TOPIC: Healing wands

So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

Matthew Hayward wrote: Chargeless wands got me excited about wands

Same here. I've been playing TD since 2011, but played a wizard for the very first time this year (and had a lot of fun doing it) in part because choosing wizard no longer feels like a commitment to use a bunch of consumables. It seems more akin to fighters not having to permanently expend their weapons (even thrown ones).

I agree healing wands in particular would be tricky, but I'm very glad to have reusable combat wands and would be sad to see them go away again.

FiannaTiger wrote: So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

I would prefer wands remain slotless, I think limiting wands would nerf mystic mouth.

Wayne Rhodes wrote:

FiannaTiger wrote: So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

I would prefer wands remain slotless, I think limiting wands would nerf mystic mouth.

I can see that but I can also see that combat will rarely go over 5 rounds. From my understanding Mystic Mouth is best used if you only use it to add 1 wand damage to a round as a free action. Yes you could use 2 wands in round 1 then 1 more every round after or 2 wands every 2 round and cast on odd rounds. Both would get you to 6 wand uses over 5 rounds.

I've mostly played wizard. I've still mostly played normal difficulty. I never used a wand until chargeless. I used to carry around scrolls but wouldn't even remember I owned wands. I'm not a fan of the chargeless wands, but I understand how it's far better to make tokens people actually use rather than ones they, at best, mulch. There's constraints with TD on design space that are rather major. Having Mystic Mouth be worth running is a variant build and TD could use a lot more variant builds.

And, it should be a healing staff or a healing rod. While a bit thematically weird, have the staff or rod check off spell boxes to be used, so it becomes kind of like a Charm of Spell Swapping in actual use. Or, since someone thought the idea of using monster bits to activate a token was cool when 2018 tokens were being discussed, power a healing device off of consuming monster bits. Yes, none of this is anything remotely like the latest wands, but, then, I don't feel a need for a healing "wand".

FiannaTiger wrote:

Wayne Rhodes wrote:

FiannaTiger wrote: So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

I would prefer wands remain slotless, I think limiting wands would nerf mystic mouth.

I can see that but I can also see that combat will rarely go over 5 rounds. From my understanding Mystic Mouth is best used if you only use it to add 1 wand damage to a round as a free action. Yes you could use 2 wands in round 1 then 1 more every round after or 2 wands every 2 round and cast on odd rounds. Both would get you to 6 wand uses over 5 rounds.

From the players handbook page 40

Instantaneous Actions
This isn’t a true action, but under certain circumstances—typically as a reaction to another event and often not on your turn—you can perform something that takes no time whatsoever. Generally speaking, you can’t perform an instantaneous action without the use of a spell or a token. Here are a few examples of instantaneous actions:
• Declaring guard
• Polymorphing
• Swapping or retrieving a non-slotted item

My understanding is since wands are non-slotted that you can use 2 wands a round of combat with mystic mouth. Even if technically you are doing the Instantaneous Actions While the monster is doing its attacks.

I think you have to consider two things here:

1. We were warned that chargless wands would obsolete direct damage scrolls (and they did).
2. Chargless healing wands during combat would wreck havoc with the power creep.

If we bring back healing wands I would suggest they can only be used outside of combat and make them charged. Outside of combat a punch is not an issue.

Ed

Honestly at this point I'd just as soon avoid healing & AoE wands all together.

Wayne Rhodes wrote: My understanding is since wands are non-slotted...

But they’re not non-slotted. You have to equip them in your main hand to use (that’s exactly what MoMM says on the token and in the TokenDB)

I like the idea of crossing off a a cantrip to use a wand. I’ll still use my +10 from Eldritch, but Normal players trading a 1-point heal to power a 5-point wand seems okay.

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Wayne Rhodes wrote: My understanding is since wands are non-slotted...

But they’re not non-slotted. You have to equip them in your main hand to use (that’s exactly what MoMM says on the token and in the TokenDB)

Ok so I missed the part of being slotted to the main hand. I had thought they were slottless like scrolls. I was mistakenly thinking that only weapons were slotted the main hand.

No big deal just means first round wand wand, second round spell wand, and so on.

I did play this wrong at gencon and origins this year totally miss understanding it. And non of the GMs seemed to understand it either that I ran into.

It didn’t seem over powered even using it wrong as compared to most high level wizard builds. But going forward I’ll start using it right. I may buy some charged wands too so I can use it for the first 3 rounds as I had originally understood it.

FiannaTiger wrote: So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

I thought we did have a limit of five chargeless wands since the day they were released (but duplicates were legal)... so you had to decide which up to five wands you would have available for the run... and I thought that it was announced that in a year or so all wands become chargeless... maybe it was a delusional dream I had? I could have sworn this came from TPTB.

Mongo wrote:

FiannaTiger wrote: So what about wands slots? If there were say 5 wand slots then this would help limit the power of wands both healing and damage. Make healing wands only useful in combat this would give a healer a little extra healing boost with 1, 3, or 5pt heal without taking up DMs time for bead test.

I thought we did have a limit of five chargeless wands since the day they were released (but duplicates were legal)... so you had to decide which up to five wands you would have available for the run... and I thought that it was announced that in a year or so all wands become chargeless... maybe it was a delusional dream I had? I could have sworn this came from TPTB.

I think all those things were said at one point or another, but things changed a lot. It’s hard to keep up.