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)