Wands and their limited utility

[vain163]

So wands, they are neat and have a ton of potential to change play styles as well as make some the best tools in the game. But at this current time they are greatly limited and patchy as to how they work. To start i want to discuss whats currently available and then what i would like to see.

Starting with offence your choices are a wand that deal 10 damage at what you point at, which will not make it hostile to you, or a shield that will add 9 damage to your attacks for 3 seconds but only if you actually block an attack, and that's the end of offensive magics currently as long as we exclude leveling weapons.

Under utility there is a shield that when you block against an enemy, they are weakened losing about 8 damage. This is the end of utility.

Under defense you have a wand that gives you 6 hearts or 12 HP of soul hearts, which have 5 charges and recharges every 3 seconds, which means you will not be dying while using it unless your one shot. A shield that every 15 seconds you gain 4 soul hearts, which is slower than the wand by a lot, less HP, but fully auto. And lastly a shield that will recover 1 heart every 2 seconds, which has is uses but overall is not that great.

A great addition to offence is more damage types, such as an aoe damage based on self or target, as in raining arrows or ghast balls or fire charges or even blaze fireballs. Ranges of damage would also make a nice goal, as having 10 damage or nothing is kind of boring, so having damage that ranges from a faster attack spam of 5 to a much harder hitting but slow 75.

In the utility book for wands i think we need more variety to annoy, trap, move, and abuse enemies. To start things out I would like to see a single target extreme slow wand as well as an area of effect spell to reduce the speed moderately. A teleportation wand (ender pearl to location or a tp command). Speed boost self and others wand, healing wand for allies, and an aoe healing spell similar to lingering regen pot or a splash healing. A snaring wand that spawns a cobweb on an enemy or even on a block would be amazing for traps, though it would need to also remove it after a set time to keep maps clean. A wand of knockback would be very fun and funny, but useful for squishy mages. Levitation wands for either you or the enemy to restrict their movement. A wand that lets you build temp walls or even fence circles would be great. Out of combat I would love a more expensive wand that allows you to spawn source water and lava blocks, set off a firework bundle, apply glowing on someone, effect bonemeal and aoe bonemeal, and lastly make magic good berries (dnd meme).

And in defensive wands, i would love to see more resistance wands again to self and target at different levels such as oak skin (resist 1) and stone skin (resist 2), maybe a encase in ice wand allowing you to be immune to most damages while regening hp, a ward wand allowing for a shorter but stronger temp HP boon (maybe give +12 absorption hearts and resistance 1 but have it last 5 seconds), a cleansing wand to remove all potion effects, and lastly a agro wand to agro all nearby enemies to you.

 

[EtingPotatos]

I could definitely do some of these wands, granted a reason I haven't made more wands is cause I wanted to avoid making wands like the shield wands in the case that you effectively "regen" 6 hearts ever 3 seconds. In fact I think there was a change to its recharges from 1 every 3 seconds to 1 ever 5 seconds

Anyways, I will mention what I think could be easily possible, and what might be limited
-- Easy/Doable in time --
Offensive:
More Damage wands with different damage, recharge, and max charges to add a range between heavy hitting and rapid fire typed wands

Utility:
Teleportation Wand is simple enough, just need to experiment a bit
Buff wands, like Speed or Regen for directly self or others would be simple
Levitation Wands, so I assume just apply Levitation 1 to the target? cause if so, simple af
Knockback wand, there's two ways to go about this, either Knockback enchant 100+ OR did you know there a knockback stat for attributes?
Bonemeal wand, just very possible, would have to check now
Water, Lava, Firework, and Glow wands very possible. would just need to tune the details for it

Defensive:
Resistance Wands, easy but its probably gonna have a long recharge
Ice wand, the "look" of being frozen in place might be hard to do but the rest is just a combo of Slowness 100, Resistance 5, and Regen 3
Cleanse wand, easy recharge is up for debate
Ward wand, interesting trade compared to the other wand, should be doable

-- Limited/Possible? --
Before I mention the limits directly, just know AOE stuff directly with wands is hard. There can be a target distance but not a radius for the effect. A work around I've found and some of you might have played with are the summons, summons can have more interesting skills like AOE
Offensive:
AOE Damage wands, It would have to be in the form of a summon that itself does the AOE attacks target towards mobs

Utility:
Trap wands, more summons, summons could literally place traps or something similar, god I wish we could do this directly
AOE Buff wands, again to before, a summon that does the AOE buff that targets players in a certain range
Cobweb wand, might be very possible, reason in Limited section is that clean up of the cobweb might not work as intended
Wall wand, similar to cobweb, just that the targeting and clean up is even more concerning here

Defensive:
Taunt Wand, can you guess what I'ma say it would do at this point if it's limited, did you say Summon? cause you would be right, granted then that means I would have to configure all the dame threat settings for all the PvE mobs to follow that stuff which would be a pain. Just wanted to point that its possible and that the wand would then just summon a mob that's always at the top of all mobs threat list