Everything I know about the game, I taught myself. I didn’t have other friends, or even a guild, to play with. Nobody to help or guide me- “Don’t do that, do this. Use this spell. Use your wand…”- I have just always played solo (I’m an introvert online and off). Somewhere along the line I read that mages don’t really use their wands too much, they are pretty much just there for stat boosts. So I’ve just never bothered with them and have always leveled solely by casting spells.
Then today I was watching a video on YouTube which helped open my eyes to how useful they can be, especially when it comes to preserving mana.
I did read the Mage Weapon Guide on Icy Veins, but I’m looking for a bit more information. I tried looking for other guides specifically on mage wand leveling, but there’s very little- if anything out there. That’s why I’ve come here. So… I have a couple of questions:
Where are some good places to grind wand skill? I’m not super concerned with XP, so I don’t mind grinding on low level mobs if it will help the process go faster.
I have the Ragefire wand currently equipped and even on some very low level mobs, I get 100% resisted. Is that because those mobs are fire-immune?
Currently my Wands skill caps at 275. Is that the final cap or are there ways to increase this?
That’s all I can think of for now. If I have other questions I’ll edit this post, but if anybody is able to help it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
1: Pretty much any mob that is not immune to the element of your wand should be good. I use the wand in dungeons on my classic mage when running low on mana.
2: You should do the wand quest in Duskwallow Marsh for a good wand that you’ll use until level 60. Enemies can resist or be immune to the element of your wand.
3. The maximum wand skill (like any other weapon skill) increases as you gain levels. At level 60, you can have a maximum of 300 weapon skill.
The cardinal rule for all DPS casters in WoW is “always be casting”.
If you ever find yourself actually shooting your wand in any PVE or PVP content, this means you screwed up.
The only good use for your wand is PVP when you’re trying to humiliate your opponent by finishing them off with your wand.
Wands are good for healers as they do need to conserve mana. They’re largely useless for mages and all other dps casters. It’s been that way for all of WoW’s history.
Is this the same with staves? Should I level my weapon skill in staves?
I am always casting, that’s how I’ve always played. But it does eat up a ton of mana and then I spend a lot of downtime drinking/eating. Depending on what I’m grinding, I have to sit and eat/drink after just 1 or 2 mobs. If I’m lucky 3. So I figured using my wand or attacking with my staff might help reduce some of that cost.
Yup same rule applies to staves, swords and daggers.
Though you will find yourself swinging your staff or sword once you get to Burning Crusade and do Karazhan. There’s a section of trash there where everything is 100% immune to all magic.
Of course, your damage contribution even with a properly leveled up weapon skill is tiny, so it’s probably not worth the effort.
I haven’t been on classic in a few months but when I was I finished off a number of Horde with my wand, but it wasn’t out of choice, but rather because I was OOM or silenced. At least while leveling, wanding is more effective than you might expect, especially if your wand is fast and reasonably good for your level. It’s actually a bit funny because sometimes people will freak out that you’re doing rapidfire ranged damage that they can’t silence or interrupt.
Back when PVE aggro management was actually a thing, you’d sometimes see groups asking their casters to wand at the start of fights and during phases when the tank needed to re-grab the mob’s attention.
Can’t say for sure about Classic since I haven’t played.
However back in Vanilla WoW it was VERY true. Good mages did not wand then. Ever.
For mana management we had conjured water. Between every gap in combat, sit and drink. Even a couple seconds of drinking was worth it since the water was free.
For raiding, the goal was to get just enough pieces with intellect on it so you wouldn’t run out of mana when using all mana boosting resources: mana gems, mana pots every two minutes, evocation once per boss fight.
For me, back in Vanilla mana was pretty much only an issue In Molten Core. When first starting raiding the BiS gear was from dungeons and tended to have no Int on it (this was before the gear revamp later in Vanilla). I found that mana was an issue unless I equipped 3 pieces of high int gear (typically Magister’s or Arcanists).
Once MC was completed and we started gearing up with BWL gear, there tended to be enough int on gear that mana became a non-factor. By the time I had 8/8 Netherwind on, mana was pretty much irrelevant for raiding.
At least that’s my recollection.
Did any mages use wands? … sure. But those were the ones you saw at the bottom of the meter. The ones at the top of the meter followed the “always be casting” rule.
Bad lowbie mages with friends would get a crazy wand from Shadowfang Keep and spec into “Wand Specialization” and it was actually better dps for a few levels.
But from the sound of it, OP is levelling, and you absolutely used your wand when levelling.
I’m not trying to be insulting, but it seems you might have forgotten the pains of levelling in vanilla. For one, you don’t have gems or evocation until higher levels. Conjured waters starts out at 2 stacks a cast at a new rank, and later ranks do give you like 18, but by then, a full drink (20 secs) barely fills half your mana bar.
It’s often much more efficient to bring a mob to low using your spells, then finish them off using a wand, which allows your mana regen to start earlier, so you can move on to the next trash. It beats sitting down for more than 20 seconds casting and drinking.
My recollection from leveling in Vanilla, and from leveling up to around level 20 in Classic, I didn’t use a wand.
Conjured food initially came in small quantities and was a royal pain to level, but it was free.
At least up to level 20, I didn’t have a wand.
At higher levels my preferred method of leveling was to AOE farm using a combination of Cone of Cold to Slow and Arcane Explosion for damage. Since I was typically taking 5 or 6 opponents at a time, a wand wasn’t practical.
That said, I can see you do have a point about a wand being effective some of the time:
great for finishing off foes who are almost dead, where a full-strength spell isn’t needed.
best weapon for shaman totem stomping in pvp
My mage in Vanilla had almost no spirit. I found wanding to get out of the 5-second rule to start out-of-combat regen to be almost worthless. My out-of-combat regen was so tiny, doing so was a net decrease to dps.
Thank you!
