I both love and hate the wand system.

Love it because I have hit the ABS lottery on a couple of characters, and it made those characters pretty successful I think. They could certainly hold their own and go into most PK situations without worrying too much about dying. These are the characters I played out to 400+ hours and kept me interested in the game.

I hate it, because on another 15 or so "unsuccessful" characters, I could only find 1 (or in some cases none) of my ABS wands, causing me to lose interest and give up on otherwise viable characters after frustration sets in at the 100 hour mark. For these characters, every fight was a struggle since I was always up against foes that had the damage resistance, while I had to burn limited wands or avoid them entirely. Or I can dump tons of points into attunement edges and feel like I crippled my character that way.

That's at least 1000 hours of being cursed with poor ABS locations, or no locations at all, and it really kills my desire to play considering my already limited time.

I didn't mind sinking that trial and error exploration time in when I was failing out of college and grouped with mortal versions Twist or Nep or even Strahd back in the old days, but nowadays I can't commit to the thousands of hours it would take to get me on par with the people who share the lists and have the knowledge about these kinds of secrets.

I'm not sure what the solution is, as it's a pretty big part about why we all love CF in that it's so rich in detail and rewarding of exploration and persistence. But to keep the interest and appeal of an aging and dwindling player base, I think eventually some compromises are going to have to be made to narrow the gap between the knowledgable "Elites" and the casual players who just need to escape from the real world a few hours a week.