Staff VS dual-wand as a mage?

[Detective]

Currently, I have Loshe use a staff while fane using dual-wield wands. Thing is, I noticed that due to having a staff, Loshe can't use her wand to attack repeatedly from range like fane could when he was out of spells, and heck: It felt as if Fane was able to do do just as much damage with his regular, duel-wielding wand attack, as his damage with searing flames.

While I believe the problem with the melee-range regular attack of a staff will be remedied as I get more skills and memory for Loshe to use, the question still stands: What is better in terms of a long-range mage standpoint? With Loshe, I am trying to pull off more of a CC and buffing allies if need be with aero and hydro, compared to Fane who is more of a direct damage dealer with poison, oil, and fire.

[Shard of Manus]

Dual Wands.

Later you'll have enough spells that they'll mostly just be for stat bonuses. Definitely dual wands though.

[Detective]

And thus, all the cool-looking staffs carry the risk of being thrown to the nearest merchant ^^' I'll need to see what builds can work with a staff better if I'll ever play another playthrough however.

[Judge Lazar]

Keep a poison wand handy for Fane so you can slap a puddle down to heal him.Poison is also flamable so throw down a nice size puddle on an enemy, then hit it with the fire.

[Detective]

Good idea on keeping a spare poison wand! I am currently using two electric wands for fane though, simply because they have more damage at the moment compared to what else I have.

[Leopanther]

Optimal would be Wand + Shield, cause the amounts of Armor / Magic Armor is incomparably more valuable than what little stats you may gain from a second wand. Of course if you have an easy enough time without a shield, a second Wand can still give some nice extra stats.

Unless you find yourself often attacking with just the wands instead of spells, I'd prioritize ability-increase stats on the wand over the wand's own damage. Stuff like Int+ or Pyro+. Crit+ can also be very good if you use Savage Sortilege to crit with spells.

Staff can be worth it if you find one that gives you more stats overall than any 2 wands you currently have combined. You still get 1 ranged 'basic attack' with staff per turn, often you don't need more than that as filler between spells if at all.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Leopanther:

Optimal would be Wand + Shield, cause the amounts of Armor / Magic Armor is incomparably more valuable than what little stats you may gain from a second wand.

I would 100% agree with that. Shield is just too good for mages to pass up on. Like way too good. And if your mage isn't casting a spell every action somethings wrong with your loadout. One wand for stats. Shield > 2nd wand stats.

[Revolucas]

The person with Leadership should use a shield to make up for the vulnerablilty. But game is not that hard that you absolutely need a shield, especially if your caster is always near the leader. Opting to use a sheild instead of duel wand means you lose 10% crit and 10% damage (+2 Int) at the very least not including any possible +magic skill on the wand. 7 attribute points worth of bonuses is hardly something I would call little. Shields, from what I know, only ever come with Str or Con.
You may think 5% or 10% damage bonus is little, but with how skill damage scales from level and rank it makes a huge difference higher levels in the game.

[muchdebate]

I always thought that if you had two different wands you would do two different kinds of damage on your base "blast" attack, but I haven't worked with it much.

Yet.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Alundaio:

The person with Leadership should use a shield to make up for the vulnerablilty. But game is not that hard that you absolutely need a shield, especially if your caster is always near the leader. Opting to use a sheild instead of duel wand means you lose 10% crit and 10% damage (+2 Int) at the very least not including any possible +magic skill on the wand. 7 attribute points worth of bonuses is hardly something I would call little. Shields, from what I know, only ever come with Str or Con.
You may think 5% or 10% damage bonus is little, but with how skill damage scales from level and rank it makes a huge difference higher levels in the game.

Yes, you are right on those numbers. However a shield not only provides a ton of physical and a fair bit of magic armour, it also provides shields up which adds a whole heap more every (IIRC) 3 or four turns. This makes mages extremely durable, the tankiest characters in the game and more or less immune to enemy magic status effects and elemntal damage.

A side effect of this is to reduce the number of casts (or potion quaffs) they need to make during combat to restore their armour. Which means more AP available for more offensive spell casts leading to higher damage output during combat. It also deters enemies from attacking them at all since the AI prioritises high threat/low defence targets so the shield lowers their priority. Which means even more AP available for offensive spell casts (and therefore more damage output).

You have to factor this in to balance against the increased damage per cast you can get from using e.g. dual wands. On Tactician I found it to be clearly superior. Even allowing for the additional damage per cast lost due to raising CON (at the expense of INT) to 14 to equip late game shields. The balance may not be the same on Classic, I don't know.

But this is why IMO Shield > 2nd wand for mages.

[Owl]

a fire wand and a poison wand do well together.

[Scary_Turtle]

Only time for me that wand and shield are superior is where you don't have enough skills to do damage. Basically a straight up necromancer.

I found the best defense is a good offense and 10 percent crit and 5 int per wand (2 from wand 3 from rune) is just too much to give up.

Seems to have worked so far through my honour mode play through but everyone plays differently

[Syrris]

Staff weapons are best used by melee builds that want to deal magic damage rather than physical damage. This is a specialized style and probably won't see much use in a 'typical' party setup, but it does work.

[slovakiaman]

One wand and a shield untill Nameless Isle, before you go:
1) Buy a second wand.
2) Respec your stats so you have high crit chance
3) Choose the spells can crit talent (forgot how it's called)
4) Buy runes (or materials to craft runes) that give you crit chance and equip them.
Now every fight becomes pretty easy (even on tactician, I tested it).
Keep in mind this is only for pure dmg mage.

[Kelder]

am very confused of the people saying to put on a shield tbh personally I use a staff and see no point in wands when they have pittiful damage output.When you equip a staff you get the ability "staff of magus" it has a 1 turn cooldown and scales with INT at my endgame the "staff of magus" was able to hit for 1k damage do wands get that high I honestly dont know?

[Hobocop]

You put on a shield because full mages will rarely need to use their weapons for anything except as stat sticks as their spell selection increases, so it's not a bad idea to shore up their typically poor physical armor.