So I don't specifically remember using the staff of earth in previous play throughs, I remember it being a very "meh" magic weapon in in the past, but I remembered it got buffed in 1.4 in my master mode play through this last week, and it seems to have been over buffed a little bit. To the point where no other post golem crowd control weapons outshined it except for razorblade typhoon (barely, and mostly because it had good single target/could be fired from any angle) and last prism. Every time I got a weapon I thought should do better, like the likewise buffed charged blaster cannon on perfectly flat ground, I just felt disappointed using them, as the staff of earth was just providing insane numbers during invasion events, solar eclipses and the OOA T3, without any of the downsides of weapons like charged blaster cannon.
I don't have a specific idea for how to nerf it back a little bit, but right now it really felt like it was overperforming by quite a lot. From Golem through solar eclipses, martian invasions, pumpkin and frost moons, I didn't feel compelled to put it away until I got razorblade typhoon, and honestly I'm not convinced razorblade typhoon even beats it on dps, which just doesn't feel right.
On another topic, I saw discussion earlier on the bee keeper and night's edge. It's to my understanding that the problem with buffing bee keeper is that it encroaches on night's edge's territory for being one of the best pre-hardmode swords, and that we can't buff night's edge without making breaker blade pointless, and we can't buff breaker blade without making the hardmode ore swords useless... all of which is understandable, and I think maintaining that progression is the right way of going about it, but I think nerfing the bee keeper was the wrong direction to take a fix for this. Honestly, none of these weapons are even really viable in master mode to begin with, not even now with buffs they have received, especially not the hardmode ore swords, which I cannot remember a playthrough in which literally anybody crafted. These weapons don't do enough to keep things away from you with their slow swing speed, even with high knockback, as tight spaces and multiple enemies cannot be kept at bay with so few hits, and the confusion debuff the bee keeper applies isn't consistent enough to matter, especially considering the small size. Additionally, the DPS and burst potential these weapons provide isn't nearly high enough to justify going close range against expert or master level enemies over the safety of attacking with yoyo's and sunfury during these stages of the game. Any value that the bee keeper provides against EoW should also not really be considered heavily, as anyone who can kill queen bee is more than capable of killing EoW without queen bee's equipment anyway. (Also...beenades.)
I've been of this opinion for a long time already, but all of these weapons need buffs. A little bit of swing speed and autoswing would go a long way for almost all of them, and make them good keep away weapons for early hardmode until you can upgrade to better stuff. Pretty much every sword without a projectile past the very earliest parts of the game is near pointless right now unless they can one shot enemies, keep them away really well or do insane dps under specific circumstances (fetid baghnakhs), which they aren't even close to doing on higher difficulty levels right now. Spears keep away better with better kill potential, flails are better crowd control with more range, and yoyos just have so much better range without much cost by the time you reach hardmode, swords just don't provide anything special at all right now.