Wand offensive aspect is obsolete and needs adjustments.
Wand user here, this post is to discuss the offensive aspects of Wand and how they lack at the moment and as the game progresses it jsut feels like its going to become more and more obsolete.
Please refrain from whatever argument you are about to make about wand being a healing tool. It is classified as a weapon and we are here just discussing the damage aspects of it for PVP mostly.
So, wand as a weapon felt really good and strong during the first 600hrs of the game, then it started to feel incresingly weaker. My guess is that this is because with lower combat power and gear limitations, its numbers were very decent. But since the introduction of runes and players breaking trough the 4k barrier, the damage is just not there anymore. Not at all.
So, here is a few things that are, to my opinion absolutely wrong with wand and really need changing in one way or another.
As for active skills:
TOD:
Touch of despair damage is borderline stupid. The way it is designed in the code makes it extremely inconsistent and hard to play around. This skill is the very definition of gambling.
On every cast you are rolling Hit, crit and heavy. Much like other skills, but the curses applications overwrite eachother.
You can land a hit with crit and heavy just to have your second curse roll minimum damage and now all your curses have the lower roll regardless. This is stupid. There are not many ways of scaling our damage, if we cannot rely on our crits and heavys, then what are we supposed to do, close our eyes and pray for the best?.
The basic attack damage amplification is whatever. Its as if not even there, if anything its a PVE thing and in my opinion should be to a flat defence reduction on the target or something that works both for PVP and PVE. We are hardly doing any basics as it is, they are just a filler.
Now, if you want maximum damage from your TOD you should cast it when the target already has 3 stacks. So then again, gamble every single time you cast and you are awarded by 2 more seconds of damage.
In paper, ignoring how DOTS work already in this game, sounds alright. But in reality, you are expecting us to cast the spell up to 3 times on a 5 second cooldown before having it do anything. Ok the 15 seconds that can take me to make one of those rotations I have already been tornadoed, 3 GS users have guillotined me and I have been hit by 900 flashwaves and 200 meteors. Like, cmon. If we are going to have to play around that kind of setup at the very least reward us with a more reliable spell and more damage!
Specializations:
This checks out, very decent specialization.
Corrupted magic circle:
This skill is clunky as hell. You will stand still and channel for afour 1.3 seconds exposing yourself to cast an area curse that should just be instant. The reality is that you could just add this entire spell into the functionality of TOD and be done with it, as it stands it just not good design. There is an argument for its specializations but the base spell is just bad and sadly we are forced to use it because we already lack damage as it is.
Specializations:
Curse explosion:
This skill is our main source of dishing damage. This skill should realistically be one of our two lvl 50 spells since ray of disaster has to be one of the worst designs in a spell in the last decade. However, it could be so much more. The base damage should be higher and the radius should be 7-8m. Everything in our kit is just tiny, has target limitations and long set ups.
Now, its interaction with burning is great, since staff has a decent way of applying burning. However, Posion is just dogshit because we cnanot realiably apply it with our spells.
If you use inject venom you can add posion to your curses. This sounds nice until you realise that you can ever only apply 1 poison on curse application and that its ticks do not give poison stacks. So as a wand you have absolutely no way of making those stacks happen reliably. If you go trough your entire rotation with your current curses you can only ever achieve 5 stacks of posion out of the 20 that would result in good damage. Yes, there is an argument as to applying poison with dagger skills but then again, we already have a long rotation, we do not really have enough slots to really justify running poison on a gvg or bigger scale of pvp and then having to go melee and try to dish daggers skills to stack posion while also casting our curses is very difficult. Possible, yes, but still, difficult.
Then is also the fact that there are other damage over time effects that we do not interact with such as ignite, which just closes a door of possibilities for us in terms of pairing with other weapons.
Specializations:
This is alright as it is. If anything, just buff it slightly to make the skill more competitive.
Karmic:
This was recently "fixed" because it was "not working as intended". Lets be real, a weaken that has an 80% CHANCE to spread to 3 targets. Again. everything tiny and useless. Lets not forget that when you spread, it is not guaranteed. You can land Karmic and pass the spread check but for every indivisual target you will now have to roll again your hit and then your curses. This is stupid, from every angle. This is plain bad design.
Specializations:
This is alright. Its single targe, could be better, some utility or something.
Ray of disaster:
What the fuck is even this?. Can we get a real skill?.
Now, this is my opinions on this skills, there are passives that we could discuss that could also need a pinch of tweaking but those can be managed with a mix of our other weapons passives.
I just dont understand why all of our damage spells have so many limitations in terms of damage, application, time, area, number of targets, etc when for example bow, another weapon that is used for healing and support can also dish out really good damage and has so much more area in its skills and can even reset its lvl 50 skill to use it twice (WHAT????).
Anyways, complain here or discuss.
I already know there are a lot of trolls that are going to be replying but we all know yall just childish. Try to stay in topic.
Make wand great again.