My impression of Staff Fighting (numerical and otherwise)

But more damage also increases the potential for an attack to defeat a target, in that it will allow lighter attacks to reach a high enough damage point to become an alternate. Also, light attacks generally have such a low recharge time (I'm considering a light attack an attack with base recharge of 3-5 seconds) that they usually be ready regardless of recharge, but may not always have enough damage to be worthwhile as an alternate.

LOL, you are doing nothing but trying to be obtuse about this that is clear.

You are not even trying to put forth your "idea of merit to save staff" on what is needed and sticking to that, you are here to trash staff by lying saying it is an underperformer then throwing up a bunch of numbers to "look" good. Something Arcana and other numbers people have already destroyed.

If you have a case for it to be buffed make it to the devs and be done with the lying and stuff about the set being an underperformer on any metric other than the absolute max in a min/max perspective. Anything else is disingenuous as just about everyone here can see through it and the devs ignore that kind of approach.

How do you know that devs ignore numbers? Do you contact them regularly and know on a first-name basis?

Considering that numbers apparently have been enough to convince devs in the past (according to Arcanaville), I would say that this is as good a method as any. You can argue that my analysis is not perfect or correct, and that would be a valid argument, but you can't argue the method as a means of persuasion.

Of course, it was a mistake to post anything on AoEs, especially considering the limited time I had to try and work on it (not enough to check for errors). But I cannot devise a method where staff is as high in AoE output as it is low in single target. Numerically, I cannot find anyway that they are better than 4th, with or without added powers, at almost any level of recharge, and most I've tried have them between 7th and 9th.

Is it good at AoE? Yes.

But I don't think it compensates for having all-round low single target damage.

The devs don't ignore numbers, they are just a part of the overall analysis they do which is why min/max'ers are FAIL in terms of these kinds of balance issues as you are setting forth, they are too myopic in their focus and lose their way as you have here.

Yes, I do PM the devs directly as those in the Kheld forum can attest too, but I only do it when someone comes to the forums and misrepresents things in the way you have for clarification purposes only.

You are wrong here and you need to stop the hyperbole it does not help any case for change...never has..never will.

Sometimes plus damage could help a light attack defeat a target, but on the other hand light attacks may not always have enough damage to be worthwhile if recharged quicker.

That skew really needs to be eliminated.

I apologize if it seems I am piling on. You're kind of in the hotseat which is an awkward place to be, but I have some disagreements with the nature of your analysis.

My major issues goes back to something you said earlier about the ideal way sets should be balanced. The essence of my disagreement with only considering damage values for balance is that all "attacks" are not the same and utility is not a freebie that should not be considered. There are reasons to want Siphon Life, Divine Avalanche, Knockout Blow, Clobber and many others powers to recharge as fast possible regardless of what "chain" delivers the most damage.

Attack chains are an abstraction that guesses at many factors, cheif among them in the case of melee characters being immediate foe availability. It's possible I'm guilty of overestimating travel time between enemies, but that time at least feels to me like somewhere between 0.5 to 3 seconds or so in the sorts of environments encountered in radio teams. However long it is, it is clear in the case of at least one melee AT (Stalkers) that actual single-target damage delivery in most combat situations is very hard to predict, because for some sets/players Assassin Strike can be demonstrated to frequently lose its guaranteed chance to crit before the player can acquire a suitable target.

In any case, one specific reason to use a low damaging attack in many cases is that the enemy is light on HP, as Arcana said. Another reason would be that the realbest set of actions would be to nix the idea of an attack chain completely and mix AoE with single target, which is a possibility I don't think I've seen addressed (my apologies if it has). The main reason to do this is what I said above: all attacks are not the same. If the optimal damage chain calls for an AoE power but, say, Knockout Blow would be more useful against one of the gathered enemies, it makes more sense to drop the chain and do that. None of this becomes very relevant in pylon soloing, but that's why pylon soloing is regarded by many players as what it is: the amount of time it takes to solo a pylon.

Think of it this way: no one would argue that the recharge of Fossilize, the hold power that appears in Controller sets, is completely irrelevant just because that power also frequently appears in their attack chains. The recharge is relevant because the power also represents how often some type of additional act can be performed. It is always useful to have that at the ready, no matter what else may be recharged. Block of Ice sinks my Ice/Fire Dominator's attack chain, but it's still worth casting.

Actually, we've had a number of posters through the years, Arcanaville being one of them, who've very much given the impression (to me at least) that, the devs haven't historically accepted math-heavy "proofs" of under-(or over-)performance. A particular dev might choose to look at something because someone made a case for doing so that resonated with them, but I'm not sure we ever heard of that happening based on modeled data.

The devs seem far more interested in data-mined performance, with maybe a dose of seeing outlier performance in action with their own eyes. If someone went to them with lots of repeated experiments, conducted in game, that showed some performance issue, they might be interested in that, depending on what "showing a performance issue" meant. If they start finding out that Staff characters level slower than other melee characters of the same AT, they are probably going to start trying to determine why. Theoretical performance is not very interesting to them. Playerbase-wide practical, measured performance is.

Evidence based on a model that bares no relation to how the game is actually played has even less validity.

You can't just "ignore this" "ignore that" and expect to draw any meaningful conclusions.

I did a Mathematical Modelling unit at University. It was a long time ago and boring, but I do remember that anything you left out of your model you had to justify by proving that it wouldn't affect the outcome.

No it isn't. For one, it leaves out Guarded Spin, which would be one of the most frequently used powers in REAL gameplay. You also leave out equivalent powers from other sets. This does not make the model better, it makes it worse. For two, you leave out Mercurial Blow (and equivalent powers in other sets), which would be the most frequently used power for tanks or brutes - you really have no idea how those ATs work, do you? I've played a great many of those sets, and I don't use any of those attack chains. I might, if I was a scrapper and attacking immobile targets that don't fight back, but last time I looked, this wasn't City of Target Dummies.

You really, really, have no idea about how different powers interact, do you?

Yes, as in "not at all".
Exactly. And an analysis that doesn't include those things is meaningless drivel.

Then you will have to live with your invalid conclusions based on broken logic, or maybe listen to other people with a better understanding of the game and/or real experience.

While +DMG has no effect between spawns, the recharge from Form of Mind does. If you don't finish a spawn with one of the finishers, and end up with 3 stacks, that's 6 seconds of 15% off of any long-recharge powers that might not be up yet. That could matter at least some for things like defense powerset clickies (Self heals, end management, tier 9 godmodes,** etc), or even pool powers.




** I started to type 'or /Nin tools' before remembering the devs opted out of giving these tools to stalkers. Yes, I'm still a little bitter about that.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

I said convincing arguments had been made. Convincing to me, and to a majority of the quantitative analysts on the forums, but it has been rare that the devs have accepted a quantitative analysis alone as proof of underperformance specifically. Particularly because the devs have an explicit and very specific definition of "underperformance" and it can't be calculated as such: it can only be measured.

Quantitative analysis combined with other evidence has been convincing. But the quantitative analysis has tended to have a very high hurdle to overcome. The devs do not like, and do not trust, aggressive quantitative analysis. And that's probably for the best. Conservative analysis places all or nearly all the margin for error against the desired conclusion and still leads to the targeted conclusion. Analysis that *can* maybe possibly suggest a conclusion might be possible sometimes normally carries little weight. Analysis that reaches for conclusions tends to carry no weight at all.

The devs are actually pretty accessible, so its also not a practical question to ask any player if they contact the devs regularly. Some probably contact the devs more often than I usually do.

Excellent points. Though it has been willfully ignored earlier in the thread, it bears repeating that pylon times have never and will never be factors in set balance considerations as the entire point of them is to demonstrate the maximum capability of a full build with every available advantage in one extremely limited circumstance.
Here you're at your very wrongest, for reasons I've explained and for the reasons O_T has brought up. You utterly fail to understand that in being forced to take all of these pools to shore up aoe other sets pay a high opportunity cost. We've already been over the fact that the staff fighter need do nothing extraordinary to have excellent aoe, so what I find more interesting now is the fact that in actual gameplay single target chains are irrelevant so long as it is possible to acquire more targets. Earlier you tried to claim that it is almost never useful to have an aoe chain, I assume due to a recent blow to the head. By now you've presumably had a chance to recuperate and should find it easy to see that the exact opposite of that is true: there are very few situations in the game where it is impossible to take advantage of an aoe chain.

If you can be hitting more than one target, you shouldn't be using a single target chain at all (with vanishingly few exceptions such as the Dilemma Diabolique finale). Staff has the built in ability to scale its attacking to however many targets are available, innocuous strikes in particular being nearly a single target attack for DPA except that it's a cone on a very short recharge. Here's what I mean: while your super duper SS/FA/Mu is either in full farm aoe mode or doing zero aoe, the staff fighter can use as much aoe as is relevant to the situation. At the alpha this probably means wiping out the minions with a cone or two followed by eye. Now lieutenants and bosses remain: stop using eye, use the cones to damage everyone and fill gaps with single target attacks on the bosses. When only bosses remain, the cones are still efficiently contributing damage. At this point the SS/FA/Mu is going to look like quite the nimrod if he's trying to keep up on aoe by using 19 endurance scale 1 attacks on two or three bosses.

Even within the context of your bias staff looks great. Now we go back to what Arcanaville and I have been saying: that doesn't even matter, because as soon as you add extra pools you're no longer discussing power set balance.

The devs use mathematical methods when the first design a set of course, and one of the things Arcanaville has managed to show up was when there where flaws in the methodology used by the developers.

But actual, measured performance always trumps any amount of theory, as it should.

The Scientific method: If the model fails to agree with observation, there must be something wrong with the model.

The Combat method: If the model fails to agree with observation, there must be something wrong with reality.

That's a little unfair, it's more like:
The Combat method: If the model fails to agree with observation, then everyone else is just looking at it wrongly! Because they do agree they do!

In terms of the devs acccepting a calculation-only analysis (perhaps with some additional accepted knowledge of the existence of a problem) to prompt revision of a powerset the strongest cases can be made for:

1. Circeus' (plus others) analysis of Ice tanker performance. Statesman flat out admitted incorporating Circeus' spreadsheets into the devs' internal analysis of the set.

2. Stupid_Fanboy's proof that Claws did not follow the reductions specified by Geko. Since this wasn't a performance issue but rather a case where a dev actually stated the math that went into a set, the math could be proven definitively wrong.


Directly, I can't take credit for getting an entire powerset changed on numerical analysis alone. But indirectly, I can take some credit for probably all the melee weapon sets. Those were all sped up and the redraw gap removed in large part because BaB realized how strongly powerset offense was affected by cast time, and that happened almost certainly because of conversations I had with him much earlier in which I laid out the principles of DPA vs DPS.

It helped my credibility greatly when the devs were adjusting Claws and BaB asserted on the forums the changes would increase Claws output by 7%, I claimed 50%-75%, and then BillZBubba decided to solo a pylon with it in Beta, demonstrating ~80% increase in damage.

BU would add between 50% and 100% +damage at a max of every 18 seconds. Therefore, it would equate to a total benefit of 5.56% damage buff, assuming scrappers at the recharge cap using it whenever it came up. That translates to a net improvement of 2.5% after enhancements, and would be less than that at anything less the recharge cap, or on other ATs, or with powersets that use a reduced version of BU. In game-play, the burst damage would be more useful than that, but for sustained DPS it isn't as useful, and could be argued that to be insignificant, or that it may actually not be worth the animation under some circumstances.


I would be dishonest if I tried to evaluate sets that way. I would be comparing two unlike objects, and the only assumption anyone would make is that I would be deliberately trying to massage the numbers to prove my point.

Also, stop insulting me. I've played the game since a month after release, and I'd dare say I know how to play just about every AT that I've spent significant time on (Defenders, WSs, MMs, Scrappers, VEATS, Brutes, Tankers, Stalkers). I've done pretty impressive things, like solo a MoITF in under an hour without any purples in my build, so I know how to squeeze performance out of a set.

Of course, these numbers are less accurate for tankers and stalkers, because of their unique mechanics. But that wouldn't necessarily help Staff, because Mercurial Blow is not one of the best DPA Tier 1 attacks (it is tied for 9 out of 15 before damage buffs, 10-11 after damage buffs).

I know the relative values of the forms. In order for FoM to be useful, it would have to either increase survivability by a factor equal to 7.5% regeneration/75% regeneration or increase damage enough to overcome the benefits of FoB/FoS. It is possible to argue that it could be worth more to recharge powers not related to either of those, but killing and surviving are the two basic tasks of the game.

Arguably, that isn't true. Sure, it doesn't use powers like Stun or DA/parry, but some single target chains have large amounts of survivability caked in. Some have a ton of knockdown, some have stuns/holds, and some have heals. But all focus primarily on doing the most damage possible. If you try and ignore that and deliberately do not try to do as much damage as possible, the analysis will be flawed.

[quote]
Exactly. And an analysis that doesn't include those things is meaningless drivel.
[/quote]
I'm ignoring this because it is silly

Stop politicizing. You are using the Appeal to Ridicule, and it isn't a valid argument. Secondly, your argument could simply be read as "I am better than you," and "You haven't played Staff at all, so your opinion doesn't matter."

In no place have I said "I know more about the game than you do." I'd reckon that I know as much, or more, about the game than you, having played it for longer and arguably done 'more', but that's just a personal opinion, not a fact. Finally, you assume that I haven't played Staff, which is completely false (or that your experience with Staff is more valid than mine, which is also false).

Same Site as above. Ad Hominem and Personal Attack.

Now, to address your arguments. First, you claim that being forced to take extra AoEs is a horrible thing. This simply isn't true, and I would 100 times out of 100 take advantage of 'high opportunity costs' if the actual result was greater than could be found in a powerset. For instance, imagine a powerset called "Rage Mastery." All it has is Rage. SS tanks could say that other powersets are at a high opportunity cost, being forced to take one pool to take advantage of Rage while SS has Rage in the powerset, but if Rage Mastery made other sets better than SS the high opportunity cost wouldn't matter.

Secondly, you misunderstand the statement about AoE chains. The point is that AoE chains aren't needed because very little content requires constant AoE output, as most minions will die too quickly to use a second or third chain, and lts not much more. This would be more apparent in teaming. The only content with constantly pouring enemies and continually saturated target caps is farming, and that is not relevant to most gameplay.

Also, you confuse single target chains with "only single target attacks". Many sets use AoE attacks in their single target chain, including Spines (3 with Quills), Electric (2), and numerous sets with at least one good cone. But in order to be more efficient than the attacks in the single target chain, AoE attacks have to do more damage per activation. Usually this takes 2-3 targets, but that is balanced by the increased recharge on PBAoEs and small area of most cones.

That form of analysis, however, completely ignores the fact that combat tends to narrow down the number of targets very quickly, leaving one or two high HP targets per spawn. Most of the time I don't even get to use multiple AoE chains before combat is down to bosses, and those bosses aren't always close enough to hit with cones. Single target chains reduce the time it takes to defeat those last few spawns in a way AoE damage generally cannot.

Here's a few reasons to use single target attacks (and BTW, I love the continued assumption that I have a SS/FA/Mu, which I can only assume is being used as an attack because I have stated numerous times that I've never played that combo):

Every single AV or EB in the game, generally at least one per mission in team content and every few missions in solo content.
Defeating one or two bosses too widely spaced for AoEs
Defeating one target quickly to stop them from using dangerous abilities (eg, Tarantula Mistresses, Sappers, Nullifiers, DE Eminators and Spawners, Vanguard Wizards, Carnie Mistresses, etc.)
Defeating a single target in order to reduce damage taken
And more

And while SS/FA/Mu is fun to pick on because it has no cones, most sets tend to have at least one 5 target cone. The sets that don't are primarily tanker legacy sets like Ice, Energy, and Stone, along with MA. So your 'advantage' isn't unique to staff in the slightest.[/quote]

Again, Appeal to Ridicule.

You haven't shown ANY measured performance. You've given anecdotal evidence. That literally means nothing because it requires nothing to prove and cannot be compared to other sets. In order to show 'measured performance', you would have to do timed trials of every set at various difficulties and levels showing that staff validates your anecdotal beliefs.

And while I appreciate the attention (no press is bad press), you are simply using grade-school level tactics to prove me wrong, including name-calling, tons of appeals to ridicule, and anecdotal evidence in place of statistical proof.

The 'Combat Model' isn't about ignoring game play experiences, but about valuing the accuracy of simple models in comparisons, especially over opinion statements like "Well, I can solo at +4/x8, so its fine."

The scientific method very rarely uses the type of 'observations' you have claimed in this thread. "I feel ..." simply does not work in science. Indeed, the only 'scientific' observations we've seen would be the Pylon times from the other thread, as those could both be reproduced and statistically compared to the expected result. In that case, the Pylon times are fairly close to what we would expect from Staff. And while Pylon times aren't representative of all gameplay, they are more 'scientific' than anecdotal statements about the sets performance, and will be the best thing available until someone does time trials of missions at various difficulty settings and levels for all the powersets to show the actual speed of the various sets.

The other argument everyone has used is Appeal to Popularity and it is also wrong. It doesn't matter if all of you hold a different opinion than I do, and it doesn't mean you belief is correct or that mine is incorrect. You know that is a logical fallacy, so using it is at best ignorance and at worst a deliberate attempt to use illogical statements to win an argument.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Actually, even as "low" as Staff's single target damage is supposed to be, that's not what happens with Staff. With Staff, the logical approach is to set up on the boss and use AoEs as often as possible, slipping in single target attacks into the gaps. When you do that, the pattern seems to be that the minions go down first, and then the boss goes down fairly close to when the Lts go down due to the damage distribution from that kind of target selection.

One thing that I found surprising, and I'm not often surprised, is that my Staff/SR is having almost none of the problems my MA/SR had with high multiple Nemesis. I'm up to x4 with bosses, and what I'm finding is that vengeance is not as much of a problem because its very often not hitting anything. Because everything, or nearly everything, dies almost simultaneously due to all the AoE. It is far more likely that vengeance is going to cause me a problem with the next spawn, because its close enough to get a vengeance buff, than it is going to cause me a problem with the current spawn. Its not perfect, but its a lot better than with MA by a long shot. You'd think that killing things one at a time would lead to less vengeance stacking, and it does, but its even better when vengeance is landing on dead bodies.

I've actually taken a slight break from Staff to level my Titan Weapons scrapper. Of course, its going to take a while to make any comparisons to Staff because TW is actually not a joy to level at all. Until you can sustain momentum pretty much constantly, its actually a very staccato set. I probably won't be able to make a "fair" comparison until I get it into the 30s, but I can say that Staff and TW are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to actually leveling the character.

I took you at your word that you don't have a SS/FA/Mu but since you kept bringing it up I felt completely justified in doing the same.

To sum up my objections to all that stuff I quoted there, I don't believe that you put very much effort into your staff fighting stalker if you don't think it could have done those things. The great thing about staff's single target is that that's where most of its control lives: it gets a guaranteed mag 3 stun which it can easily if not reliably stack with precise strike's on bosses, it gets giant amounts of knockdown and it gets range with one of its best attacks which in practice is extremely significant pretty frequently.

By contrast, its aoe powers are at once more defensive yet less reliable. Guarded spin is a no-brainer when you're in a pinch, but innocuous strikes' immobilize is very subtle in its utility and eye's knockdown and debuffs are variant and not guaranteed. I find that this creates a truly excellent balance of outright power and necessary consideration on the player's end. There are times in aoe situations where I use single target attacks because it would be safer and vice versa. No other set has that. I was going to make that sentence longer but it's true how it is.

Regardless, this is no longer theoretical for me. My staff/elec scrapper is now 50, decked out, and capable of tanking ITFs with zero DDR and 35% s/l defense. That is far and away the least favorable high end situation for that combination. On STFs and LGTFs it might as well be invincible to go along with its spawn-shredding facility. You can say whatever you want about staff in theory but staff in practice gives titan weapons a run for its money and it isn't even supposed to.

Thanks for being civil.

I can't make comparisons between my TW/Elec Brute and Staff/Dark Stalker because of the level disparity and investment disparity. No character of mine has had the sheer damage of my TW/Elec, including the Stalker, but that is largely due to the extreme nature of TW at high levels of recharge than some deficiency with Staff. I can say that staff was pretty easy to level, though I never experienced the problems many had with my TW characters (to be fair, staff is probably worst at leveling on stalkers).

While Staff has decent mitigation in its single target, it isn't unique in its abilities. Energy and War Mace both have a fair amount of stuns, and most single target T9 abilities have some measure of control (KO Blow's Hold, CU's Stun).

You can make the claim that Staff's AoE control is better than other sets because of the versatile nature of Eye and IS. My experience has been that attacks like FS and Whirling Smash were great at keeping enemies on their backs, but I could see the advantages of having an immobilize in the set for keeping guys in range for more AoEs.

However, I've found that I tend to abandon the AoE defense attacks at higher levels on my TW characters, and I felt I would probably do that if my staff stalker got to 50. At first, I thought such attacks would be overpowered, but I've since felt that they were pretty perfectly balanced, in that sets couldn't easily slip them into a single target rotation without a DPS drop but could use them in regular combat as an effective attack in most cases.

My /Electric brute has 32.5% to positionals on one build (45% smashing/lethal on the other), and I've found that I rarely need to use lucks to reach the softcap. Combining end drain, with decent resists, with defense, with heals, with soft control from TW meant I was very survivable. I'd expect Staff to be at least as survivable. However, I'm not sure that the survivability I experienced was horribly greater than other sets.

Personally, my main problem with Staff (numbers aside), is that seems designed to be the anti-Titan Weapons. TW was a set with ridiculous damage potential, locked behind an annoying mechanic and horrible endurance problems. Staff is a set that focuses on being as easy to play as possible.

To me, every set should be designed with ease of use in mind. I think TW and Staff are wrong because they try to balance power and annoyance, and I don't think those things should be related. It just promotes bad lines of thinking, leading to even more annoying mechanics with OP sets and a greater tolerance for low damage sets with QoL features.

That's going to be a matter of personal opinion and preference, of course. I never leveled any character as fast as my TW Brute for two reasons: It's too much fun to stop playing, and the set felt like I was holding onto the handlebars of an out-of-control motorcycle. I made it a point to hit all the mayhems while leveling, and I had to be super-careful not to overlevel them. And I didn't take Build Momentum until level 47, after I had destroyed any endurance problems.

I'm enjoying my Dark/Staff Tanker, although progress on Staff is of course slow because Tanker. Damage feels pretty good, too; I've dropped Tankers in the past because they just weren't doing what I felt was reasonable damage, but I'm fairly happy with Staff so far.

That's exactly what you are doing. Sets are played differently, so ther is NO SUCH THING as "equivalent rotations" to compare.

I think you will find that is exactly what everyone believes you are doing...

I'm not talking about helping or hindering staff. I am talking about valid and invalid assumptions. People do not use the best DPA attack, there are a great many other factors to take into account, from building fury to looking cool.


Again you forget that the ATs are DIFFERENT. You claim to be familiar with Brutes, yet seem to have no idea that since fury is responsible for a significant amount of their damage output, and thus FoB worth comparatively less, and hence the equivalent benefit of FoM and FoS is larger.

Exactly. In normal play PEOPLE DO NOT FOCUS ON TRYING TO DO AS MUCH DAMAGE AS POSSIBLE. Ergo, your analysis is flawed.

Quite. Experience >> theory

Which is why you fail. You believe you know far more about the game than you really do, wheras I am aware that there is lots I don't know, even though I have been playing since EU beta.

But you don't need to know anything about the game to spot invalid assumptions, and to know that a conclusion based on invalid assumptions is false.

If you have played staff, then try saying "I have played staff, and I have felt that it was under-performing..." and people might listen to you, rather than coming up with a pile of spurious mathematics.



I don't need to. I don't claim to know if Staff is underperforming, overperforming, or whatever. My point is: NETHER DO YOU. If your so called "proofs" can't convince us, they sure aint going to convince the devs.

In my opinion, staff is significantly worse for Scrappers than for the other melee ATs, so I am quite willing to believe that either the scrapper version underperforms or the other versions overperform. But I don't have a problem with that, lots of powersets perform differently on different ATs and in conjunction with different secondaries or primaries. If the difference was significant enough to notice, you can be sure there would be a hoard of people coming to the forums complaining (especially when they have spent money on it). When (if) that happens, then it's time to crunch some numbers and try to find out what's going wrong.

Oh, well done, you have just disproved the entire democratic system, old chap! When are you going to tell the president he needs to step down?

here is a valuable life hint: not everything you read on the internets is true, posting a link to something doesn't convince anyone of anything. Just to show that anyone can paste a link instead of making a valid argument, here is one for you:linky

Quite true, but I'm also of the opinion that Titan Weapons isn't really very much fun to level, wheras staff is great fun.

And the bottom line is, the game is all about having fun.