Is this legendary staff any good? Compared to uncommon staff with 3 Mighty Sparks and 3 Sparks it deals in total only 3 damage more and requires one Major Token more.
Consistency of damage output is generally a good thing. It makes for more reliable play. Is it worth the tokens? That's up to you and your total build, can you spare the token? Also, do you have an even better staff you'd rather use? These things are not easy to decide in isolation. Deadly, Deadly Staff isn't often (if ever) mentioned as a very desirable item, though. Of course, if you like sometimes getting better draws and sometimes worse, having more excitement, the staff is not better.
I think the answer to your question depends on the rating you desire to play at as well as the comp you are running. I will say generally that running a staff of winter or some other freezing combination should be similar in damage (at least ignoring traits) and have the better result of keeping your opponent encumbered. If you are talking about upper echelon play right now, I'd have to say that the item in question isn't worth it; being cost prohibitive and insufficient in terms of control (which is the typical role of wizard in most 1-wiz comps). It's harder generally to buff magic damage, and to remain at a range where you can do damage without exposing yourself to the enemy wiz and or zerging nimble strike murder killers. Damage won't help a wiz survive (particularly when it can be mitigated or completely ignored) but cold can encumber without being 100% resisted by grounding or resistant hide, and the staves don't require 2 golds. If someone makes an effective build like this, they'd be the first that I personally knew about
I should have pointed out that I play SP only and I'm anticipating additional content for higher level parties. I asked the question because I have Deadly Deadly Staff available in Randimar. My elven wizard is focused on Sparks (both staffs and Skill) and with A. Items I go with damaging terrain (hot spots etc) and control cards (Winds of War, Imp. Telekinesis) with a bit of damage (tokenless Copper Wand).
You're probably the best person for this staff, but I'd say it's still not worth 2500gp; Deadly Spark just isn't all that deadly.
I'd say it depends on how much money you've got. I can see that potential future changes to the game might make me tempted to build a focused spark wizard with it, if I were already running encumbrance. At the moment, it's marginal, but I was certainly happy to find it compared to many other legendaries.
At it would rock. At , not so much. I'm a collector and hope to get one, but I doubt I'll ever use it.
I just picked one of these up from Randimar's. I doubt that I'd have done so before the recent balance changes unless I was rolling in gold, but now that Deadly Spark has been buffed to be linear, I can see it as being at least in the ballpark of being worth two major tokens for certain SP maps.
