While there are still several weapons in the game which simply overperform I want to solely focus on the Coruscation Staff and give some suggestion outside of the more-than-justified community complaing about Javelins.
So after a long while most of the community has finally caught up and noticing that Coruscation Staff is unbalanced and a devastating destroyer of worlds. What does this mean? Right, horribly increased pickrate in public Legend and Cataclysm games (similar to how 90 % of all RV and OE have a combination of Coghammer/Dual Hammer and MWP/Trollhammer Torpedo (only OE)). Most of the suggestion will focus on the RMB attack as it becomes more problematic on higher difficulties but the LMB is not without issues.
The Fire Geysir - Coruscation Staff RMB Attack
For moderately low cost Sienna can cast a fire geysir damaging every enemy standing it in or running through it for a duration of 10 seconds. Keeping enemies in the geysir - which isn’t really that difficult - deals enough damage to kill most or all horde enemies on Cataclysm as well as severely damage elites and specials and monsters. In addition to that, due to the moderately low cost of the geysir, it can be spammed multiple times all around you and burn down everything while you can switch back to your melee weapon and blocking. And yes, the fire geysir has unlimited cleave. This means the higher the difficulty the more broken that thing is. For the official realm this means that the RMB is overpowered for Cataclysm and Legend difficulty. There are several ways how this could be adjusted and I will name a few which came into my mind. However, I want to emphasize that heavily prefer the first suggestions as it is the most elegant of the lot:
- All damage of the fire geysir is divided by the number of currently active fire geysirs. What does this mean? As long as you only place one geysir it does the equal damage as right now. If you place a second, each geysir does only half damage. If you place a third one, each does only a third of the maximal damage. Why is this solution the most elegant? Because it discourages spam. If you place your geysir well-timed and well-placed you still do excellent damage. If you just spam though, you see a lot of mildly burning fire. It gives the weapon also slightly more tactical depth. Do you want to concentrate on one side and burn down the horde there, or do you want to create geysirs on multiple fronts “just” weakening the enemies for your team mates to finish them. Also the 10 s duration is no longer a pure boon where you spam and go into defense mode. It is now detrimental if you placed it badly. It punishes spam and bad decision making just like a powerful weapon should do. Also, this change will hardly affect the feel-powerful-casual difficulties of Champion and below as enemies have roughly half the health of Cataclysm and it still does excellent damage even on multiple geysirs. On the higher challenge difficulties of Legend and Cataclysm it asks better decision making from its user to show its full power.
- This is the option I suggested earlier but which seems dated to me now. Increase the duration by 2 seconds, decrease damage by 25 % so that damage per Geysir roughly stays the same. This would help at least a bit on Cataclysm but has close to no effect on any other difficulty. Also, the RMB would still be spammable without end. You could try to limit the number of maximal active fire geysirs to two or three but it would feel more artificial.
- Fire geysirs are only active as long as the Coruscation Staff is hold in hand. Interesting on paper but a nightmare in reality. Would ask for a very different playstyle of backsitting and casting which sounds nice but very few people may be able to do without dying. Also feels counter-intuitive that the geysirs abruptly vanish when switching weapons.
- Decrease the duration to five seconds or less. Due to the moderately low cost of the geysir this solution wouldn’t really work well. It would still be geysir spam, just with shorter bursts. While it would tackle the issue of cast and block, it would not tackle the issue of hell inferno burning everything to the ground. One of the badder solutions.
- Increase heat cost to double or triple. Would work and discourage spam as you just have very few casts. But it is a boring solution and not close to the elegance of non-linear balance suggestions like the one made in point 1.
- I thought I had more ideas but can’t remember anything right now. Maybe I’ll edit later.
The Fire Shotgun - Coruscation Staff LMB Attack
Press LMB to bodyshot one hit kill every unarmored enemy (bar monster) in the game up to Cataclysm. Plague Monks? LMB. Berserker? LMB. Mauler? LMB. Oh neat, killed the gas rat in the mix to. And you can do this multiple times is succession like 6-8 times or more. No, that the shotgun deals only moderately against armored enemies does not justify bodyshotting these elites in such a quick succession and no weapon should be able to deal out shotgun damage this frequently (looking at you Griffon Foot). If something kills a Plague Monk on Cataclysm with one shot, you shouldn’t be able to do this more than four times in a row without reloading or venting. Period. Actually, I would say 2-3 is the good limit but I doubt I get this through. So I will compromise on four.
So summarized: Increase the heat cost for the LMB attack by 50 - 100 % to make it a balanced shotgun type weapon.