So the consensus seems to be that wands are better than staves in almost every way, even when not investing in the wand/DW skills. Sounds to me like a slight range nerf on wands (10-12m max) and removing the cooldown on staff of magus would at least give staves some kind of niche as long-range finishers. I also like the idea of staves giving charges of defensive spells, wands giving offensive ones. Potentially, I think high level staves could even grant you low level skills for permanent usage.
Another thing that staves could really use is on-hit effects applying to staff of magus and not just physical hits of the staff. Otherwise, they ought to just take those modifiers off of staves because there's almost no reason to hit something with a staff. Or maybe make the chance for these effects fairly high so if you do hit something, it's a good chance it'll be crippled or what have you.
A couple staff-only combat maneuvers could be a cool way to give staves their place, though I'm not sure what skill trees they'd fit under. Maybe even man-at-arms could take it, for a sort of hybrid that uses staves to deal physical damage along with spells, though that would be a pretty niche focus.
Staves could give a minor chance to block, too, maybe 15% on the best staves.
Dunno if any of these changes will make it in the EE, but Larian might consider them in D:OS2.
