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 ?

[Soma]

Publicado originalmente por Darren Daulton:

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.

I am so going to kill the elder with sow tonight and its gonna feel good. Summon multiple to make it hard. I have tons of ancient seeds anyway. Thanks for the idea!

[glass zebra]

Publicado originalmente por 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.

The frost stuff does extremely low dps, while also slowing you down and blocking Eitr reg for a long time. It is a CC weapon. SoW can do quite a lot of dps until the boss starts doing a ton of fire aoe in melee range.

[Darren Daulton]

Publicado originalmente por glass zebra:

Publicado originalmente por 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.

The frost stuff does extremely low dps. It is a CC weapon. SoW does quite a lot until the boss starts burning a lot.

You can hold the trigger on the frost staff, it's a freaking gatling gun. Assuming you have high elemental skill and have eaten 2-3 eitr, used the queen buff, and a lingering eitr, you can lay out tremendous damage each volley.

[glass zebra]

Publicado originalmente por Darren Daulton:

Publicado originalmente por glass zebra:

The frost stuff does extremely low dps. It is a CC weapon. SoW does quite a lot until the boss starts burning a lot.

You can hold the trigger on the frost staff, it's a freaking gatling gun. Assuming you have high elemental skill and have eaten 2-3 eitr, used the queen buff, and a lingering eitr, you can lay out tremendous damage each volley.

No you can not, since each of those projectiles do next to no damage and your Eitr reg is blocked the entire time you are using that staff, so none of the buffs you listed help. It is a gatling gun that shoots peas and stops any way to get new ammo for a long time. Any staff that bursts out Eitr quickly (which is every other) with high damage output per cast (which is every other) is better for dps and for Eitr reg, except of course that Fader is fire immune. What the frost staff is good at is slowing down enemies.

Edit: Forgot to add that the lingering Eitr mead grants less Eitr over its 5 minutes duration than 2 minor Eitr meads you can drink in 4. When locking yourself out of reg a lot with the frost staff, it might even be closer to 1 minor Eitr mead.

[Darren Daulton]

Publicado originalmente por glass zebra:

Publicado originalmente por Darren Daulton:

You can hold the trigger on the frost staff, it's a freaking gatling gun. Assuming you have high elemental skill and have eaten 2-3 eitr, used the queen buff, and a lingering eitr, you can lay out tremendous damage each volley.

No you can not, since each of those projectiles do next to no damage and your Eitr reg is blocked the entire time you are using that staff. It is a gatling gun that shoots peas that makes a lot of the Eitr reg boni matter a lot less. Any staff that bursts out Eitr quickly (which is every other except Dundr with super low skill) with high damage output per cast (which is every other) is better for dps and for Eitr reg, except of course that Fader is fire immune. What the frost staff is good at is slowing down enemies.

I don't know what to tell you. I've burned Bonemass down from full health to about 25% on one eitr bar.

I used it to kill Fader. Dodge all his spammy AOE spikes and acid and things. Unload a full eitr bar, then it recharges while your busy dodging all his aeo ♥♥♥♥ again , rinse repeat.

Also if I remember correctly each projectile did something like 30-40 damage. it adds up, mostly because of the fully automatic thing i mentioned earlier.

tbf , i'm talking about 96-97 skill level in elemental also.

[glass zebra]

Publicado originalmente por Darren Daulton:

Publicado originalmente por glass zebra:

No you can not, since each of those projectiles do next to no damage and your Eitr reg is blocked the entire time you are using that staff. It is a gatling gun that shoots peas that makes a lot of the Eitr reg boni matter a lot less. Any staff that bursts out Eitr quickly (which is every other except Dundr with super low skill) with high damage output per cast (which is every other) is better for dps and for Eitr reg, except of course that Fader is fire immune. What the frost staff is good at is slowing down enemies.

I don't know what to tell you. I've burned Bonemass down from full health to about 25% on one eitr bar.

I used it to kill Fader. Dodge all his spammy AOE spikes and acid and things. Unload a full eitr bar, then it recharges while your busy dodging all his aeo ♥♥♥♥ again , rinse repeat.

Also if I remember correctly each projectile did something like 30-40 damage. it adds up, mostly because of the fully automatic thing i mentioned earlier.

tbf , i'm talking about 96-97 skill level in elemental also.

Bonemass has ~3 times the HP of a morgen and takes 150% dmg from frost. It is hardly a real "boss" at that point in the game. Of course you can use it to kill fader, but it is very slow and slows you down a lot instead of just emptying your Eitr bar in 5 second and running around freely while regging. Of course you can kill Fader and anything else with the Forst staff, but the others are simply doing a lot more DPS, give your Eitr back earlier and do not slow you down so much of the time.

The roots of the SoW should easily hit for ~170 damage at your skill level any time they attack, which is ~5 times the damage of the frost staff and with 2 Eitr foods you can start regging again after 4 seconds instead of after 10 seconds. If they hit only twice after you hit with the projectile, you are doing more damage per Eitr bar, more than 2 times as fast (compared with player action time) and are locked out of Etir reg and full movement speed less than half the time. They are capable of hitting 10 times. Even the 2 fire staves do similar dps than the frost staff on Fader, solely due to the blunt damage. The frost staff is just not designed as a max damage weapon, which is understandable due to its very strong CC which basically lasts as long as your Eitr. Fader is of course immune to that.

It's been a while, but I think my first full Eitr bar unload with SoW put Fader down to less than 80% hp and it took me 4 seconds to unload that. After that it slowed down a lot though, especially since Fades does more and more AOE. For some reason, Irongate also decided that it is okay for the boss to be affected by the immobilisation. Might be a bug or by design (hard to tell in Ashlands).

[Zombits]

fracturing does more DMG than amber on a direct hit, also a VERY useful knockback.

wild staff is the king of all . Will kill quickly high HP mobs if you know how to use it, it's also why fader died quickly on very hard mode.

The only use for dundr was for morgen , it's slow to reload though.

frost is always good on high eitr diet

[Draconis]

my problem with staff of the wild is still that the roots don't actually hit enemies often as long as they are moving. Anything faster than a charred warrior just walks out of their attack.
So I have to either slow foes down or involve them in melee battles (i.e. I have to use it together with dead raiser + shield or trollstav)

Not excactly a fan of blood magic right now, because the shield is just too squishy (don't know what level of blood magic is expected to be useful in ashlands and afk-skilling it at a "training site" created around a greydwarf nest works but is lame somehow and feels cheesy). Most of my deaths in Ashlands as a mage result from the shield breaking and being hit by a projectile out of blindsight between during casting a new shield (so... while the life has been drained and the shield is not there yet).

Regarding staff of fracuturing, Zombits already pointed out the most important thing (that is for ashlands at least, where fire (even if it stacks) is no option) - you must hit directly, so it does it 12 times of the damage on the item card.
Imo it should be written in the items stats that the damage is per projectile and how many projectiles there are each shot.

Dundr actually helped me to save charred warriors in coop by pushing them out of range for my fellow melee campanion :D Although we had a good laugh when I ran into his screen, shot, and immediately flew out of his screen due to the recoil.
And could it be that dundr's recipe is bugged? It clearly is a lightning weapon, so I would expect it to require iolite and not a bloodstone....

Trollstav is great, but there seem to be situations where you just can't cast it. I tried to use it to summon trolls through a small crack in a fortress wall, however it just drained my eitr, made me vulnerable by slowing me down and no troll appeared. Tried a second time, a third time, realized I shouldn't have tried again when I died and put on my melee stuff to gather my corpse...

[glass zebra]

Publicado originalmente por Draconis:

my problem with staff of the wild is still that the roots don't actually hit enemies often as long as they are moving. Anything faster than a charred warrior just walks out of their attack.
So I have to either slow foes down or involve them in melee battles (i.e. I have to use it together with dead raiser + shield or trollstav)

You can move around in a circle and the root staff can immobilise enemies (including Fader). Them not being able to always hit easily is their balancing though, since otherwise you could do well over a thousand damage with one shot easily. What is pretty bad is though how much issue them have with uneven terrain. They often just do not attack even though it looks like they could easily hit that giant troll just next to them, because the feet of the troll are 50cm above their base.

I would agree that it is rather bad for general use (also because it is slow to start hitting), but for some big enemies it can be worth it. Frankly I went through most of Ashlands with the ember staff, since it still kills everything quickly despite resistance and the AOE is much more useful there than in Mistlands. The 75% fire resistance are almost irrelevant on the low hp of twitchers and archers, especially consider that you can easily stack them, it now leaves burning trails for extra damage and is super easy to aim. It probably still does close to ~70% of the damage total if you factor in everything. Seekers were also not an issue beside the 50% blunt resistance and much lower skill level and twitchers/archers basically have the same HP as those. I definitely had no issue killing crowds in seconds with it. How Eitr combat works you can also just dish out a lot damage faster on range than other characters, so dps is still fine despite resistance, yet you have a bigger downtime after that. That is even less of an issue with the new feather cape though.

I only really used Dundr for Morgens and Valkyres and rarely for Asksvin (they still have low enough HP that ember/fracture kills quickly). The knockback seems frankly broken and should probably be nerfed (pretty sure it is just a copy/paste from the crossbow code, which has the same knockback value, but with less shots of course). The damage of it is good, but having to run all the way over to the enemy reduces its output quite a bit.

Note on charred warriors: you do not have to fight them. They are usually too slow to reach you if you don't want them to and after some time they just escape combat, even if you a keep hitting them with stuff. Enemies need to be able to make an attack every 30s or so or they just go into evade mode and the warriors are just too darn slow to be able to do that. Even if they spawned from a fortress, they will just run off into the horizon after you killed everything else.


Not a fan of blood magic either. The trollstav is basically unusable with a blood build, since it makes your barrier obsolete and skeletons and trolls will fight each other. The troll does not level blood magic with their hits nor their impact and while they are basically an I-Win button, they frankly slow down blood building a lot. And yes they are also quite bugged and don't tell you when they can't spawn (e.g. due to maximum of 2 reached) and I am not sure if leveling the staff even does anything. They frankly feel like a mod and not something from the Valheim devs. They are just too wacky.

The big problem with skeletons in Ashlands is, that they vanish each time you go through a portal and you have to do that in Ashlands a lot more often than in Mistlands and then you have to resummon all of them and will probably mostly get melees, which can not hit all at the same time, have to be babysit to not run into lava and knocks enemies out of each other's melee range. The archers are so much better to mass (despite the 50% resistance), but getting those up after portaling costs too much time. The barrier works fine even at a skill level lower than 40 though. It still feels pretty much like invincibility tbh. Blood is just not fun to play with atm, besides how "cool" the Trollstav is. The SoW would have frankly made a better blood staff, if those roots would actually grant XP on hits.