03-26-2005, 09:35 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-06-2005, 11:15 PM by playingtokrush.)
MongoJerry,Mar 25 2005, 03:41 PM Wrote:Not at all true. I thought we had this discussion before. An equivalent quality staff will typically outdamage a wand by about 25%. By placing points into wand specialty, it'll basically makde them about the same. Going with any one-handed weapon reduces your dps far too much, and usually staves have better stats than any 1H+offhand combination.Yes, I remember that, and despite favoring melee over wands in that discussion, I never fully convinced myself that a wand couldn't outdamage a staff.
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In some brief testing, I used an Argent Crusader as my staff and a Bonecreeper Stylus as my wand. I was able to kill level 42 starving blisterpaws at roughly the same rate using just my staff or just my wand. On higher armor mobs (level 43 turtles), the wand actually outperformed the staff. I suppose caster mobs might die slightly faster to the staff than the wand.
Using the staff-wand combo killed things noticeably faster, but of course that requires a lot more attentiveness and timing. I was getting around 120 ms ping during my tests, which is unusually good for my connection. : ( Obviously, the higher your ping, the worse wands will perform in comparison.
I didn't feel like testing extensively, but I encourage you to test this yourself to see what sort of results you get. I was somewhat surprised how things turned out for me. Of course, thanks to Inner Fire, priests will be able to get more damage from their melee weapons than mages.
I, personally, would never take wand specialization as a priest (and especially not as a mage), as I don't always feel like spamming wand shots for maximum effectiveness. It's simply not a talent/weapon choice around which I'd care to base a priest build. However, I no longer think it's completely out of the question, and I'm sure someone with the stamina and will to work frequent wand use into his/her combat routine could make it work. You'd want to carry around at least two wands of different damage types in case of immunities if you intend to rely heavily on them.