There are quite a few unique and very useful staves actually -

Staff of Magnus
Wabbajack
Skull of Corruption
Staff of Jyrik Gauldurson
Haldir's Staff
Sanguine Rose

Staff of Zombies / Resurrection etc (corpses don't disintegrate on death)
Staff of Summon x Atroncach (unlimited summon distance)

And probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head!

My character is also molded after Gandalf (complete with an enchanted SIlver Sword named Glamdring!) and while I agree it would be nice to be able to block with staves, I can see how the button mapping makes it difficult. What I do wish for though is the ability to dual cast with staves - e.g. having a staff of fireball and a fireball in your other hand, or two staves of fireball - to allow for impact stagger.

Ebony isn't the same in TES, it's quite clearly a metal, since you can mine Ebony ore, smelt ingots and then smith it in a forge. I have not heard of the other wood, and I'm sure there are some very strong types of wood.
It's not only the material that would mean that a staff would break easily, but the shape and weight of the staff. It's not exactly built to take the swings of an axe, is it?

They just ran out of buttons in Skyrim. And they wanted to make a staff a one-handed device so you could use it in conjunction with a spell, another staff, a weapon or a shield. That's why you could block with a staff in Oblivion (no dual wield/cast) and not in Skyrim (dual wield/cast plus staves being one handed = not enough buttons). They could, however make staves a two-handed weapon for combat and block and assign the bash function to using the staff's magical charges.

With the right type of wood and the angle you're holding the staff, it would deflect the axe. And a magic enchantment would do the trick by itself.

How about this? Pressing left on the D-PAD makes the staff go into "blunt mode". This would free R1, L1 to be used in the same function as a sword. It wouldn't be nearly as effective as a sword obviously.

Pressing left would equip one of your (only) 2 favorites in that hand instead. The only way I can see it working is if you pressed L1 while moving backwards to block, and L1 while moving forwards to do a sweep that causes a stagger like the bow. However, this would prevent you from attacking for a second so as to not be broken, but during this second you can move back out of danger. It means that you have to be stationary when you begin casting a spell with a staff, because otherwise you would do a melee action. Once a spell is charged (or at any point after the initiation of the spell charge) you can move around with the charged staff. This is the same way the game decides whether to do a stationary or moving power attack with melee weapons.

The other option is having a 'tap L1' option for melee actions, as most staves require holding down the trigger to use magically and charge the spell.

Gildergreed is

Okay, how about torches? Those are presumably made of wood, also not properly designed with the shape and weight to block axes, and yet perfectly capable of doing so in Skyrim.

Don't like that, here's a few more options:

1. The process of making a stave magically hardens the wood.
2. Staves have a metal core and wood covering.
3. Staves aren't actually made of wood, they just look like it.
4. Wood and metal don't share the same properties as wood and metal in the real-world (if it's true for Ebony, why not for wood or metal).

As for Gildergreen wood, it's a tree in Skyrim, not real-world based (as far as I know).

staves?
how bout staffs.
and h2h and unarmored?
lol.

They already the left D-pad mapped that as a hotkey.

Here's a minor variation of your proposal that should work though: Make staves one-handed for purposes of their magical function but two-handed for use as a weapon. So, if you wanted to use a staff for its magical function equip it to one hand. Now you want to use it as a weapon, just equip it to both hands, then it would function like a two-handed weapon with block, bash and attacks of a two-handed weapon.

You would need to unequip one of your hands to switch back and forth between weapon and magical functions. But, you could probably do that with your left D-pad hotkey if you made that staff your hotkey.

Its like dwarfs and dwarves. Since Tolkien nobody spells them correctly anymore.

Please no, that's too complicated. My fumble fingers cannot even get power attacks to work. Don't do this to my mage.

That sounds pretty good to me. No objections here.

A solid Dwarven metal Bo staff, capable of emmitting large bursts of lightening as I swing it at my opponents you say?


Mmmmmm... YES PLEASE!

understood, turija.

pu say

not needed

help

What?

Ebony is a metal in skyrim end of story

Prior to The Hobbit, the plural of "dwarf" was "dwarfs" and the adjective was "dwarfish." Tolkien decided that it should be "dwarves" and "dwarven" for his books because he was describing a race, not a little person. The new spelling caught on with other fantasy writers and game developers. I apply the same logic to staves, since the magical ones don't exist in the real world.

I know. I was replying to the weird posts by 'Osheao'

Funny how many of us know weird and useless trivia like that. One of his posts was responding to my cryptic reference to Tolkien and spelling so I though I would explain it. Not sure about his other posts.

Those were the posts I didn't understand. And it's not weird and useless trivia. It's necessary facts one SHOULD know

we can do every;thing eety
bye

That's believable and sensible for the origination of "dwarves" but I doubt the same logic applies to staves. Staff comes from the German, der Stab (the "a" prounounced as in "staff"), the plural of which is die St?be (the "a" pronounced as in "staves"). This suggests the original plural is actually staves, and staffs is likely an Americanized deviation from the original English.