Wands

[playingtokrush]

Stopping and drinking every two or three kills is not what my mage does as it is something that I do mind having to do.  By starting the practice of mana efficient fighting early, it possible to get into a routine where you only need to stop every 8-10 kills to drink for mana recovery while soloing the more normal monsters.  Then when you group with others, you can more readily keep up a pace of play that the does not come off as so annoying to do them of having to stop constantly to recover.  Learing to use the wand at good skill is part of this technique.  For example in my mages last run through Gnomeregan my mage only used about 12-14 water for the entire run.  And most of that was from each time I had to do a massive iAE set of attacks to clear large normal group pulls.

I'd like to hear more about your combat routine that's letting you kill 8-10 equal level mobs before drinking.

And somehow I don't think tedious wand spamming was really Blizzard's idea of fun gameplay.

[savaughn]

I would disagree that there's anything tedious about using a wand. I'm in the process of playing (yet another) priest through on the Azgalor server since I have some friends I'd like to play with over there. She's level 14 and just found a wand that pops for over 10dps - well above what I'd expect to get off of a staff or 1H mace at that level. She simply swaps out her staff attacks for wand attacks and does does far more damage. In looking at the available wands I've noticed that wand damage at a given level should continue to progress at about this same rate. MOST caster classes expect to push a button every 1.5s or so. The fact that it's a wand instead of something else isn't really that big a deal - especially when you remember that wand damage skips armor reduction, hitting all the harder.

At the top end, a level 60 can expect to pick up a wand hitting for over 62dps. If you swing that stick you're carrying, consider wanding instead.

[MongoJerry]

At the top end, a level 60 can expect to pick up a wand hitting for over 62dps.  If you swing that stick you're carrying, consider wanding instead.

Be careful with those numbers. For one thing, there's a one second delay after shooting a wand before you can do anything else, so really that 1.5 second attack speed wand has an effective attack speed of 2.5 seconds. Second, staff attacks get bonuses from your strength and Inner Fire attack power bonuses. My level 60 priestess definitely gets more dps from staff attacks than wand attacks. Of course, wands are nice when you don't want to stand next to a mob.

[malphigian]

Be careful with those numbers.  For one thing, there's a one second delay after shooting a wand before you can do anything else, so really that 1.5 second attack speed wand has an effective attack speed of 2.5 seconds.  Second, staff attacks get bonuses from your strength and Inner Fire attack power bonuses.  My level 60 priestess definitely gets more dps from staff attacks than wand attacks.  Of course, wands are nice when you don't want to stand next to a mob.
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This is as good a place as any to ask I question I had. Someone over on the Basin forums posted a "trick", and I've been trying to figure out if it makes sense or not.

If you are melee and watch the combat log, you'll notice the hit/miss messages come up *before* your weapon swing. You can initiate your wand during this time and it will interrupt the weapon swing animation, you will then proceed to swing again after the wand fires. (it helps to set your hit/miss messages to some garish color).

What I have not done is clocked my DPS to see if this is actually increasing it -- that is, if I'm managing to overlap the wand cooldown and weapon delay.

Anyone tried this?

[playingtokrush]

This is as good a place as any to ask I question I had.  Someone over on the Basin forums posted a "trick", and I've been trying to figure out if it makes sense or not.

If you are melee and watch the combat log, you'll notice the hit/miss messages come up *before* your weapon swing.  You can initiate your wand during this time and it will interrupt the weapon swing animation, you will then proceed to swing again after the wand fires.  (it helps to set your hit/miss messages to some garish color).

What I have not done is clocked my DPS to see if this is actually increasing it -- that is, if I'm managing to overlap the wand cooldown and weapon delay.

Anyone tried this?

I've pulled this off before. I can't imagine that the overall increase in DPS is very significant, though. I've probably ended up firing my wand a quarter to half a second earlier, at best. I think only the hardcore min-maxers would care that much about the potential DPS improvement.

I would disagree that there's anything tedious about using a wand. I'm in the process of playing (yet another) priest through on the Azgalor server since I have some friends I'd like to play with over there. She's level 14 and just found a wand that pops for over 10dps - well above what I'd expect to get off of a staff or 1H mace at that level. She simply swaps out her staff attacks for wand attacks and does does far more damage.

Well, it doesn't matter how tedious something is; there will always be someone who doesn't mind it. As boring as I thought EQ was, as much as the tedious Draw system turned me off from FF8, there are people who just don't mind them at all.

However, WoW was never supposed to be designed with the "meh, some people will put up with anything" design philosophy. Wand spamming simply doesn't mesh with Blizzard's supposed "World as Toy" design paradigm as far as many players are concerned.

Also, have you ever actually used a DPS monitoring program to compare the damage you do in melee vs the damage you do with a wand? The difference probably isn't as much as you'd imagine from the listed stats on melee weapons and wands. Staves, in particular, being two handed weapons, tend to do as much or more damage than equivalent level wands. If I had more of a choice of which weapon I used when, I would tend toward using melee attacks when adjacent to a mob and a wand when at range (when I'm not using damage spells, that is).

[Nordramor]

I'm pretty sure that using a Wand interrupts your normal attack cycle, meaning it offers no real long term DPS.

However, you can get some additional burst dps. Since you can initiate a wand attack immediately following a melee attack, you do get some extra fast damage.

You will notice, however, that after using the wand like this there is a large delay before your character will melee again. This is probably intentional to prevent wand users from just doing melee->wand->melee>wand repeat.

The 1s delay after using a wand is very unfortuante. :( It basically forces you to manually recalculate your Wand's DPS to see if it's any good (the UI lies).

Wand attacks may not be affected by armor % reduction though, so against high-armor monsters they may be more effective than melee weapons (would need testing confirmation).

[playingtokrush]

Wand attacks may not be affected by armor % reduction though, so against high-armor monsters they may be more effective than melee weapons (would need testing confirmation).

Wands aren't affected by armor % reduction, but they are affected by full and partial resists. On multiple occasions, I've had my wand shots hit for less than the low end damage of my wand.

[savaughn]

Be careful with those numbers. For one thing, there's a one second delay after shooting a wand before you can do anything else, so really that 1.5 second attack speed wand has an effective attack speed of 2.5 seconds. Second, staff attacks get bonuses from your strength and Inner Fire attack power bonuses. My level 60 priestess definitely gets more dps from staff attacks than wand attacks. Of course, wands are nice when you don't want to stand next to a mob.

So, I agree. But you aren't being complete with your numbers either. Lets complete the picture.

A end game staff may have as much as 50DPS. Luck will get you 58DPS. The Nathan Blightcaller quest nets you a 62DPS wand. Luck will get you a 71DPS wand. Staves tend to be about 80% of the damage of a comparable level wand. If you can get a 10DPS wand at low levels, you're probably using a staff around 8DPS.

Staves have a set of bonuses and penalties. You benefit from any bonus attack power (strength and inner fire, possibly item bonuses as well). These bonuses are then reduced by armor and blocking. Staves have complete DPS loss from misses, dodges, and parries.

Wands are not likely to be augmented in power (possible item bonuses) but is similarly unlikely to be reduced in power (certain mobs seem to take reduced damage from certain magic types but this seems uncommon). Wands suffer DPS loss only from resists, with some very rare mobs having extrordinary resists.

Discounting the exceptions (you can expect to wand the nastiest armored mobs and staff the wand immune ones) you end up with armor penalties negating most (but not all) of the attack power increase. You also have a substantially increased miss rate because of the ways to avoid melee damage. Off setting this there is a slight delay increase (having timed this last night it seems to work out to be an additional half second increase - about a 1/2 second pause from when you hit the button to when the spell goes off followed by the delay timer spinning around on the icon) which reduces actual DPS on a wand.

Applying some sample numbers (World of Theorycraft), assuming an additional 0.5s delay and a 5% resist rate, Stormrager gives us an effective DPS of approx. 43.

I may have some of these formulas completely wrong, but lets try this anyway. We can assume 110 attack power from Inner fire and we can assume a strength that is somewhere in the 48-50 range. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the AP exchange for Str is for priests. If it's x2, then we're looking at about 210 AP, or (am I remembering 12AP/DPS correctly?) 70.5DPS on the Argent Crusader. We then assume a 12% miss rate including parry, et. al. which swings us back to 62DPS which is then reduced by armor (we'll assume an average of 30% based on some of the numbers we're seeing from the beast lore skill) and hits for a DPS of approx. 43.

I think it is reasonable to say that outside of the extreme, wanding something or hitting with your staff is pretty close to identical in damage results for priests. Considering that wanding also works at a distance and that you might lose Inner Fire in a fight if you're not spot on it, why not keep that twig out?

[Malakar]

Wands and staves being balanced wouldn't surprise me. This game is extremely balanced, almost everything has been taken care of. Of course a few things remain, but they're few and far between.

When people scream unbalance, I typically assume they're either missing something, overreacting, can't accept that they lost fairly in a duel, or just plain don't know what they're talking about.

What bothers me about wands, though, is that there is no auto-attack. You have to waste a hotkey space on it, which annoys me.

[MongoJerry]

Wands and staves being balanced wouldn't surprise me. This game is extremely balanced, almost everything has been taken care of. Of course a few things remain, but they're few and far between.

I'm not surprised either. Blizzard's been pretty close with the numbers in most things in WoW -- certainly better than Diablo II ever was. Most numbers have just needed a few tweaks to get them in line.

I think it is reasonable to say that outside of the extreme, wanding something or hitting with your staff is pretty close to identical in damage results for priests. Considering that wanding also works at a distance and that you might lose Inner Fire in a fight if you're not spot on it, why not keep that twig out?

I went through my, "OMG! Why wouldn't you just use wands all the time" phase, too. Don't worry, yours too shall pass. You're excited about the possibility of just using wands, so you're neglecting two important components in your calculations. First, I'm fairly confident that you're stuck for a full 1.0 seconds and not 0.5 seconds after a wand shot before you can do anything else. That'll reduce your wand ideal best-case dps by about 20%. Second, there is the all too real and all too ignored real-world scenario of combinations of lag which include but are not limited to: Time for your client to recognize that the wand shot is complete and let you hit your shoot key again, time it takes for you to hit the wand key after a wand shot completes, time for the signal to go from your processor through the network card, transmit to Blizzard's equipment, Blizzard's servers route the information to the appropriate place and for the game server to register a "so-n-so shoots a wand" signal. Note that the combination of all of these factorss is much longer than normal ping times that most people think about. Is this "lag" .25 seconds or .50 seconds? Dunno. However, it is an extra attack speed delay that affects wands but does not affect melee attacks.

In my general experience, fighting your average mob, I've noticed wands doing about 75-80% the dps that staves do for equivalent level and quality of weapons. That's actually pretty close. Considering that most priests do a mix of SW:Pain, some Mind Blast, and then mix in some normal attacks, the drop in overall dps from using wands all the time versus using a mix of staves and wands will be relatively small. However, if you're trying to eek out all the dps you can, then you should use both staves and wands, and generally use staves in most situations when you're in melee range.

Discounting the exceptions (you can expect to wand the nastiest armored mobs and staff the wand immune ones)

And this is exactly the situation that *is* actually more important. That is, you should get a feel for what mobs are heavily armored and which have good resists versus your elemental attacks and tailor your tactics appropriately.

[Treesh]

What bothers me about wands, though, is that there is no auto-attack. You have to waste a hotkey space on it, which annoys me.
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Since shooting a wand puts a little cooldown on just about all your spells, I'm glad it's not auto-attack.

[savaughn]

Note that the combination of all of these factorss is much longer than normal ping times that most people think about. Is this "lag" .25 seconds or .50 seconds? Dunno. However, it is an extra attack speed delay that affects wands but does not affect melee attacks.

You're right. Last night on a high pop server I was seeing red lag levels and I re-ran some checks. With a 1.5delay wand I was consistently getting 2.5-3 second delays and when the lag got really nasty I wasn't even able to fire consistently at the 3s mark. With a 1.0s delay stormrager (which I used as my sample wand above) drops down to a 33.7DPS device after figuring in resists, et. al. - running 78% of the damage of the staff.

On the plus side, when the nasty desync hits, wands tend to keep firing (albeit slowly) where melee weapons start to give you that strange run of "facing the wrong way/too far away" errors. I think the real world "correct" solution, though, it to get the best wand you can and the best staff you can and then trade off a bit. That way you're pretty close to max skill with both. If you just default to swinging the staff, you take a nasty hit when you do want to use the wand, effectively eliminating the option.

[KiloVictor]

What bothers me about wands, though, is that there is no auto-attack. You have to waste a hotkey space on it, which annoys me.
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This always bothered me too, so I went looking at the WoW UI customization forum, and read up on the options for extending the UI. I then wrote a little AddOn to add a keybinding for "Shoot", so you can map it directly to the key or mouse button of your choice.

If anybody's interested, I can make it available. Send me a PM with an email address that can accept a .zip file, and I'll zing it over.

Kv

PS - Haven't played a ton of other MMORGs, so dunno if this is de rigeur, but I'm impressed with the UI extensibility in WoW. Anybody else out there creating mods?

[MongoJerry]

I think the real world "correct" solution, though, it to get the best wand you can and the best staff you can and then trade off a bit.  That way you're pretty close to max skill with both.  If you just default to swinging the staff, you take a nasty hit when you do want to use the wand, effectively eliminating the option.

Yep. The solution that has worked well for me is to use staves mostly while soloing and use wands mostly while instancing (it helps me to stay back where I can see what's going on). My wand and staff skills are at 298 and 297 right now.

[playingtokrush]

Actually, the little "post-shot cooldown" duration is dependent on the wand's cooldown itself. It's easy to see the difference if you have a fast wand (around 1.40 speed) and a slow wand (around 1.90 speed) with which to compare shots. I don't know exactly how this factors into the extra wand delay discussion, but I'm guessing it ends up adding a proportionate amount of delay to both fast wands and slow wands.

[MongoJerry]

Actually, the little "post-shot cooldown" duration is dependent on the wand's cooldown itself.  It's easy to see the difference if you have a fast wand (around 1.40 speed) and a slow wand (around 1.90 speed) with which to compare shots.  I don't know exactly how this factors into the extra wand delay discussion, but I'm guessing it ends up adding a proportionate amount of delay to both fast wands and slow wands.

Interesting. So maybe it's the initial step that takes a second and it's the cooldown that takes the time listed on the wand speed?

[playingtokrush]

Interesting.  So maybe it's the initial step that takes a second and it's the cooldown that takes the time listed on the wand speed?
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Perhaps, but the initial shot wind-up seems to be dependent on the wand speed, too. If you can, try to pick up a very slow wand and a very fast wand and test them on gray mobs. The differences are not too subtle if you test them back to back. It's like the combination of shot wind-up plus "wand cooldown" adds up to some duration that is proportionally longer than the listed cooldown of the wand -- something in the neighborhood of 25-33%, I'd say off the top of my head.

[acidjax]

I think wands are very useful for priests and warlocks. In my opinion they carry the following advantages:

1. Wand damage is unaffected by target passive defenses (dodge, parry, etc.) or armor values.

2. Wands are less prone to streakish results then staves.

3. A slow wand can be used in conjunction with a very fast one-handed weapon such that the melee weapon will still swing even when repeatedly activating the wand as soon as the cooldown refreshes. A fast weapon would be optimum for a firestone regardless.


Although the damage display only shows wand damage at the listed value (after adding in wand mastery) I have noticed countless times where I have scored damages higher then the listed maximum damage. I'm guessing that stats boost wand damage (agi?) rather then the existence of many monsters with negative resists. I also believe resists affect wand damage similar to direct damage spells. When I leveled on creeper type elementals I noticed that my nature wand would constantly get quite a bit more partial resists then my fire or arcane wands.

The slower skilling rate of wands does make it very tough to keep wand skill near cap but I still prefer its use to staves. I have a hypothesis that the chance of skill gain is based on the speed of the weapon. The listed speed of the wand is used in that equation rather then factoring it in with the additional unlisted wand cooldown resulting in a noticeably slower skill-up speed of wands compared to other weapons.

[playingtokrush]

Although the damage display only shows wand damage at the listed value (after adding in wand mastery) I have noticed countless times where I have scored damages higher then the listed maximum damage.  I'm guessing that stats boost wand damage (agi?) rather then the existence of many monsters with negative resists.  I also believe resists affect wand damage similar to direct damage spells.  When I leveled on creeper type elementals I noticed that my nature wand would constantly get quite a bit more partial resists then my fire or arcane wands.

No stats boost wand damage. What you were probably seeing were crits.

[acidjax]

No stats boost wand damage.  What you were probably seeing were crits.
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They were not crit hits. They were non-crit hits that hit for higher then the listed maximum wand damage.

The reason I guess the stat to be agi is because when you add agi, it increases your ranged attack power. When you mouse-over the ranged attack power it will tell you that it is increasing ranged dps by X. When you increase your agi, the amount it displays on mouse-over will increase. Furthermore, all the blue and purple cloth sets add agi.

Obviously agi boosting wand damage is nothing more then a guess until testing is done. For the time being I've observed numerous times where my non-crit wand damage has hit for higher then the listed maximum damage value (which does not factor in dps increase from attack power mouse-over). Either there exists numerous monsters with negative resists or stats are boosting wand damage and the listed display damage is incorrect.