Bolt staff is insane

Fatshark Lounge
1

So, I see a lot of people not using the bolt staff and at first i thought that their was an actual reason for this as i didnt really use i too. But now that ive leveled up my pyromancer a bit, I see no other reason to not use the bolt staff, This thing is insane, I used to see the beam staff quite a bit but once again, the bolt staff does everything better in my opinion, Not only this, it also does better than the conflagration staff.

So, you might be wondering why you should use this weapon, well it’s because it does everything, Crowd control, Horde killer, Damage for armoured. It can one hit stormvermins at a full charge.

So, just if your wondering, once i started using this staff, i began to get like 600 kills a game, 10k average damage and around 2k boss damage.

The bolt staff is just insane but i should warn you, It seems to be at it’s best with a pyromancer and the critcal hit reduces Overcharge, Because this thing get’s crazy crits, whether your just firing with the left click which you most of the time will never need to overheat if hitting your shots and the right click attack just pierces to so much enemies that after one crit with it, You will be near to no charge. If you do however almost overheat, Just use your F when if you have the level 25 talent.

ALSO, I just did some testing, and i was only able to fire the beam staff without overheating for a atleast 40 seconds and it went to overheat, And when i was testing with the bolt staff, I was able to fire past 1 minute, still in the grey and the start of the middle bar and rarely got past that, This was a test dummy though so.

2

I’m not really sure what you were doing with beam, it does everything that you listed bolt staff as doing except better.

4 Likes
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I disagree, the bolt staff is a lot better. I mean a lot for me atleast, With the beam staff, if i somehow got cornered it was basically over.

4

And there we have it, different people have different taste and affinities towards different playstyles and staves. You might not be as good with beam as you are with bolt because you dont like how beam functions, or simply like the bolt more. It is proven that you will play better with the weapon you like the most.

There is no convincing people, so i dont really see the point of this thread. If anything, it would belong in lounge subforum.

1 Like
5

aye, agree on bolt staff has been shining lately more than the beam staff.

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You do realize you posted this in the feedback section instead of the lounge where it belongs right?

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Oh, Your right, I forgot all about that, I changed it

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I played a lot with bolt staff 1st, but i´m on the fireball staff now.

  • I´ll never use that stupid beam staff-

So the bolt staff is quite good, but not that good like beam/fireball staff. The Waveclear is good at all, but it can´t really do more. The DMG Output laggs so hard even on the loaded attack. I mean… it should be a sniper to kill specials etc, but the dmg/heat relationship just sucks. I do everything better with the fireball staff now. Just the big amount of hits work fine with the “crit-heat” passiv.

1 Like
9

Advantages of bolt:
Eliminates hordes in corridors or similar hyperstacking better than anything par fireball, due to it’s high cleave and just enough damage to one-shot fanatics (two-shotting marauders) and high rate of fire
Only staff to do decent damage to chaos warriors
High damage to unarmored targets, allowing it to take out maulers in 2 charged hits, generally good in chaos segments
Good range along with a flat trajectory make it good at sniping
Decent armor damage, not on the same level as beam, but good enough.

Advantages of beam:
Better armor damage
Can abuse on hit procs (heat sink, resourceful) better
Way better boss damage, the beam melts bosses
Shotgun to make space
Hitscan

Advantages of fireball:
Stagger on it’s lights
Annihilates hordes in a corridor with even more ease, while also dealing iwth more dispersed ones more easily
Can make space by firing on the ground infront of you
Better mobility while charging

Advantages of conflag:
Stagger, lots of it, on it’s lights as well as on the heavies, especially on the heavies
Wide AoE horde clear, rather than linear
Can make space by exploding infront of you

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10

BTW fireball rightclicks damages bosses way better then beam, with 20% monsters and barrage trait it’s boss killing power is similar to hagbane’s.

1 Like
11

I tested it and from what i can tell, the beam is definitely faster. Took 40s flat to take out a chaos spawn. Fireball with +5% monster and barrage took 50s, without them it takes 60+, making beam more than 50% faster, on top of being way more heat efficient.
Beam is able to take out over half of a spawns HP in one filling of heat, while the fireball managed more ~20%.

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I’d be curious to see results from fireball with Hunter, that’s a huge power boost

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IDK how you use fireball, but i just tested the time in wich I kill CS as Unchained with non-crit build and got opposite results, around 36 sec to kill him with FB (20chaos 20 monsters barrage) using uncharged rightclicks, and around 45 sec to kill with Beam (same 20 chaos and monsters, but w/o barrage) with barrage Beam kill speed will be the same as FB. Maybe I’m just using Beam staff in a wrong way, and my kill speed with it should be much higher. I can explore such different results if you was testing all staves with crit build pyro, but if you wasn’t IDK why they are so different.

1 Like
14

Hunter works quite well on FB in general, not uncommon to have 2 hunters up at once when spamming into mixed horde/elites.

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15

Are you sure you are just holding down left click for the beam staff? Because that’s slower than me using the blacksmiths one on pyro.
Using blacksmith i got:
44s on beam
65s on fireball
When and for how much are you venting on FB?

16

Generally I think you’d be better off going crit power than VS monster or anything else on FB. You’ll get a bit more consistent damage against bosses or whatever, but crits are fairly frequent, procs against anything and +40 crit power will mess things up quite neatly. Remember that Pyro has pretty insane crit chance at high overheat.

3 Likes
17

Yeah anything with a high innate crit rates it’s better to go all in on crit and crit power for the most part.

1 Like
18

I don’t think you can perma stagger an entire chaos patrol with bolt staff. You can with the conflag tho. Also my gripe with the bolt staff is that it ff’s really hard and you have to guide your shots and it has no zoom for the charged attack :,c

1 Like
19

Well, after recent tests looks like I was wrong, Beam is the best boss-killing staff in Sienna’s arsenal, with FB it tooks me around 25% more time to kill the same boss with same power setups on both staves. Sorry for my mistake.