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Originally Posted by davem
It may be that Gandalf was powerfull enough without his staff to perform certain magical acts, but clearly it is useful in extreme circumstances. Or maybe its just easier to use a staff & means less energy is expended in the particular act. I'm not sure there's anything a wizard could do with a staff that he couldn't do without it, but at the same time one could ''charge' it with so much power, or become so dependent on doing magic with it, that without it one became virtually helpless.
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(My emphasis)
Well, Davem's comment brought another case of an innanimate object being "charged" with energy to the point that the one who charged it becomes extremely dependent. Yes, the One Ring and Sauron.
Gandalf looses his staff but then recovers it when he comes back. Gandalf only increases his powers. On the other hand, Gandalf breaks Saruman's staff and Saruman looses most of
his powers. Before I did not really see how Saruman could have lost his magic "all of a sudden" when his forces were destroyed by the Ents and the Rohorrim, yet if you think of the Staff as a "weaker" equivalent of The Ring, it'd be possible that by loosing his staff Saruman lost his magical "energy" or powers or what ever name you may give it... yet he had not compromised so much of his own being as to be destroyed with the destruction of the staff.
In that light, the creation of the One Ring could have very well been the science of magic staffs taken to the extreme. In a way, both things are very similar, inannimate objects that give their Ainur owners powers far greater than before.