long as you've got some refresh because staff innately recharges spells very fast. I've had successful loops where I didn't get spell crit until the 4th or 5th loop.

[Toxi The Vagrant]

Fair