Can someone persuade me this is a good skill to use in a build? It seems much weaker than the other crafting skills, for several reasons: 1. Direct attack wands don't seem that good late game, given the faff of crafting them. You'd be better off with a real spell, generally. 2. The stat boosts granted by Wandcrafting aren't that spectacular. 3. The real killer though is that I can get 3 from items (and the Hat of Bergstrom in particular seems to be ubiquitous). At that level you can make most wands, including Zodiacal and Coral, which are arguably the most powerful. There's also the Rogue Scientist skill, which covers for most of your needs in AND , as well as doing a bunch of other cool stuff. All I can think of is a real Mad Science build, making heavy use of Wands of Transmogrification...
Hmm, how about this: Rogue Scientist Tinkering Wandcrafting Alchemy Perception other skills to taste With the first three skills maxed out, a Wand of Transmogrification does (70 + 0.2 x ), plus it drops ores. You need some resources to make the wand, of course, but they shouldn't be too difficult to come by with this build. Lots of ore means extra potions and crossbow ammo. Wandcrafting also adds 30 to your Aetheric Death Ray. One thing I think the Wand Lore tree could do with is a way of getting better use out of random wands you find lying around, which are mostly junk in the middle and late game. 'Turn a wand into a random different wand' is a bad idea because it breaks the crafting system, but for instance you could have an ability that lets you drain a wand for mana.
theres a few wands which are useful all game (although their wand levels are pretty low for crafting): coral stone (or is it rock? i always confuse the two. the one which makes a wall) Zombie uh the one which entangles enemies (brain not working atm) handy wand gelatinous wand (if you have good stats to scale it) zodiacal (less appealing i think that is more than enough utility to warrant taking it on its own.
It's only really worthwhile if you're playing a non-melee Necronomiconomics character as Really Holy Shield, Coral Wand and Zodiacal Wand, not to mention all the other encrusts, are pretty sweet. Although you're probally better off with alchemy and... yeah it's just bad. Actually I'm toying with the idea of a modskill that's surpossed to make Wand Lore and Aetheric Death Ray playable by having a number of skills meant to scale with , it's still only on the planning stage and it'll stay there untill I figure out where my mod directory went, got a new PC and it's confusing.