This was in the GW2 Guardian forums as a response to a thread with a similar title from a dev poster.

"This is something we talk about often. Scepter is borderline long range but has issues when there are large height differences. Staff was his long range option at some point but that has somewhat gone by the wayside leaving him a bit exposed. It is certainly one of the things we will be looking at between beta events. Thanks for the feedback.
Jon"

That was pretty much my only gripe about Guardian as well and a lot of people seem to agree. I personally think the staff should be the long range and would like to see a channeled auto attack like the one that you use in your downed state, just because I like laser beams.

Source

I agree staff guardian was a lot of fun. I enjoyed being able to get everyone to sprint and I enjoy supporting those around me so it's the class for me. I also enjoyed water elemental.

I posted this as an easy way they could fix the staff over at GW2 guru

1: Swap the #1 & #2 abilities around.
2: Give wave of wrath a 15-20 second cool down, but up it's damage & make it knock enemies back or slow them down.
3: Make Orb of light spammable (Take off the detonate effect), have it heal allies as it passes nearby passively & speed up it's movement.)
4: Combine "Line of Warding" & "Wall of Reflection" into one ability
5: Make the Ability "Martyr" remove up to X (5-6) conditions from nearby enemies and give you protection, regeneration, might, fury & vigor lasting 1 second per condition removed. (Then lower it's cool down).

This would make the staff much more on par with other guardian weapons (And also free up room for a new ability to be created to replace wall of reflection) .

Either way I'm hoping they make the staff a bit better as outside of PVE it falls way behind other weapons for how useful it can be.

They kept the range the same, but they did increase the speed of the orb a bit and now the orb traverses the Z axis.  It used to float along the ground, but now you can hit people on keep walls.  Definitely a welcome change.

The staff was alright as it had a solid mix of support & damage.

My only complaint about it was that the #1 & #2 abilities seemed a bit meh.

Franky speaking I wish they would swap the #1 & #2 abilities around and do the following changes.

1: Speed up orb of light, Make it spammable, take the detonate effect off of it & instead have it "Explode" on impact doing moderate damage & light healing.

2: Make Wave of Wrath have a 5 second CD but multiply the damage by 3-5 times.

after that the staff would be fine.


Edit: The scepter kind of sucked though since the recent changes to it made it crappy. If they were to speed up the orb attack it would be alright but until then it will keep sucking because you can our run the orbs or simply side step out of the way easily.