I've noticed a few times when wand knockback doesn't seem to work on, for example, knife-throwing bandits. Also with some other enemies, the first wand hit doesn't do knockback, but the hits following that do.
the knockback doesn't work past certain distance. This is by design, original implementation pushed ranged enemies too far away to be hit further, and they still could shoot at you (to prevent exploits NPC range is longer than player's)
You can test that pretty easily yourself, but it appears knockback kicks in a little close to you than your max damage range. Mummies or other slow to alert enemies can make good practice dummies if you're trying to fine tune the range.
It seems to me that mostly you can only (mostly) knock back enemies that are either already aggressive OR are very close but have not been aggressive yet (trees/bushes/prison walls in the way).
Also something rather annoying is that if you knockback other ranged casters...you can end up nuking yourself.
For example attacking a Lich and knocking him/her (hey, I'm, not judging) back results in the Lich sometimes shooting double attacks at you...which is dangerous considering how much damage they can do. (35 Armour 100 Death Resist and they still cheese through me if I don't play dodgeball)
The game is designed to prevent you from knocking back long ranged enemies because it doesn't make sense, they can still reach you from a distance and their range is longer than yours so letting you knock them back let them kill you from a range you can't reach and they can buy time before you can do another shot.
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