Strategy:Arena Master's Staff

The Arena Master's Staff will deal 10 fire damage to all enemies in your vision, at the expense of tiring you. Unless you find yourself swarmed by formers, this effect is rarely useful; it can't kill healthy Imps in one hit, it'll deal a pittance of damage to anything else, and if you're in a situation where you would want to use this, it would almost certainly do you better to activate run instead and get out of there into a more advantageous position. Also don't think you can use this to easily wipe out a Lost soul swarm such as in the City of Skulls; with their 75% fire resistance, Lost Souls will be barely damaged by this thing and you'll pretty much give them free attacks while tiring yourself out.

This staff is pretty much useless as an item and a waste of an inventory slot, but it has one special use that it is primarily meant for; opening the vaults in, well, The Vaults. The left and right vaults can be opened without the staff, but the center vault is completely inaccessible without this staff, unless you get lucky with a Phase device to teleport yourself into it. But besides relying on luck, doing that would put you right in the middle of a contained room full of nasty enemies, so clearing The Vaults this way is obviously not a sound strategy.

If you intend to clear The Vaults, the Arena Master's Staff is essentially a must. However you get the staff in The Chained Court after dlevel 5, while the stairs to The Vaults don't appear until all the way at dlevel 19, so you'll be lugging around this useless item for a looooooooonnnnnnnngggggg time. Is it worth it? There is a five times increased chance of Unique/Exotic weapons and armors spawning here, but otherwise the guaranteed loot is only some ammo, and basic weapons/armors you probably won't have any use for at this point. Plus even if a Unique and Exotics spawn, you're going to need a good amount of luck for it to be something actually useful for your build at this point of the game, a cool Unique Pistol spawning here is going to be worthless if you're running anything but a Pistol build. And if you're playing on HNTR difficulty, you're going to have Barons of Hell here who will most certainly steal the armor here from you while brutalising your armor, which will be especially troublesome if a good Unique/Exotic armor spawned. Indeed a lot of times, The Vaults isn't a worthwhile level itself to enter and beat, which makes it even more questionable to carry 1 less inventory slot through most of the game just for the chance at a very unreliable payoff in The Vaults.

In conclusion, if you're not going for a Conqueror run and don't care about losing 100% kills by entering The Vaults without the Arena Master's Staff, it would be worthwhile more often than not to just leave the staff behind in The Chained Court and not have it take up inventory space for 14 or more levels. Omega Tyrant (talk)

Reversing a Common Game-Ending Scenario

The Arena Master's Staff not only deals 10 fire damage to all enemies, it does this damage in a radius of 1, which is the whole 8 squares around each enemy, and this is an important distinction, because that means enemies standing directly next to each other also take every fiery explosion generated by one of their friends as well. When is this important? When you spawn into the level surrounded by enemies. This catastrophic stroke of bad luck can end an otherwise amazing run unless you expend all your resources to survive and get lucky, especially on higher difficulty, and worse yet, because of the sheer volume of enemies spawning on high difficulty, it becomes more likely as well. Running will often do you no good, since if you spawn in already surrounded, it almost always means there was nowhere left to put you, so there's just going to be more enemies.

You're probably going to have to use either a phase device and/or a medkit anyway, so you might as well soften up the herd before they all get a chance to attack you. Arena Master's Staff to the rescue!

At high enough levels, enemies start to spawn in big clumps, so they will always be standing next to a bunch of other enemies on turn 0. Frequently, the most dangerous of these enemies will spawn in the center of the clusters, completely surrounded by their allies on all sides, and these unfortunate souls will take a whopping 80 damage from the Arena Master's Staff, which is more than double the maximum damage of a rocket and more than even the BFG 9000 can dish out with a max damage roll. Most enemies in the game will die even without the full 80 damage. Even Arch-viles, Mancubi, and Revenants can die to this attack, and most weaker enemies will not only die but have their corpse gibbed. Any survivors would not survive a blast from the BFG or a rocket, and some may even die to a shotgun blast. If you are a Technician, using the staff doesn't even cost you any time, and you can easily annihilate the whole horde before they even wake up.

The one time I remembered I could do this, I turned a Game Over into a free level-up. The Arena Master's Staff is no joke and is certainly not useless! Definitely still not a good idea to use it on City of Skulls, though. Ya Girl Juniper (talk) 06:13, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

So when doing an AoMR run on UV with Sharpshooter, on floor 7 I got spawned in a big open room right next to a Revenant, a big group of Pinkies to the north, and other groups of Formers and Imps around in my vision. Seeing this run as likely dead as I did not have Sharpshooter yet, I tried out the Staff to see if my former assessment of it was wrong... and it did shit all other than killing the Formers, just like I said it does. Not even a single Pinky in the Pinky group was killed by it, so I don't get where this claim that it'll kill Mancubi and Archviles bunched up in a group comes from. Something important to note with explosive damage is that explosions do not occur simultaneously, so when the first enemy in calculation gets hit, it'll knockback the enemies around it before the game performs the explosion for the next enemy, where the enemies in the group are no longer in range of their buddies to get hit by their explosions, and so on. You'll never get close to this theoretical 80 damage in a group of nine enemies as a result, when no normal enemies are immune to knockback, unless it's some very niche scenario where that enemy group spawned completely stuffed in a room during a hard walls event that kept them from being knockbacked and you were somehow able to see them all still (not to mention that an enemy's armor will apply to each individual explosion, so chain explosions that each deal only 10 damage will still end up doing substantially less cumulatively). I ended up surviving this scenario still, but thanks to good old running after popping a medkit to get my tactics back, where I was able to run to an area to establish a safe zone and take on some Hell Nobles in the way that I would have surely died to if not for the aid of running allowing me to avoid getting hit by them too much when in an open area with no cover. The much better strategy would have been immediately running off to begin with, rather than using the staff and then having to burn another medkit just to get my tactics back.

With that said, I still stand by my stance that the Staff is a waste of inventory other than being necessary to clear The Vaults without luck, and so if you don't plan on clearing The Vaults, then this should be one of your first items to drop once your inventory starts getting tight. The only other instance I see the Staff worth holding onto for outside The Vaults is if you're playing Nightmare or Angel of Darkness, where the Staff could then be possibly utilized to gib a corpse you really don't want to respawn in a pinch, especially during the challenges that lock your weapons and thus you are unable to use a rocket launcher to do so. Omega Tyrant (talk) 05:34, 16 July 2024 (UTC)