So after reading my imm comments and realizing the imms hated me, I thought I would redeem myself.

My understanding is this, ignoring idiots wanting extremes:

Players:
semi-instant gratification, that is, dont wanna look for 40 hours
dont want spots "too hard"
feel too weak without abs

Imms:
exploration, searching
Dont have them 24/7
Risk
Dont want to homogenize everything
Competition

Now then, my suggestion:

Create -wand fragments- placed in the sleek locations that everyone can see.

These will be new items that are essentially sleek wands, but have only a fraction of the duration (1-2 hours), and only one charge. What this will do is allow you to go to a spot, grab the fragment, and then if you meet arial dagger/mace berserker #783732 on eastern, you can zap yourself with it and have a full shield or barrier etc for a short duration. That satisfies both exploration and instant gratification.

Now then, as you say to yourself "thats too easy to farm!" theres a catch in that the respawn on each fragment is pretty long, and everyone can grab them, so people will camp the easy spots, leading to competition, risk, etc.

Moving further, you can save up a couple wand fragments and combine them into a sleek wand. These sleek wands will be the same as they are now, maybe with a few more charges. However, once you have a sleek wand, you cant collect any more wand fragments of that type until you use it up. This satisfies not having it 24/7.

What all this will do is prevent mages from hitting 36 and saying "lolz demon didnt have my black, peace out lolz," while still making people use every wand location in order to have a supply of fragments.

Thats about it. Detect artifact would still be useful in the sense you can know if X mage has a fragment.