A wand is a ranged weapon that causes Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, Shadow or (in rare cases) Holy or Physical damage. They may be used by priests, mages, and warlocks. There is no restriction on the damage type that can be wielded and used; you can use wands outside your native damage capabilities. No class that can use wands needs to train to use them. Wands can autoshoot, but unlike a melee auto-attack, a wand attack can be interrupted by certain disabling offensive strikes and will not re-engage until the player activates it again.
Wands will work at both ranged and melee distance. They are fast and will often outperform a caster's melee weapons at melee range. Wands are not affected by Disarm.
Shooting a wand does not require ammo or mana, and it does not count as casting, which means that mana regeneration occurs normally. This also means that they do not receive benefit from spell power. They are typically used as a back-up for when the player runs out of mana, or as minor damage dealing without generating too much threat. For low-level casters, a wand is often considered an effective means of killing a mob while saving their smaller mana pool for other spells, such as crowd control or healing.
The listed DPS on a wand will always be greater than on other weapons of comparable level. However, other weapon attacks benefit from statistics like attack power, while wands do not. It is always a significant DPS loss to use a wand instead of casting a damage spell.
Use of a wand[]
To use a wand:
- Equip a wand in your ranged weapon slot on the Character panel.
- Move the 'Shoot' ability from the General Abilities tab of your Spellbook to a hot button on your button bar.
- Target an enemy.
- Push the Shoot button.
To stop using a wand, do any of these:
- Use an ability.
- Take a few steps in any direction, or jump.
- Press the Esc key.
- Click the fire button again.
- Right-click a mob (this should put you back into melee mode).
- Re-target a mob by pressing 'T' (assuming you have the default key shortcut).
- Activate an item.
- Use a /stopcasting macro.
Sources[]
- Most of first low-level arcane damage wands are made by Enchanters. These are one of the few items (other than Enchants) an enchanter can make and sell directly (these all Bind on Equip), so you should be able to find them in your auction house, often heavily discounted due to seller competition. These are all Uncommon Quality (Green) items, but note that unlike most green weapons, crafted wands cannot be disenchanted.
- There are also Common Quality (White) wands which can be purchased from wand vendors. None of these are available to a beginning (Level 1-10) caster. As white items, these cannot be disenchanted, but most do not bind (the only one that does is the Charred Razormane Wand) and can be resold or otherwise traded. There is a wand vendor in each capital city except Thunder Bluff and Darnassus (See Wand Vendors below) However, these wands are expensive, enhance no attributes, and are usually inferior to all other wands of a similar level.
Made by Enchanters[]
Vendors[]
- Ardwyn Cailen <Wand Merchant> in Stormwind City
- Harick Boulderdrum <Wands Merchant> in Ironforge
- Katis <Wand Merchant> in Orgrimmar
- Muragus <Staff Merchant> in Orgrimmar
- Sydney Upton <Staff Merchant> in Undercity
- Zane Bradford <Wand Vendor> in Undercity
Patch changes[]
- Patch 1.5.0 (patch date:2005-06-07): The Shoot Wand ability is now a toggle. While active, it will continue attacking with the equipped wand until cancelled (e.g. moving).
See also[]
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