No doubt some of them have been complete scrubs but some of them I know because they’ve rerolled and I’m still dealing with them fine.
I do agree the fire staff needs something else but it’s still a fairly usable weapon, it’s just a tricky one to get value out of.
Buff PoF
I have nearly 5,000 hours in the game almost all on Firestaff, have been in 250+ wars, and probably have thousands of OPR matches played at this point, so I consider myself educated enough on the weapon to discuss its flaws.
What makes a weapon good in new world is one of two things, it has the ability to burst or kill players, or it has the ability to setup kills. If you look at the most popular weapons they have abilities that are able to be combo’d together to one shot players or make them easy to kill with someone else helping. Think Hammer Wrecking ball → Shockwave → Heavy Attack, GA Gravity Well → Maelstrom, Blunderbuss Grenades → Shot-> ASB, the old IG with Shower → Spike, Bow Heavy Attack → Penshot. These are all hard hitting combos that can one shot players when used in the right scenario, there are also some combos that are good cross weapon like the old Scream → Spike or the current Gravity Well → Shockwave. The other example of popular weapons is ones that can setup kills for weapons that can combo, think the VG with Scream, Rend, and oblivion, or the IG with Shower and Ice Storm. Some S tier weapons like the Greataxe have the ability to setup kills for your team and to burst players down in the same build.
The problem with Firestaff is it doesn’t have either of these attributes which makes a weapon popular/good and it’s raw single target damage has been nerfed to a point that it does less meaningful damage than most other weapons. All it’s abilities are skill shots that have no way of comboing off each other. To do meaningful burst damage to someone with the FS you have to hit multiple skill shots in a row while they are usually dodging. You actually can’t kill a good player who is eating, potting, LOSing, and dodging if you try to only kill them with a Firestaff, it’s literally impossible, even if they aren’t fighting back.
They could fix this problem if Firestaff damage was boosted a bit and they gave it the ability to combo abilities. For example if Pillar of fire knocked players down or stunned them which could be used for a fireball combo. There is just really no way to punish players who make a mistake with a Firestaff combo of abilities outside of getting them to stam out and standing there using flamethrower.
Magic weapons have largely been relegated to support roles due to players complaining when magic weapons can burst them down. You don’t see similar complaints for weapons like the BB even though it can dish out 7K+ damage to fully geared enemies all in a combo that can be used in under .25 seconds and has an 8 second cooldown. I believe this is because Firestaff has a lot of overall stat pad damage which makes it appear high on the scoreboard, which makes it more likely less skilled players will think it’s broken and complain about it. This is because these players judge what weapons are strong off the meaningless score boards.
One of the other biggest problems with the Firestaff is AGS for some unknown reason made all the blunderbuss abilities do fire damage instead of thrust. The blunderbuss may be the best burst weapon in the game, so many players now run Rubies to resist the blunderbuss which hurt the Firestaff even more.
Another problem with the Firestaff is it’s range and critical damage makes it good for killing noob players without resilient. If you don’t have resilient or proper gear you will get absolutely melted by a Firestaff and receive flamethrower ticks of around 1.2K every half second. These noob players then take to the forums to cry about things like flamethrower and Firestaff and how broken they are. Meanwhile flamethrower is ticking for 300 damage on experienced players with good gear.
This post was longer than I wanted it to be but as you can tell I have thought about this a lot. It is disappointing that the weapon has been so bad for nearly 10+ months now during which time it is barely accepted into competitive wars because it’s kit is so bad.
I don’t agree that FS does need more burst. I like it before they nerfed to much. You can FS for dmg and IG for setting up/defending.
Before IG nerfs and last dodge nerfs + mele slow buff you could play mage vs any other build. Sure you dmg cant burst, sure you cc is weak. But you could move combat back to mid range when mele jumped on you. You could fight bows on range and so on. It was not perfect but was fun.
Now mage still can’t brust (could only when PoF did x2 and ice spike was 1 shoting). Can’t defend himself vs more than 1 player (IG cc nerfs) and cant get out when jumped by mele like: Gs, ss, hatchet. Build is in terrible state now.
But still imho main issue is not lack of burst dmg. Issue is lack of mobility/cc this build had before. Devs have to decide how this build should look like instead of random nerfing it. If they want it to stay mid range 10-15m build then mobility has to be restored to min. before last patch. Combination of slow after attack + slow from mele is to much. With dodge way shoter there is nothing mage can do when jump by LMB smapping mele like hatchet.
If they want it to be mid range but that can be wasly jumped by mele, then add way more dmg. Pillar of fire dmg +50-100% and fix stupid bugs on aiming. Ice spike - fix it, its to random to land full dmg from it. Icrease dmg from auto heavy attacks so we can do some dmg on mele before they close gap.
You have to choce ags. What is place and role of mage in fight? And provide proper tools for mage to be good at his role.
Fire Staff is this way because after release. The Devs decided that player wieldable magical weapons should not be a thing in their game. So instead of just blatantly remove them from the game. They decided to make them as useless as possible.
I hate saying this, but if you want to play a magic damage dealer that’s worth a damn. You have little options other then turning New World off. And play a MMOs that actually supports their magical playstyles.
No does not need more burst other builds needs to be nerfed. Damage burst, healing in this game are too strong… If you increase FS burst you will have only another annoying weapon.
That could be true but then 90% weapons should be nerfed to position where FS is now. It will be hard or impossible for now. Better just rework/buff Fs then.
Making magic weapon way weaker than they supose to be isnt as much big problem and making mele as low skill required as you can.
With mele tracking, mele slow on hit and other crap its just not funny any more. Ags just cant balance mele vs range. They make range to strong (bow and musket opr meta) or mele to strong like now.
And what they should target at is light armor vs bruiser before last patch. Balance was rlly good except shirking enery to op. It wasnt easy for mage to kill bruiser - lot of time required and lot of skills timed and landed. And wasnt easy for bruiser since he had to manage skills CDs - movment and cc. Was fair fight.
So they had issue with dex, they didnt fix with changes. But they destroyed mage. Bad things happens when balance team do not play all roles in own game.
I dont care… only arenas are playable now only place where you skill matters… rest is just skill spam and detonate inside clump… Detonation rune loading is too fast… mortal empower is too strong, inv punishment gives really strong boost to your skills… cap points fights are awful after BSS patch… and now they have plans to add another rune even stronger than detonation xd Muskets will be even stronger RIP range mages… In my opinion they are going to wrong direction… but who cares people like big numbers…
True. I play only pvp in this game. And when I see good burst melee on mid or heavy armor (for example GS+GA, Hatchet, SnS, BB), anything I can do is just run and troll him untill he is bored of chasing me. I can`t kill him as mage and he can kill me very easy if get me. If melee is on light armor then mage is done, untill there is very big skill difference between players.
true and unortunately arena rewards suck… and as a solo player healer premade is broken
Mage in pvp is unplayable right now. Lead dev who accepeted all this changes from last patch has no idea what he is doing and how game works.
Now ultimate play vs mage is LMB. Even if you miss all skills and you are blind, you keep spamming LBM and you will kill mage at some point.
mage still can win 1v1 with some builds but most of the time it has to be very good mage player vs bad melee/archer player. In equal fight mage is mostly done.
Im not talking about good mage vs bad mele. In case both are ± same skill and gear lvl mage cant do anything. Game was very close to balance all types of builds in relation to each other and here we are.
Musket is op as it was, bow crazy dmg but mobility nerfed so now they run with crazy dps from range and close cobat (GS). All mele is just sh… on light armor builds by LMB usage. Its a mess like never ever before. Head of balancing departments have no idea how game works. Best prove of that is PTR 2 muekts nerfs where each of them does buff musket build that is used by 90% of players.
because right in the penultimate beta fears some mimimimi who were in the forum crying for FireStaff, and Amazon as a good listener of dead game fanboy and PvP sucker, went there and nerfed FireStaff.
There used to be INT Scaling on gems that would let mages psuedo scale melee weapons off INT.
No longer the case though, cause Magic Gem scaling was gutted prior to launch day.
Base weapon damage is always going to be higher than INT/FOC scaling, even if you run 400+ INT the scaling coefficient is meaningless.
we dont need mele weapons scale with int. reason ppl do play mage is that its not mele builds. mage is a caster.
fact that ice spike - hardest to land skill in game is doing less dmg than half random skills from mele weapons is a joke.
fact that mele weapons do more dmg with auto aim skills and heavy attacks than pillar of fire is a joke.
even musket and bows does more dmg with 40-50m+ auto attacks than mages with close range hard to land skills.
whole department of weapon team should be verified and ppl who have no idea what they are doing moved to place where they can be competent.
Mages with melee weapons would be a byproduct of INT Gems having actual scaling.
300 points in INT is equal to 200 points in STR or DEX.
INT and FOC falls short big time due to lack of scaling on a per-attribute point basis. Same can be said with CON.
Scalling is small issue. Real issue is they made mele LMB spam to kill mage where you cant counterplay that. Im tired on mele missing all skills on arena and LMB me to death couse i used stamina to aboid all their skills. As long as state of mage is like that im not buying single items from game shop. Big middle finger from me to amazon dev team.
The answer to why it is so bad is because AGS’s data analysis is flawed. They see that mages are always in very good spots on the leaderboard in OPR so they think the class is fine. What they fail to realize is the concept of statpadding which applies heavily to fire mages. Yes, they put out tons of damage over time, which brings you to the top of the leaderboard, but that damage is all meaningless because it gets outhealed by AOE heals anyway. This is also the reason why nobody brings the class to wars. It’s super weak.
Don’t even talk about PvE, same state as musket there.
How are mages doing against melee since the recent changes to light armor? I haven’t seen many mages in arenas, so I assume it’s not going well.