Removing the crit procs on first tick severely hurt the left click utility of the staff and doesn’t really make the staff more balanced. It’s still really strong in the current state, but there’s no reason to hold the beam on a target or group of targets except to build up a higher burst damage. The fact that the beam is now weaker against hordes than it is against a single target makes no sense to me when most other ranged weapons benefit from hitting multiple targets with their traits. Beam is a waste of time and only builds heat which you don’t want while doing low dps and netting very few kills. It would be better to reduce tick rate/attack speed whatever and proportionally increase the damage of the beam, still allowing (but to a lesser extent) the utility of the beam.
The right click attack of the beam staff can roll through a horde in just a few attacks.
No staff should have a single attack that is the perfect answer to every situation.
So can flamestorm, and I assume you mean the shotgun blast. Flamestorm and Flamethrower more specialize in horde killing as it takes a lot less heat to do so. Like I said, the beam being changed this way doesn’t balance the weapon, it just makes one aspect of it useless. Beam staff does not nor ever had one attack that is the perfect answer to every situation, it’s versatile array of attacks makes it good in every situation, but it’s not the best for every situation.
So “Beam is a waste of time that only builds heat that you don’t want while doing low dps and netting very few kills” followed by “it’s versatile array of attacks make it good in every situation” has me flat out puzzled by what your complaint is.
I meant before it got “fixed.” This “fix” only removes one of the options she has for removing heat or building ult charge, but her other two attacks are still strong. I just think beam should have a reason to use, otherwise it doesn’t need to exist. The staff could get reworked into just having a burst shot and a blast shot and still be good, but that seems kinda silly when we have a workable situation. FS seems to over-do all the nerfs as of late. Instead of just adjusting the numbers (bar scrounger), they flat out remove things.
The beam can still stun lock a gutter runner or open a Shield SV.
The proc on 1st tick was completely broken with heat sink, resourceful sharpshooter and stumbling grouped enemies.
Is this a beta change discussion?
On the whole the beam staff is perfect in every situation, The only time it might be considered weak is against boss type enemies and even vs them it does considerable damage. The beam staff certainly does not needs cooldown reduction or similar effects of first tick to be useful.
On the other hand the FS staff is terrible vs armour and terrible vs boss type enemies, has a charge time on its alternative attack, and has an extremely limited range.
Fair point about shields. The proc on 1st tick was broken, but removing it and making it only proc on second tick does jack sh*t, that’s why I suggested to change the way the beam functions to balance it, not scrap it.
I never said the weapon was useless, I’m only saying the hold left click portion is useless. It can be used for getting an enemy to stagger or break a guard.
Still unsure this is a *beta conversation right? (I don’t play the beta)
I’m really not sure why you consider left click useless then, I’ll just continue to disagree with you. 
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it’s useless in terms of the procs, it has little uses right now. This is both in beta and live
You have shotgun blast for hordes, beam blast for specials/elites, and sustained beam for bosses. Every attack is useful in the right scenario. For that matter, wiggling is still useful occasionally if you really need to stagger a horde at long range (maybe someone is getting overwhelmed and you want to support them).
Yes. This comment I can agree with. Left click beam is not that useful for procing RSS and Heat Sink. It’s a function of how the crit window works and it only rerolls for crit every second. You’d be better off with a staff that hits faster than that. So bolt and maybe fireball. Flamestorm seems to be manipulating the target cap limit more like beam shotgun/rss so it doesn’t count.
Otherwise the staff performs fine without the wiggle mechanic.
Although, I do wonder what it would look like to keep proc on first tick of beam (permitting the wiggle and synergy with Heat Sink and RSS), but create an internal cooldown on how many procs can occur within a specific window (like 3 procs per second). Technically, this limitation would also applies to melee swings and flamestorm. Tinkering with that and adjusting the balance could theoretically still allow a crit synergy with traits on beam, but limit it to something slightly more reasonable.
Yeah, it does not proc well, just like how fireball didn’t proc crits on splash or whatever it’s issue was. All traits should work as expected on weapons and putting such a nuance on beam is just a bad way to balance a weapon imo.
Just checked the latest patch notes.
I’m glad this bug was fixed… even without left click proc’s this staff is still way strong, you can still get procs from the shotgun blast and you still do incrementing damage over time with left click, and I’m not going to miss the beam pyro ult spam, also its about time the staff encountered some kind of ranged heat issues…
I had dropped the pyro and the beam staff from game play as I felt they were cheese. I look forwards to adding the beam staff back into rotation.
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