Caster weapons are stat sticks, always have been.
It is lame that they dont wield and use staff like gandalf.
casters are perfectly fine without their weapons, just like how hunter’s melee weapon slot got removed.
WANDS are cool. but they are no longer in shadowlands
Yeah, i never understood why we didn’t go down the route of using Harry Potter style casting animations, i think wands would be a lot more popular if we actually shot our spells out of them. Strangely enough, the animations are mostly already there, they’re just unused. I can remember halting dps at certain fights in ZG and wanding, it looked pretty funny lol
I miss monks using weapons in combat. What jerk decided to take that away?
Rift has great animations for caster weapons and off hands. It’s pretty awesome and I wish WoW did that.
I am going make a Gandalf type character in Elden Ring
Thanks for the idea OP 
monk use weapon only if one of your hands equip/transmog a fist weapon.
That’s lame as hell. It was far cooler when my monk would pull his swords off his back for a quick attack and sill throw punches and kicks. Fire whoever made that change. they have no idea what they were doing.
0h good no wands hurrah! That is a good sign of things to come.
In WoW its always going to be a stat stick.
At least you can sheath your weapon (as it were) unlike in EQ you held it for all time.
tbf Gandalf was a Maiar, he was more capable than mortal men, but i still would like to see the equivalent of a Battlemage, Staff and Sword dual-wielding, casting through the staff or the blade.
Wands have always been annoying after they stopped players from being able to turn off the autocast.
I agree that it would be neat for my warlock to shoot a Chaos Bolt out of her staff. Some spells are more hand-gestures (such as curses or over-time effects) but the major stuff would be great to be a weapon-based effect.
I have the Resonant Reservoir trinket and my character take his weapon on his hand when I use the ability. I love it.
Definitely should be casting animations that involve the weapon.
There are actually quite a few SL wands, though the appearances have little variety.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
theres no wands in raids or dungeons, nor from covenants.
FFXIV manages to do this well. Not sure WoW ever could. They took the ez way out.
I like things as they are. I didn’t enjoy Rift’s animations.
casters cast spells with lifting hands in the air, there’s really no point for them to have weapons
I’d like it too.
But Ability Animations in WoW are NOT tied to the weapon. Even for melee specs. They’re tied to the ability (for the most part). a Shaman using Stormstrike is gonna look fine whether they’re using a Mace, Axe, or Fist Weapon.
How do you reconcile the difference between how a Wand would be used and how a Staff would be used and how a Sword or Dagger would be used for Casters if we wanted our ability animations to use the weapons? Waving a dagger around like a wand looks dumb. Taking a heavy-handed stance like one would with a Staff makes no sense for anything else.
Asking for Casters to use their weapons in their attack animations is asking for Blizzard to make several different sets of animations for casters when right now, EVERYONE has global ability-based animations.
It’s one thing to maybe shift the way a weapon is held. But this would be more involved than that. Not impossible, but it would be kind of weird to make this super extra exception for specifically casters.
O noticed that recently too on my monks. Was rather disappointed.
simply lifting their weapons while casting.
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