I’m hoping they address this issue. This patch ( aka DLC) was undertaking and I’m hoping they have enough staying power (money) to see it through to the end. I wanted to say finished state, however with a game this big it's hard to balance. I will continue to support and be hopeful.

Yeah i really hope they work on fixing up the problems with the game. It has a lot of potental.

The big oof is on staves, they made the spells scale off of the physical damage of the weapon but staves have the worst base damage of all the 2H weapons.
This makes the normal attack hits like a wet noodle and the spell scaling is still too low for the end game.

I came across a 2H legendary mace with twice the damage of my staff with 1 dmg modifier while my staff has two for the same level. It's quite depressing to see.

It's almost like they forgot that casting, attack speed, staves, and 2h melee are all different factors that change gameplay based on what skills you're using and they just combined them all into one category.

Slowing cast speed AND attack speed hurts melee 2h weapons in both realms. Not only are you using the same skills that non-2h weapons use, you're also using them 25% slower on top of executing attacks 25% slower (which was already built-in to 2h weapons pre-patch).

Without a sizeable investment in attack speed, melee skills with 2hs feel like wading through maple syrup. Some (like Bladestorm) are almost impossible to execute properly, movement skills (like Wings of Ishmir) look REALLY off and fail to get you where you need to be in a timely fashion, and you can forget about dodging in time due to excess swing/cast lockout.

If you wanted to bring the damage of 2hs down, that's done by actually lowering the damage (which was also done...to a level that is abhorrently close to 1h weapons).

These side-effects of lowering attack speed seem to never get taken into consideration (by any game developer):
1. Less survivability; taking more time locked in animation prior to dodging/moving
2. Broken/Unusable skills that are built around old attack/cast speed values
3. Animations looking goofy or unintentionally slow leaving things feeling unpolished

Also, where are the extra gem sockets for losing an item? I never see any balance around that either. GW2 took forever to realize that 2hw lose an item slot for a sigil. Why is math so hard for programmers?

Mage staff damage is a shame, .