Wands

[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.