Staves and Accuracy bonuses

[elboyo]

I have been having an exceptionally good time with the revamped Sun Paladin on Nightmare (Roguelike).

Although I was not all that blown away by standard sword and board or two-handed weapon builds, I really latched onto the idea of using a staff.

The 2.5% proc damage/accuracy bonus from staves applies to damage from Weapon of Light, Weapon of Wrath, and "on hit" egos on my equipment and gives me some really amazing damage. Especially Weapon of Wrath which often gives me 500+ or more in bonus fire damage for being at 900/1100 HP.

My question is this -- What else can benefit from the staff's accuracy modifier?

Does the Doombringer's fire aoe proc benefit from it? If not, does the Detonating Charge skill benefit?

How about a staff-based Wyrmic? With the upcoming 1.3 changes, any procs that affect a radius around the target would be great with all of their aoe weapon skills.

The Mindslayer's Augmented Striking tree and Projection tree all seem like they would benefit from this, do they? Also, would the auto-attacking telekinetic weapon gain the same bonuses?

It's looking like the Sun Paladin with a staff may be my first NM Roguelike victory and I would like to be able to try to replicate this strategy with another class.

[0player]

Anything that triggers on melee attack (as opposed to using the modified melee attack itself), is an instant damage (as opposed to being a projctile) will do it.
Staffbringer is hella fun.

[elboyo]

Does the Incinerating Blow burn damage or the burn aoe from Detonating Charge work on the Staffbringer?

That was not really made clear. I tried it briefly, but I saw no change in damage dealt on my Incinerating blows.

[0player]

Remember that you need to hit something which has less Defense than your Accuracy to notice the difference.

[elboyo]

I am aware of this. I was testing it on 1 defense mobs versus 28 accuracy. Mobs also had 0% fire resist.

Does the bonus not apply to the AoE? If it only works on the main target, it seems like it wouldn't be viable at NM or beyond. Is it maybe the fact that the burn is a DoT that ruins it?

[0player]

Ah yes, it'd only be applied to the first tick, I believe.

[elboyo]

I feel like that would make it difficult to make good use of the staff modifiers.

I guess that Obliterating Smash with a staff that has "no hit" radius damage egos could do some work.

I think that a Staff Mindslayer will be my next attempt after the Sun Paladin wins or dies.

If all of the Augmented Striking and Aura talents work with the the proc bonus, I'm thinking of using a TK Staff with any short staff + mindstar/shield/dagger depending on what I get a good roll on.


Another question, can staves roll the ego that gives random elemental explosions on hit?

[HousePet]

Augmented Striking and Projection bonuses should benefit, including the TK weapon.

I've only noticed damage bursts on rare and randart staves.

[elboyo]

The bonus damage from auras seems to work, but the augmented striking bonus damages did not seem to increase.


Also, question about Detonating Charge. Is it supposed to apply a burn in the explosion radius? It is not doing the stated damage. Either the tooltip should tell us that it applies the fire damage over X turns or the skill should have a much higher burst damage.

[mikekchar]

First of all thank you so much for this thread!!! I've always wanted to make staves work for melee and I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Once I saw this post, I searched the forum history and noticed 2 builds that people were talking about: reavers with dual weild short staves and arcane blades with staff and shield. I couldn't really see how the reaver would work off the top of my head, so I went with the arcane blade. One thing to keep in mind is that many shields *also* give you the 2.5% damage bonus on proc. So with staff and shield you get 5% (or possibly slightly higher if they are cumulative)! I decided to go with only lightning since testing fire, there was very little damage (it is a fireball that travels at 2000% speed so possibly it does not have the proc bonus added to it). Earthen missles are apparently in the same boat. It's admittedly limiting to avoid the fire and stone trees, but the lightning damage is insane! At level 11 every third attack is for 4-500 damage. Once I get arcane destruction, and maybe top off with firey/shock hands, I think I can easily sustain a 2-300 damage per turn average below level 20 -- and that's just bump damage. With the shield offense tree there are plenty of opportunities to spike that. Of course the shield cuts the chance of a proc by 1/4th, but I think the extra hits it does and the ability to deal physical damage still puts you pretty high in the win column -- not to mention that you are more than doubling your proc damage when it happens.

There are still many things I don't understand about this game, so very possibly this is not a viable build, but in the early game it is ridiculously overpowered and fun

[Effigy]

Oh, it's a very viable build. Staff/shield is the best overall in my opinion, with dual wield being in second place. Most people seem to favor Stone over Air for Arcane Blade, but Lightning is certainly viable and may even be optimal for staff builds if you can get enough resist penetration from gear. You probably want to keep an Elemental Fury ring handy for lightning immune mobs.

[grayswandir]

(it is a fireball that travels at 2000% speed so possibly it does not have the proc bonus added to it).

Note that once it changes to the beam attack (level 5 I think?), it will no longer have this problem.

[malboro_urchin]

Staff/shield is the best overall in my opinion, with dual wield being in second place. Most people seem to favor Stone over Air for Arcane Blade, but Lightning is certainly viable and may even be optimal for staff builds if you can get enough resist penetration from gear. You probably want to keep an Elemental Fury ring handy for lightning immune mobs.

Is this because Lightning is always a beam (benefiting from staves' accuracy bonus regardless of talent level) and because Lightning does all its damage in one shot, unlike Flame?

Also, unless you're playing an Ogre, any shield/staff build depends on finding a good shortstaff, right? Anyone tried an Ogre Arcane Blade with a 2h staff in one hand and shield in the off-hand?

[Effigy]

Yes, doing all damage up-front makes Lightning better than Flame, and getting damage from staff's accuracy bonus potentially makes it better than Earthen Missiles. Before I learned about the "quirk" of Earthen Missiles not getting the proc bonus, I would have said it was the best, period. In light of that quirk, Lightning may be better under some circumstances. Lightning is definitely better for the first half of the game regardless, because the advantage of Spell/Stone mainly comes into play against mobs with high physical resist. One other benefit of Earthen Missiles is that it counts as three spells, so it will trigger on-spell-hit/crit effects up to three times per proc.

Short staves are harder to find that most weapons, but you should typically be able to find several during a playthrough. Oftentimes you can find them for sale in Elvala or Angolwen. You can use normal 1-handed weapons until you find a short staff.

[mikekchar]

I did wonder about the fire beam. That sounds useful as you can get flame shock then. So far I have had very little difficulty even though I'm mostly goofing around. The fight with the master took 5 hits total (and didn't end with me dying!!!) The one thing I totally missed until I was about 20th level is the combat techniques tree. I picked up a rand art pick axe that gave me perfect strike and it was... um... enlightening . One thing that surprised me (and may be a bug) is that I still seem to get the proc bonus when disarmed. What's even better is that it seems to remove the shield penalty for chance to proc. Since I don't do any physical damange anyway (maybe 20 damage per hit?), this gives me a fairly huge boost when disarmed (basically 25%). The only downside is the removal of multi-hit shield talents.