Magician Epic quest...

[commongood]

Earth staff is definitely the bottleneck. You are going to need to:

a) be very patient
b) be very lucky

or

c) save up a bunch of money - not sure how much exactly but I seen people quoting upwards of 1 million plat.

Good news is, that Magi is not monopolized by A/A and/or farm crews. He does get killed by CSG on occasion and probably by other guilds of that size. The staff is just a rare drop on top of things. So you could join a medium-type raiding guild and then just hope to go for either option A or option B.

I'm under the impression that mage epic - and possibly warrior epic too - is in a league of its own in terms of pain-in-the-assery