Fixing Wand Use Tree

Wand Lore is a pretty cool skill tree - but level 2 and 4, which increase your "Wand Use Affinity" are a joke. Wands are totally unreliable, even for folks who specialize in them.

Here's my suggestion: change what "Wand Use Affinity" as a stat means:

Wand Use Affinity: A wand cannot burn out while its current Entropy is less than or equal to its Entropy Build-Up rate multiplied by the user's Wand Use Affinity.

At level 2 give +1, and another +1 at level 4. This means that at level 2 a player is guaranteed to get 1 uses out of a wand, before needing to recharge it. At level 4 a player is guaranteed to get 3 uses. This would make Wand Use Affinity really cool - and a good thing to get as a bonus from Krong, even if you didn't have the Wand Lore skill tree.

 

Yeah, having a whole tree that relies on the idea of "beating" the RNG which will, without fail, burn out your best wand when you fire it with 2 Entropy, is a pretty awful tree. Couple that with the fact that having more points in the Wand Use stat ends up conferring no real benefit (I love when Krong "blesses" my items with it), and Mr_Stranges's ideas become even more appealing.

 

^^ This. It happened to me, literally. I had +4 Wand Affinity from maxing out Wand Lore and a very strange artifact ring, and I was all booyah on having a Wand of Laser that had a net Burn Rate of 1. I Polished my Rod, shot my load once...and it went down and refused to come back up.

I'm all for Mr_Strange's suggestion for that reason alone.

 

That's not how it works. Burn Rate shows the net burn rate, not the gross. It is capped to a minimum of 5 which makes it useless. If you noticed it gained 5 entropy not one. Wand lore maxed gives +6 not +4 btw.

Instead of saying it can't burn out with less than that, why not subtract it, that way the percent means more when there's a high wand affinity. Otherwise you'd have one that would immediately burn out once it got at all over your limit, if it had a high enough burn rate, and another slightly lower that would burn out immediately. So it's not 90% versus 60% when it's past affinity it's 15% versus 10%.

Of course with making it work like this the boosts from wand use would have to be a bit lower.

 

The basic problem with wands right now is that players don't like to use an item that has an unknown number of uses. Devoting 1/7th of your character to wands is submitting to the RNG in a big way, since not only do you have to find the right wands (admittedly ameliorated by the Rhabdomantic Hacking ability), but also you have to have those wands not burn out on you when you need them most. That's why you see most people recommending Wand Lore as a get-past-level-1 skill, never using a wand unless it has 0 entropy (and is thus guaranteed to not burn out), and basically abandoning wands after that point.

Of course, if wands were reliable, they'd probably be overpowered...

 

Ooh - I really like the clarity of what you're saying. Let me amend my previous suggestion:

Wand Use Affinity: Wands burn out as if their entropy was (Wand Entropy - Wand Use Affinity).

Level 2: +10
Level 4: +10 (total of 20)

This means at level 4, a wand with 20 or less entropy could not burn out on the next shot.

At level 2, you would be guaranteed to have 2 shots from a Wand with build-up entropy of 5. That method of phrasing it is much more clear, and still makes wands with lower entropy build-up more valuable to players, which was an oversight in my original suggestion.

 

I will think about putting points in for something like this. A 5 burnout coral wand literally means reliable 5 use before recharge (or 115 HP per 80 steps) and every wand is a coral wand.

I actually hardly see that recommendation anymore. Yes it's primary perk is get you through level 1, but it is also recognized as the most powerful 0 point skill. It provides healing (coral), status recovery (zodiac), and burn (tentacle) with no level investments. Burnout doesn't matter that much as long as you got a spare. It's sorta like astrology where it's pick for the first skill and nothing more.

Although level 3 wand lore does provide re-rolling for lots and lots of corals.

 

Taking the randomness out of Wands is no fun. Why even have 'entropy' if players never use wands that are above their 'burn limit'? Might as well give up and change to a traditional 'charges' system.

If I were reworking Wand Lore I'd just take the sting out of burning out. Permanently losing a wand because you dared to use it outside of the safe zone is a bit harsh. Players should be able to recover burned out wands - the question is at what price. Here's two ideas I've had:

Idea #1

• Make 'Wand Hack' respark burned out wands (in addition to randomizing them)
• Allow players to respark burned out wands by dipping them in Wishing Wells

The idea is that players have two choices/playstyles when they burn out a wand. Either adapt by submitting to the Random Number God and taking whatever new wand he gives you or stow away your wand until you find a well. Prevents consequence-free wand spam but takes away the horrible risk of losing your only Coral/Tentacle wand forever.

Idea #2

• Move 'Rod Charge' from the first skill to the last skill
• Make 'Wand Hack' the starting skill and let it respark burned out wands
• Add way more wands

Wands become the 'random' skill. You might start the game with a Tentacle Wand, breeze through the first few rooms before burning out. Now you're stuck with a Handy Wand - it has good crowd control but your other skills have to pick up the slack in killing power for awhile. Your wand keeps changing and you have to change with it!

(I prefer #2 but I guess I just really want a 'random' skill)