My impression of Staff Fighting (numerical and otherwise)

I'm not going to crunch numbers, and get confused when others do. The character I have using staff is doing quite well, thank you very much. At level 3 he was able to take on level 5 minions with out any problems.

Yes, it takes a little longer to put opponents down, but the defensive bonuses that the staff offers seems to off set this quite nicely.

WOW....

OK, Combat quick question with a yes or no answer. Have you pm'ed the devs with your statistical analysis yet? If not when are you going to do so?

I focus on looking cool.

and I'm afraid to say, not liking a style of debate does not make it false, whatever link you may be able to find on the internet...

I tell you what does make something false: Invalid assumptions.

This thread got funny since I last skimmed it.

It did prove one of my theories correct though:

An imperfect understanding of how something works, compounded with the delusional belief that the understanding is in fact perfect tends to lead to some interesting conversations.

Combat is just flailing wildly at this point. In fact, the attempts at logic are starting to remind me of the Barb Swipe animation.

I think Staff looks amazing.
Fun to play too...

Just fwooshed my way through Heather Townshend's arc on x6, tier 1 musculature my only incarnate goodie so far. Staff worked exactly as I predicted it would: exceptionally well. One death against the talons of vengeance of all things when all three bosses in the spawn hit build up at the same time and I neglected to get out of the way, no deaths against the tsoo or pantheon. My plan was to use purple inspirations judiciously but in reality they were fairly unnecessary; for the last two missions I didn't use any inspirations at all save obviously for the final fight. This was possible for a variety of reasons, from guarded spin's amazing usefulness in high end chains to having sufficient aoe damage to chew dangerous lieutenants up rapidly and en masse to having appropriate control powers immediately available any time a problem enemy was present.

As it happens I can think of an easier way to sum all of that up: Staff is a stellar set.

Whoops, I meant knives of vengeance there, as the talons clearly are not featured in that arc (and getting killed by the talons would be less embarrassing).

Staff/elec scrapper. I wanted to mix things up from my normal strategy so I shot for ~34% s/l/e/n defense rather than focusing on smashing and lethal, and so far it has been seriously paying off. In addition to that I was able to get 87.5% global recharge for nearly-perma hasten which is only a little more than you need to run staff's single target and aoe chains. In spite of the fact that power sink is up like constantly and I never use it, I forgot to switch out of form of the soul for form of the body just because soul was so handy while leveling that I was essentially married to it. I even made a bind to switch between them and everything! Old habits, I guess.

But yeah, I can't say enough good things about this combo. It seems like staff would also be very good with the other damage aura sets, but elec caught my fancy and I'm glad I went with it.

Going to roll a Staff/Elec Scrapper. Tonight. Never played Electric Armor either.

Defense debuffs are hard on it but its excellent resistance numbers plus the near-perma regen buff and frequent heal from energize tend to mean that even in ginormo-debuff situations you have a bit of time to thin out the crowd or perform a tactical rearward relocation.

Here's where I definitely don't fit in with the common wisdom: I think this combination is particularly powerful on scrappers because of the fact that enemies get scared of you so easily. If everything I pulled in Dark Astoria stuck to me like glue the no inspirations thing would not be happening. Since things run away for a few seconds before returning it's more like being the nucleus of a villain atom. I may not be able to measure where that Conqueror is going to be at any given nanosecond but sooner or later its general proximity to my whirling doom vortex will cause it to die. Any time they spend scooting around aimlessly is time not spent attacking me.

Isn't it quicker to kill stuff if it's all sitting next to you? That depends. One question is whether you'll survive its undivided attention. Without even going into that, though, my attitude is that nobody ever said I had to fight just one group at a time. As long as you maintain aggro on some members of a spawn and prevent anyone from running two hundred yards or so away from you they'll all come back eventually, so why not meet some new friends in the mean time? Older members of the probability ellipsoid are cycled out as new ones are cycled in, as nature intended. Obstacles can be used to cluster up the enemies that remain before you enter a transition they can't follow you through, such as an elevator.

That was a wild aside that didn't really have a lot to do with the topic at hand but I figured I'd bring up my playstyle since you may or may not favor the sit 'n stomp technique that's all the rage with the brutes these days. I think that this is more fun and that the results speak for themselves.

None of the above. Pretty tight build up to 49 and then I had one throwaway power so I picked up focused accuracy, slotted with one common endurance IO for major -tohit situations. Haven't actually used it yet but it may be handy some day. I didn't have enough spare slots to give more than the default one to confront so I definitely wasn't going to have enough to use for a non-essential level 49 power. I guess body mastery is the obvious choice for burning power picks, but staff/elec is uniquely indifferent to conserve power so focused acc is the only one I found to be worth considering.