In the late game (ie, DL 10+) I'm finding it difficult for craftable damage wands to justify their inventory space. Even with 7 Wandlore, a transmogrify wand can expend all its charges on a Muscle Diggle and not kill it. With Meatwands, I can kill one or maybe two basic mobs before exhaustion. Wands of Bling- they parcel out damage in 8 or 13 level increments for me. Laser Wands didn't impress me earlier in the game, and I haven't run across any recently. Gelatinous wands stopped being a useful damage dealer in the mid-game as well. My point? Well, what am I missing with the damage dealing wands? If you can use up a wands entire set of charges and still leave a basic mob standing, what scenario are they useful for late game? Is the original design intent of wands still being met? (If they aren't currently useful, maybe an additional scaler? Say Savvy, so Rogue's and Mage builds could get more bang for their buck.) But really, I'm hoping someone will point out what I'm missing so I can get more use out of them.
Lol. No. I find wands worthless before I reach level 8 or so. At least as a skill, wandlore seems broken to me. There are a few good wands, but they require what may as well be called unobtainium to craft. When I find a wand in the early game, if I do not need Zorkmids I use it up and discard it. By the late game I do not even pick up any but the best of them because I almost always have a better method to deal with what I contend with.
Pretty much what Omni said. IF you can find "high-level" wands early on, they deal okay damage (about on par with your long cooldown abilities/high mana spells), but this only lasts until Floor 5 or 6, at which point I MIGHT keep an AoE wand for Zoos, and simply ignore or sell the rest. Taking Wandcrafting and trying to craft the damn things is a cruel joke, sort of like how crafting Traps with Tinkering is. Playing Inventory Management Sim 2012™ for two hours in order to make a Wand of Laser? Yeah, a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Honestly, even with all the sort-of buffs that Wands have gotten in the last few patches, they continue to fail to impress me in any way, and I feel confident that I could play any character and if they never picked up a single Wand, I wouldn't even notice.
Yeah, I almost never use them after DL 7 or 8 or so unless it's something like a Wand of Bling that gives me stuff or a Tentacular Wand because those remain okay against bosses/golden halo dudes up until the endgame.
