Wands: How powerful should they get?

[Bardez]

I'm in the planning/research phase of wands for Caster Crafting. I'd like to solicit opinions for how powerful wands should get to be. In the base game of BG2, we see a Cloudkill wand, and Spell Striking wand (which has an effect identical to spell of level 6, and its ability has a power of 6). Everything else seems level 4 and lower.

D&D 3E games only go up to 4th level for wands, so I'm curious if wands should be generally restricted to the first 4 spell levels, or if there is a desire to see obscene things like a wand of Time Stop.

[Morgoth]

I have a request.

Please, make the wand of monster summoning better. I have played with it in Siege of Dragonspear and it wasn't as good as I would have hoped it to be. It turned from great in BG1, to almost pointless in Siege of Dragonspear. I won't mention bg2 (read later on why)

I would have liked to use something different from the wands of fire in the encounters of Siege of Dragonspear.  

In general, I would make it so that the wands stay as useful as possible until BG2. I don't think you could do much in BG2 to make them "interesting" - because the higher level makes them redundant.

Edited January 21 by Morgoth

[Jarno Mikkola]

When it comes to the summoning wand, the BG1 and BG2 handled the two very differently because the game wanted to run fast, and if you have 20+ minnions, it won't, at that times computers. But todays, it should be possible(in the EE games). And so the game(non-EE BG2) limited the summons to be 5+1, via the gender flag in the creature itself. But you can remove that in EE's by flexing the summon cap file(don't have the geme, so can't check the exact details).

The reasons all the wands are lower than x power level is that the spells themselves needed only that level x level, as it's the spell level ... not the cast level it's casted on. The fireball for example should be cast as if the caster is level 10 mage, meaning it will do 10d6 damage, not 3d6.
What spells are availble on wands is then a question of complexity, as you need the item, and the .spl file that is not the native spell, that doesn't pop out from no where(including the item visualization). And no, we are not all artist that can do pixel perfect reflexions of viaualizetions of our dreams.

So if you Bardez want to create all the level 1-9 mage and level 1-7 cleric spells, go ahead.