But surely, if you are not bothering much with the wands, then you are much better of just playing a normal mage.
You are correct in that wands have nothing to do with the Inquisitor. I made an Inquisitor in vanilla, which obviously doesn't even have wands.
The difference between the Inquisitor and the traditional mage is that the close-range focus an Inquisitor has, investing heavily into Speed, getting close to enemies, and using touch-range and close range spells (which have short cooldowns and low AP costs).
2 extra skills half invested are quite a handycap. I've started a mage myself and the best use I found for wands is basically as beefed up scrolls. Use their special abilities and then drop em.
It feels to me that the dual wand mage is supposed to be a different beast altogether, perhaps a mage who focuses only on one school, and uses his wands for the rest of the damage.
For mages that want to focus on the classic 3-4 schools, the wands feel like a waste of point that is only useful for the first area.
So unallocate those points at character creation and put them into something else, problem solved.
Every single preset in the entire game (except the EE Rogue) starts out with 1 point into five abilities. Exactly ZERO (0), nada, zilch, none, zippo of them can possibly get the necessary 75 ability points they need to max out all five of those abilities through normal play. Those two extra points are going to "go to waste" regardless.
So I do not understand why you are so hung up about the wands when every single other class has the same problem.
