>I'll be honest, when people say put something in the Tower of
>Sorcery, I just assume we may as well put it in Galadon.
>There is no risk, no difficulty at all with that.

Different kind of risk. The risk being that it's a fairly well-known place where thieves and assassins can hide.

>So it enables a second system based on gathering coin instead
>of exploring areas (which I'd argue, gathering coin is really
>easy).

Regardless of how easy or hard gathering coin is, you'd set the wand costs such that:

"effort of gathering AMBER-PRICE" = "slightly more than the effort of killing current-system AMBER-MOB".

The up-side to buying your wand is that you don't have to pay the up-front cost of finding the wand-mob. The down-side is that it's going to cost you more time/effort "per wand" to buy one than it would cost you to kill the wand-mob, if you knew where it was.

>How exactly does this encourage character longevity?

Older character -> higher haggle percentage -> cheaper wands.

>Honestly I think that if these things were going to be for
>sale, it wouldn't be all of them, and the prices would be
>fairly prohibitive.

That's the way it is now, afaik. I think certain sleek wands are for sale in the HTOS for prohibitive prices. Nobody buys them because, if one DOES know a large set of potential of sleek locations, it's quicker to pay the large "up front" cost of checking them all, then have a lower per-wand cost for the rest of the character's life.

>I think a new player who struggles
>searching through areas is going to have the same troubles
>gathering enough coins.

My thinking was that "gold gathering" is a skill most players have to some degree or another. "Knowing a bunch of wand locations" is something only serial mage players have.

>I agree that allowing bartering for wands is going to
>encourage more looting. I'm curious what your definition of
>"powerful magic item" is.

It would depend. Maybe based it on the item level and/or item limit? Have it take more rare/high-level items to get barrier, compared to aura/shield?