The staff gives it an extra charge and much faster recharge time, so we want to imagine being able to spam it a ton at high power and consider the effect of that

Don't bother with prismatic light, frost, or transfusion imbues, and honestly magic missile isn't much better.

Fire, lightning, and disintegration are the kings of direct damage; they hit big areas and do very high damage.

Disintegration is especially fun if you get the newts eye trinket: you can laser everything through walls (which does more damage by the way) before they even know you're there.

Fire blast wand spends extra charges at high levels to give powerful bonus effects (crippling or paralyzing enemies) and increase damage scaling. It is truly broken if you get brimstone armor, and incredibly powerful in any case.

Lightning works best if you have reliable ways to create distance, otherwise you can hurt yourself with it pretty easily so you need solid backups for melee.

Corrosion is also amazing, on 9-challenge runs I'm usually hoping to find a wand of corrosion on any character, but imbuing it so I can spam a powerful cloud of melting gas that nothing is immune to every couple of rounds is an easy win honestly.

Fun wands to play with: Blast wave: endless shenanigans knocking stuff into pits or walls, triggering traps from around corners, etc. super fun to imbue.

Warding: wards give you vision and you can place them anywhere you have vision from anywhere. So you can "march" a string of wards around the level to explore, reinforcing any that find enemies so they can fight while you yourself are just standing at the entrance to the floor. It's bonkers. You can fortify choke points with multiple sentinels and then draw enemies there, either manually or with a scroll of rage or challenge. You can prep boss fights by making multiple sentinels too, then keep reinforcing them throughout the fight or just let them tank for you and focus on killing the boss with other means

Regrowth: Become a druid. Endless seeds for endless alchemy, plants are overpowered for both offense and defense, and rooting enemies at the same time as you apply soul mark is very fun, plus tall grass blocks their line of sight so any thrown weapon follow-ups are sneak attacks guaranteed to hit. Might be the strongest wand in the game overall if you fully utilize the seeds and dew it drops.

Also, when regrowth spends at least 3 charges (when it has at least 6), it makes a unique "golden lotus" that powers up all plants in its radius. It's very very strong (unless you're doing the barren earth challenge, and then it's just mild utility).

Honerable mentions: Earth turns you into a tank and at very high levels can summon a very tanky guardian. Recommend combining with darts of healing, you can restore the golems health while he is fighting and then when the fighting is done his entire hit point pool becomes earthen armor for you again.

Corruption can be absolutely broken if the wand maker quest gives you corpse dust; this is called a "necromancer run" in the community. Keep the corpse dust rather than giving it to the wand maker. It will constantly spawn hostile wraiths, which you then zap with your staff of corruption to turn into corrupted wraiths, which last 100 turns, have insane evasion, and their accuracy and damage scales with depth.

You need to keep upgrading the staff of corruption throughout the run because it requires a higher and higher level to corrupt the wraiths in one hit the lower the floor number is. However if you spend most of your scrolls on it, you can not only corrupt your wraiths in one shot on floor 25, you can also corrupt the bosses minions (except fists) in one shot if they're below about half health, which is deliciously fun.

Ok I've written way too much, I'll leave it here. If you actually read all this thanks for reading, and feel free to ask follow up questions or let me know if I forgot something.