But this staff is a new weapon, it couldn't be obtained before, as far as I remember.
Yup ... new since patch 4, certainly.

I was just clearing the rest of your statement.

I don't think they are using the EA to build a better game anymore
Or, their idea of making "better game" is simply not the same as ours.
I mean ...
- there are people who demand real time with pause ...
- there are people who demand erasing every rule that is not written in 5e DnD ...
- there are people who demand complete rewriting some questslines, bcs they dont feel "motivated enough" to complete them as they is now ...
Come on, that will never happen, it all would mean that Larian throw out everything they did until now and start over. -_-
You know what im trying to say right?
Maybe we were never here to "change the game" ... more like just "tune the game" ... but its still Larian game, and as such it will look, work and feels like Larian game. And i dont think it would be a bad thing. :-/
Most studios dont even bother to tune ... they simply create, give it to us, and sometimes dont even "officialy" let us mod things we dont like. :-/
Something definitely has to have happened if the devs suddenly went from 'we did some backend stuff so patches should be coming faster now'
And then we get 4 hotfixes ... every of them significantly smaller dowload than ever before.
Maybe they were talking about that. Its not all about big patches bringing new stuff. :-/