Is wand pve exclusive? (LLD)

I really want to make a stylish wand build but after some basic tests with a ele dmg crit shadow wand there seems to be abbbbbsssooolutely no point in doing so for several, well tons, of reasons.

No utility to skills. Power siphon? junk. How about something that gives endurance charges to compete with melee? There's absolutely no comparison in any way wand vs bow skills, whatsoever. Bows have utility skills such as puncture (huge), freezing arrows (huge), igniting arrows, explosive arrows, tornado shot (huge huge huge), where is the powerful wand skill? I feel like if melee can spectral throw then wands should have an alternative melee attack.

The cost is the same as a crit dagger build, meaning each slot on every piece of gear is incredibly important and therefore the price to craft/purchase wayyyy more than a basic build. For the rarity of this build the min/max output just isn't there.

I understand that wanders can use traps, but the kitability, consistent dmg, and utilization of equivalent meta skills just isn't there for wands. There are also relatively shitty wand nodes.. idk. Any thoughts?

Wands are not horrible. A guildmate is doing a phys-crit wand build in BL and the damage is insane. Kinetic blast has huge aoe and hits multiple times, you can cull your own frostwalls with power siphon to get power charges. Granted his survivability is not that great but it's a temp league and with better gear it would do better. Utility/movement wise it's far behind melee with wb/leap slam and ranged with blink arrow. So I guess a nerf for KB is in order ... :D

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dzordzo wrote:

Wands are not horrible. A guildmate is doing a phys-crit wand build in BL and the damage is insane. Kinetic blast has huge aoe and hits multiple times, you can cull your own frostwalls with power siphon to get power charges. Granted his survivability is not that great but it's a temp league and with better gear it would do better. Utility/movement wise it's far behind melee with wb/leap slam and ranged with blink arrow. So I guess a nerf for KB is in order ... :D

This is about PvP, not PvE...

I am talking about PvP tho ...

Wasted 4ex on multimods on Torment trying to make a wander work. It doesn't. :P


When I say "it doesn't work" I mean it's very flaky, can on occasion do a large burst of damage and 1-shot someone, but for the most part loses to top-tier builds.

Hi bigfoot,

at the moment it almost definitely is PvE exclusive and has been for some time, at least in my opinion/experience.

I started LLDing back in the days of release with a wand-witch, which sucked (lol). I learnt pretty quickly that for wands to be in any way able to kill players I had to go crit, so I tried around with several variations of shadow and ended up at a pretty good spot. Back at that time I used Elemental Hit, which resulted in a critchance of about 60%, over 300% critmulti and a screendps of 2.5k, which means my real dps was around 8-10k, depending on the added element. Additionally I had pretty reasonable defensive stats of about 35% block, maxed resists and about 1k life. My manapool was stable as manaregen covered my skillcost and I ran Clarity and Tempest Shield for auras. Then came the low-lvl Ele-Hit nerf and the aura changes which pretty much ruined the char and I am still a little mad at GGG about it, especially if I look at todays meta and the current top-skills.
Anyways, I mention this to show I speak from experience although it might be a little outdated. I don´t claim to be an expert on the current LLD meta, but I frequently try to reactivate my wander, only to run into the same problems over and over again. So I think I have pretty good idea of what the current state of wand-LLDers is.

Nowadays there are several problems that prevent a wander from being even mid-tier-viable from my understanding. Those are the lack of viable defensive concepts, the extreme lack of mobility, the low synergy between attack- and utility-skills and the absolutely insane required investment to make it even playable. Now when I speak of wander or wand character or sth like that I mean crit-wand-shadow as other chars/speccs simply won´t have the damage to kill anybody, so there is no real option here.

In my opinion a wand char suffers the most from the blocknerf, as you cannot get additional blockchance from the tree because A) there are no nodes on the way and B) you simply have no points. That means the nerfed Perandus block (no other shield is viable as you need the life, see below) has to be enough. Just compare that to a ranger or duelist who get additional dmg with their blocknodes which are on the way to either more damage or more defence, so they get additional block basically for free.
The same applies for Eva-Rating, which is hardcountered by RT anyways thus suboptimal in itself, as we neither have points left NOR any nodes on the way. Not speaking of armour, which is useless unless you stack crazy amounts, which isn´t possible on a shadow.
Therefor your best defence is HP, which is fine as you get a lot of Int on a crit-shadow so you can stack ES on gear (which is hardcountered by Chaos but Viperstrike is rare and weak. Another good lld build ruined. Yay for balance! Oh wait, there is Molten Strike so nvm) but your lifepool is rather small as you have restricted access to life nodes. Thus your main defence basically comes from gear alone, which means in itself that your options are limited.

Now you might say "well, you have a critbuild, so you need no defence when you can oneshot everybody" and while that is true sometimes, more often than not it isn´t. Your shots can be blocked, dodged, evaded or you could simply miss.
Pair that with desync...

...and an insane mobility of your opponents (WB, BA, Flicker and so on) and you have a hard time oneshotting people.

Speaking of mobility, we have our next problem at hand. Aside from Lightnig Warp we have no movement skill that is usable with our weapon (I will talk about that in the next paragraph) and weapon-switch is not always possible, so we have to walk. Therefor we need Movespeed. Mind you, we cannot get a lot of movespeed from the tree because no points and nearly nothing on the way. So we have to have movespeed on our boots, but if we go for ele-dmg (which imo is the way to go for acceptable dmg) we would miss out on Wakes, which is like a Wrath aura, and as we cannot use Wrath due to manacost we miss out on a lot of dmg when using rare boots. That leaves Quicksilver Flasks as our main way to gain mobility, but if we spam flasks for respositioning we might have no warding or staunching available when we need it to prevent death. Additonally, walking paired with a low life-pool leaves us extremely vulnerable to Bear Traps which as it so happens everyone and their dog uses. Just compare that to Blinkarrow, Leapslam or Flicker Strike and you see the clear disadvantage of a wander.

Now I mentioned a lot of skills but none of those, except Warp are even usable, let alone synergize, with our weapon. Ok, so we use Warp. But as Warp is a spell, it does not synergize with our build, as we cannot afford to get castspeed from the tree (barely any on the way and also no points). Thus, as we also might have Wakes equiped, our Warp takes ages and we are slower than anyone else. Same goes for trap clearers, because Arc does not synergize with our build and we have no trap-killing AoE-attack (which could potentially be suicidal, but that is not the point). The same applies to Curses (a problem we share with other attackbased chars) but we have it worse as our curse of choice is Assassins Mark because we need the damage. So CoH-corruption is out of the question (aside from not being affordable on legacy Maligaros anyways, because we would only use Eleweakness or Tempchains, so we are picky).

Speaking of legacy Maligaro´s, those are probably the most affordable piece of gear. We need near-perfect Life and ES on every piece and resists where possible, because we NEED Maligaros, Perandus, Fragments, more often than not Chayula and likely Wakes, thus we have few slots where we can go defensive. On those slots though we need high %WED on our belt and second ring, we need an Elreon mod on our ring for obvious reasons, we need flat light-, cold- or physical-damage on our ring (depending on the specc) and high Accuracy on our helmet. We also need at least a 5link chest or we don´t even need to start this build. Additionally we want high manaregen where possible. And ofc we want a Diamond Ring. The rares cannot be mastercrafted because we would miss out on a suffix which results in less resists or stats.

So much on my experience with wanders in LLD. Some of those problems can be overcome (gear-requirements/manaproblems and so on), some can be managed (damage, sometimes mobility) but others are simply back-breaking (huge mobility disparity, lack of synergetic skills, skill-shot mechanic). It is not worth trying in my opinion, because when you hit the wall after investing dozens of hours and multiple ex it is just disappointing and frustrating. Imo this is very sad as LLD wander is extremely fun and you can really stand out and be unique with your char, but it just does not work and you will look like an idiot in a mid- to top-tier-3v3, let alone a 1v1 against some high-end melee.

best regards


edit:
@ZenithStar: once the leagues merge I would REALLY like to try out that Empyrean Spell; that´s a crazy Ele-wand...

Well put man! I hope GGG reads that because we're missing a huge portion of diversity, style, and fun by ignoring wands. I've got a similar wand to his empyrean. It's t1 fire dmg but on carved wand (highest APS), it needs to be master crafted/modded but has insane potential.

After more testing and tossing lots of exalts at this build there is hope yet. Barrage is very powerful and can compete with and beat t1 builds. The biggest issue is that wanders can almost always get rounds drawn out or easily kited because of the lack of utility. Enabling WB, flicker, or leapslam with wands I think is essential to put this build on the same platform as the others floating around. My post was made a little hasty, this build is actually very very viable.

After doing team blitz, there was one guy, somethingsomething-truck, cant remember his name, and he was doing very well with kinetic blast. He was quite squishy though. I also saw him on wyncote's stream.

With proper gear I got 2k barrage dmg with 900 life. It's pretty intense.