Wands

[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?