Guild Wars 2

Was anyone able to figure out one? Is there some combination of gearing, Traits, and Legends that would result in a really capable DPS staff?

I played with staff and Zerker/Knight gear in WvW and PvP and found it to be decent, but generally not preferable to sword when it comes to damage. Autoattack and #’s 2 and 5 worked well for damage in PvP, especially combined with quickness from Impossible Odds. But it had poor capacity to stay on a target, even with Phase Traversal in Shiro stance. And staff#2 is slow and not very reliable against moving targets. I used it with sigil of frailty and could keep 3-6 stacks of vuln on the target at all times, to take advantage of the devastation traits.

That said, sword/axe maintains much higher vulnerability, has better burst damage against single targets, and can stay on a target much better. Also the faster attacks mean lots of extra damage through life leeching (if you’re using devastation traits).

I did not compare staff to sword/axe in pve, except checking out the new HoT zone, so I can’t say which is better in a PvE environment. So far, without any math, I would say that staff seems decent for multi-target damage, but sword may be better – and sword is almost certainly better for single-target damage.