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Alright, so my friends and I started with the essentials starter kit, and now have the rules copendium, the dungeon master book, the monster vault, and heroes of the fallen land, but after reading through all of them I still have a lot of confusion.

First of all, Mages: My friend is playing a mage and he has this thing where he tries to become overpowered oppose to balanced, so I just want to make sure his interpretation of the rules are correct, do staffs count as quarterstaffs? With the following attack and damage stats? So a mage with the feat to use intellect instead of strength for attack roles has a weapon that has an attack bonus of 10 and damage of 1d8+3, kind of weak but still a lot stronger than I believe a mage should be meleeing...

Further, Fighters: We've had a sort of loose interpretation of the rules as to classes because we don't want to stick to the specific classes, so this question might be sort of hard to answer, but I was creating a fighter sub-class with proficiency in Plate armor, but not shields. (So inbetween a slayer and a knight.) But while creating this class, I noticed the bonus for plate armor was +8, but the bonus for hide armor was +3, but with hide armor you still retain a bonus to AC from dexterity, so with a dexterity of 20 (starting at 18 and a racial modifier of +2), which my character has, that results in a modifier of +5 and a total AC bonus of +8 as well, but the hide armor also allows the user to retain his speed so same AC bonus but no speed penalty... So why bother with anything higher than hide?

Finally, Longsword versus Greatsword: Both have an attack bonus of +3, and the long sword does 1d8 and the greatsword does 1d10, but the greatsword is 2 handed and the longsword is versatile so you get a +1 bonus using it 2 handed, which results in a roll of 1-9 versus the greatsword which is 0-9 so why bother with a greatsword?

P.S. I forgot some of the questions I originally had typing this, there are loads, but I'll add to this thread as they appear.

Edit 1: Oh right, d10's, the starter box comes with a d10 numbered 1-10 but the player handbook has a picture of one numbered 0-9, and when I bought more dice sets they came numbered 0-9, so we've been playing using 0-9 as the correct numbering but my query of longsword versus greatsword seems to imply otherwise.

Thanks for all your quick answers.

Ah right, I meant to ask about bastard swords as well, I forget where but I read somewhere that bastard swords can be used one handed with the correct strength and training? So I've been using one one-handed on my old fighter class having assumed the pre-requisite was less than 20, is this accurate? With a +3 attack bonus and 1d10?

But aren't bastard swords by default 2 handed unless you have strength training?

Also, I know that it's highly not recommended, but originally we started with just the starter book (which is severly limited), and when we started building our own dungeons we found play severely lacking, from there we started playing with a 1st edition playerbook and a 3.5th edition DM book (due to miscommunications on my christmas list) and no monstervault, so needless to say we entered this game with a need to be creative, but so far everything have been more balanced than my experience with the starter kit, so it seems to be working.

Yeah he ended up with that too.

Keep in mind that each edition of D&D is a separate game, they don't just mix and match with each other.  If you vaguely remember a rule from somewhere, it's best to check where it was from.