Dual Wielding with wand offhand


Advice


Would it be possible to dual wield with say one hand weapon in main hand (say a short sword for instance) and a want in an off hand (say cure light), and as a full round swing with your sword and touch yourself with your wand to deal damage and heal yourself in the same round? I understand that activating a wand is a standard action in itself, however so is attacking with a weapon, so in a sense dual wielding two swords would be two standard actions even though it is not worded as such. And for a melee sense it does not seem to be a broken maneuver as your essentially cut your damage in half to perform this. I was thinking of allowing this in my game but would like everyone's thoughts, i however would not allow a dual wield with a wand that would target anyone (friend or foe) other than the one using it, ie self target spells only.

Feedback?


That's the magus spell-combat class feature plus their wand-wielder arcana. Significant change that devalues the magus, even with the self-only nerf. And the self-only restriction doesn't have any in-game logic to it. Not a fan of this idea.


Im not too worried about devaluing a magus as i dont not have one in the game. The purpose is the party im working with has a very high damage output, which is great for them, except the blow through creatures of their CR in only a couple rounds. So the only way i can extend combat to keep things interesting is to raise the difficulty on their encounters, which results in the party taking more damage and being incredibly easy to hit. This however was offset by the party's cleric who was also now enjoying fights as he loved to be a healer. Bad thing about it though is he had to leave the game because his wife is 8 months pregnant and he can no long spare the time. So im trying to come up with a means of keeping the combat interesting without making the players feel as if they were just weakened because they no long have a healer. And the regular wands and potion rules means they would no longer be putting out damage on their entire round and i dont want them to feel these combats are now too hard, because the only alternative would be to use easier monsters that would thus just die in a few rounds and never really pose a threat to the group. Basically putting everything back to square one and making things more linear, repetitive and thus, somewhat boring.


Keep in mind i would never use this kind of wand rule to start a game out, just looking for something to continue this games high level of action, danger, and fun.


The only ways to use a wand and a weapon in your other hand in the same round is if you have some sort of way to use a second standard action that round(Use of hero points or something), have an ability or feat that allows you to do such(A magus). Or something enables you to cast a second spell.

Even though the source is a wand you can only ever cast one spell per round. As casting a wand is a spell, you can only do so once per turn. There is the quicken feat which allows you to cast a second spell in a turn, but you must sacrifice a spell slot in order to do that. As wands have charges instead of spell slots, you cannot quicken a wand.


If you were to wield a wand in your off-hand for the purposes of, say, two-weapon fighting, you could do so - but you wouldn't be able to cast a spell from it. It would be the equivalent of an improvised weapon at that point, and a poor one at that. You'd be able to attack with whatever weapon you have in your primary hand and then poke them with a stick for a minimal amount of damage.

By RAW, there is no way to use a wand while attacking outside of the magus class. Or... (incoming tangent, probably will start a new thread about this)

That brings up an interesting question: They recently released Mythic Adventures. One of the basic abilities for all mythic characters allows you to take an extra standard action during your turn.

It explicitly states that you cannot use that standard action to cast a spell. However, using a wand is an 'activate magic item - spell trigger' action; a spell trigger action is not explicitly called-out as equivalent to casting a spell (using a spell completion item is, but that's scrolls, not wands).


Xaratherus wrote:

If you were to wield a wand in your off-hand for the purposes of, say, two-weapon fighting, you could do so - but you wouldn't be able to cast a spell from it. It would be the equivalent of an improvised weapon at that point, and a poor one at that. You'd be able to attack with whatever weapon you have in your primary hand and then poke them with a stick for a minimal amount of damage.

By RAW, there is no way to use a wand while attacking outside of the magus class. Or... (incoming tangent, probably will start a new thread about this)

That brings up an interesting question: They recently released Mythic Adventures. One of the basic abilities for all mythic characters allows you to take an extra standard action during your turn.

It explicitly states that you cannot use that standard action to cast a spell. However, using a wand is an 'activate magic item - spell trigger' action; a spell trigger action is not explicitly called-out as equivalent to casting a spell (using a spell completion item is, but that's scrolls, not wands).

Yeah on a side note, my next gamer will be using mythic characters, and im really excited about the possibilities and more epic nature. However i cant/wont add those rules in Mid adventure just to solve this problem. So sadly i need another way lol.


Well, at this point you're moving into house rule territory. There's not any way to do what you're requesting by RAW; a wand is always a standard action to use, so you'd need a way within RAW to get that second standard action.

Since what you're looking to do is essentially moving into house rule territory, you could try adopting the 'healing surge' rules from 4E. Alternatively, just bring in an NPC healer.


You could go with an Intelligent wand able to activate itself.


Jaatu Bronzescale wrote:
You could go with an Intelligent wand able to activate itself.

What

Wut
Whut

This sentence, I must go research more about these intelligent wands immediately.


I believe the rules don't allow Intelligent versions of items with charges. Would be kind of silly too in my eyes, because after a certain point, the item would just be an incredibly expensive talking stick...

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