staff have +transfer where catalyst have -transfer
At endgame if you get few items with transfer time you will not need any pontion or attack skill to keep up with willpower generation when you have staff.
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For bow i don't know since i play mage.

In this game auto attacks are almost exclusively for early game and for resource generation, and most of the damage is done by skills. Your base damage will increase your skills damage, so the idea of making the ranged attacks do more damage than melee attacks doesnt really make sense from a balance standpoint. Melee characters are already at a disadvantage in most cases from needing to chase enemies or use mobility skills to stay in the combat meaning they spend much more time getting in range to do their damage.

Whether or not it was developed this way on purpose, even as a melee character the majority of your damage is coming from skills and not from basic attacks (even with crit builds) and attack speed seems mostly wasted unless you are playing dual daggers or dual pistols (and even then it seems like once you get it to a reasonable place, you'll still want the majority of new stat points to go into ferocity or wisdom or toughness, not more agility). Since ranged and mage have a larger variety of high damaging and aoe skills than melee, it doesn't make sense for the ranged weapons (which have the advantage of being at longest range ) or the mage auto attacks (which already have the advantage of bouncing and being ranged) do the same damage as the two handed melee or the melee would have no niche to occupy.

This is just my opinion, but I don't see any real reason to buff the damage of the two handed weapons. There's also a HUGE range of potential damage for any given weapon type, AND the fact that ranged weapons can have additional projectiles very easily (multiple additional projectiles from passive skills), each of which ends up multiplying the damage of ranged attacks (two projectiles = 2x dmg)

If they made ranged two handed weapons that powerful while you can add additional projectiles there would be no reason to play anything BUT two handed ranged in the game