Ranged wands

I was thinking it would be fun if certain wands, perhaps just ones with projectile spells (icicle, flame arrow, magic missile), had the ability to hit at distance like fired weapons.  Most wands aren't really worth using at 50, since you need to have a free hand and it's usually better for a Mage to use their own stronger, higher-level spells.  Giving them the ability to hit at range might make them more useful.  Thoughts?

It's an interesting idea.  I would think you'd need a new spell to fulfill that purpose however or else it'd make the normally casted icicle/flame arrow/mm comparatively weaker.  Just for clarification, did you mean that you still held the wand in your offhand and zapped from a distance or would the wands be treated like bows and worn on the ranged slot?

I think making wands a main hand weapon w/ no melee stats, with weak avg damage, and bad weapon matchups but still carry charges would be interesting.  Staves would be counted as a staff w/o melee stats.

I was thinking zap from a distance, not true ranged weapons, but really either could be an idea.  I like the idea of making some weak auto fire weapons that parry terribly (to make sure we're on the same page, it would have no melee attack, would parry like or maybe even worse than a whip, but it would auto cast a weaker flame arrow or whatever every round until it ran out of charges) - it would give Mages a much-appreciated greater variety of weapon options.  Even DKs could get in on the fun and dual a wand.

Very interesting, if rough, idea.  I like it so far, though.

Just to verify, can I get an Imm to state that no wand of fireballs exists anymore. Because it would need to go.

As long as we could not return fire with wands, its actually a beneficial step for our current melee oriented playstyle.

Perhaps we could modify the way wands work as well.

The spells attached to wands have a set level. I believe if the spell is in the casters repertoire then it should cast at the characters caster level.

Actually maybe we should alter this to affect other spell stored items as well, scrolls and staves.

Object 'wand' is type wand, material wood.

Extra flags: magic.

Weight is 4, value is 3800, level is 14.

Has 1 charges of level 14 'fireball'.

Introduce a spell 'Floating wand' where your wand can float beside you vs having to hold it, this would make it more useful.

We could always let wands be stowed in an equipment slot and zapped from that position.  Like a form of doublesheath but only for wands or again slot it in the ranged/float (like @sarcon mentioned) slots.  I mean you'd have to give up that slot anyway to have the wand ready.

@PaliThat idea of casting a weak spell but no melee is pretty interesting.  I mean certain wands could fire off at different intervals, like once a round or once every other round.  I'd imagine that the spells are weak enough that a sanc and decent aff saves would only do a low amount of damage.

I was thinking more like a low avg. damage hitting wands that still carried their charges.  A flame arrow wand would do a flame type melee attack, a non-elemental wand could do a generic magic melee attack, and so forth.  Not like we're really worried about getting meleed to death by a wand.  Though this would make wands more vulnerable to being disarmed, which I think is a good check.

I really like these ideas, I think this would really be a good additional to help out mage players.