In the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator, a ball-pen probe (BPP) has been routinely employed to measure in the island scrape-off layer (SOL) across large parts of the recent 2024/2025 campaigns. The high temporal resolution of allows us to resolve fluctuations, their probability density functions, and modulation via low-frequency magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) modes. We present a unique comparison of the ion temperature measured using BPP with a more conventional retarding field analyzer (RFA). A good agreement between the two diagnostics is observed, when fast measurements are reduced to the same temporal resolution (5 ms) using ‘RFA-like’ averaging. Using an RFA-like interpretation of the fast BPP data, we find a linear decrease in SOL and with line-integrated density. The SOL ion-to-electron temperature ratio ranges between 1 and 3 with smaller values observed for higher densities (collisionalities) and at positions close to the LCFS. The upstream BPP measurements are compared to the average C2+ obtained by coherence imaging spectroscopy (CIS), in the divertor region, magnetically mapped to the BPP. The downstream measured by CIS is about half the upstream and exhibits a similar inverse scaling with line-integrated density. Finally, we benchmark the experimentally obtained SOL and against the EMC3–Eirene modeling and find good agreement for high density plasmas, but significantly diverging results for low density plasmas.