unique items *no longer updated*

Congrats on getting your wand in, Zahn. I've been messing with the blind mechanic for a few days on my melee Shadow and really, really love it.

Also, the girlfriend digs the reference.

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Charan wrote:

Congrats on getting your wand in, Zahn. I've been messing with the blind mechanic for a few days on my melee Shadow and really, really love it.

Also, the girlfriend digs the reference.

Yeah I bet blinding will be a popular mechanic :)

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Jonathan wrote:

I was already taking in to account the bonus levels that rare monsters get. When I said something can drop from a level 63 map or higher, it was because the ilvl of the base item was 65.

fantastic. I thought as much, thanks for the clarification.

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Chris wrote:

*brohoof*

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Falcord wrote:

I smile when someone says "that's a crappy unique, I don't know why anyone would want it".

I thought the same about Crown of Thorns, and Redbeak. The former I found a great use for, and the latter is in the featured build video #5. There is always a use for uniques.

This wand is awesome I think. Very respectable physical damage, which is useful for slinger builds, but most importantly the double chance to blind makes for a great PvP tool!

I have a couple questions regarding blind however that hopefully devs can answer:


1) If you have, say, Power Siphon on this wand and hit with it, what's the chance to blind? Is it rolled twice? (Once for the wand's chance on hit and another for the blind on spell bonus?) Or do the chances stack additively?

2) Can you actually use a Blind support gem in this wand? If so, will it override its bonus? Otherwise, are there THREE separate rolls for blinding? Or do they stack again?

Yes I think the wand would work great with a power siphon build that uses some spells on the side. Maybe stick to the cooldown based spells (Traps? Totems? Mines?) that make more sense to power siphon between CDs.

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Wulf2468 wrote:

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Strill wrote:

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Sunflow wrote:

Just found this unique wand >

Unavailable

What the heck kind of build would use that?

Looks like a pretty good wand for an Ethereal Knives build.

How would Ethereal Knives be good with that? It only has 40% spell damage and 10% cast speed. You can easily get much better caster weapons than that by level 30.

The physical damage only applies to the WAND's damage, not Ethereal Knives's damage.

The only exceptional thing I can see about this wand is the 10% chance to blind on hit. The slotted gems bonus is a lot worse than just using an actual blind gem on one of your other 4-linked pieces of equipment.

Unless there's some new skill coming out that can benefit from this, I just don't see what's so good about it. The stats for any particular category are half of what a good specialized weapon would have.

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Lionguild wrote:

Yes I think the wand would work great with a power siphon build that uses some spells on the side. Maybe stick to the cooldown based spells (Traps? Totems? Mines?) that make more sense to power siphon between CDs.

I don't know of any totems with cooldowns.

Regardless, if you're going to sacrifice over half your potential damage to force yourelf into some hybrid spell/weapon build for which there is no synergy or shared damage stats, I'm sure just about anything would work because you obviously don't care about your effectiveness to start with.

There's already very little incentive to have two primary damage abilities in this game. Having two primary damage abilities with mutually exclusive stats is just ridiculous.

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Strill wrote:

I just don't see what's so good about it. The stats for any particular category are half of what a good specialized weapon would have.

Then I think you don't know about the builds that actually dual-wield wands and use the physical damage rather than spell damage...

There are great passives that support physical damage with wands.

I really don't get why the amount of spell damage is such a dealbreaker for you. First of all, I have never found a wand with more spell damage. I am sure they exist, but I'm also pretty sure they are not as common as you make them out to be.
Secondly, there are many sources that increase spell damage and your wand is only one of them. If you already have quite a lot of spell damage, you'll hardly know the difference in damage output.

Finally, 'effectiveness' is more than raw DPS numbers. According to the blind support discussion threat, at level 20, the chance to blind is 25%. An extra 10% makes a huge difference. Much more than a few tens of percents of spell damage could ever make if you have a proper spec and proper gear.

Imagine a lightning warp build with increased AoE and this baby. The blind effect may even allow you to tank as a caster that is using the spell offensively. Tunnel visioning on your DPS really doesn't help for builds like that.

If you want to stick to the conventional tried-and-true builds though, then yes, I'm sure you have much better wands in your possession. Even for random ranged spellcaster builds though, the survivability boost of the blind chance might prove to be superior to a small increase in damage output. Hard to tell without seeing it in action.