Well, I wanted to be an ass and be vague or say something like "Ohohohoho, there is a secret" but let's be real there are legitimate use cases for staves and, furthermore, in the current build you're kind of limited to gear RNG to begin with so you do want to spread out your itemization.
You could always do something silly like boulder => phoenix dive => whirlwind => crippling blow or something silly along those lines and you would be doing AoE + Physical Damage at a non-trivial rate.
