A Guide to Mages comment thread

[Skandranon]

In practice, wands don't outdamage other ranged weapons at all.  Their apparent higher DPS is negated by the fact that other weapons have increased DPS from ammunition as well as ranged attack power.  Ranged attack power has absolutely no effect on wand damage.  It is a common misonception as wands appear to be treated as ranged weapons, but it is not the case.

I did point out the lack of ammo. I didn't know ranged attack power didn't apply, but mages' ranged attack power adds a fairly forgettable 1.5 or so dps even at high levels. Whether it applies or not is academic. I agree that they're not a problem now, but a typical knee-jerk Blizzard response could be very bad.

Here's another tidbit of my vast knowledge of wand mechanics that I'll impart upon the lounge: the wand damage type stat is purely cosmetic.  Don't believe me?  Try using a wand that does fire damage on any fire elemental.  It does standard damage, despite fire elementals being immune to fire spells.

I don't believe you, only because I used my Nether Force wand on something cursed with Curse of Shadow and immediately got better damage. Fire wands may not do fire damage, but I don't think you can say that the damage type stat for all wands is meaningless. Arcane wands clearly do Arcane damage.

Actually, if you'll note in my wand thread in the Blizzard forums, I made a perfectly balanced suggestion to fix the primary problem of wands for all three caster classes: make the wand skill auto-ranking.  It would take a quite the perusing of the thread, but one can see that I have shown that there is no possible way that this change would be unbalancing.  No one has been able to prove otherwise (good luck trying; it's impossible).

I think this would be a fairly safe change. Wands would be much more useful if we could dispense with the long training time, and even auto-ranking wands wouldn't be used frequently.