run details:
You can +20 tho… also why of warding, I’d transmutate
wand of warding at higher levels is by far one of the strongest wands. like it’s not even a question. how do you get 20+ on one item?
It’s actually possible to get a +21 staff – but it requires a lot of luck. Get a wand +3, plus two other wands of the same type. At the troll smith, upgrade the staff to +1 and reforge the wands to get a +5 wand. Dump all upgrades on the wand to get a +20 wand. Imbue the wand to get a +21 staff. See https://lemmy.world/comment/10573988
Ok, got it. How do you do the reforge order?
If it would ever even be possible, Id like to be ready for it. If nothing else, its at least somewhat common to get 2 wands of the same type.
Reforge the +3 wand with any of the other two to get a +4 wand, and then reforge the +4 with the remaining wand.
Of an item in general? Example, a plate mail. +3 from grave, +2 from smith and +15 upgrade scrolls. Same for wand, except you actually have to get the wand from the old wandmaker. Lightning, freezing and disintegration are stronger. (Disintegration is technically equal, but it’s instant and piercing, which I’d rather use)
You can’t +2 something that is already +2 from smith. Also, a wand is not a staff, and the upgrades don’t transfer. So it would be basically useless and you don’t get the meaningful upgrades from it being imbued in your staff.
And ward is stronger, you just need to use it correctly (it has to be in your staff). Easily hundreds+ damage per round if you’ve set things up correctly. The other wands can’t remotely compete. Hypothetically you can do something like 2000 damage in one round with ward staff (not realistically though, this would be an extremely contrived scenario).
If you set upgraded wards to level 2 each and set out like 8 of them. You’ll literally do something preposterous like 400 damage per turn, ever turn. Since strike with staff recharges the wards (and elemental blast), you can run this indefinitely. I one shotted king of dwarves this way (both stages).
While hypothetically you could get a level 20 wand if you got lucky enough to get a level 3 from wandmaker, this would be an absurd waste because a ward build only makes sense when its imbued in your staff. And I should have screen capped it, but there is also no combo where you can do a very consistent 400-500 damage per turn indefinitely.
You don’t need to deal 500 damage consistenly but only at a spot at a time and with +5 turns of setup, you need to hit 100 consistently and on the fly
Even without that, the ward when maxed is superior.
Its irrelevant because I can only fire those other wands/staffs at 1x/ turn.
The staff of warding I can have as many or as few as I need.
Its quite obvious: no other wand compares to the damage output of the wand of warding.