So I was playing Dark Messiah the other day, and I couldn't but help like how much they implemented staffs. Slow, kind of weak weapons, but good for knocking people down, and some were even infused with fire and lightning, and other miscellaneous effects.
For Skyrim maybe you could carve runes into a custom made staff to infuse it with magic of your choice, in addition to being able to use them as melee weapons. It's too late to implement something like that if it isn't already in, but I hope Beth had the same sort of idea.

What do the good people of this forum think?

EDIT: Hm, on a whim I searched for "staffs" in the Oblivion wiki, and saw that there actually was something like that in Oblivion. The point about using them as physical weapons still stands, though.

You probably won't be able to beat your enemy's over with a staff, but you can dual wield with them. Staff in one hand and a sword in the other. We'll have to see how they play out. I'm hoping we can enchant our own as well.

GANDALF :mohawk:

Can't speak for the "good people" of this forum, but I'd like to see staves come back as melee weapons.

my exact thought for a while, i want white staff and beautiful sword!!!

The whole "infusing you're staff with magic" thing sounds like enchanting to me, and I doubt that's limited to staves.

In any case, we don't know how staves work, though we've seen images of characters wielding them with other weapons before, so we know that staves, or at least some staves, are one handed weapons, which might have been done so that using a staff wouldn't stop you from equipping a spell. But the mechanics of using staves are at this point uncertain, I think. In Oblivion, staves could shoot ranged magic projectiles, whereas in Morrowind, staves were simply melee weapons, and ones that were pretty worthless outside of role-playing at that, with the exception of a few unique staves that you'd be using for their enchantments rather than their base damage, though even that I'm not sure about as I just never bothered with them. The question is, how will they work in Skyrim? I could see them going both ways (Though with staves being more useful than in Morrowind if they're melee weapons.) Or who knows, maybe we'll be able to do both, by which I mean to say, for example, that much like how you can block with a shield by pressing the button for it, and bash by holding the button down, perhaps with staves, you cam hit enemies in melee by tapping the button or fire a ranged magic attack by holding the button down. Of course, I don't know how they'll work, I'm just presenting ways I could see them working.

YES

Say you equip a Staff of Lightning to your right hand. How do you differentiate between a melee or magic attack? I doubt you want to be depleting your magic charge every time you want to strike someone. You can't use a main-alt trigger system when you have the ability to dual-equip. There are only two options for that kind of a system, I think:

1) Make all staffs require both hands. This would let you easily trigger either magic or physical. However, it doesn't make sense to require both of your hands.
2) Power attacks (holding down the button) made with a staff trigger any magic effects rather than a physical one. However, this doesn't let you make power melee attacks. That's the price you pay for having two attack options with a single weapon...

Both of those have their drawbacks, but I think the second one is the most likely. If you have a spell alt-attack for a weapon, you would be seriously overpowered if you could use both the spell *and* power attack.