TLDR; You should probably not use the staff for anything other than condi removal and only if you really want to because there are other ways to remove conditions like ventari tablet, Generosity/Purity sigils. or other players
First things first, I love the staff. When I started my rev I was using sword and axe and I thought it was so cool but then I got a staff and decided to try it out and it was love at first sight. I had already decided I wasn’t going for a full dmg kamikaze build and the supportish skills of the staff were just perfect for me. Sure #2 does suck, the weakness debuff is negligible, the daze even more so and the whole “if using a skill” just makes it even worse, #4 glitches more often than not and #5 requires practice to use it effectively but I was happy and ejoying using my staff… Then Herald happened. You get a shield with 2 healing skills, one is a 3s block and the other heals for substantially more than staff #4, has faster casting time, lower energy cost and same cooldown. So if you use Sword/Shield you get better heals than the staff with Shield #4, you get better escapes (Staff = #3: 2s block, #5: 1s evade/move forward. Sword/Shield = #3: 2s evade, #5: 3s block) and way more dps with Sword’s auto vulnerability + Devastation’s Targeted Destruction + Devastation’s Vicious Lacerations + Devastation’s Swift Termination, adding all of these you’d probably do more than double the staff’s damage because it’s not hard to get at least 10 stacks of vulnerability with devastation + sword so that’s 10% then stacked vicious laceration adds another 10% then 7% from targeted destruction and 20% from swift termination, do note that you can get swift termination and even targeted destruction bonus using the staff it’s just not as effective because you will only have 25% chance on hit to apply vulnerability so in the end sword can easily get 27% plus the 20% from swift termination while using the staff you can kinda maybe but probably not I mean really get 7% bonus plus 20% from swift termination. Btw did I mention that sword already has a higher base dps than the staff? So yeah…
I agree with most of this. I also really like staff and tried to use it early on (PvP, WvW), but it just wasn’t working for me. Not only does it do less damage than sword (as it should), but it’s also terrible at keeping up with mobile targets and the defenses are not great compared to X/sword or X/shield. So when I equip staff my survivability and damage both go down. I could see it functioning as a group CC weapon, but as you say, skill #2 really needs to be looked at for this. It’s too slow to be used for AoE daze, and the weakness duration is very short. I also think #5 needs a cooldown reduction.
I will point out, regarding the Devastation traits, that I put a sigil of frailty on my staff and that does help a lot with the damage. But it is still much less than sword (again, sword should do more damage, so this is not bad in principle).
I will also admit that, on paper, staff may be okay for a healing build, since when traited it can put out a lot of self-healing (about 2300 hp per autoattack chain at around 1200 healing power). But most targets in PvP/WvW will not sit around and let you autoattack them, and furthermore running around picking up all the orbs is not always possible.
