Wand hits, the weak spells included with wands as item cards, that just do a bit of damage, you either love them, or you hate them, and while drawing them instead of a stronger card can doom you in a boss fight, that extra bit of damage is just as likely to save you. I propose that the wand hits of different schools gain different properties, in order to differentiate them from eachother. Fire wand hits will do the damage like normal, but in a DOT effect, rather than all at once. Ice wand hits, instead of dealing damage at all, will create a ward (either an extremely small absorb, or a like 2% tower shield) Storm wand hits will deal extra damage, but unlike other wand hits, will have a chance to fizzle Myth ones instead of dealing damage, can have a very low chance of stunning, or at least of removing stun blocks, or they can cause enemy blades and shields to lose a few percent of effectiveness Life ones will obviously heal Death ones will have lower damage, but will swap some of that damage to healing Shadow ones will slightly lower backlash If we also want to add wands for the stellar schools too, instead of wand hits, sun can have small enchants that can stack on top of the normal ones, moon can give you polymorphs that only last a few turns, and star can give one turn bubbles
Wand hits are fine as they are, and Shadow wand hits already reduce backlash [not 100% sure on this correct me if I'm wrong] by 10%. Here's why I disagree:
Fire: At middle to higher levels, there's this really great Trap spell called Feint. What it does is it puts a 70% trap on your opponent while putting a 30% trap on you - some risk but very high reward. An overtime would put your Feints out of action for a few turns. And I'd like to also point out that the Sky Iron Hasta [L30 from Olympus] is the best non-pack wand all the way up until the Hades critical wands [barring Life's sword of kings, but they usually use that for healing and not damage] and the one that gives the highest damage up until the Hexacorders you get right before Empyrea. The SIH gives fire wand hits which is why I bring it up.
Ice: This is... probably the biggest one I disagree with. Wand hits are often used to break shields, so if this just doesn't do damage and puts like a -5% tower on you that's so incredibly miniscule that nobody would use wand hits.
Storm: I think I like this enough. A wand hit doing 200 damage at around max isn't bad, and you'll have accuracy by then. But, this and maybe one other are the only ones I agree with, so it'd be slightly unbalanced.
Myth: Actually THIS is the one I disagree the most with. This, as you say, has a low probability to do literally anything. And when it does, it's a major dice roll between being actually pretty effective [not on later bosses though] or not being effective to the point where you might as well have just not used it.
Life: This school learns Minor Blessing before reaching even Apprentice level. There's even wands that give this card, so if you want this to become a reality you may as well just look around for that wand.
Death: This is the other one I agree with, albeit by a shred. Drain wand hits are nice. But again, the other schools would have to be balanced and make wand hits worth it to use.
Just noticing Balance wasn't here.
Sun: How would this work?
Moon: Eh nobody uses these anyways. Most moon spells you'll probably see used is in PvP with the Khrysalis shift spells.
Star: This would be somewhat cool, if you're breaking a shield and then going into a hit it could be nice. But if the bubble's random, then you could be a Fire wizard preparing to hit, but then your bubble gets changed from Furnace into something dumb like Berzerk.
I thought about this myself for a while, and gave it up as a bad idea. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these days, all wands are school locked, which means life will never have another damage inflicting wand hit. However, if they did a new quest line that's school specific, and gave you these wands as rewards, it could work better. Think of these wands like the Sword of Kings. While typing this out, I came up with these ideas:
Shadow ones will slightly lower backlash sun can have small enchants that can stack on top of the normal ones moon can give you polymorphs that only last a few turns star can give one turn bubbles
See, THIS is what I like. New twists to existing items. My thoughts:
1) ALL Astral wand spells use power pips regardless of caster's school (because they're wand hits and not the normal spells)
2) Sun wands should have things like sharpened blade or potent trap that ONLY works on item cards. Yes, it would need to give a limited amount of these cards
3) Moon wands could give you the shift spell cards. Maybe only 1 or 2, that does damage only (without any hanging effects). So, for example, Shift Grendel would now only cost 3 pips instead of (potentially) 6 pips, and would shift to Grendel, cast it's spell doing 115 DMG + 360 DMG over 3 Rounds, then shift back.
4) Star wands giving one turn bubbles I'm fine with, but since it's a wand, let it stack with regular 4 round bubbles. OR, you could give the Star school wands enchantment to extend the number of rounds a bubble lasts. Amplify gives you +15% universal damage for 4 rounds. With a Star Wand, you'd get a new enchantment that you could apply to an aura, which would make it last 6 rounds (as an example)
Another way they could work is by giving those "can't be trained" spells like Solar Blade. Solar Trap, and Solar Shield. The same would go for all the other "weird" tri-spell cards (from the Sun, Moon, Star, and Shadow schools). Imagine having 3 wand hits and 3 Solar blades.
A few things about your criticisms Fire - while it would make it harder to add feints, it would be extremely useful against any enemy that has multiple tower shields stacked on top of eachother, as each turn it would remove one of them Ice - this is true, but ice's whole gimmick is being super tanky, so i couldn't see it being anything besides a defensive buff Storm - TY Myth - I didn't really think the myth one through tbh, although the only other effect I could think of it giving is something to do with minions (eg. those spells like mend minion but a bit weaker) Life - Minor blessing is good and all, but it doesn't really get stronger at higher levels like wand hits do Balance - I know I didn't include balance, but I felt like since balance is well, balance, it should just have default wand hits (although alternatively the wand hits could deal a random school of damage) Astral schools - Dayeriders response perfectly illustrates them Shadow - I forgot that, anyways shadow wand hits would stay the same
I mainly want to see the attacking animations themselves get updated. The folks over in Wysteria have a neat little animation where they wave their wand and send out a beam of energy at you, so why can't our regular wands and staves do that?
I'm fine with the wand hits as they are in terms of what they do, but let's face it: Their hitting animations are SOOO outdated by this point. They definitely need an update.
