Wand

A wand is a weapon that causes Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, Shadow or (in rare cases) Holy or Physical damage. They may be used by priests, mages and warlocks. There is no restriction on the damage type that can be wielded and used; you can use wands outside your native damage capabilities. No class that can use wands needs to train to use them. (See the Per Class Proficiencies table for who can use what weapons.)

Before the 1.5 patch, wands were often berated by the caster community, who felt they were basically useless thanks to low damage per second. But with 1.5, wand wielders gained the ability to autoshoot wands, increasing their DPS to the amount listed in the tooltip. This greatly improved their utility.

Details

• Wands are equipped in the ranged weapon slot, but they work at both ranged and melee distance.

• They are fast, and will often outperform a caster's melee weapons at melee range.

• Wands are also not affected by the [Disarm] attack.

• Wands are not interruptible. Most of your spells are, especially at low levels. (However, wands may or may not cease firing if hit by a stun)

• Wands use no ammo and no mana. They are typically used as a back-up for when you run out of mana. For low-level casters, a wand is often considered an effective means of killing a mob while saving their smaller mana pool for other spells, such as crowd control or healing.

• Shooting a wand does not count as casting, which means that mana regeneration occurs normally for you, but also that they are not benefited by potions and buffs that increase spell power.

• The relative value of using a wand vs casting diminishes as the caster gains talents that improve casting and remedy the same casting deficiencies that wands remedy (mitigating spell interruption, lowering mana costs, speeding up casting and cooldown).

• Many casters prefer to carry two or more wands of different damage types to match up with the target's vulnerability. The Arcane, Fire, and Shadow types are more common than Nature and Frost types. Holy damage wands are especially rare and valuable due to Holy's nature of not being subject to resistances.

• Higher level wands often have effects on attributes, resistance and spell power.

• The listed DPS on a wand will always be much higher than that on other weapons of comparable level. However, other weapon attacks benefit from statistics like attack power, while wands do not. It is always a significant DPS loss to use a wand instead of casting a damage spell. Wands are still useful while soloing at low levels, when mana pools run out quickly.

Wand Usage

To use a Wand

1. Equip a wand in your ranged weapon slot on the Character panel.
2. Move the 'Shoot' ability from the General Abilities tab of your Spellbook to a hot button on your button bar.
3. Target an enemy.
4. Push the Shoot button.

To stop using a Wand

To stop using a wand, do any of these:

• Use an ability.
• Take a few steps in any direction, or jump.
• Hit the Esc key.
• Click the fire button again.
• Right-click a mob (this should put you back into melee mode).
• Re-target a mob by pressing 'T' (assuming you have the default key shortcut).
• Activate an item.
• Use a /stopcasting macro.

Sources

• Most wands are drops or quest rewards. You will rarely see these at beginning levels. (The blood elf starting zone, Eversong Woods has a quest  [11] Zul'Marosh that rewards you with the choice of a [Hoodoo Wand]. The draenei starting zone, Azuremyst Isle has a quest  [10] The Prophecy of Akida that rewards you with the choice of a [Stillpine Stinger].)

• Most of first low-level arcane damage wands are made by Enchanters. These are one of the few items an enchanter can make and sell directly (these all Bind on Equip), so you should be able to find them in your auction house, often heavily discounted due to seller competition. These are all Uncommon Quality (Green) items, but note that unlike most green weapons, crafted wands cannot be disenchanted.

• There are also Common Quality (White) wands which can be purchased from wand vendors. None of these are available to a beginning (Level 1-10) caster. As white items, these cannot be disenchanted, but most do not bind (the only one that does is the Charred Razormane Wand) and can be resold or otherwise traded. There is a wand vendor in each capital city except Thunder Bluff and Darnassus, and also one in Shattrath City. (See Wand Vendors below) However, these wands are expensive, have no attributes, and are usually inferior to all other wands of a similar level.

Comparable examples of each kind:

• Dropped: [Blazing Wand]
• Crafted: [Greater Magic Wand]
• Vended: [Smoldering Wand]

Wands made by Enchanters

• [Lesser Magic Wand]
• [Greater Magic Wand]
• [Lesser Mystic Wand]
• [Greater Mystic Wand]

Wand Vendors

• Ardwyn Cailen <Wand Merchant> in Stormwind City
• Harick Boulderdrum <Wands Merchant> in Ironforge
• Katis <Wand Merchant> in Orgrimmar
• Muragus <Staff Merchant> in Orgrimmar
• Oss <Wand Vendor> in The Exodar
• Quelama Lightblade <Wand Vendor> in Shattrath City
• Sydney Upton <Staff Merchant> in Undercity
• Zane Bradford <Wand Vendor> in Undercity
• Zathanna <Wand Vendor> in Silvermoon City

Notable post-Burning Crusade wands

Holy damage wand

• [Wand of Cleansing Light], a drop from Sunwell Plateau

Wand talents

As of 3.0.2, none exist.

See also

• Getting your first wand