Staff or wand on my sorcerer?

[Erdrick]

Which is better?

[DirtyMick]

Depends on the affixes.

[AlphaVictorKilo]

Just like in POE1, it depends on

1. Do you want raw damage?
2. Do you want faster attacks with some defenses stacked (your offhand spirit shield/focus)

[Erdrick]

Do wands give + levels to spells & fire or lightning dmg?

[AlphaVictorKilo]

Originally posted by Erdrick:

Do wands give + levels to spells & fire or lightning dmg?

They can yes, but since they often have other "ingrained" skills, usually they'll prioritize those

[Chief Romanji]

the prefix/suffix system can be pretty daunting. It tells you the range but only of the specific prefix or suffix you have, not the full range of what *could* be. Cheetah vs Gazelle vs runner in terms of movement speed. you could get anything from 10% to 30% but entry level you won't know Cheetah exists and think 10% is the cap unless you see something higher.

[magnumaniac]

The answer is... both.
Staff with innate Sigil of Power in weapon slot 2, and that skill bound to weapon 2 only so it auto switches to the staff when you cast it. Ideally you can use some weapon skill passives to branch out to skill duration / increased AoE nodes.

All other skills bound to use wand and focus, so you cast the Sigil first then blast away with everything else in your element of choice.

[wulfster42]

Honestly witches are better pure spellcasters and in almost every case your better off using a sceptre and wand over a staff for a witch. Wands can get +to all spells, +spell damage (not as much as staves), + elemental damage and +elemental skills.

The spells provided by the wands blow for the most part, but....you have your own spells...they won't be free, but bone blast etc can still be made halfway decent ifyou want (for free spells ....which can be important for blood mages).

Even pure sorcs who go the mind over matter route will often want a wand/focus over a staff due to the large amounts of eshield (Which you can convert to mana) that you get from a good focus. You can get spell damage from the focus as well which makes up for the loss a bit on a staff.

The spells on the staff are superior though and since free, that can be a big deal, but later on it really doesn't matter, especially if you do go with a mind over matter setup since your mana pool and regen get so huge.

So yeah, I don't use a staff very often sadly.

[islander]

Yeah, so I had a question along these lines.
Do staffs do inherently more spell damage?

I am level 32 still using a level 14 unique bone wand Sanguine Diviner that has 97% spell damage and a lower level focus with a +1 to all spells.

Would a staff with similar spell damage do the same, or more damage?

I'm just trying to understand the benefit of a good staff over a similar good wand.

[GeforceJoe]

Duel wielding wands IS OP

[Tazz]

in POE2 weapon dont effect much in main dps only skill gem is importance but if you get dual weapon that is good cos every weapon got their own skill on, wand can be dual weapon not like staff only have single skill on it

[GeforceJoe]

Originally posted by Tazz:

in POE2 weapon dont effect much in main dps only skill gem is importance but if you get dual weapon that is good cos every weapon got their own skill on, wand can be dual weapon not like staff only have single skill on it

You can duel wield staffs with the warrior on the passive talent tree

[wulfster42]

Sadly you can't dual wield wands nor staves (even with giants blood, it only works on maces/axes (but you can use a mace + sceptre etc).

The biggest difference between a wand + focus or wand + sceptre is the spells you can get on the staff vs the wand.

Foci can give spell damage etc that can generally equal out to what you get on a staff or pretty close. Sceptre not so much but you get all that yummy spirit which makes up for it.

You CAN have a wand/sceptre or foci on one weapon setup and a staff on the other.

That can let you for instance start off getting your blood orbs/over max health with a nice strong staff setup (possibly the unique fire staff which is great at getting your SRS out anyway), and then switch to a nice wand/sceptre setup that boosts the damage of those SRS (and any other summons) and gives you more spirit to work with (you can even have another aura going with vitality/clarity etc on it that ONLY works when you are in wand/sceptre mode, so it doesn'tmake you lose many if any minions that way (other than the free ones from your sceptre of course!!

You can/do get ALOT of spell damage eventually from the passive tree if you are focusing on it (even if you are not, it ends up getting pretty high just from nodes your passing by, and initial minion damage/spell damage nodes). That makes the difference between a wand a staff as far as spell/elemental damage bonuses not as important long term.

[Drandok]

There’s actually a surprisingly simple answer to this.


Staves are usually a very solid very cheap and very reliable way to obtain damage when you first build your character. Once you start reaching very, very high end builds (such as 300+ divs) two wands or a wand and a focus even will greatly out damage a single staff for the simple reason that two maxrolled items absolutely can and do give more stats than one. Once money is no longer a question two wands will nearly always outperform a single staff, and with some builds even a focus can do it too. But again you have to reach very high heights for the difference to be even relevant or possible. Staves can take you all the way to the end, two wands is just pushing it 10-20% further for 300+ divines.

[Piggy]

I ran with double staffs up until around lvl 70. Now I use a wand and focus and a sigil of power staff as a 2nd. I think it just depends on whats available and better at the time.

[Drake]

I see people talk about 2 wands, but I can't dual wand. It's either wand/scepter or wand/focus.

Are people mistaking it with poe 1 ?