After noticing how wands work in Classic WoW, a thought struck me.
Staves and otherwise generally magically imbued weapons. Do these allow casting to be funneled through them (like wands do), or are they just there for show?
My general idea for them was that you could cast something through your staff depending on the type of staff it is - much like in The Elder Scrolls Online - but I don’t know if there’s any lore on staves just being the two handed version of wands or if that’s just headcanon. Since I honestly wonder generally what the use of staves is for mages if not that.
To give you a serious answer, though… I believe Aluneth (the Arcane mage artifact from Legion) had an animation where you rose the weapon to the air when you wanted to use its special spell and channeled the magic through it. If not for the effort it’d take them to create new animations, I’m assuming we’d have more of these and this is how staves are supposed to be used by casters. Isn’t there a number of quests/fights where we see NPCs use their staves too?
Yeah, I was thinking that mostly your weapons can channel magic through them - for example a Holy Staff could throw Holy Bolts whereas a dark staff could throw shadow bolts. Much like weapon speed was a thing with 2handers and 1handers in Classic, it could be that wands do less damage and more frequently when staves take longer but do more harm.
I honestly think that’s the general fantasy behind them. Personally I’ve used anything from wands to axes to channel magic through, it just depends on the properties of the weapon; or even object.
any object can be used to channel magic, as long as it is properly conditioned to be.
I don’t know if this might help:
Medivh and Khadgar use: Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian.
Atiesh can be used to open up portals to [Karazhan] and is also known for attracting ravens towards the wielder. Atiesh gives its wielder the ability to turn into a raven themselves.
Khadgar uses atiesh as a golf club to shoot arcane balls to the enemies in draenor intro quest.
Don’t know why. He looks like he’s having a lot of fun tho.
From what I’ve read in quests, things like wands / staves / gems or quartz in totems are used as foci to channel the magic through. So precision and power enhancement depending on the, for example, magical crystal you use.
Khadgar does this in the Broken Isles during the questline with the dragons too. :3
Honestly, I think considering the fantasy elements that go into the game, it may be safe to assume you can use just about any weapon to channel, etc. Since its seen in a few quests. Blizz just hasn’t done any epic animations.
It’d be cool if they integrated staves & wands to casting animations.
Trautfizzle actually calls his staff ‘Limitless Potential’ because of it having magically engineered properties.
To me I see his staff as a means of subverting and normalizing the flow of chaos and fel through his body as he casts spells. With the power of the infernal core which is stored within the reactor atop the staff he can do amazing things with the fel and I actually RP him as needing it to cast some of his bigger spells and most of his magic actually coming from the staff.
Without it Traut can still use fel magic but it’s generally weaker or more uncontrolled and comes at the full cost of his own life force. At that point he tends to rely on his demons if they’re around or shadows. Having dedicated so much of his time to fusing fel magic with Blackfuse era technology; he doesn’t know many curses or shadow spells so he pretty much relies on his staff to do any sizable damage or great feats of magic.
I guess if he had any other kind of stave he’d be able to focus his magic more sure, but the more tailored a staff, wand or blade is to its wielders specific school of magic, the more useful it will be than just eyeballing it by casting spells with your hands.