All the other staves benefit from more tightly clustered enemies, but the surge staff’s target limit is very noticeable on high intensity.
At the same time, it also becomes more useful at higher difficulties, because the enemy types that you want to stun, also become more common and more dangerous.
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Its primary issue is that it has a very functionless left click, which is generally only good at getting rid of a pesky Dreg or two.
I saw a suggestion where it should be made into a hitscan lightning bolt that briefly stuns individual enemies, which I thought was a really cool idea. It sort of works on the same level of the Purgatus, as its left click is primarily meant to quickly stagger small groups of enemies approaching you.
But the Surge Staff is mostly ideal in situations where you want to lock down Elites or Specialists so your team has more breathing room to deal with multiple threats at a time. It would be nice if it had some sort of priority or a magnetization toward armored enemies so it has very consistent uptime in horde situations.
My suggestion then is to bring a good complimentary weapon that can kill and cleave, such as the Illisi Force Sword or a Combat Axe. The Surge Staff is ultimately a team support weapon for crowd control with an optionally very rare capability of dealing with armored threats efficiently.
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Yeah. All staves need a left-click that actually compliment their charge attack or give them some versatility. After a while they do start feeling one-dimensional and rather boring to use.
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It has been stated by the Devs they want builds to deliberately have a weakness so that you cannot have ‘do it all’ builds. Then again Illisi exists…
And the power sword… And the bolter…
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I love the surge especially on higher levels, but I think what it’s key issue is that it’s HUGELY out damaged by purgatus builds.
You’d think it’d be king of stagger. Which it is for stun-locks, but from what I see on the scoreboard mod (YMMV) the purgatus can ALSO (seemingly) apply a stagger status to a lot of enemies, which of course several other roles can use in their feats & weapon blessings. And that it does that to more targets than the surge staff appears unbalanced.
The comments about the primary being a bit “meh” are probably justified. It’s a copy-pasta from the voidstrike mechanic imo. I don’t have a thought through proposal, but I think it’s primary fire is where a buff/change should be made to be best balanced. May be a lift-slam for high damage on all but unyielding types?
Ultimately… let’s be honest, this is the Emperor character from Star Wars, so we all want some kind of megalomaniac power from the staff. I’m just not sure how to balance it. It’s already good-ish, just the purgatus is better 
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I think just changing the secondary channel to prioritize elites and specials would put the surge in a really good spot. The issue isn’t that it’s damage doesn’t scale well into high intensity, it is that it’s stun function doesn’t. When there is a horde surrounding the charging mutie or burster it is impossible to actually hit and stun them, and so it is unable to even do the thing you’ve brought it along to do. That isn’t really a problem on lower difficulties, but on high intensity it really falls down in a noticeable way.
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You are actually comparing
the “i can stun all specials and elites” support-staff
to the “i burn down hordes” damage-staff…
Good one.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the damage staff setup deals more damage than the support staff setup.
The surge staff IS the king of stagger.
The purgatus constantly applies a bunch of weak staggers to a ton of small trash mobs, when ever it is burning down a horde, so of course the “number of staggers applied” is gonna be high.
Higher than for the surge staff, which has limited targets and should not be spammed at hordes, but can heavily stun all enemies in the game (except bosses), turning them into training dummies.
I would not mind if the surge staff had target prioritization for specials/elites and got access to the Blazing Spirit blessing to boost its damage against most targets, but your arguments and comparisons are just ridiculous.
A little civility hurts no one BTW.
I love the surge staff. I think you’ve misread what I was saying. So tldr:
Yes or no. Do you think the purgatus should apply a stagger, however small, on top of its damage, dot, and target radius capability?
Yes of course.
All attacks should have at least a small stagger effect (and afaik they do).
But if you just look at the scoreboard, you will see a number based on how many staggers have been applied. The number does not have much to do with the strength of the stagger, or how big the target was.
Even if the surge staff knocked enemies across the room, a weapon that hits many targets and often, will still have a bigger stagger number on the scoreboard as long as it makes the enemies flinch a little when it hits them.
So; not arsed about big numbers on a scoreboard. I’m referring to the scoreboard only because I don’t think its obvious otherwise that mobs are being staggered too.
But what I think makes the purgatus a more useful staff - even though I persist with surge as my primary as I like that role - is that not only can you deal a lot of damage, which is always useful, but you can also apply widespread debuffs and +synergy buffs for any player with a bonus against staggered opponents. It feels like it gets a lot relative to other staffs.
I’m fully aware of the benefits of locking down 6 crushers. That’s why I use it. But what I’m saying is that that utility is probably outshone by the all round usefulness of the purgatus. Judging by popularity.
So on the op’s point. I’m agreeing that imo at t5 and above the surge has some issues. I’ve not a perfect solution to offer. It’s either extra damage. Or maybe it’s a right click for specials+ priority, left click for proximity priority.
But to be clear, I’m not comparing damage capability as my argument.
Ok then.
I reacted the way i did, because in your previous post, it seemed like you were making that argument.
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I find this absolutely hilarious.
This means the devs actually want you, sometimes at least, to get in a game where the three other people in your squad physically cannot kill a Crusher, because of weapon choice.
Evidence? Happened to me not more than a day or two ago.
No joke, my Damnation success rate with pubs is like 3 times higher with those two weapons on Vet. They guarantee that you fill in any gaps that the squad needs filling.
Are you sure that it was this what they said?
That every build is supposed to have a weakness, not just each individual weapon?
Because this would mean that any combination of a melee and ranged weapon on any class, would have to share at least one weakness.
And in order to achieve that, all weapons available to any class must share at least one weakness.
The only thing I don’t like about the surge staff is that shop inventories are always full of stupid guns and axes instead of surge staffs.
That’s fair. Note to self to be more clear.
The surge staff has very impressive critical multipliers, which also gives it a perfectly capable primary attack. Stick a T4 warp nexus and +5% crit chance on it, and your dps with primary attacks will increase dramatically. Of course you’ll have to get comfortable playing at higher levels of peril to make this happen, but that’s a skill issue.
Surge staff needs one thing, and one thing only, and that’s target prioritization. If you’re going to hard cap the number of targets it can hit, then at least make sure it hits the mauler and not the poxwalker next to it. Otherwise it’s fine.
The problem there is how it could make surge staff janky if it’s prioritizing mid distance elites over the close range trash that is meleeing you…
So basically all the issues with the staff could be solved with these two changes:
- add special and elite target prioritization to the chain lightning attack
(at least for the first target) - add Blazing Spirit to the blessing pool of the staff