Mage advice needed: Staff or Sword/Offhand?

I've managed to finally save up enough Arena points for the S2 spellblade. I could either purchase this and get a decent offhand or wait a week to get the S2 staff. From what I gather the potential for higher DPS is there with a good offhand, but the stats also appear to be lower. Is this a no brainer or am I right to be in a quandry?

Never really see mages with a sword/offhand, just staff.

For PvP, I'd go staff.

For PvE, I'd go MH, cause you can pair it with a PvE offhand which results in much higher damage usually.

mh/oh is usually best for pve because it favours pure damage over stats, wheras a staff will have a shitload more health (for example) for pvp. depends what you're doing.

Well a little of this, a little of that. My guild is a small collection of Tribalwar posters, so we don't raid the 25 man instances. I guess in that sense the staff would be a better choice since it'll be good enough for PvE and still give me the PvP boost.

Actually, if you do a mix of things, I'd recommend MH/OH. The reason being that it's more versatile. You can just swap in a PvP offhand for PvP, and a PvE offhand for PvE.

But it doesn't really matter that much.

You can snag really nice offhands for badges as well, for fairly cheap. If you're trying to save arena points for something in particular that might be the fastest way to upgrade. I always went with the MH/OH because it was versitile, myself. I still have my Claw of Chromaggus in the bank.

Yea I figured if I go with the knife I'll get the +spellhaste OH for 35 badges at the next opportunity (probably use the Ogri'la Exalted OH until then). Eventually when our raiding is no longer the focus I'd like to switch to Ice for PvP purposes until the next expansion.

whichever looks the coolest is easily the the best choice

2's, 3's or 5's matters a lot too.
You won't get focused as much in 5's, so you can go for more dmg, less resi.

ive seen high ranked frost mages that use either staff or sw/of

As was posted above, staff is generally better for pvp due to the comparable damage with boosted stats.

MH/OH you can usually buff spell damage and hit/crit/haste for an all around more versatile setup, but you lose a considerable chunk of stats. It all really depends on whether or not you're hit/crit capped and how much hp/mana you're willing to donate for increased spell damage.

Of course if you're going for haste set you're gonna want the badge off hand with a MH.

Good point with the 3v3/5v5 comment, when running 5's there's much less chance that you'll get focused. In 2's and 3's I routinely get focused even with my s3 gear on, thus those 40 or so extra stam points help out immensely, especially when I don't have a pocket healer.