Majority of mage classes, combos, definately will need ABS to be viable. Maybe not viable when compared to newbie, uncabaled, melee classes, or Heralds, but agaisnt any prep-using, battle, skilled foe, wands are nessesity.

In response to Mekantos: All this change will do is make the majority of vets have to put in hours of area searching before they can jump in and enjoy the game. Realizing most people 'hanging on' to CF for the glory days, probably won't want to do this...it will probably have a negative effect.

Just keep doing what I do. Every single mage character you meet, give them every single wand location you have learnt so it becomes common knowledge. There is nothing elitist or special in hoarding knowledge. If you can make the game fun and on even terms for everyone, then we might do something about these crappy numbers and the trend for people to quit playing CF.

Things like making practicing/learning rates harder, getting rid of preps or making them limited, mixing wands up, are cool I guesss, but again they don't really add to the fun factor of playing a text based game.