Can we talk about wands?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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First of all, There are a few issues I have with wands. Suffering pushback from melee attacks, when ranged weapons don’t, but it’s literally the same “spell.” The amount of time it takes to auto attack after using a wand. A few others also, but I won’t take the time. I’m not here about these issues. I’m here about a bug, and whether or not it’s even being discussed.

Let me preface this next part with some facts, that have been tested and proven to work. The first fact is if I had +100 nature damage on my gear, and my wand was a nature damage wand, then it would have +100 damage, despite it’s attack speed. Meaning, a faster attacking wand would benefit greatly to +spell damage of the same type, even more so than a slower wand.

I first tested early on with low level arcane damage of about +12, which increased my greater magic wand damage in the low levels. I then continued with testing of a shadow wand and +shadow damage gear, as I had it for my shadow priest spec anyways.

This means that elixirs like Arcane Elixir, which increases spell damage by 20 for 30 minutes, should affect wands. This also means that +spell damage from gear should also affect wands. Spell damage should affect wand damage, no matter what the element type of the wand is.

So here is my issue. My wand damage is 40-75 nature damage with an attack speed of 1.4 seconds. In the tooltip it shows I have +159 damage to my wand, for a grand total of 248 - 293 damage per shot. However I am seeing 40-90 damage numbers.

Something is clearly wrong. This isn’t “this mob has X amount of resistances, so your doing less damage.” It’s every mob, and they’d need about 70-80% reduced damage from that magic type.

I think +spell damage and healing gear isn’t actually affecting the spell damage portion of wands. I have more test to run, but I wanted some feedback, if anyone else noticed this, etc.

TLDR: Spell damage is supposed to affect wand damage. Tooltip is showing damage numbers way higher than actual values.

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Wands are OP if anything, it is good free damage, and iirc it procs judgement of wisdom for the alliance casters as well…The hybrid classes have no wands and when they have to just sit back and heal it is a drawback not having one.

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https://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa159/mormonslice/wand_zpsldgb5anc.jpg

https://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa159/mormonslice/wand_zpsldgb5anc.jpg

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That’s just a display bug, wands never gained from +dmg in vanilla.

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Just throwing this out there but wands aren’t spells so ‘spell damage’ has no effect on them. Just a display bug in the character sheet as Reboen said.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if this were intentional. Wand used to be single-click (not activated on/off) which meant you could melee/wand/melee/wand for some pretty impressive DPS numbers.

Once it changed to activated I recall trying to mimic the old behavior unsuccessfully. They may have changed it to also reset your swing timer though I never bothered to test this.

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It’s not a display bug, like I said, I tested it. If you go and get +arcane damage on some gear, and go use a greater wand, you’ll do more damage with that wand because it’s arcane damage.

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Here’s some additional information for you from the past.

https://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=18826 - BC

https://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=38623 - This one shows them talking about how wands aren’t spells and how the damage they deal is only increased by debuffs on the target. (except seemingly shadow form somehow affects shadow wands as well)

But perhaps the most interesting information I found is the simple ‘wand damage is white, therefore it is not spell damage’ which seems amazingly simplistic but also very straightforward.

If you are getting bonuses from something that says + spell damage then that’s the bug, not the wands not getting buffed.

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There is a difference between ‘arcane damage’ and ‘spell damage’, so it could be true. If so, any elemental effects (+shadow damage, +frost damage, etc.) you have might increase a wand’s damage if they were that element. Something to check out.

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Spell damage is just all of the elements combined. +Shadow damage and +Spell power are literally the same thing, except +Spell power affects ALL the magic types.

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Wands aren’t spell damage, they’re not affected by damage modifiers on your gear.

I just bought a + nature damage staff to test this for my nature wand just in case it was bugged but no, it doesn’t affect the damage.

Please mail me 60 silver to recover the costs of the staff, ty.

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12

As someone else mentioned, a wand is not a spell so it will not benefit from + spell damage bonuses. However if any of your gears has a say, + arcane damage, and you are using an arcane wand, then yes your damage will increase corrrspondingly.

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that is the correct answer, but shadow form increasing shadow wand damage are intended because the tooltip said so “While active, it increases Shadow damage dealt by 15%”

so not just limited to shadow spell, like shadow weaving debuff, it increase shadow damage from spells, (wand) attack, and even item

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14

Would be pretty busted if wands did get buffed from damage. But they don’t. I got over 100 frost damage on my mage and a frost wand and see no difference in power.

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God, if you had like +200 spell dmg added to your wand that’d get crazy lol

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To add, melee attacks absolutely DO NOT inflict pushback on wand shoot.

I face tank mobs with renew, spamming wand, and their is ZERO delay.

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Its an odd thing with the pushback and wanding. I don’t know if its just a graphics bug because it does slow down when a mob finally reaches me and starts beating on me. It typically only is the first attack that gets the “pushback” after that it goes to normal even under melee attacks.

Again, not sure if its just a graphics bug but I too see somewhat of a pushback on my wand as well.

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Wands don’t get bonus spell damage, as others have said. But they do count as range weapons, which means agility will increase their crit chance.

Not so much that it’s worth stacking agi, but hey…thats a thing.

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I’m kind of thankful it takes a moment, because every once in a while (when things are gettin’ crazy in a dungeon), I’ll have the wrong thing targeted for wanding. Then I’ll switch to the right target and be thankful that the wand didn’t fire off, yet, lol

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Knockback kills wand shoot.