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I'm going to go over staff-specific things, then focus on supporting skills, THEN comment on your plan, then answer your questions. get ready for a long ride, or skip down to what you want to see, and read back up if you want to see my justifications for things.
Staff overview:
ok, staff focuses around crits, counter attacks, block, and dodge.
Those 4 stats are critical (pun intended) to any staff build.
The passives are key to seeing what it can do:
Triumph will give you +45% crit chance after 3 kills. That means that you'll have a minimum of 50% crit at that point. (and +45% miracle chance too) Given that crits hit 3 foes with a staff, and that you can make multiple attacks per turn with hail of blows + counter attacks, that alone will give you huge millage with crits.
For that reason, I would not look to go above 55% crit chance before triumph, as going over 100% crit is useless.
Battle trance gives you 50% energy drain on staff crits... But staff crits alteady give 50% energy drain, so that makes it 100% Total energy drain. It also lowers all staff and spell cooldowns per crit. This means your staff skills are almost always off cooldown, and your energy is almost always maxed.
Destabilizing hits gives foes +30% damage taken (and -30% magic and nature resists) after you stagger or knock back them in melee. That right there is a huge damage jump.
Now or Never gives you +30% counter attack after you have dodged or blocked 3 times. This is vital, as counter attacks will often crit, adding to your cooldowns and energy even more via Battle trance, and giving you crit faster as the counter attacks kill foes. Spells you cast also increase both dodge and block by 10% each, (30% max)
The stance is nowhere as useful as it used to be, (due to each counter attack removing stacks) but it does give damage reduction and block power recovery, both of which are very helpful.
In summary: Spells give you damage, crit, block and dodge, block and dodge give you counter attack, staggers, knockbacks, and kills, which skyrocket your effective damage and crit chance, crits top off your energy and refresh all your cooldowns.
It is a pretty obscene upwards spiral that comes with attack skills that let you charge, retreat, reposition, or hit multiple times.
So what skills best support this?
first, anything that lowers backfire chance will LOWER your damage and crit chance, with the only exception being the magic mastery passive: Body and Spirit, which actually increases your weapon damage and crit more than the backfire chance loss lowers it.
Magic Mastery:
Seal of power- Spell that adds to your weapon damage, and adds a decent amount of backfire chance, further increasing damage and crit.
Body and spirit- passive that adds weapon damage and crit every time you cast a spell.
Armored combat:
Brace For Impact-15% dodge AND block, + lowers foes ability to hurt you. Great for starting that counter attack based upward spiral.
Battle Forged-bonus counter attack and dodge for your movement, maneuvers, and charge skills (so basically every action you take).
Athletics:
Elusiveness- with so much ability to move around the battlefield while attacking, elusiveness has plenty of chance to restore stacks to it. That makes it an amazing defense AND way to get the initial dodges to fuel counter attacks.
No Time to Linger-basically a free 10% crit chance, as you will constantly stagger foes with your active skills.
Sudden Lunge- Free attack to a staggered foe, that lowers your cooldowns and adds to your foes. Too good to pass up.
Adrenaline rush-25% Crit. Then add massive Damage reduction, cooldowns, energy, and pain resist.
Peak Performance- 15% damage and dodge, basically always up.
As to Attributes and gear:
Strength adds block and weapon damage, armor damage, and crit eff. As you can already turbo-charge your crit chance, and the massive number of attacks you do will multiply the effect of armor damage, this is likely the most useful stat to a typical staff build.
Agility gives dodge and counter attack chances, and lowers fumble and backfire chance. Lowering backfire is a bad thing with a staff build, the rest is great. Likely the second place you want stats.
Perception strengthens your armor penetration and accuracy, and adds more crit. Given the huge crit you can get from skills, that is not as good as Str or Acc.
Vitality should only be taken to a level ending in 0 or 5. Energy is too easy to come by to use ability points to get more, but block power recovery and health are always useful. Not sure I'd raise this.
Willpower... Just no. You have a build that is all about removing cooldowns and restoring energy. This is not worth pumping.
Gear: You want things that increase block, dodge, damage resistance, or add crit chance/eff or counter attack. The duelist set is an obvious thing to look at, diamond or ruby rings, the hand amulet or phylactery, Etc. (I'll talk staves later, as it is specifically a question of yours)
So Looking at your build idea specifically:
I wouldn't unconditionally recommend hard target or unyielding defense, for 2 AP you get very little that helps you before you get to 5 stacks of unyielding defense. Hard target is not very useful with a staff build, you can close range on foes too quickly for them to get many shots off. Unyielding defense looks good, but between casting spells, taking ranged attacks, or getting stuck in melee to get all your amazing passive buffs, when are you going to find the spare turn to use it? Elusiveness and Brace for Impact are better go-to skills for survival situations, and would save you in emergencies, where unyielding defense needs to be pre-cast in order to benefit from it, and you already have a ton of pre-melee things to do. I would get battle forged, it is a small but constant bonus that stacks well with your power spiral.
The idea of using Hunters Mark and Upper Hand is cool, if you could reliably stack Thrill of the Hunt, you'd be looking at 25% extra crit chance in melee. Of course, Adrenaline surge does that without the weapon swap, and for 5 less AP, and taking both is likely overkill. (you'd go way over 100% crit if you max out both + other skills and gear) If you are not maxing out Thrill of the hunt, then I'm not sure that the lesser crit amount would be worth the AP investment. This also forces a heavy reliance on perception, as you will not have take aim, (except through dexterity), so you need the accuracy to hit reliably. This diminishes how much you can put into strength, lowering your weapon damage. It is a balance I would have to examine a lot more before I could say that it is worth the investment.
I think the idea of using ranged, spells, and melee, all in one package, is pulling in too many directions at once. Try to envision what skills you would use in what order vs. foes at different ranges. In a dungeon you will not have time to get more than a shot or two off before melee, and in fields you may find the melee to be less useful than just shooting people. Jolt will likely not cause Resonance, so it would not be worth casting in many cases,
Staff is a "weak" attack, but the armor penetration is not a big deal, as your repeated hits will shred armor pretty quickly, and crits with enough crit eff will slaughter. Boosting weapon damage to huge numbers will not have the same returns that boosting crit chance and eff will, because crits hit multiple foes, and therefore are up to 3x as effective as weapon damage boosts.
That isn't to say that weapon damage boosts do not help, they do, but they are a percentage of an already low number... thus they are not as good as a similar weapon damage bonus on beefier 2H weapons.
Armor crusher is not needed. You'll destroy armor quickly enough with your hit/hit/hit/counter/counter/counter combos. Armor crusher is way too many AP for what you will get with staffs. (RoT for the 5% Acc/Crit/-5%Fumble isn't bad though, as you should almost always have a attack skill off cooldown)
I would grab Seal of Power and Body and Spirit before Jolt and Residual Charge. Damage as shock will be resisted separately from your base damage, so that 15% from spell casts is not as good as it sounds, and the 5% base damage bonus is minor for 1 AP. Grab the magic mastery first, and see if you need more damage come endgame, getting Jolt and Residual Charge if you need it then.
Stacking crit will beat armor damage/pen AND weapon damage.
As to the choice of staff:
The Orient Staff is the end-game staff of choice: HUGE (for a staff) damage, and lots of combat stats. But it is unique, so your looking at distant dungeons for it.
The Geomancer staff is a top-tier choice. That 5% Damage reduction is awesome, and it's other stats are not bad. The debuffs are not enough to matter, your active skills will reliably daze, stagger, and knockback with or without them.
I personally prefer the Exquisite staff. Best block chance (6%)/block power, (12) 5% crit chance, 17 crushing 2 arcane, Solid buffs to your core stats. (Block and Crit) It can also be bought at Amity, making it easy to acquire.
Other people can give input too, but I suppose not that many people have experience with this exact question I had.
I know. And as you can tell form the answer, I don't mind being called out. (also not like I haven't called you out when people ask about Dual wielding)
I rarely talk to Steam friends these days which is why I didn't bother adding you (or anyone else in this forum). Hence when I wanted to ask you something, I did it publicly. If I've offended you, my bad.
I'm no longer the Dual Wielding expert I used to be. I took some time off this game, my knowledge is just outdated now.
I'm honestly not the staff expert either, for the same reason, but I know enough about HOW it plays to hit up the wiki for the exact info, and could build up good answers from there.
Thanks for doing it, it was nice to look over the staff stuff and theorycraft for an hour or so.
Any comments on my answers?
On that note, I just want to explain why I decided to try using Thrill of the Hunt...
I just wanted to try a staff build that isn't magic-heavy. Every time I start a staff build with Jonna, I find her magic capabilities just overwhelm the need for a staff in melee. In the end her staff just ends up being a stat stick.
Then, if it comes down to using a staff, Arna or Velmir will do far better than Dirwin because of their respective character traits. However, Dirwin is the one that starts with staff skill tree unlocked. Since he is uniquely the guy with both staff and ranged weapons skill trees unlocked in the beginning, I decided to give that a go.
Early on I was deciding whether to pair Thrill of the Hunt with dagger instead. But I believed doing so would make me lean more to ranged weapons, since dagger isn't great at eating Onrush from say, a Magehunter. But still, the choice was 50/50 so I decided to go with staff in the end. After all, I never played with staff builds before, even back when it was OP.
As for why I thought of Thrill of the Hunt build; I've always found Upper Hand to synergize with some kind of melee build. But Dirwin owns everything at range if we build with that focus in mind, so there was never really any reason to use the melee component of Upper Hand except for dire situations.
But Thrill of the Hunt has a great potential in hybrid builds... I believe that out of all the weapon types we have now, dagger and mace have the worst "engagement" potential - as in, you would have to get an enemy to get into melee with you for you to hit them; if you walk in front of them first, you get hit first. There are ways to circumvent around this problem, but these are either escape skills (Dash) or charge attacks that cost more AP to get to. Or they don't do enough damage, or have short range, etc.
This may not seem like a big deal if we're seeing this from the perspective of the player. But enemies use these skills too. So, we as players are most afraid of enemies with skills like Onrush. Especially since these skills usually hit like a truck or can stun, and getting stunned usually means a death sentence. This is the reason for Thrill of the Hunt - it allows me to weaken enemies getting close to me, or eliminate squishy enemies hiding behind tanks that can Onrush me, and still place a debuff on the enemy frontlines so I can slaughter them when they do rush at me.
Hunters Mark/Thrill of the Hunt synergises well with melee, but Staff has synergy with spells. It makes for a weird situation, because trying to do all 3 is spreading too thin, but then which 2 do you use?
If you want to try for the ranged/melee hybrid, go for it. Just keep in mind that if you can kill the squishies at range, then you are pretty much one step away from having another godly ranged killer, who maybe uses the staff every so often because he feels like it, instead of a hybrid.
I did play some of the new staff tree (without magic) and I can tell you that it is a pretty powerful tree, even alone. In the current meta, 2H Sword is simply better at everything a pure melee staff build does, but that is still the difference between an "S" Tier and an "A" Tier. Staff is still that good.
That said, I haven't tried blending in the magic, and haven't taken it to the distant dungeon levels, so there may be some falloff there.
Yes, actually. I have some questions.
Doesn't Seal of Power need a spell from a specialized magic tree to get some kind of buff? If I don't get Jolt early then how can I change the Seal of Power into Seal of Fire/Lightning/Earth (or whatever they're called, haha)? Or are you saying it doesn't matter; but then why learn Seal of Power and Body And Spirit?
I actually didn't know about this. I thought the 78% or whatever chance to cause Resonance isn't affected by resistances... But now that I'm fighting skeletons with 50% nature resistance I realize they actually don't get Resonance debuff that easily. Does this have to do with their nature resistance or are there some factors causing Jolt to not cause Resonance as much as its stats implies otherwise?
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The reason why I decided on Jolt instead of other things is Resonance has -20% shock resistance, and then every staff hit will reduce shock resistance by at least 1% (since 2 AP needed to get to Residual Charge). This means if I have shock damage in my melee attacks, the +15% damage dealt as shock will eventually ramp up due to negative shock resistance of my targets. If the enemy is wearing heavy metal armor then they probably start with -20% shock resistance already, meaning I'll be hitting them with close to +50% damage (but then again, they may have higher nature resistance to negate that, I could've checked with my other high-level characters but I decided to be lazy and not do that research with my other characters haha).
This is why I also considered learning Seal of Power, as well as Body and Spirit. I have enough AP for these, but I was wondering about Armor Crusher. Anyway that question is settled though.
I did consider Fire Barrage and Ring of Fire as well, because Seal of "Fire" (?) gives +5% crit chance, and fire damage has a chance to cause burning (although it is mostly irrelevant). But I guess Residual Charge and Resonance looked more attractive instead.
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There is also my question about staff blocks: how "useful" are they?
The reason I ask is I think 1 Strength stat no longer increases block power by 1. I might be wrong but it might be 0.5 block power now. Or 0.75. Either ways I am pretty sure that sometimes when I raise my Strength stat I don't see my block power rise by 1. This leads me to believe staff blocks don't block nearly as much damage as it would've if Strength and block power increases are at 1:1 ratio.
Edit: I realized why the ratio of Strength to Block Power isn't 1:1... Block Power coefficient of weapons... Every weapon has its own block power coefficient, duh. Damn I forgot about that. That is what happens when I take long breaks from my favorite games haha...
Coupled with Unwavering Stance not being able to be sustained at 4 stacks most of the time with all the counters happening all the time, it means I'd just be able to recover 20% of my max block power half the time I'm in battle, assuming I don't dodge (but I will, of course).
This is probably my only argument against raising Strength instead of Perception. I guess if I was playing a pure staff build I'd raise Strength like you would suggest, but in this case this is a Thrill of the Hunt build and I don't plan on using a bow, so no Taking Aim. (This is intentionally so, because using a bow = bow build, as bows reign king in the range game, there'd be no reason to go into melee if I use a bow.)
I did consider using Adrenaline Rush as well. But ... I haven't gotten the right stats to unlock it right now, lol. I didn't want to base my core build on a skill I might not get until very late in the game, hence why I tried to go with an alternate solution.
Plus I have enemy mages to deal with. Crossbow just feels like a safer choice. Even with bodkin bolts I'd still lose some accuracy over range. Hence why I felt more justified increasing Perception than Strength. Although Strength would help me fight better in melee, I know I have no trouble with melee foes most of the time - it is more the mages and archers I have issues with, especially when they're hiding behind their meat shields and even going as far as taking risks shooting their comrades in the back with impunity...
... Then there are monsters like Gulon or Young Troll that I don't feel I can confidently beat them in a straight duel, lol.
Thus, when I make this hybrid build, I am intentionally playing Dirwin not to maximize this specific character's potential based on his starting skill trees; rather I'm intentionally maximizing a specific build to see if it can be done. I'm not looking for the next S-Tier build, I'm looking for an A- or B-Tier build that actually works. :)
Staff now almost needs to be a hybrid in order to "work as intended". Otherwise skills like Now or Never will only function at 50% efficiency (without the spell casting component).
The main problem I found with Staff builds now is it is not as "fun" to build them... The reason being Dirwin is a godly archer, and Jonna is a godly mage. These are the characters that start with staff skill trees, and they both don't exactly need it. Since pure Staff builds will now always play second fiddle to the 2h swords in the counterattack niche, we are incentivized to play Staff builds as hybrids now. Yet there is no incentive to do so either because bow and magic wreck everything at range, and the two guys who can build this way best are exactly Dirwin and Jonna... exactly, no incentive whatsoever to make them hybrids other than to gimp them, just to see if the hybrid builds work. :P
To be fair, I considered using Velmir for this build at first, instead of Dirwin, since his trait is better for this specific build. But I am a bit OCD about my "character order" (when it comes to organizing my save files)... Currently Velmir is my 4th character, and I don't want to see a "Velmir (5)" save file next to my "Velmir (4)" save file. I previously only had 4 concurrent characters made and only Dirwin is missing from that list. So I chose Dirwin just for that reason... of course, other than the fact he starts with staff skill tree as well. I mean, I have no qualms with starting with Velmir and then just use a 2h axe to hack everything to death before going to Mannshire and unlock his staff skill tree there, haha...
Seal of power adds 10% weapon damage alone. Then the backfire chance and using a spell both kick in too, adding dodge, block, more damage, and crit chance.
I'm not sure how resonance works exactly, I just know from playing electromancers that even at 100% chance it doesn't always apply, so I assume some kind of resists come into play, be it move resist, control resist, or nature/electric resists.
Block used to be (in part because of the forever stances we used to have) king in the staff build. I imagine with unyielding defense, it could be again, (as UD doesn't degrade from making attacks) but that leads back into the issue of where in the rotation you use UD. If you went pure melee staff, I'd use it instead of a stance. But when you are using ranged to soften foes up, you'll likely not have that free turn. Without it, block is still powerful, ESPECIALLY when each block, total or partial, is adding 10% counter attack. That lets you boost counter attack to huge levels, and take multiple counter attacks per turn, each of which can hit 3 foes on a crit. Enchant a staff with lifesteal, and that can be a huge way to leech life back from your foes. Block will do a huge amount to mitigate damage on you, but it isn't the invincibility cheat it used to be.
As to mages, I think you underestimate just how quickly you can get into melee with them given sprint training and so many ways to kill your cooldowns. many times I'd use the staff charge to hit a melee foe, then use it again the very next turn to charge an archer or mage. (leaving the wounded melee foe behind me to play catch up.) Staff is a VERY maneuverable style. Crossbow works though.
I actually don't plan to fully spread my AP investment across all 3 fields.
The build is mostly melee at the end of the day. That isn't going to change. But I will use the ranged component (Thrill of the Hunt) to debuff enemies, soften them up, kill off ranged annoyances, and shoot down runners. It is just a shame that Resonance doesn't proc as often as I thought it would. Dammit... Probably better off going Pyro instead then. At least with Seal of Power I'd get +5% crit after casting a fire spell.
This is the issue exactly. If you are looking for a meta breaking build right now, staff has no place to call its own. Well said.
But you will lose the 10% weapon damage. That is overwritten when you make it a seal of fire. You'd trade it for 25% weapon damage done as fire. (resisted separately, so not as useful as it may first appear)
Trade offs. And while I would take crit above 10% damage, this build can max crit pretty easily.
I see. I haven't ever played an Electromancer before, wouldn't have known that until now haha. Thanks for warning me ahead of time.
Fair enough. I didn't think about that yet, didn't get that far. But I didn't plan on expanding into Armored Combat so early either. Most of the Armored Combat skills are just there to facilitate for the counterattacking build, since I gotta get hit first to counterattack. I'm not confident in the block/dodge chances I got from stats and equipment so far, using a staff... even with Unwavering Stance. That is why Unyielding Defense was in my initial plan. But otherwise if I am a whirlwind of death I wouldn't bother with it.
I haven't fully tested the "+10% dodge and block chances for 4 turns; this effect stacks 3 times" effect. I noticed some effects (of other skills) will refresh its own duration upon stacking upon itself; and then some other effects don't.
For example, Jorgrim's trait only lasts for 10 turns per enemy. It will count to 10 turns before disappearing. If he kills another enemy on turn 9, this doesn't refresh the duration of the same effect gained when he killed his previous enemy; thus on turn 10 he'd still only have 1 stack of his trait effect.
The same for the No Retreat skill passive of spear tree. (I think? Don't quote me on this, I checked this skill multiple times in the past and it was always broken in the past. I checked recently and it seemed to be fixed though... So maybe this observation no longer applies now and my memory is all jumbled up.)
But I noticed some skills do refresh that duration. (Forgot which one; I might've remembered it wrong too.)
For staff's Now or Never I'd have no clue, but I think it doesn't refresh as well. Which means unless you're casting spells 3 turns in a row, you won't get 3 stacks of +10% dodge/block for a total of +30%. I'm not entirely sure because I currently don't have 3 spells, I only have Jolt, haha. (But I can still test it as Jolt has a 2-turn cooldown, I just haven't done it yet, been busy leveling him up instead.)
I'm also not sure about Triumph.
Fair enough. I probably have been trying to look for an invincibility cheat this whole time, haha...
I see... I haven't gotten to that stage of the game yet. Still at level 9 so far. Got my Metallic Staff. Arguably I'm still at early-mid game as far as my build is concerned, haha.
Edit: No, Now or Never appears to refresh the entire stack's duration e.g. I cast a spell, I get +10% block/dodge for 4 turns, on turn 3 I cast again, I get +20% block/dodge for the next 4 turns. Which means every 3 turns I cast a spell, I can keep the +30% block/dodge buff indefinitely.
This changes many things...
I think you might be wrong on this. I think you're getting this info from Battle Trance. But Battle Trance gets its bonus from the percentage of Backfire *Damage*, not the chance lol. (I made that initial mistake of assuming it was Backfire Chance at first too...)
Basically we are still incentivized to lower backfire chance as much as possible, so we can keep casting until we have 100% backfire damage, which will yield an obscene +50% weapon damage and +25% crit chance.
It also means spells that lower Backfire Damage Change, such as Seal of Finesse and Seal of Earth (Power converted to Geomancy) would lower the Battle Trance buff. (This is one of the reasons why I didn't want to dabble in Geomancy in this build.)
The Backfire Damage % is viewed in the character stats tab. I checked it and verified Battle Trance indeed scales off Backfire Damage instead of the chance.