Haha not at all. It's a matter of it being more convenient to hold it that way than it would be to have that unwieldy thing on your back. When I hunt, I have to take the rifle off my shoulder if I'm in the woods. It gets tangled on trees and such too easily and it's easy to get stuck. A rifle is half the size of a staff. It would be awkward at the least, and an enormous, heavy, unwieldy pain at worst. If you're holding it, you can lean on it when you've been walking for a length of time, making the trail a bit easier. You can also maneuver it easily without all kinds of crouching and twisting of your body.

Short of swimming, there's no situation in which I'd lash a stave to my back rather than just holding it like a walking stick.

Avada Kadavra, Confringo, and Glacius will not help as much as FUS RO DAH! Besides, we have staves and our own spells.

Why not?

Wands, casting tomes, scepters, orbs I would like them all.

Mages with wands are cool, all nonchalant and [censored].

Good point, although I would rather wonder how I can lash one on my back without support.

It's just... glued there.

Wands are for hos. Staves are for pimps.

look at this battle between staffs and wands lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIMoQHpvFQQ

i think the guy with the wand won

Such a waste of good sticks

i am not sold on the idea of wands in Elder Scrolls - we've gotten by several games without them. However, it is amusing that most of you went to the Harry Potter route immediately, but wands have been used in games, most notably WoW, to good effect as a ranged back up for a mage that is running out of mana. :shrug:

Wands in elder scrolls? ... ... ... lame ^^

Wands could be a nice addition to the game.

They could focus your magical energy, and would act like if you have selected a magic spell for that hand, but focus your magicka better and use less magicka for each cast, and/or give more power to spell effect, and/or add additional effects to the spell, like splash damage, and so on...

We can have different wands of different quality, with some of those effects that I mentioned, and some can have more than one effect, and the magnitude of those effects can be different in wands of different quality.

Some wands could be used to cast their specific spells, and would loose some charge in each cast, and after a while they would burn out and fizzle away, no recharging possible.

Like a type of spell scroll, but with more than one charge.

Maybe some mid level alteration spell can let you recharge the wands, at some altars, to 2/3 of their original charges, but permanently lose the remaining 1/3 of the charges.

Edit, It can work like this:

You equip the discharged wand in one hand and the recharging spell in the other hand, and use both of your hands together, and the animation would show your magical energy flowing through the tips of our fingers into the wand jewel, gradually using up your magicka, as you fill up the wand.

Can be useful for the spells that you do not have learned yet, and have a wand for, or some wand exclusive spells.

I was using the word wand in my comment in order to make a connection between Mr. Howard's words and the topic. But seriously, I've got a question for you and everyone else who is expressing similar opinions. Why are people so hostile against wands? In this case, please do correct me if I'm wrong: a wand is an item that takes up one hand, and can be used to cast a spell. Correct? It's fine to believe that a staff possesses different characteristics than a wand. Why would we have regular wands in Skyrim when we have the larger staff. It's not like Dovahkiin can't carry a staff, and needs to resort to a half-pound wand. At the very least, it would throw off his/her balance during combat, and we wouldn't want that. That being said, what is the true different between a staff and a wand? We're arguing so much against wands, and for what? As Todd has shown, one-handed spell-casting wooden instruments will be included in the game. Todd calls the light-casting one a staff. It's a staff. That's exactly what it is. It fits every traditional definition of a staff. That's all I'm really trying to say. If you want wands, they're called staves. If you don't want wands, then that's okay, we have staves instead.

As for what honestly feels like an attack regarding the number of hands that can hold a staff in Skyrim... there is no rulebook for Skyrim. You have no confirmation that we cannot use two hands to wield a staff in Skyrim. The one thing that we can see is that you can use a single hand for that particular staff. We can extrapolate that there are more staves, and that at least some of them (if not all) will fit in a single hand. You are corrent about the staff casting a light spell. We don't know if any staff at all will require two hands, or will have the option of being held in both hands. I won't even speculate on a parallel relationship between dual wield casting and combined hand casting as it relates to staves. All I really want to say is that you're coming at me in a very odd way. I know I'm trying to be lightly confrontational, but it's weird to attack the two-handed comment since that had very little to do with my original post.

I thought wands were in Skyrim already?

Those seem like some good ideas. there are plenty of ways wands could be differentiated from staffs. they could replace the role of scrolls in the game. i hated those things because they only had one use. but wands could have maybe 3 or 4 uses before expiring.

also some people prefer the aesthetic of wands over giant obtrusive staffs

Heh, I was right. Bang, check out this screenshot. Wand in left hand, sword in right hand.

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/02/Skryim-Trailer-anolysis-15-Empty-Cave-Shoot-590x308.jpg

thats a staff

Being used as a wand, yes.

i guess, but not really. its just a one handed staff. its too big to be considered a wand

I dont think they would fit in too well.

I vote yes.

I wouldn't often use them, because like others have stated I associate them with the wimpy mages of Harry Potter (just trollin, I've never read/watched any of them), but I would like the option, and the more the merrier.

I, personally, will be going the Lezard Valeth route and just shoot death from my hands. I would like if there were magic tomes though. I have said it in another topic, but since we learn magic from tomes, I think it would be cool if we had to equip tomes in one hand and cast it with the other to learn the spell. We would have to use the spell a good amount of times before we learn it, and some powerful spells (like for instance fingers of the mountain if it didn't svck) would be un-learnable and require the book to be equipped to be cast at all.

There's technically nothing that limits the size of a wand, other than one-handed use. A short staff is a long wand, and vice versa. I feel like the argument between whether it's a short staff or a long wand is semantics.


EDIT!: Also, I can't tell how short it is exactly, but after a certain level I don't think it qualifies as a staff anymore. If it's less than shoulder-height, then it's more a cane than anything else.

A she-elf witch without a wand? I think not. I want one purely to just wave it about as I cast magic. Consumable wands? No thanks. Permanent wand in a variety of woods? Yes please.

wands? this is not harry potter

why pick a short stick when you could pick a long big one? and if you're ran out of magic, you can hit your enemies with staff

And as Harry Potter demonstrated, if your wand becomes useless for whatever reason, you can always shove it up your opponent's nose.

http://www.alicia-logic.com/capsimages/hpss_067Troll.jpg

I'd say that is what qualifies it as a wand. Strictly speaking, a magic stick thingy that you wield in two hands is a staff, while a one-handed magical stick thingy is a wand. Maybe the wand is long because it has more magic in it? :tongue:

Agree agree agree agree!
Maybe they can unleash magic faster too?