Newbie Conjurer Question - Wands vs. Canes?

Hi, newbie healer here. I was wondering about the differences between two-handed canes/staffs/crooks and one-handed wands? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

The advantage was that you could block things if you somehow tanked things; however, wands are phased out for canes in later levels. Don't worry about the block "benefit" as it really makes no difference, especially when weapon damage & MIND is way more important than any minor benefit (it literally is abysmal).

Wands are only really a thing early on. Once you get like around LV40 to end game, you'll use Canes exclusively (because they don't make wands past LV50).

Difference: Wands, trade a bit of power for defense with the shield. Canes, more power. Other than that, they're the same.

One-handed mage weapons was something they stopped doing after ARR. This is because with a one-handed weapon your stats were split between you main-hand and off-hand, which always made the one-handed weapons natively weaker if you didn't have an off-hand to compliment it. Since the solution to this problem was either to always create an off-hand to go with each one-handed weapon, or simply make all mage weapons two-handed, they went with the latter because it was easier development wise since they only had to make one item instead of two.

Long story short, use two-handed weapons if you can help it, if you get a one-handed weapon, try to find an off-hand to go with it, but don't worry much about trying to make this work, since once you get into Heavensward territory, you won't see one-handed weapons anymore.

Okay, I'll go with two-handed. That's what I wanted to go with in the beginning, anyway.

Now, if only we could get a proper 2 handed weapon stance...

Wand+Shield is beneficial in the early levels. Someone choosing to progress the MSQ as a CNJ will get the most benefit from it until about level 40 or so. There really isn't much of a difference though since HQ upgraded wand+shield will have comparable if not identical stats to the respective cane. But with Wand+Shield you will get additional slots to meld if you really want to put in maximum effort.

I actually wish there were some cane/shield combinations to choose from in the end game content. Ot has so much potential to give you a cool alternative style visually. Most of the spell animations involve cool theatrics with your wand which would be interesting to see contrasted with a Cane/shield version.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I actually wish there were some cane/shield combinations to choose from in the end game content. Ot has so much potential to give you a cool alternative style visually. Most of the spell animations involve cool theatrics with your wand which would be interesting to see contrasted with a Cane/shield version.

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I agree, but this kind of extra work is probably one reason they dropped it.