Wands tend to drop off after a couple of floors simply because they don't do as much damage as you'd need. The only wand that does a large amount of single-target damage is Transmog, and only if you have a crafter's build heavily into tinkering and smithing with maxed out CK and Rogue Scientist. Utility wands are also in short supply. My suggestions therefore are: 1. Rebalance wand damage as a whole by making them all scale better to wand lore/magic power 2. Introduce more utility wands (Wand of digging, wand of teleport for instance) 3. High-level combat wands (Wand of Tactical Pyre also doing 3x , Wand of Corprus Burst, etc.) Just putting it out there for the devs to take note.
You know, people stopped complaining about wands after a few balance patches, so I presumed they felt wands were fine. I've personally always liked wands, and not being a true min/maxer I don't have the to figure out what's really underpowered or overpowered (with the exception of Egyptian Magic, which was reeeeeeeally obvious when I used it). That said, I think we should first give all wands their own unique spell effect, so as to give every wand scaling. And it should be good scaling too, to make skilling the tree quite lucrative and powerful. I haven't touched Encrusting yet, and I've heard it has some good ones. That's good, but how about some other things craftable by Wand Lore? I'd personally rather see wands become more powerful than wand lore getting more non-wand recipes, to be honest. Why not beef up wands, and make them rarer? That would make the skill important for accessing such devastating devices.
The problem here is the spawning doesn't quite scale right for wands. I would expect Tentacular and Transmog wands to spawn in deeper in the dungeons, ~floor 6 or floor 7 onward for instance. And then we need a higher level variant of Tentacular which casts Tenebrous Rift instead of a squid bolt effect. A coral wand giving out medium regen instead of minor spawning at about the same dlvl on. A wand that can cast The Stars Aligned. You can really do so much more with wands than what they are at now. I can see the next x-pack before my eyes: Dungeons of Dredmor - Wands R Us. (or insert other witty title here)
I don't like that wands are just "Spells on a stick." Why not make more unique wands? I'm fine with a few that are copies, but they should have their own spell effect so that they're copies that scale off of . Otherwise, that's not a bad line of thinking. An improved version of coral wand would be nice. How about one that restores mana, or both health and mana?
Oh man, I would love to see Coral Healing scale to , that would be fantastic. Or even just craft-only "greater" wands, which you can only make with wandcraft. And (though this would be significantly harder to code) the ability to encrust wands with on-cast buffs would be awesome. The new + wandcrafting crusts all look nuts, but, yeah, I'd love to see some more good wands, not just more free bonuses to the wandcrafting skill that just make the wands themselves look weak by comparison.
What wands really need is more functionality. So far they can only target creatures, blockers, and the player. If wands could target walls or the floor, we would see modders making more interesting wands.
Yes. This. I love wands but they could use a little more flexibility...it would at least give them more life past the first few floors. That said, though...wands have saved my ass many times. Especially against boss monsters. They are severely underrated.
Same here! Things like Arcane Wand and Wand of Laser are great rank-and-file killers (though Laser has no scaling despite a 4 and hefty resource requirement... this is very egregious, even with its high amount of charges) while Fiery wand and Tentacular wand both beat the snot out of tougher opponents. Wands aren't really consistent damage output given their crafting requirements. Piracy is practically a must to take advantage of it. But this would be fine, if wands were devastating to compensate. But running with the sentiment that wands are underrated, I feel small buffs are in order: specifically, more scaling on wands, and more lategame stuff.
We also need more wand because there isn't enough stuff in wandcrafting. IIRC There are hardly any wands that require more than the third level to produce, (and the skill doesn't have a particularly large number of possible encrusts either
wands are nice early game but get outclassed hella fast by xbows specially with the bolt erruptor,at they also save inventory space!
I think that would result in an even worse problem: Where people hoard wands and are hesitant to use them "just in case". Past a certain point, consumables in a video game become Too Awesome to Use
Given the nature of this game, I don't think that's a problem. Or rather, it's already so ridiculously common that it's accepted as natural course. Come on. You mean to tell me you don't hoard buff 'shrooms and potions? Even if you don't, that just proves the point that the trope is entirely subjective, and really not that important for consideration of balance changes. I believe "Too Awesome to Use" is only valid if there never comes a time when you should use it. But in DoD, the use of such powerful wands will come often. It's pretty easy to see a named monster and go "Yup! That's the one I'm gonna blow a few charges of this thing on. That thing is gonna burn." BRN.
Why yes, I do. When they have the same effect as one of my skills (in which case they always get used whenever I need to use something like that skill but the skill is still on cooldown) or when they give me healing (or mana, as needed) and food just doesn't cut it anymore. Other than that, elemental potions for monster zoos and large bolts/throwables too (whenever I need to use them, I just use the weakest I can, but since most of my builds have Tinkering and Perception, I can just make more if necessary and thus am not afraid to use stronger ones). Oh, and stacks of traps that I unload on monster zoo (on the same floor) monsters while cackling like a maniac. There will always be people who will hoard stuff and die with more items than most Pharaohs ever had. But that's their decision, really.
I often feel this way with Holy Hand Grenades, Bolts of Mass Destruction, Clockwork Sawblades, and Squid Bolts. They aren't necessarily overpowered, but by the end of the game I have 100000000 of them when I really only need 50. Wish there was some more incentive to use them, to really have a tight game where you use up everything and sometimes even have to struggle a little. But I could just be an outlier, since the vast majority of Dredmor players have not beaten both Going Rogue and Dwarven Moderation like I have.
But can everyone refrain from doing something dumb that they regret? Worse yet, can everyone refrain from doing something dumb that they don't regret? Because that's the deadliest mistake.
Does using a sub-optimal build count as being dumb, then? There's quite a few wizard builds that I've blasted through GR with on, but I'm struggling to make any kind of melee warrior work well.
It's not being dumb. It's just doing something dumb, if you're absolutely trying to win. However, this isn't a competitive game; I can't fault anyone for doing sub-optimal things if it's in the name of fun, because that's really the goal here. However, when it comes to balance, people generally think competitively, for the sake of balance. Because if things are balanced competitively, they'll probably be balanced for fun-havers, for the most part.
If you don't like wands, I can understand. But it's a bit of a strech to say they arent effective piracy roguescientist wands alchemy has a ton of synergy. Throw in alchemy gem transmutation and you have nearly unlimited access to any type of wand, in addition, you can max out the aetheric death ray spell.
You should know that this is my most commonly build played. Alongside Tinkering, Crossbow, and a magic tree. Started with Psionics, now I generally use my mod's tree.
