Bolt Staff Improvement

I just got a red bolt staff today and figured I’d give it a few tries. It’s fun to use, but isn’t good. Aiming well makes it decent, but here’s a small addition I think would make it worlds better: shield-piercing. Sienna currently has no way to deal with shields quickly so I think the Bolt Staff would be the perfect weapon to change that.

Mace charged knocks regular shields out of hands, timed lmb strikes with fireball staff break stormvermin block, follow with lmb headshots.

With bolt spam timed Uncharged-charged attacks and follow with a semi charged or two when block is broken. The lmb only infinitely staggers them, or at least to a degree where it’s unusable.

Not saying all this to disempower your topic but while they’re not optimal she does have ways to deal with them, thought I’d share a few use-cases, is all.

All this fluff aside, I wouldn’t object to a fully charged bolt piercing through heavy armour (edit) shields, it’d actually reward you for fully charging that way. One can argue that a lot of situations won’t give you the time to do it due to movement slow.

Also please add alternate-fire zoom to bolt staff’s rmb, it’s been on my wishlist for a long, long time.

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@johncbyrnes i would disagree that the bolt staff isn’t good. It’s the best vs super armor, good vs armor and generally good at range. It also absolutely deletes tightly packed hordes. The only staff better at it is the fireball, which sacrifices range and pen.

But it already does? The fully charged bolt penetrates super armor really well, actually. I believe it’s the 2nd best of all ranged weapons, only slightly short of the handgun.

I personally rarely ever use the 2nd charged bolt, fully charged just does so much more damage.

Also please add alternate-fire zoom to bolt staff’s rmb, it’s been on my wishlist for a long, long time.

Yes please, i need this.

I think bolt staff is a great weapon and hell of a fun to use. idk what you’re talking about.

And it’s one of the best weapons in the game to deal with shield-bearers and the most easy one - you just hold LMB till their block breaks and they die. Can it be any more simple?

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Ah, excuse me, I meant the heavy unbreakable shields, I have no clue what to otherwise call them so I’ll use that wording instead and fix my other statement.

As for general opinion I personally like it but I’ve often felt it struggled a bit in heat generation compared to say, beam and the super reliable stagger on fireball, what are your thoughts on that? Just curious!

The only way bolt is in any way better at hordes is at ranges past where beam/flame can reach with their aoe. which still leaves it lagging behind fireball and conflag. Also, bolt kills per second on hordes is not good comparatively. it definitely could use some kind of buff and i think making it a strong anti-armor could be a good way to go about buffing it. should also remove the move speed decrease on charged attack and/or make it hit-scan imo.

I’m totally agree, but IMO charged shot with this staff need some improvements, at least QoL. Let’s see, we can remove or lower movement slow while charging, also we can add zoom when fully charged, slightly remove charge speed, maybe add some improvement to proj speed when fully charged and add some better indication of “full charge” in general, not only a sound one (which is bugged btw, or was bugged in a previous patch, coz I didn’t played Sienna a lot and IDK if it has been fixed or not).

I don’t think FS should impliment all of these, to be honest, implimenting all of this ideas will may rise Bolt over the top, but a few of this changes could be realy nice improvement to this weapon.

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all it needs is zoom maybe

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THIS

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Beam i’d say is a bti of an odd-ball because it just allows you to very easily remove over-charge with heat sink or get your ult back up in seconds with resourceful, nothing can really compete with that level of heat mitigation.
Generally, i find the bolt works okay in the heat, the bolts are too slow-firing to realibly trigger crit traits, but generally you can spam lights for a bit.

The bolt staff has an insane cleave on the bolts, even uncharged. Uncharged also has enough damage to kill anything beneath marauders in one hit, will kill chaos marauders in 2. Comparatively, the beam/flame have less damage (especially beam), relying on their stagger to hold the horde off. As long as they are tightly enough packed for your bolts to penetrate a good chunk of them, especially when they are advancing in a line, the bolt just eats hordes for breakfast.

This is really the best change imo, pure QoL. Makes it less of a pain without having to making it any stronger.

(which is bugged btw, or was bugged in a previous patch, coz I didn’t played Sienna a lot and IDK if it has been fixed or not).

Before 1.1 it was still bugged, in the sense that speeding up or slowing down your charged speed didn’t actually do anything to the animation, so at high overcharge/on BW you’d have to guess when it was at max. No clue if it changed with the patch.