In terms of gameplay, there's a slight problem in the idea of making some sort of specialised sub-class. Unless you're roleplaying, the optimal build is almost always going to have some dps potential. While healers might seem necessary or useful if you play with one, pure healers are actually significantly reducing your party dps, extending fights, and resulting in everyone receiving more damage and requiring more healing. The same applies to a 'crafty mage' (or a tank for that matter). Additionally, hawke has the greatest dps potential (more attribute points and ability points available, access to stat modifying clothing), so it's a massive waste to use a non-dps hawke.
So I would say that your idea of making Anders a pure healer and hawke a debuffer/only have single target dps isn't going to be very effective on the gameplay side of things.
But if your main question is 'how to use arcane, spirit, and entropy'...
For spirit, you can either drop 5 or so points into it and pick up spirit bolt and walking bomb (which make very effective disorient CCCs) or 8 or so points to get spirit mastery, which is useful in a crit-mage build using Malcolm's honor (e.g.
my crit-mage build)
Spirit mastery only increases the damage of your spirit bolts and auto-attacks (with spirit staves), so if you're primarily using walking bomb there's no need for it.
Arcane has a few useful abilities, but I would give them to merrill as it's kind of a waste on hawke. Barrier can be used to make characters at low health invincible for a few seconds, giving them the time they need to chug a potion or get healed. It's particularly useful for a reaver hawke or perhaps some sort of melee walking bomb detonator setup, but it does help considerably with survivability.
Crushing prison is one of the most powerful stagger CCCs, dealing high damage and paralysing the target (although it is single target).
All the rest are fluff, although mind blast can potentially destealth assassins, elemental weapons increase autoattack dps, and arcane shield increase your parties resistances and defence.
Finally entropy. I could spiel on about how useless it is, but if you search through the forums you'll probably find one of the older threads discussing it. Besides one-point into the debuff (hex of torment) and perhaps another two into horror (for single target crowd-control), it's pretty much useless.
Sleep is unreliable and unlikely to work on higher ranked enemies (the ones you actually need to crowd control), you're better off killing enemies than trying to debuff their attack with a misdirection hex, and entropic cloud is unreliable (and hard to use if I remember rightly)
If you were really desperate to use the entropy tree, an upgraded hex of torment can be pretty devastating (especially paired with brittles), but there are simply more practical ways to spend points just for a few seconds of auto-crits.
As for your other questions:
All staves can be used in melee but both the ranged and melee damage is only determined by magic. The staff of parthalan and several other staves do have blades on one end, but it's mostly cosmetic.
The staff of parthalan required unlocking by signing up for a bioware newsletter. I'm not sure if you can still get it via that method, but if you're a PC player you can simply use to the console to 'additem' it
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