Staff needs Implicit Spell Damage

The problem is that GGG wants people to use these crazy hybrid builds when in actuality no one will. If this game ever becomes competitive in terms of PvP or actual difficult content, a hybrid build will be far too weak in comparison to a pure build.

No one will play a gimped class in PvP, and no one is going to want to party with someone who is gimping their group for a difficult boss or zone. Hybrid melee caster won't EVER be as strong as a pure melee or pure caster, period.

Now I get that some people like to play around with crazy builds, and that is fine. What I don't get is itemizing the game towards these unconventional builds that will be played by a smaaaaaalll percentage of the community and really be unwanted in any competitive group setting.

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Envor wrote:

One could make staff work as 2 items, and by that I mean you have stick and staff head, each having its own mods, with 6 sockets in stick and none in head, will be similar to bow+quiver. This can work for most 2h weapons too

Very good suggestion.

Although the two-handed axe, mace, and sword are fine as they are currently- the staff could use the "shaft" and "head" treatment. The additional "head" could add the implicit spell damage, and hold up to six additional modifiers. Would need to limit the affixes to caster only. With this addition the hybrid staff-user would be in good shape. Probably create some balance issues requiring further consideration though.

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Vaux wrote:

The problem is that GGG wants people to use these crazy hybrid builds when in actuality no one will. If this game ever becomes competitive in terms of PvP or actual difficult content, a hybrid build will be far too weak in comparison to a pure build.

No one will play a gimped class in PvP, and no one is going to want to party with someone who is gimping their group for a difficult boss or zone. Hybrid melee caster won't EVER be as strong as a pure melee or pure caster, period.

Now I get that some people like to play around with crazy builds, and that is fine. What I don't get is itemizing the game towards these unconventional builds that will be played by a smaaaaaalll percentage of the community and really be unwanted in any competitive group setting.

They have said it before, that there will be no group only content. They want a large range of class variations. So gameplay will not be balanced for only the munchkin crowd.

Currently there are only downsides to grouping for the least powerful player. Since they have trouble refilling flasks if they aren't allowed to kill anything.

I always group, and since our group is pretty balanced we rarely have issues with this anymore. Though we did in the beginning, when some of us were still learning the tree.

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Envor wrote:

One could make staff work as 2 items, and by that I mean you have stick and staff head, each having its own mods, with 6 sockets in stick and none in head, will be similar to bow+quiver. This can work for most 2h weapons too

I like this idea, though it does come with it's own set of problems. The biggest issue I have with it is that it's too similar to Guild Wars.

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Vaux wrote:

Now I get that some people like to play around with crazy builds, and that is fine. What I don't get is itemizing the game towards these unconventional builds that will be played by a smaaaaaalll percentage of the community and really be unwanted in any competitive group setting.

It's not like all items are designed for hybrids... Each hybrid item has similar counterparts, for each side of the hybrid, that is intended for a pure class. I don't see what the issue is at all. If you want your staff to be more like a mace, use a mace. If you want your staff to be more like 2 wands, use 2 wands.

Staves shouldn't have to be as good as a 2-hand mace, a mace and a shield, or 2 wands. They're different, not meant to be directly comparable to any of those setups.

The fact that GGG provides capabilities and options for hybrid builds is a good thing. It's not forced on anyone. If someone wants a pure class, he can play a pure class. If someone wants a hybrid, there are hybrids. If someone wants to play a hybrid as a pure class, he can do that as well.

PvP isn't the main focus of the game, either. Allowing off-the-wall, unconventional builds improves the game's appeal to many people. It does nothing to interfere with those who want to play pure, conventional classes.

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Vaux wrote:

The problem is that GGG wants people to use these crazy hybrid builds when in actuality no one will. If this game ever becomes competitive in terms of PvP or actual difficult content, a hybrid build will be far too weak in comparison to a pure build.

No one will play a gimped class in PvP, and no one is going to want to party with someone who is gimping their group for a difficult boss or zone. Hybrid melee caster won't EVER be as strong as a pure melee or pure caster, period.

Now I get that some people like to play around with crazy builds, and that is fine. What I don't get is itemizing the game towards these unconventional builds that will be played by a smaaaaaalll percentage of the community and really be unwanted in any competitive group setting.

Binary play is really terrible. It leads to people bitching about things like phys reflect and elem reflect, makes 99% of rare items trash ("it only got 4 attacking mods and 2 caster mods, what a piece of shit rare"), and burns the game out.

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Vaux wrote:

The problem is that GGG wants people to use these crazy hybrid builds when in actuality no one will. If this game ever becomes competitive in terms of PvP or actual difficult content, a hybrid build will be far too weak in comparison to a pure build.

No one will play a gimped class in PvP, and no one is going to want to party with someone who is gimping their group for a difficult boss or zone. Hybrid melee caster won't EVER be as strong as a pure melee or pure caster, period.

Now I get that some people like to play around with crazy builds, and that is fine. What I don't get is itemizing the game towards these unconventional builds that will be played by a smaaaaaalll percentage of the community and really be unwanted in any competitive group setting.

Hybrid melee/spell classes are usually best accomplished by having spells that buff melee or vice versa. The idea being to combine both specialties into a single attack that is on par or even better than the equivalent single specialized attack. It is NOT to use both specialties alternatively, IE to cast spells sometimes and to melee sometimes.

The basic example is the enchant weapon type spell. You cast a spell benefiting from +spell damage and other magic specific abilities which then buffs your weapon, effectively combining both spell and melee into a single hybrid attack.

The reverse is to have spellcasts that use weapon damage as the base damage, and then convert it into their special effects that are modified by spell damage. Consider if your Ice Spear spell was cast via your wand, therefor doing wand damage as it's base (instead of a number on the gem) then modified by spell damage.