As some immortals have pointed out, most wand discussions haven't been constructive. Many of the discussions have turned into bitch-fests and in other threads immortals have stated that they would be willing to consider wand-system ideas.

Please keep this thread devoted to wand ideas. If you want to point out a flaw in the current or a suggested wand system, that's fine, but try to come up with an idea for a way to fix that flaw.

I'll briefly gloss over some of the flaws that people bring up regarding the current wand system (whether I agree with them or not) and then under this post, I'll present some ideas in separate posts.

Some Flaws:
1. Many mage classes are not competitive solo without wands.
2. For veterans, the search for wands is boring. Players are forced to comb through areas they've been through dozens or hundreds of times
before and look at the same old things in order to find some new wand spot.
3. Because of the above, wand locations cater to OOC traded information. It's much easier to have 5 people combing areas and finding potential spots and sharing them than a single person. From personal experience, I can say that this does happen - although not in
a coordinated effort. You can't really fix this, because it also happens IC.


I'll start this thread off with a few ideas. Feel free to add your own or give suggestions/criticisms of the ideas.

There is already a thread going on this very subject.

This would help relieve the boring part of searching for wands. Rather than checking each and every room for the umpteenth time for new spots, you can run through areas and be competitive at a lower rank.

I realize that imms may not want people to have that sort of 'ease' at finding wands until they reach the hero ranks, but
the current system defeats that purpose because there are huge rewards for finding wands at a lower rank, causing players to
submit to a boring search and most of the time, causing them to get frustrated with the search.

Let's say that there's A Vorpal Sword of Player-Killing that randomly decapitates people and has an avg damage of 31.
(Never mind how unbalanced and game-breaking this would be.) It also either returns to its owner after death, or is easily
obtainable after the first time it's obtained. Now I as a player have a choice of spending 20 hours getting that sword at level 30 or 1 hour to get it at level 51. I guarantee you that you'll see pretty much every warrior spending those 20 hours getting that sword as soon as they hit 30.

That's what the situation is now with the 'detect aftifact' quest. Most players are going to start their wand search at
30 or 35 and get frustrated rather than wait until they've ranked up to 51.

Give mages another protection spell that's generic to all the wand users. It can be something like 30% damage reduction to all forms of damage and it can have a reuse timer that's twice the duration of the spell, so it can't be kept up 24/7.

All of the other wands would be reduced in effectiveness. Combining ABS + this new spell would have the same total damage
reduction as ABS currently has.

Like the other idea, this helps to fix the competitiveness problem some mages have.

Each mage would have aura, shield and barrier available to them at certain levels. Aura might be available at 30, shield at 40 and barrier at 50.

These spells would be just as powerful as they are currently, but would have usage restrictions / timers on them, and they would require more time to prep with than using wands.

1. Each of these spells would take 4 rounds of lag instead of the normal holding wands + 2 rounds of zap lag.

2. The durations of each of these spells would be significantly less than their sleek durations. Barrier may only last for 2 hours maximum. Also, consider that with the additional prep lag, you're wasting a lot of that time if you decide to use all 3.

3. A reuse timer on these spells. Give the user half a day or or a full day after each of these spells before they can reuse
them.

4. Can't use these spells in combat, but you can still cast them, much like teleport.

The rest of the wand system would remain as it currently is and having these wands is still a boon to the mage due to the
restrictions on wands. But this will at least give mages a way to prep for some fights without being completely reliant on
wands.

It also increases the tactics players can use against them. A four round lag is nothing to sneeze at, and if you manage to
catch a mage with while they're prepping, that's a lot of time to do significant damage to them. Stunning a mage or drawing
out a fight is another way you could combat these new versions of the preps.

This doesn't fix the problems associated with finding wands, but it does fix the competitiveness problem while giving other
classes means of combating this new power.