Staff is the worst of both worlds.
Humongously slow animations with large animation lock making you super vulnerable as a cloth armor wearing mage, while the staff itself does little damage and focus generation is still low, since they changed it so most of your focus generation will come from parries.
But since you’re a light armor cloth user as a mage, you can’t afford to gamble on hard to land parries for focus because then you lose 70-80% of your life or outright die on top of being stunlocked by the hit you didn’t parry.
The Everfrost staff also has this horrendous attack chain where you actually kite backwards as you shoot the final ice projectiles with the combo, and all that does is put you two dodge rolls away from the enemy so you can’t punish the enemy now that you have staggered or frozen him.
Since enemies love to spam dodge dashbacks currently, the low reach and the fact your own weapon sequence forcefully displaces you backwards makes playing a staff using mage a nightmare.