Do casters even use non-unique staves?

I mean, how good/bad this item actually is in your opinion? because personally Id prefer dagger/wand +shield for 95% caster builds

"

Ludvator wrote:

I mean, how good/bad this item actually is in your opinion? because personally Id prefer dagger/wand +shield for 95% caster builds

Dagger wand is vastly superior if for no reason other than WB.

Blowing your load for nichy +3 staves is a poor investment.

I would use it, but I play self found, so standarts are lower, I guess. Main benefits are a second 5-6L and +2 gems (even support cold gems). In some cases definitely worth losing some crit and %spell damage. Shame it doesn't have +flat cold to spells.

A +3 Staff with good stats as well can be quite nice, especially for Spells that scale quite well with Levels.

Though most of the Unique Staves themselves ALSO give + to Gems, so it comes down to the Stats/utility provided therein of the Staves in question.

it is more of a 'whirling' problem

whirling blades is so good that it makes using non-daggers feel terrible. i have a pretty gg incinerate wand (all that youd like to have on it, sick combo) but im closer and closer to dropping it and equiping a subpar dagger just for whirls. it is insane that whirls have no drawback and yet flamedash has 3 charges..

it has nothing to do with staves albeit the pledge is pretty much BiS anyway

First off, congrats on the staff, it's absolutely sick.
Second, I personally try to use staves because I love the aesthetic of it so much, but more often than not I switch to wand/sceptre+shield or dual daggers. The shield defense I find is just too good, and the dagger crit can make or break a crit build.
However, staves have one huge advantage: Sockets. If you don't enjoy one-button builds, staves can be the best option (or I suppose hierophant now) because you can have a clearing skill (ex. Flameblast/magma orb) AND a six-link single-target skill (ex. flame surge).
I suppose staves can also be cheaper to gear as you can find a good staff for really cheap (partially due to their unpopularity), but you lose life and resists that need to be made up for on other gear (unless you get/find a staff with damage AND resists).

"

sidtherat wrote:

it is more of a 'whirling' problem

whirling blades is so good that it makes using non-daggers feel terrible. i have a pretty gg incinerate wand (all that youd like to have on it, sick combo) but im closer and closer to dropping it and equiping a subpar dagger just for whirls. it is insane that whirls have no drawback and yet flamedash has 3 charges..

it has nothing to do with staves albeit the pledge is pretty much BiS anyway

Well, WB can't go over cliffs, that's a drawback. They are only better if you really care about going really fast, if you don't they are worse than both LW and FD, in my opinion.

thanks for the replies. Kinda confirm what I thought

Except the sockets, the staff advantage is also in those nice global crit staff passives. But even with those, it cant compensate (when talking about high end gearing) for not having defenses from the shield, as well as WB stuff. also ES shields can roll crit and spell dmg, which can compete with +2 level. exalting +1 gems could probably change this, but yeah, I will most likely just craft cold leech on it so it stays decent but not real high end

Right, in sheer power no staff can compete with two 1h caster weapons, that leaves just sockets and we usually don't need more than one high link setup so staves fail at the drawing board level. One thing they're very good for are attack/cast hybrids but it's extremely hard to get a good hybrid staff because you virtually have no free mod sockets. Besides that, you'd also need to convince yourself to play a hybrid in the first place :/

I dropped this one in last league, too bad it isn't on a maraketh base.

@raics

well, hybrid builds, theres no point in CoC hybrid, so the only real ones in my opinion are CoMK. I made good one with those lightning facebreakers, but that was too easy..

CoMK hybrid would actually be pretty nice, because then you would solve the main problem of CoMK, single target (small groups) with second 5L/6L. too bad it is that hard to roll such staff, too bad spell dmg is a prefix as well as phys dmg

the staff I linked is by far the best staff Ive ever dropped. It is shame that something that hard too roll is not adequately valuable