Suggestion for Coruscation Staff

Having played around with it a bit on Battle Wizard, the new staff does struggle to perform well when compared to Sienna’s other choices. It’s clearly trying to be something different, but the role it performs is outdone by other staffs.

Seeing as how the release version has such a short charge time to max size (that is feels negligible), it would possibly suit the staff to swap around the different spells. Having the flame geyster as the light attack wouldn’t change the way it is used due to the insignificant charge on it and its low utility, and give the flaming rocks more utility.

If the flaming rocks became the charged spell, the power/ stagger/ explosion effect would give the staff a much stronger role than it currently performs as.

This could be criticised as the beam staff already has a similar charged spell, but I feel the difference in fire DoT between the two makes up for part of this comparison. Furthermore, the rocks have higher stagger, which the beam makes up for in it’s light attack ‘punch’, and not the wide blast, which also has little difference in power when charged, at least from my experience, thus they still would not be as close in comparison and my suggestion can plausibly give the Coruscation staff a more respectable role.

After playing around with it more in Chaos Wastes (CW), I’ve now got mixed feelings on my previous thoughts. On one hand, it became a formidable weapon in its current state with a mixture of powerful boons. The stagger potential of the light attack is, at least with Unchained, impressive. On the other, any other staff would have been just as good with the same boons.

I barely put to use the flame geyser as Unchained as would be expected, but used it much more as Battle Wizard over the light attack. The geyser has the greatest synergy with Volcanic Force (50% more power at max spell charge) among all staffs, which makes me question whether I should run that or Famished Flames (In CW together, and with Lingering Flames the geyser is wonderful).

To conclude, the staff has potential in it’s current form just as much as I believe it could in my prior suggestion. It remains to be seen how others reflect on its power, but only analytics will be able to tell, and we need more time for that. I would like to try the staff more as it is, having put in more work familiarising myself with it, before I think about changes again.

So, I’ve been messing around with the Coruscation Staff on mostly champion difficulty, mostly either Chaos Wastes or quick play, and I have some thoughts on it.

First, the primary shotgun blast is fine. It’s heavy burst, has natural armor piercing (not super-armor) and does a ton of damage, just more single target/small horde, not real AoE. This is fine, it’s a nice sidegrade compared to the Fireball/Conflag’s primary while filling a similar role as those 2 with a twist of being much higher damage but much lower range. Certainly beats out the bolt and flamewave staff primaries by a lot.

However, the charge attack in my opinion is just awful. The problem comes down to one thing. It’s a horde clearing tool that takes too long to clear hordes while not being good against bosses. A DoT build massively helps, but it’s still bad even on DoT builds It takes 1 to 2 seconds to kill standard skavenslaves, and often times you can’t place the aoe circle out far enough for that to matter.

Basically, there is no situation in which I’d use the Coruscation staff on unchained or pyromancer because it completely removes half the weapon’s capabilities to a place of bland terribleness, meaning you kind of need a DoT build of Battle Wizard to make any real use out of it. The shotgun is nice, good even, but having one half the weapon be useful while the other half is garbage is a huge problem for a weapon to have arbitrarily for a character defined primarily by their strong ranged weapons. Any other weapon outcompetes it both with primary and secondary attacks short of the bolt staff, and the bolt staff probably needs some buffing as well because its primary attack is kinda meh in general these days.

I digress. The staff basically needs a handful of things: The geyser damage needs to be useful on non-Battle Wizard builds, and it needs to be better able to wall off paths more completely and more quickly, else it’s always just going to be a bit on the awful side as you need to be able to kill off entire horde waves from range without threatening melee damage for it to actually be worth using over any other staff that does the same thing, but better.

It’s already very strong in higher density content in my opinion, if you’re going to buff the geyser to be stronger on non-BW builds you’d just make it absolutely busted on her. Sienna needs larger rebalancing for staffs to be less reliant on BW.

I’m not sure I’d judge a weapon that’s definitely very reliant on higher density to get value based on how it performs in champ, either.

The thing is, Fireball Staff, Beam Staff, and Conflagration staff all:

  1. Don’t rely on high density to thrive.
  2. Thrive in high density anyways.
  3. Aren’t reliant on specialty DoT builds in order to actually be worthwhile.

All while functionally having the exact same utility as Coruscation Staff. Heavy horde clear, solid anti-special capability at longer range no less, good-fantastic anti-boss.

Oh, and the horde doesn’t risk hitting any of them because they can’t just run through the flames without instantly getting deleted.

The Coruscation staff is beaten by other staves at the very thing it is supposed to be good at because Coruscation’s area denial isn’t actually worth using because it doesn’t kill as fast or in as wide an area as other, better options. The one area that Coruscation beats out any other staff is in a patrol situation. Having a DoT build, either of them, and DoTing an entire incoming patrol is legitimately powerful. However, you’re giving up a lot of utility for the niche application that you will slaughter patrols, at the expense of being able to slaughter actual threats. And BW running a Kaboom build typically doesn’t struggle clearing anything but a dense CW patrol.

The Coruscation staff is like the Bolt Staff. Half of its useability just isn’t very good and it ends up being outcompeted by other more generalist staves.

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I’d agree it’s probably one of her weaker staffs, but I don’t agree on a lot of your individual points.

I’d agree the lack of immediacy to the alt fire is an argument against it. I disagree it’s bad overall though. I tried a Legend solo with bots on a Volcanic Force BW and tried to intentionally primarily use alt fire, and play around it to the best of my ability. I ended up killing ~400-500 enemies (the majority) with the dot alone. It doesn’t really matter that the horde reaches you before dying when they die 1-2 seconds later anyway. I imagine with a shield ally you could duo any horde very very comfortably and quickly. It certainly is map dependent and doesn’t play nearly as well with open spaces, but honestly I find that more interesting than problematic.

No I wouldn’t use the alt fire terribly often on Pyro, but that’s because she can be built to spam the primary fire much more than her other classes, and primary fire, as you pointed out, is pretty damn strong. I like that you can build to focus on different attacks with different builds, allows for different playstyles with the same weapon across careers, and that’s nice for diversity of builds.

I don’t even think it’s terrible on UC honestly. It has good utility for building heat quickly, and the primary fire is a very good get off me/short range special killing option. I could see a more melee focused UC player getting solid use out of it, and she could even use the fire debuffs enemy damage talent to synergise with the alt fire if she wanted to play a more supportive role.

Overall I like it, I dunno what I’d want added to it honestly.

Really, it needs its radius un-nerfed. If it can quickly get down area denial, then it can justify having crap damage because it constantly hits new incoming enemies instead of them (just) running around it. Sure people will run through and get hits, but that secures its niche as a fire-and-forget aoe damage.

I’d also seriously remove famished flames from BW and actually balance the staves and damage around not having it, since a big part of the problem balancing it is if a DoT is good on unchained/pyro, it’s god-tier on BW running a DoT build of any form. Which means you fix the problem by removing the cause of it.

Conflag doesn’t really thrive in high density at all (considering most high density stuff is with deathwish), especially compared to corus, where you can just put down the geysers where the horde is, vent a little bit and continue applying more dot with flamesword. You’re comparing it to staffs that are much, much greedier with charge to put out their damage, and ignoring that you can be in melee while it’s still hurting stuff.

Corus puts out pretty solid damage with basically zero investment. It’s not as strong on other classes, but that’s because BW is by far the strongest Sienna class, and if you balance staffs around pyro you’ll just have BW breaking the game again.

Bolt staff is super strong though?

I haven’t bolt staved in so long because the right click is fine, but the left click really doesn’t do anything fun. It’s a sniper rifle and little else.

It’s arguably the best tool in the game for killing elites and specials, the left click doesn’t really need to do anything special.

Being a slightly better weapon than a handgun while sacrificing the versatility of the weapon is why people tend to not run flamewaves and flamethrowers. Being “the best” at one thing at the expense of everything else on a class that has the primary theme of having versatile staves doesn’t make it a good selling point.

I also miss the days of having a crit vents heat build with the bolt staff when the primary let you ki blast hordes endlessly, when the bolt staff was actually moderately versatile.

sure, except it’s significantly better than the handgun, not really sacrificing anything, and people absolutely do run it in some of the hardest content available.

Ok, just did a few legend bot solos with Pyro and coruscation to see if it’s as strong as I thought it would be and it’s honestly even better than I thought. It’s very competent at killing specials in close to mid range, and coupled with deathly dissipation and heat sink you can spam it to an ungodly extent. Use Ult for temp health and vent frequently and you almost never need to put it away, and oh boy spamming primary fire just wipes everything in front of you. It’s almost like a shotgun but with good armour damage, which is kind of crazy.

Does Pyro spend the significant majority of her time with it using primary fire? Absolutely, but there are still plenty of situations where you want to set up geysers to clear as quickly as possible, especially since you can set them up and dip into melee, allowing you to clear very fast while still farming THP.

To me it’s really cool that the way you use the staff optimally changes depending on which career you’re using it with. And to be clear whoever you use it with you should absolutely be using both its moves, just which one you’ll favour will depend on your build. I really fail to see a problem with it. It performs really well on at least 2/3 classes, and is probably fine on the 3rd too.

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