I have nearly 5,000 hours in the game almost all on Firestaff, have been in 250+ wars, and probably have thousands of OPR matches played at this point, so I consider myself educated enough on the weapon to discuss its flaws.
What makes a weapon good in new world is one of two things, it has the ability to burst or kill players, or it has the ability to setup kills. If you look at the most popular weapons they have abilities that are able to be combo’d together to one shot players or make them easy to kill with someone else helping. Think Hammer Wrecking ball → Shockwave → Heavy Attack, GA Gravity Well → Maelstrom, Blunderbuss Grenades → Shot-> ASB, the old IG with Shower → Spike, Bow Heavy Attack → Penshot. These are all hard hitting combos that can one shot players when used in the right scenario, there are also some combos that are good cross weapon like the old Scream → Spike or the current Gravity Well → Shockwave. The other example of popular weapons is ones that can setup kills for weapons that can combo, think the VG with Scream, Rend, and oblivion, or the IG with Shower and Ice Storm. Some S tier weapons like the Greataxe have the ability to setup kills for your team and to burst players down in the same build.
The problem with Firestaff is it doesn’t have either of these attributes which makes a weapon popular/good and it’s raw single target damage has been nerfed to a point that it does less meaningful damage than most other weapons. All it’s abilities are skill shots that have no way of comboing off each other. To do meaningful burst damage to someone with the FS you have to hit multiple skill shots in a row while they are usually dodging. You actually can’t kill a good player who is eating, potting, LOSing, and dodging if you try to only kill them with a Firestaff, it’s literally impossible, even if they aren’t fighting back.
They could fix this problem if Firestaff damage was boosted a bit and they gave it the ability to combo abilities. For example if Pillar of fire knocked players down or stunned them which could be used for a fireball combo. There is just really no way to punish players who make a mistake with a Firestaff combo of abilities outside of getting them to stam out and standing there using flamethrower.
Magic weapons have largely been relegated to support roles due to players complaining when magic weapons can burst them down. You don’t see similar complaints for weapons like the BB even though it can dish out 7K+ damage to fully geared enemies all in a combo that can be used in under .25 seconds and has an 8 second cooldown. I believe this is because Firestaff has a lot of overall stat pad damage which makes it appear high on the scoreboard, which makes it more likely less skilled players will think it’s broken and complain about it. This is because these players judge what weapons are strong off the meaningless score boards.
One of the other biggest problems with the Firestaff is AGS for some unknown reason made all the blunderbuss abilities do fire damage instead of thrust. The blunderbuss may be the best burst weapon in the game, so many players now run Rubies to resist the blunderbuss which hurt the Firestaff even more.
Another problem with the Firestaff is it’s range and critical damage makes it good for killing noob players without resilient. If you don’t have resilient or proper gear you will get absolutely melted by a Firestaff and receive flamethrower ticks of around 1.2K every half second. These noob players then take to the forums to cry about things like flamethrower and Firestaff and how broken they are. Meanwhile flamethrower is ticking for 300 damage on experienced players with good gear.
This post was longer than I wanted it to be but as you can tell I have thought about this a lot. It is disappointing that the weapon has been so bad for nearly 10+ months now during which time it is barely accepted into competitive wars because it’s kit is so bad.