Only if the fight prohibits melee in some way. Furthermore there are literally dozens and dozens of low level wands you can pick up off the AH in a matter of seconds that offer ranged JoW procs without the massive DPS loss of consuming ISB charges. If you're OOM then the stat loss is irrelevent anyway.

I can think of many fights where I would rather not be in melee range, and would rather wand than whack with my staff. Plus, you will probably get more JoW procs from a fast wand than from a slow staff. And the stat loss is not irrelevant if some of those stats are mana regen.

Now all that being said I see your point, for some fights it may be better to not consume iSB charges if possible. But for other fights, the JoW procs could also be important.

For the uninitiated (like me) who don't have warlock talents memorized... He's talking about Improved Shadow Bolt:
"Your Shadow Bolt critical strikes increase the next 4 sources of Shadow damage dealt to the target by 4%/8%/12%/16%/20%. Effect lasts a maximum of 12 seconds." <<EDIT: I have been informed that this spell description is obsolete. Anybody have the current version?>>

It is very common and (in some mana-intensive fights) critical for healers to pause and wand while a pally judges wisdom. If your guild really relies on ISB for additional shadow damage, then you really need to find a way to live with your wanding healers.

Our guild calls out when we judge Wisdom for the healers to wand up some mana. Perhaps if y'all do the same thing (or have the pally change the raid icon during Wistom Judgements) then you can do something besides shadowbolt. (For example, lifetap/bandage or just wand up some mana for yourself!)

<< EDIT: Removed comment about SW:Pain since DOTs do not consume charges. >>

When I'm LOM and about to wand up some mana I switch to a high spirit wand with a fast ROF. (Much faster than my mace). We don't use healing rotations, so this usually happens when something has gone wrong and we need to recover mana quickly.

You can have my wand when you pry it from my cold, dead, ruddy little dwarven hands. :-)

Periodic damage doesn't consume charges. You didn't even quote the right description of the spell!

Just delete your post imo...

It's very easy to switch to a fast, green +spirit wand that doesn't have shadow damage. It will help you regen even more mana without hurting all of your warlocks and shadow priests (surprise surpirse, eating ISB reduces your shadow priest's ability to regen your raid's mana).

Once you get into the 25 mans, this becomes more important, as you can have up to 5-6 people benefitting from ISB, and enrage timers become a much bigger deal.

JOW is 50% chance, or 37 mana per wand attack, right?

If that's true, then the speed is easily the most important part of wanding back your mana, much more important then stats. The [Consecrated Wand] from a duskwood ally only quest will get your mana back the fastest, as it's the only 1.2 wand in the game (30.8 mana/s). Next best is the [Wand of the Seer], a netherstorm quest reward available to both factions (29 mana/s). It's also the highest damage 1.3 speed wand. If you have trashed that for some reason, the next best is the Sporeggar rep one [Sporeling's Firestick] (28.5 mana/s). Assuming I got JOW right, it will easily beat any epic wand with regen stats, based on its superior speed.

None of these are shadow wands, there isn't much of an excuse to use one when the firestick is clearly superior and easily obtainable.

Imagine if you could use a scope on a wand!
Stabilized Eternium Scope

Apologies. I quoted WOWWIKI, which is obviously out of date. If you'll point me to the correct description I'll be glad to correct my post.

Thanks, Dennis. Very useful information. You've convinced me, and I'll be spreading the word within my guild as well.

Any guild with a warlock in it relies on ISB for additional shadow damage, every lock in your raid is assuming at least 30-40% ISB uptime if they're casting shadowbolts otherwise they'd more than likely be better off casting incinerate.

SW: P does not consume charges, SW: D and MB do but they certainly don't consume charges on the order of once every 1.3-1.5 secs for a measly 20% of a couple hundred damage.

If you've never played a warlock it's more than likely you had no idea what ISB was or how vital it is to any build spamming shadowbolts (read: all serious warlock raiding builds). It's a big deal though, and keep in mind that wanding with a shadow wand also hurts the shadow priests DPS as well which, in turn, means less mana back for the shadow priest's group. So do the raid a favor and pick up a non-shadow based wand.

Thanks for the info. I plan to.

Also, thanks for setting me straight on the DOT situation. I'm going to edit my original post.

Umm, no. But I say this only because I've been testing it. Data first, then explanations.

70 Night Elf priest, naked except for wand, shooting at Dr Boom (level 68) till the wand broke - he died once during this and I waited till he respawned and continued the process. Wand is "Wand of the Netherwing" (sorry, don't know how to link) which only adds to Stamina. Spell Crit (paperdoll) from Int is 3.05%. Melee/Range crit (from paperdoll) is 5.08%.

During the sequence only three results were obtained: Hit, Critical Hit, and Resist.

Total attacks: 8569
Total Hits: 8121
Total Crits: 278
Total Resists: 170

Miss rate: 1.9839%
Crit rate: 3.2443%

Observations and tentative conclusions:
1) The crit rate is significantly closer to 3.05% than to 5.08%. This tends to support the idea the spell attack table is used instead of the ranged attack table. Supplemental but by themselves very weak evidence is: a) the miss is a "resist"; and b) crit damage modifier is 150%.

2) The slightly higher rate is interesting. It alone would imply level may influence crits. What I'm discovering, however, is that this is not necessarily true over other tests. As in...

Additional: I made a similar test - there are enough differences it cannot be considered conclusive, but it tends to support the above. This time my night elf priest was fully geared and had a 6.59% paperdoll spell crit rate, still a 5.08 ranged crit rate, and used the calming spore reed. Out of 2959 attacks, 189 were critical hits - giving us a 6.3873 crit rate. Note two facts. First, this approximates the new spell crit rate. Second, it is LOWER than the paperdoll crit rate. I find it curious. I have had similar wild divergences using other wands - but the crit rate tends to approximate the paperdoll spell crit rate regardless of where I apply it.

Untested: do spell-damage enhancing talents (such as shadowform and shadow-weave) affect the performance? And do wand hits proc other items and talents?

I'm curious whether wands are capable of activating other on-hit trinkets. Since wands proc the physical bonus rather than the magical bonus of the Darkmoon Card: Crusade, perhaps wands are able to proc other physical chance on hit trinkets, but not any magical chance on hit trinkets.

For the purposes of procs, it would appear that wands count as "ranged hit" and "do damage" but not "spell damage" or "XXX damage" where XXX is a spell school because, despite doing damage of that school, they are not spells and the ambiguous wording does not reflect that they are looking for, eg shadow spells, not just shadow damage.

Debuffs, in general, only look at damage type. It's self-buffs, procs, and abilities, that bother with whether the damage is a spell or not. JoW, of course, does not distinguish between types of attacks but I don't know if JoL does. If it triggers on ranged attacks it may trigger on wands as well.

JoL health restore will trigger on melee attacks only.

If the damage is not classified as a spell, does that automatically mean the game looks at the damage as physical? That is to say, does this mean that the wand damage is counted as physical when it is dealt, but is counted as a particular school of magic when it hits the target?

When you perform a damaging attack, it's classified as (attack/ability/spell), with spell further split into schools. When the damage lands, it's only classified by schools. A wand attack counts as an attack, not a spell, when launched so it doesn't even get into the school breakdown. It's not that it counts as physical, it's that since it's not a spell such a distinction doesn't exist (it doesn't count as a physical spell like taunt or demo shout). When it lands it counts as the appropriate school of damage.

I think.

I went to Dr. Boom and used the Wand for a while, +spell damage does nothing, but wands do crit with regards to your spell crit rate.

And it appears spell hit rating affects wand hit chance in the expected way as well.

Is it certain that AP boosts do not change the damage of the wand, several people have stated that it used to be but that aspect was removed, anyway it could have snuck back in?? Because im having devilish thoughts of respeccing my mage i barely use

edit: i suppose im asking if the normal hits on the wand roughly match the dps of the wand used.

It might not impact the dps as much but; You don't want to use nature-dmg wands either since they consume stormstrike debuffs. Here is wowheads list of wands:

Wands - Items - World of Warcraft

might it then be beneficial to get the holy damage wand from brd for mana regenerating
Wand of Eternal Light - Items - World of Warcraft
or a frost damage wand such as the Calming Spore Reed
Calming Spore Reed - Items - World of Warcraft

both are fairly quick wands, which as stated earlier ist best for judgement of wisdom regenerating, and should not consume debuffs on the mob whiich could be better utilised otherwise. The Frost damage wand should get a damage bonus from Curse of Elements.

The wands you listed are both pretty slow though.

Wowhead list of wands faster than 1.3s, ordered by DPS:
Wands - Items - World of Warcraft

[Sporeling's Firestick] is a fast wand with fire damage and you don't have to rely on luck to get one.