Don't know whether this goes in bugs or suggestions. As it is there is no practical way to craft a tentacular wand as the only official recipe requires the sacrifice of a vastly more powerful (vastly more powerful than all four charges of the wand combined, mind you) Bolt of Squid to craft. This hardly seems balanced.
The damage from the wand scales to your Magic Power, so it can potentially dish out way more damage than the Bolt (which does flat damage). The AoE is probably smaller, though, right? I can't remember. I don't know, one bolt for 4 charges, I think it kind of works. EDIT: I made a stupid
If it does, then there is a problem because wands are supposed to scale to , although given that all the wand does is trigger some other spells that very well might be possible. The bolt of squid is absolutely more useful, though.
The only scaling to wands have are the amount of charges you get on them, I think. Like you said, wands trigger spells, those scale to (well, usually, anyway). I think it would be silly to make duplicates of every spell wands can trigger just so they can scale to . EDIT: just like higher-tier crossbows and melee weapons scale to and respectively. Those scale to their appropriate attributes for damage, not the crafting attributes. I would say the wands are working correctly without scaling.
Wands don't have stats associated with them -- presumably if you are crafting the weapons yourself, the ones with the best stats will require a better smithing level. Smithing doesn't need any other kind of boost to make it a viable skill. On the other hand, Wand Lore needs all the help it can get.
Many wants are not all wands. Nobody said that every single wand scaled to , just many of them. Fiery Wand is also not every wand, and while it was a bug that it wasn't scaling its damage to wandcrafting, that doesn't make it a bug every time a wand doesn't do so. Because the best way to do that is to cripple an entire class of weapon if you don't take and level that one skill tree? Essence had a decent idea for wands a while back, which was that wands would all scale their damage primarily to , as in they would be balanced in the hands of anyone with decent , plus additional scaling at the rate of 1=4, so anyone with Wandcrafting could deal more damage with their wands without restricting wands to them alone. http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/a-somewhat-radical-propsal-for-wandcrafting.5569/ Too bad he never got around to coding it.
Wands are consumables, at least that's how they are treated. You don't wield a wand, you use it until it's used up. And they are not crippled, they just scale to something which not a lot of people take the time or effort to improve. In any case, there are few consumables that really are as powerful as wands are, so far as damage is concerned. So there's nothing actually crippled here. It's not the wands themselves that I feel are broken, but the wand lore skill itself. That said, if wands are changed to scale differently, that's fine by me. I adapt to the rules. Just keep in mind that if you change the scaling, you are taking an already subpar skill and making it weaker.
You mean except the stats from the spells they trigger. Melee weapons use the listed damage and don't proc (bar a few artifacts), wands don't have listed damage and instead proc spell damage (that scales to just like melee weapon damage "scales" to ). Wands that trigger better spells take a higher to craft, as well. (Or, a higher gives more uses, which directly translates in a higher output of damage. There are a few caveats considering resistances, but yeah). In my opinion, the scaling not taking into account is still correct and still makes sense.
As I said, I'm ok with changing it, I just think that Wand Lore needs a boost, regardless. It's ok as a skill to not put points into, just for the starting wands that you get, to make the early game easier. But overall, I'd never put points into it unless I had maxed out my other skills (a notable exception being demonology which you never want to max out).
I am pretty sure when they said "many" they meant "all wands that can reasonably scale". So, not like say, the Bony Wand, or the Zodiac Wand. The coral wand also does not scale, at all, for some reason. There is also the Sonic Wand in YHTNTEP, which is an intended exception, and in fact scales to your tinkering ability. That said, the Tentacular Wand scales to where it does scale, and it uses the exact same spell as a certain arrow trap called the Tentacular Infector. And this is probably a bug, but also probably not one important enough to fix.
