I’ve been thinking a lot about a Conflagration staff that instead of spreading enemies around, sucks them in and then makes them explode (not necessarily throwing them around anymore).
Fireball would be the “explosion” and Conflagration would be the “implosion”.
Yeah, all good stuff. I think you sound experienced enough to make Axe work if your latency isn’t too bad. Also surprised anyone reads my posts when they’re longer than university philosophy essays.
Try these if you’re interested in Axes. I’ve thoroughly tested them:
You’ll find he can cleave out of the axe on crits with his massive power bonuses, and you’ll crit 25% of the time for light attacks. This is probably the easiest build to make Axes work with.
Slayer does work with 1H Axe and Throwing Axe, but it’s not an ideal combo since the Throwing Axe is good vs armor, and so is 1H Axe, instead a more ideal strategy would be 1H Axe with a crowd control melee weapon. You can take his 10% crit bonus with 10% crit from items for a whopping 35% crit chance on light attacks using the axe. It is potent and does require lots of dodging.
Still, on Slayer, the Dual Axes are hard to beat for 1H weapons, with rapid speed and a powerful push attack, I use those to great effect against both crowds and elites, and I’ve become decent enough with the throwing axes to reliably snipe specials and headshot armor. I don’t even need extra stamina with the dual axes because with the trophy hunter giving leap cooldown combined with crunch, I’m able to keep swinging fast enough to stay in my ult permanently during cata hordes. I can stun-lock a chaos warrior by throwing axe headshots + the trait for headshots consumes no ammo, also works against bosses, and gives trophy hunter stacks. A very powerful combo if you git gud with the throwing axes. Dual Axes, is also hugely underrated.
If you get decent with a one-handed Axe Ironbreaker with Drakefire Pistols is very doable and brutally powerful. You can get a burst of speed Vengence and stagger plague monks and black rat patrols with Drakefire bursts at high overcharge with Under Pressure. Throw in with Hunter Trait + Drengbarazi Oath + Enhanced Power Talents, and you get up to about 60% more Power, and I often take Crit Power too or a bunch of other item power buffs to clear out trash. The Drakefire will control crowds mixed with elites (of course watch out for chaos warriors), and the axe with stagger power will keep your THP decently high on IB because of Impenetrable and level 25 stamina talents giving you lots of pushes which make 1H weapons with decent stamina easy to get Stagger THP just by pushing. There’s all kinds of ways to play this build, but Ironbreaker with Fire Pistols is amazing. Axe+Shield is the more common way to play this. You can watch ChocoB do Cata with it with ease.
Now, if you master that, and you’re good with 1H axes, I recommend a challenge. Try Ranger Vet with Shotgun and 1H axe, again, take the Crit Power and Crit Chance on both ranged and melee and charm with some speed, use the reload for ability cooldown, can take the THP Ult and use the shotgun and careful positioning to clear crowds. I like to take the Ale talent for damage reduction and more attack speed, and the Ranger Vet can make 1H Axe work, though again, you will need to have mastered not having cleave in melee to make it work. I recommend using THP on Stagger and some from pushing and knocking black rats around.
Note: I haven’t figured out a great way to use the Axe on BH, even with Griffin Foot, I seem to get much more use out of semi-cleave weapons like Falchion, and the low stamina cost of the Rapier so so good, I just don’t think the Axe has a solid use on WHC or BH. I’ve made it work okay on both, but it’s just far less than ideal. Bardin has no Crowd Cleavers, instead having mainly hammers for Crowd Control. The Greataxe is a bit too slow for great crowd clearing unless using Slayer or maybe Ironbreaker, but it can work. Since Bardin has the Grudgeraker for Ranger and Drakefire weapons on IB, you can get solid use out of axes on him, but though Saltzpyre’s main 3 careers have no hammers, he has a lot of bladed weapons that do the job in melee and wipe out elites, Rapier, Billhook, Axe+Falchion, Falchion, they all work well enough against armor and don’t have the lack of cleave the Axe does.
Even then, as was said, One-Handed Axe is terrible overall. The axe’s complete lack of cleave makes it synergize so poorly with THP talents and makes it so difficult to use with dense hordes on high difficulties that most players can’t make it work well enough to be worth it. Even on shields, it’s not great, and in reality, the extra weight at the end and hook made them great at taking down shields (not that I expect realism in a Warhammer game, lol). Even a tiny bit of latency makes it so that not having cleave or CC is deadly in hordes. With elites mixed in, your strikes often hit the trash enemies instead of the armor, so they can’t even focus on what they’re good against. So these builds I shared, while fun, are not so great if you’re not excellent at avoiding getting hit or surrounded.
In regards to Conflagration, I think lingering flames works better with the Beam Staff since it’s DOT is one of the highest.
I tested in game a few days ago, the beam staff is the only staff having good DOT with lingering flames.
All other fire sources deal about 6 or less, holding the beam on target 3-5 sec deals roughly double of that.
Before the rebalances fireball staff was the best in this regard.
Yup, so Conflag is pretty crappy.
Thanks for all the builds.
Hadn’t tried this combo before. Mostly, I felt it was a showcase for how much better the Hammer is than the Axe. 
This is pretty much what I’d moved to.
My old, reliable Slayer build had Great Axe as the primary weapon. I moved away from it because of the extreme usefulness of the high-stagger charged attacks. Little guys were chopped in half, big guys were staggered, and Grimnir’s Focus was maintained almost effortlessly. I didn’t feel like a Slayer. Swinging the axe while moving through a horde felt like waltzing. Well, waltzing with occasional bouts of homicidal fury when encountering an armored foe.
Swing left back, swing forward right, swing left chopchopchopchopchop! … swing left back, swing forward right …
Trying it again after using the Dual Axes, the Great Axe build felt slow and clunky. Better … but dodging around with the Axes is fun.
My other go-to build for Slayer features the Cog Hammer. For the “bonk” sound.
My son is hilarious with throwing axes. Not all that many headshots, but for the distance at which he can still hit specials. (And, yes, I was happy when the Javelin got nerfed, because that wasn’t funny.)
I think V2 is mostly in a good spot, just about everything is workable on say Legend and I would extend this to vanilla Cata. Sure, there are some outliers, class wise(WP OE), and weapon wise(Torpedo launcher, MWpistol), but overall you can grab just about anything and be effective in those game modes. Like the look of Kruber with a big f*^k off halberd(who doesnt), equip a big f*&k off halberd, go have fun.
Switching over to Cata deeds and 200%+ twitch Cata and things change a lot. But I don’t think the game was ever meant to be balanced around these kind of modes. And it is what, 5-10% of the playerbase? In these modes there are just specific ‘better’ builds to accomplish what you are doing.
Take for instance the Volcanic Force, rechannel, Bolt staff battle wizard build. Works great on legend, even vanilla Cata, but that ability to snipe a couple of SV’s/elites hitting the field loses a lot of value when there are literally 20+ elites on screen and waves of hordes. Don’t get me wrong I have had some funny moments with it, like 12 Plague monks in a line on a crazy twitch Cata run, think we were at 250%. But setting everything on the screen on fire with Coruscation and FW with burnout/VQ and flame sword pwr attack 1 block cancel repeat. Add Lingering Flames or Famished Flames is simply the better way to go, not only is everything on the screen burning, it’s burning for a lot, or burning forever. And if you kill it, 3% to your elite with flames from the ashes. It even sets fellow players GPU’s on fire there is so much fire being rendered on screen.
Everything on your screen is dead by the time you fully charge your bolt on legend.
So there are more than a few outliers still, but they were created in the “balance pass” and I think they fixed more than they broke. Besides Warrior Priest and Engineer, I think Pyromancer is OP now, but players are still sleeping on her because they don’t understand how good she is in melee when you keep your overcharge high. She’s supposed to be a ranged career, but it’s easy to sit at 50-90% overcharge and have massive boost to Crit Chance + Burning Head to give a massive boost to THP with Boon of Shallya so that she can go into melee with 40-50% Crit Chance, +50% Crit Power and about 35% increased attack speed.
Try it out
Throw on Heat Sink to the staff, and crits refund the overcharge cost of the attacks, and near max overcharge when you get 40-50% Crit Chance, half your ranged attacks are crits and refund the cost of the attack. Incredibly fun for me since I like the idea of maxing out Crit Chance and normally Crit Power is garbage, but it works on Pyromancer.
It is true but is it to the point of being problematic? OE and WP are the two standouts atm, and I dont think it would take much shaving to bring them back into line. There are other performant classes, like Grail Knight, BW lingering flames, which you could argue for or against some tweaks down.
But like I said in my previous post I think most everything is viable up to and including vanilla Cata, and that is probably 90% of the player base.
Overall I think the balance is generally in a good spot.
Can you explain it why you think it is still crappy? IMO conflag is pretty sick right now. This is a serious question i am just curious what you are expecting from it.
It’s not the worst; Flamestorm gets that spot easy, but if you got a solid frontline, there’s time to charge the staff and significant damage.
The Fireball Staff does the same damage on a charged shot, also with great stagger, but you can spam it and use partially charged shots for less overcharge too. They both have similar damage, but the Fireball is much better overall for applying DOT more frequently and for dealing damage. The Beam Staff also does a way bigger DOT if you’re using lingering flames, and on Pyromancer, beam staff does incredible amounts of damage with high crit chance and can stagger everything besides chaos warriors at near max overcharge. You can spam the light charged attacks to get a little stagger on elites with Conflag, but it’s nothing impressive. The coruscation staff may not be able to snipe so well, but even post-nerf, it’s got better crowd damage. You look at the top builds by the best players, there’s nothing impressive for the Conflag. It’s viable, it’s kinda fun, but it’s performance is lacking.
If they just tweaked the DOT, Damage, charge time, or overcharge cost, any combination of the above given an appropriate buff, and this staff could be much better. It is fun, it’s got it’s own thing goin on, but even it’s advantages are not. I think maybe just give it some more damage and/or a better DOT that lasts longer when charged longer. Then it would definately have the advantage over fireball for the charged attacks, but not for the spam attacks.
I use Conflag on Pyromancer with Core’s builds for her once in a while. Again, not great, but viable. Just a backline crowd killer. It’s even better now if you keep overcharge at around 50% getting like 30-50% crit chance on every charged attack while having double the amount of overcharge bar to work with.
Battle Wizard’s Volcanic Force really is the main build I use with it, because you can overcome the slow charge time, and since it’s DOT is nothing impressive, you got outright damage.
Still, in any case, I could use the fireball the same way, and have better spamable attacks for CC. It’s really a way of compensating for the charge time because the staff has not major benefit with which to build on, or I could use the beam staff, and have better CC with a larger DOT with either Lingering Flames or Famished Flames, and both Fireball and Beam are better on both Pyro and Battle Wizard. On Unchained, I would rather have sniping from Bolt Staff or a staff to synergize with “killing burning enemies may make them explode” and/or burning enemies do less damage.
EDIT:
Because we both have invested a lot of time in the game, take a wild guess man. I wrote a few paragraphs giving you a breakdown, but it sounds like stuff that should be obvious to most any player. I kinda need to know why it’s a “serious question” to narrow things down a bit, because in this context, from one experienced player to another, that response sounds dismissive and implies skepticism about the validity of what I’m saying from the get go, and I really don’t know where to begin if you honestly don’t have a clue why I would think it’s crappy.
The dot damage of fully charged conflag compared to beamstaff shotgun attack is equal on the dummy both are 4,5. Coruscation staff dot damage is 1.5.
So the conflag staff has one of the best attacks to mass apply dot to an horde. In addition it is a good tool to crowd control. With the talent “rechannel” you also can charge it very quickly. I play it with lingering. And i get really good numbers and also the gameplay itself feels quite impressive for a dot build, the elites dont live too good. And so many good players i am playing with are using mainly conflag on BW.
That’s not the numbers I have. I get about 7 with the beam staff shotgun, and 4.5 with the Coruscation and Fireball, again Fireball requring less investment.
Also, Coruscation is apples and oranges here for obvious reasons. It’s better because of how it applies damage by being a static geyser on the ground.
you have tested it with the same properties and with deslecting the level 10 talent?
It’s been awhile, we know there’s nuance, again cause we’re comparing one value when they differ in so many areas, but overall, the performance isn’t there. Lingering Flames is applied faster and easier on the Beam Staff by hitting roughly 8 enemies or so with one quick attack that requires little overcharge.
Sounds like you’re testing it right now on the combat dummies. I don’t know how accurate those are, but I don’t know where to find better info on it. Curious, what is the DOT damage on every staff and how long does it last if you have no items or talents on?
Thats true just wanted to hear your opinion, but for me it is a nice balance between the fast and easy apply of beam staff and utility. And for me it seems both have roughly the same dot damage