ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It always confused me what weapons should one go for while leveling, when playing as Arcane Blade, staff doombringers, staff demonologists and similar.

I know late-game they end up using one-handed staffs, but how should it look like in the early and mid game? What weapons and what stats on them should one utilize when playing low level Arcane Blade or the other classes mentioned above? Two-handed staff for AB with physical power? And what about demonologists?

I guess I just can't grasp the staff playstyle well enough, would love to have some advice from you guys. There definitely should be a staff proc guide somewhere!

In most cases you want slow, gloom, disease, torment, curse. These are the talents that disable npcs.

ABs and doombringers are both pretty simple - start using staffs as soon as you find a good one. ABs don't care about weapon damage and play like straight mages early on, while doombringers use 2h weapons anyways and only need good investment in staff mastery to do well with staffs. Sun paladins are more RNG dependent since they need a staff AND shield do do well, but since their damage isn't wholly based off procs they can do just fine with a normal 1h weapon and 3/5 points floated in weapon mastery until they get a good short staff. Staff demonologists are by far the hardest staff using build to get off the ground - they need the weapon damage since they don't get decent procs until around level 25, so an elm or ash short staff is less than optimal since they've got no good damage options that aren't tied to weapon attacks until way later. Furthermore, even if you do find a good short staff you also need a decent fire imp, wretch titan, or possibly dolleg seed for your weapon specifically, which introduces even more RNG. I myself have yet to get a demonologist past 20 since there's so much going against them in the early game in both RNG and less-than-optimal class design.