xx% Increased Damage with Wands - passive skill tree

There are 2 nodes to the north east of the witch start position in the passive skill tree that are listed as '10% Increased Damage with Wands'. Is this physical damage, spell damage, or both?

It's all damage with attacks. Spells do not use your weapon to deal damage so don't benefit from this sort of node, but unlike most weapon-specific nodes these ones also benefit weapon elemental damage.

As Viperesque said, this inceases all damage done with a wand attack, physical, elemental and even chaos ;). It's basically "Attack Damage with Wands".

Thanks, I think I got it. But who would ever 'attack' with a wand - they are so weak. I use 'em to hold skill gems to cast spells from and use the 'increased spell damage' from the wand modifier itself to add ele damage.

Really - wands are useless as attack weapons as far as I can see.

Attack-based wand builds have been among the strongest builds in the game (assuming unlimited currency) throughout its history, actually. As with daggers, the combination of very high crit chance, strong skills (Power Siphon, Elemental Hit in the past, and now Kinetic Blast) and amazing passive nodes more than make up for their lackluster base damage. And with the advent of Kinetic Blast (and to some extent Piscator's Vigil), wanding is now a much more affordable option.

Wands have by far the lowest base damage of all weapons, that is true. They also have the highest critchance and can scale all types of damage well.
Physical based elemental scaling(*) wand builds are among the most powerful out there. They are also among the most gear intensive ones.

In short: wands can be extremely powerful but a good wand is the most difficult and expensive weapon to roll.


(*) Get a high physical DpS wand with a high critchance. Add accuracy and flat physical damage via jewellery. Get all the "% of phys added as elemental damage" wand nodes. Get Added Fire/Hatred/Heralds and scale the living **** out of it via crit and the Weapon Elemental Damage support.