Falling sky’s fully restore stamina on focus use affix is unique and interesting, but awkward since there is no particular reason to use stamina with the weapon. Even if you do want to regain focus, the attack chain is slow and inefficient for doing so. The staff does do full cold damage on melee attacks, but that’s not enough when the attacks are slow and the runes are cheap and have so much higher damage potential. The staff could be a lot more fun if it had 1-2 more affixes to lean harder into the gimmick.
I’d suggest adding two other affixes to the staff — melee attacks recover 10% of missing focus and melee attacks deal 0.33% more damage per focus missing (obviously placeholder numbers pending balance testing). This leans into a generator/spender build that makes the generator actually worth using.
I mentioned that in my post. The fact that all the runes are melee range and the staff deals elemental damage on top of the stamina restoration affix make me feel like it’s intended to be a hybrid type weapon. The thing is that its melee is slow and is competing with cheap runes that have much bigger multipliers on their damage. Why would I use the basic attacks when I can do a 250% damage melee attack for 25 focus, or a 1000% damage shotgun for 50?
But the issue is that if you stack focus, get focus regeneration and use a focus on damage dealt gem, you basically don’t need to use the basic attacks. Even if you do run out of focus, you’d be doing more damage per second by drinking focus potions and continuing to use the runes.
But that’s an issue with focus in general. Hopefully that will eventually get fixed so that players can’t just wipe everything out instantly by spamming the same runes over and over. Even if it does, weak generator attacks to build impactful spenders is not very satisfying. I think it works a lot better when both generators and spenders are good at different times or in different situations. Cold damage on the normal attack chain is a nice bonus, but I think it would be a lot more fun if it also came with good damage under the right conditions, so boss gameplay doesn’t come down to cycling between tickling the boss for 10 seconds before you actually get to damage it.