Old staves better than new ones (?)

[Megatron]

Playing the Ashlands PTR. And the new staves are cool but somehow underwhelming. The shotgun one is so - so, best used from point blank. The Trollstav is actually cool and super fun. But the other two, are worse than the old fire and frost staves. Staff of Fracturing is doing roughly the same damage as the Staff of Embers, and the later one is far more practical and useful. The Staff of the Wild's tentacles have a huge delay until they start hitting, and the overall DPS is lower than using the old Staves of Frost or Embers. Is it just me, or I haven't figured out how to properly use them ?

[The Gunsmith]

no that about sums it up

hell i didnt even find the staff of fracturing to hold a candle to the staff of embers, such dissapoint.

[HamsterPants]

I love the trollstav, it's pure chaos on a stick. Dundr is also extremely satisfying to use, especially if you can use the knock-back to good effect, like launching a charred warrior into an exploding lava blob. Also good for getting a bit of breathing room as lightning causes staggering. Maybe staff of fracturing works better for some things? It has the advantage of being cheap to make and it levels elemental damage really quickly. Maybe it's intended to quickly convert a melee build into a mage build in Ashlands? I think I need to experiment more with it. I do agree about the staff of the wild - the poison needs a direct hit and the roots don't seem to do much at all. Maybe it's better for crowd control, but I can't work out how to get the best out of it.

[Megatron]

The staff of the Wild need either a damage buff or a CC (crowd controll buff), for example being able to root enemies in place while the poison is slowly doing DoT on them. I would personally ditch both Staff of Fracturing and the Shotgun staff for something entirely else: for example a staff of (chain) lightning ? Also why not adding a special attack mode to some stave like many weapons have ? Like a Fire Nova to the Staff of Embers ?
Don't take me wrong, I'm not complaining about the difficulty, I can do the whole Ashlands with the old staves. But as a magic lover, I find the new stave's usefulness disappointing. Hope they fix these issues soon

[The Gunsmith]

Originally posted by Megatron:

The staff of the Wild need either a damage buff or a CC (crowd controll buff), for example being able to root enemies in place while the poison is slowly doing DoT on them. I would personally ditch both Staff of Fracturing and the Shotgun staff for something entirely else: for example a staff of (chain) lightning ? Also why not adding a special attack mode to some stave like many weapons have ? Like a Fire Nova to the Staff of Embers ?
Don't take me wrong, I'm not complaining about the difficulty, I can do the whole Ashlands with the old staves. But as a magic lover, I find the new stave's usefulness disappointing. Hope they fix these issues soon

a staff with the chain lightning eff would be balla as hell! sign me the f up

[The Gunsmith]

Originally posted by HamsterPants:

I love the trollstav, it's pure chaos on a stick. Dundr is also extremely satisfying to use, especially if you can use the knock-back to good effect, like launching a charred warrior into an exploding lava blob. Also good for getting a bit of breathing room as lightning causes staggering. Maybe staff of fracturing works better for some things? It has the advantage of being cheap to make and it levels elemental damage really quickly. Maybe it's intended to quickly convert a melee build into a mage build in Ashlands? I think I need to experiment more with it. I do agree about the staff of the wild - the poison needs a direct hit and the roots don't seem to do much at all. Maybe it's better for crowd control, but I can't work out how to get the best out of it.

think you might be right about the fracturing's purpose but i wouldnt use it in ashlands to try and train, that would be like trying to train swordsmanship using a feather duster: your opponent will laugh then split you in half.

i think the staff of the wild's issue is it seems to take the root you summon a good solid 5 mins to realise it exists, let alone that there is stuff it can hit nearby. Speaking of nearby its reach could probably do with a lil work as it seems to only try and slap that which is straight up stood on top of it (minor exaggeration but its wayyy too short ranged).

The projectile does feel weak but i thought the summoned root was the real "power of the wilds" within the staff and if so: the wilds be looking noodle armed yo.

[HamsterPants]

So I've been using Dundr a lot and in certain situations it is very powerful:

1. Use it to blast enemies into water, then do 1.5x lightning damage when they come out wet. Good, solid combo, works very well on charred warriors.
2. For some reason it does 1.5x damage to morgens and doesn't even need to be point-blank to do decent damage. Not sure why, I don't think they're weak to lightning? Maybe a bug.
3. It makes the Lord Reto fight trivial - he suffers the full effect of knockback and if you keep blasting him away every time he gets close you can just wear him down without even having to move. Feels very cheesy, very possible that could be changed in future.

[jonnin]

also the old frost staff did so much damage if you kited enemy through water or it started raining... it was obscene. Hard to improve on this with other elements.

[HamsterPants]

Originally posted by jonnin:

also the old frost staff did so much damage if you kited enemy through water or it started raining... it was obscene. Hard to improve on this with other elements.

Frost staff definitely works well in ashlands, especially for bonemaws. The frost effect is really nice for keeping enemies form moving while you machine gun their health bars down. It's just a bit harder to get some of the enemies wet now. Also, rain does not make enemies wet for some reason - you have to get them to swim/wade to get the wet debuff.

[The Gunsmith]

Originally posted by HamsterPants:

So I've been using Dundr a lot and in certain situations it is very powerful:

1. Use it to blast enemies into water, then do 1.5x lightning damage when they come out wet. Good, solid combo, works very well on charred warriors.
2. For some reason it does 1.5x damage to morgens and doesn't even need to be point-blank to do decent damage. Not sure why, I don't think they're weak to lightning? Maybe a bug.
3. It makes the Lord Reto fight trivial - he suffers the full effect of knockback and if you keep blasting him away every time he gets close you can just wear him down without even having to move. Feels very cheesy, very possible that could be changed in future.

Morgen is 100% yes weak to lightning, i only get yellow numbers out of iolite slayer when the chain lightning procs on him

[Nerevar]

morgen is sadly also 50% resistent to all forms of phys dmg. so a himmin afl actually does more to it per hit than any ashlands weapon does^^

itembalance is a gross joke in ashlands sadly. too many of the weapons arent upgrades they feel like sidegrades or downgrades in some cases.

the new firestaff has atleast 1 HUGE advantage : it levels elemental magic 10x faster than any existing magic tool does.

the staff of wild falls under "cool but useless"

the trollstav is valheims version of the fatman from fallout : stupid strong but dont fire this at a wall right next to yourself....

the lighting shotgun. is a lighting shotgun. thankfully its not a half automatic one or all other weapons would be useless^^

the biggesz letdown by far is the new gem system. the new dynwyrm sword is basically just a trophy item to hang in your house. it has no gameplay use. a sword thats literally ON FIRE nonstop does less FIRE dmg than a TORCH? what?

atleast the new armor and shields are worthwhile upgrades and unlike mistlands can atleast use the emblems on the shields again.

bonemaws are weak to frost (cause everything swimming in the water is in valheim). frost arrows obliterate them. but they cannot get stars afaik and they have only 1100. thats less than a gjall and only about 2.6 more than a regular serpent.

aside the lava blob and lord reto everything is either neutral or weak to frost. alot of stuff is weak to spirit.

mistwalker just shreds most enemies. thier hp values are all very low and barely higher than mistland enemies ones. which is why any nerf to spawnrates would overnerf this biomes difficulty as thier numbers is the sole reason its difficult at all. thier stats themselfs are actually very unpowered compared to previous biome hp and dmg jumps. because devs balanced them with thier number advantage in mind. yet people demand spawnrate nerfs not getting that this would ♥♥♥♥ the biome over royally.

[Megatron]

I was thinking about the Staff of Fracturing. And came to the conclusion that this staff will get some kind of an upgrade and be much more powerful.

This is my hypothesis :

The rather cryptic description mentions that "Only those with patience and focus will harness the true power of this staff". I tried all kinda of combos, gameplay wise, and the current staff is still pretty lame. So I think the staff is "dormant" at the moment, and we will need to do "something" to awaken it's true power. Melee player already have a nice miniquest to craft the sword Dyrnwyn. Why shouldn't mages get a similar task and get an epic staff. (Also archers need love too)

When I look at the spell animation, and overall usefulness, it's like the devs intentionally made it look pathetic. Like if you want to detonate a nuclear bomb, but it just fizzles. That's what exactly this staff does: a fizzle.

Crafting wise, this is the only staff which doesn't require a gem to make it. Not even a surtling core. Why ?

And I noticed one more interesting thing. All other magic weapons have a nice glowing effect, except this one. It has some red bloodstones which look nice, and that's it. No fancy effects like on other staves.

And in the recent PTR some staves got nice upgrades, like the Staff of the Wild (now it's usefull). But the Fracturing staff only got nerfed by removing the very one thing usefull : the huge xp gained by casting it on mobs.

So what do you think about this? Or perhaps some of you actually figured out it's secrets ??? Then please tell us now :D

[glass zebra]

The fracture stuff gets much more from level up than the other staffs and does not spread fire you might not want. That is about it. "Patient and focus" seem to mean "level up and aiming well".

Dundur also still levels elemetal magic up very quickly. They just removed it from the fracture staff. Since it is basically a crossbow, it also gets much stronger faster than the other staffs when your skill goes up due to attack speed.

[Nokturnal]

Fracture is actually better for single target DPS than the Ember, it can stack it's Fire DoT faster for definitely more DoT than the Ember against the Ashland enemies. Though it's more of a mid range weapon to Ember's ability to snipe if aimed well.

Dundr or Gundir as I call it, is basically a melee weapon with it's effective Range but does do great against big targets like Morgens and Valkeries, they buffed it's reload speed with the new patch so now it's pretty decent but even with the buff it's a bit slow at killing smaller targets as you have to get so close to land every projectile on top of it's fairly slow reload speed.

Haven't tried out the Wilds staff post-patch, but it was pretty bad previously.

The Troll staff is actually great at distracting/killing hordes of enemies while you sneak away or do something else, you can also use the Meteor to destroy rocks/structures/Dvergr stuff biggest problem it currently has is it doesn't level Blood Magic at all.

[Trash Panda 🦝]

Originally posted by Megatron:

Is it just me, or I haven't figured out how to properly use them ?

I think it's somewhere in between first they're only lvl one or two and it's early in the update so all of this is subject to change and they will get better when deep north comes. Second sof is easier to hit stuff with especially at range but doesn't do as much aoe or have the knockback, the shotgun is really good against Morgan as they're weak to lightning and finally I haven't used the sow but seams like it would be good if you have 3 eitr foods against a large group

[Darren Daulton]

Shotgun staff is amazing, love it. Point blank destruction on yard trash and impressive damage on morgen , even at range. You can safely run around Ashlands as a mage with this thing.

SoW grants a direct hit and a lingering root , not unlike the elder. It's ok if you kite the enemies into proximity of any roots. Seems a bit gimmicky.

Trolstav is freaking awesome , but also terribly dangerous. If they don't have a target it'll be you so you can either train them into something else , run , or deal with them. Situational.

SoF was the first of the new staves we crafted, looks really cool, sounds really cool. But so far in the field it's been less than impressive.

I used the Frost staff to burn down Fader , I went full mage so getting in close to use the Dundr was a no go.