Well, he’s a POTTER, and he’s HAIRY, so he’s a HAIRY POTTER, right?

I was a level and a half from level 20 tonight, I wasn’t sure I’d make it to 20 — the starting level for the Grizzleheim quests — but I finished the quest chain in the pyramid and dinged 20 on the final quest. It was clearly meant to be :)

I have barely looked at Grizzleheim since there was really no reason to do it with my Grandmaster. But now that Marissa, my 20 Myth wizard, and Allison, my 30 Balance wizard, are both ready… I’ll be writing quite a bit about their paths through the expansion.

With the Grizzleheim expansion, KingsIsle also brought crafting to the world of Wizard 101. The crafting system chosen is the most … um … unique(?) … that I’ve seen in any MMO.

Crafting in the real world was once the domain of skilled artisans who devoted years to learning their craft, and then spent the rest of their careers making items of art and utility for their customers. A good craftsman’s name was known far and wide, but every village had a smith, and larger towns and cities would have entire quarters set aside for the crafting trades.

By and large, MMOs have used the idea of a skilled artisan earning a living by selling the items they make as the basis for their crafting systems. Becoming a skilled crafter was so expensive and time-consuming in EverQuest that those who chose to take on a trade or two were highly prized by their guilds. WoW simplified crafting, as it did so much else, so that everyone had a trade, but getting the best and rarest recipes required significant effort so that once again, the best crafters were a rare commodity. EverQuest 2 started out considering crafters a separate but equal career path to adventuring.

What binds them all is the notion of a crafter who, with great effort, is able to use their artisan skills for the benefit of their friends and guild, or just to hawk as a service to others or a means of income. In most MMOs, after spending time and money learning their craft, an artisan can earn a good return on that later.

Wizard 101 looks at things differently.

Harvesting

Most WoW-like MMOs require crafters to harvest raw materials from the world, and here, Wizard 101 is no exception. Harvesting nodes spawn here and there throughout the world. W101 crafting requires so MANY resources, though, that a given zone doesn’t have enough active harvesting nodes to support even one crafter. Instead, the most efficient means of harvesting resources is to find an area with several node spawns, then flip between the different servers harvesting where you can. This might seem like a hack, but it’s impossible to gather the necessary items for free otherwise.

While the first crafting “badge” isn’t too onerous, all later ones require hours spent flipping realms and running a route. I spent the better part of a day running the same circle in Moo Shu for enough items to complete the first of the Moo Shu crafting quests.

I don’t feel this is appropriate for a kid’s game, but it’s not out of line with the effort required for other games, since there are no skill-ups for W101 crafting, just earning badges (analagous to levels).

But here’s where W101 takes an exciting turn toward the bizarre.

Crafting Slots

In order to prevent crafters from being overly productive, every crafted item uses up a crafter’s ability to make another item for anywhere from 15 minutes to 60 HOURS or more. Earning new crafting badges earns you more crafting slots; working on the second half of my initiate crafter badge, I have three slots available, all of which are working off twelve hour cool-downs.

Cool-downs punish crafters by making it impossible for a crafter to make things to order. But that was already never going to happen because …

You can’t trade money or items to other people

People love the new mannequins, which let you show off your best outfits in your home. Any Apprentice Crafter or above can make these, but they take vast amounts of very, very rare harvests, so it’s unlikely to be something I make casually, especially if someone doesn’t have the materials. But even if someone DOES have the materials, they can’t give them to me (and I couldn’t give them the mannequin) because there is no item trading in the game — just Treasure Cards — special, single-use cards.

The only possible way to get an item from one player to another is via the Bazaar.

The Bizarre Bazaar.

The Bazaar also came along with Grizzleheim. It’s not really a bazaar in any traditional sense; it’s more or less an NPC store where the stock is sold to it by players for a fixed amount, and bought for a fixed amount.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Bazaar is that it is filled to the very top with trash items. From Wizard City through to Dragonspyre, most items awarded from battles are trash, never used, only sold for their cash value. (And helpfully, the vast majority of the equipment you can make by crafting also falls into this category, making it likely most recipes in the game will never be made by anyone, ever).

So for me to make your mannequin for you, you would have to sell your rare components to the Bazaar, I would have to buy them back (at a higher price) to make the mannequin, then put the mannequin on the Bazaar and hope you bought it before someone else did. All very risky, and with a significant chance of loss. (And a certain chance of being out lots and lots of gold for the privilege of making an item for someone else.)

The 5000 gold recipe for a mannequin, by the way, can only be used seven times.

Crafting in Wizard 101 is not any fun at all. Zero. Neither harvesting or the crafting experience itself provides the slightest bit of enjoyment, not even the satisfaction of making something useful for a friend, since even that is impossible. Having to buy three crafting stations (you get a fourth for making the very basic items for free) to make items is pointless, since you are only at them for an instant, unlike EQ2, where crafting stations have their own animations and the crafter is actively using them during the entire process of crafting (which ranges from a few seconds to a couple of minutes for hard to craft items).

Fixing crafting

Here’s my suggestions for fixing Wizard 101’s crafting.

1. Get rid of crafting slots. Instead, make crafting take a set amount of time spent at the crafting station, like WoW, EQ2, LotRO, DAoC, Aion, etc etc etc. Having crafting cooldowns of 59+ hours for some items is just … weird.
2. Let people trade items between each other, or at least implement something like EQ2’s “commission” system, where two people can join the crafting process. One provides the skill, and the other the materials (and gets the item).
3. Remove trash crafted gear. The selling point of having equipment strong in two schools loses its lustre when the items so made would seriously gimp the wearer. Case in point: Flaming Cloak of the Tomb, recipe sold by a Death school recipe vendor in The Necropolis. +1% Death accuracy, +10% Death damage, +6% Fire damage, no health, no mana, no card, nothing — a robe no death wizard in Dragonspyre would EVER wear, for any reason, having gotten superior robes probably in Wizard City.
4. Remove trash loot from the Bazaar so it is possible to find worthwhile items.
5. Remove trash loot from the game. It just overflows backpack space and gets into the bank and overflows that as well, causing people to miss out on items of actual value because trash loot choked up all available space. Just give the gold instead.
6. Allow players to sell their crafted items for prices they set. Make it worthwhile to be a crafter.
7. Add appearance slots, so crafters can make equipment of unique appearance for wizards to wear over their battle gear.

Crafting, currently, is a money and time sink. Its only real use, thus far, is to make unique housing items (which I have done), but those taking amazing amounts of resources and aren’t likely to keep up interest in crafting as a past-time. It needs a huge overhaul to be at all useful, and in its current form, I very much doubt many people will take up crafting to make items at considerable expense for no reason.

I probably shouldn’t have titled this post “First Night in Grizzleheim”, because I hardly went there after doing the quests to open it. At 50, Tara doesn’t get any experience rewards from defeating monsters or completing quests, nor are any of the gear rewards any upgrade, so she has no reason to go. Allison, my Balance wizard on my second account, just hit 30 and is a perfect level for Grizzleheim — but she’s been partnering with my level 13 Myth alt, Marissa. And level 13 is too low for Grizzleheim — she can’t get any of the quests yet.

So, I explored all the OTHER things that came new with the expansion, instead.

First, top of the page, the sprawling neighborhood of the Marleybone Royal Estate. The new Bazaar makes it easy to overindulge on house items, and combined with the loot she was siphoning from Marissa’s completed quests and monster drops, and her own equipment, she’d outgrown the modest Marleybone mansion where once she dwelt.

Next down, Tara proudly bears her “Apprentice Crafter” badge. This took awhile, not because harvesting takes too long (more on that later), but because the cooldowns on the crafting slots is so onerous. Thankfully, they want fewer items made for the first tier than they did on the test realm. But it’s still pretty bad. I’m working on the Marleybone crafting quests now — five rings and five athames for the FIRST quest, and each takes an astonishing number of harvests.

EVERYTHING takes an astonishing amount of harvests. Crafting would be utterly impossible if there weren’t a trick to harvesting, and here it is. Enjoy it before KingsIsle nerfs it :)

First, find a place AWAY FROM OTHER PEOPLE where a harvest spawns. I like the room outside King Djesserit’s Chamber in the Djesserit Tomb in the Temple of Storms in Krokotopia for Stone Blocks and Parchment. There are two Stone Block spawns and two Parchment spawns in that room, and there is a third Parchment spawn in his chamber, along with a possibility of two Wooden Chests, one in each room.

Start in the Ambrose realm. Check out the room, harvest anything you find, then switch realms to the next one down — Bartleby, or whatever. Continue this until you have enough. You can speed this up with a partner checking realms, too, since you can port to someone in a different realm even if your realm change cooldown timer is still running.

I got all the Cattails and Ore I would need in the Cave of Sorrow in Moo Shu, and Newgate Prison gave me enough Deep Mushrooms to fry a hundred steaks.

I haven’t found a good place for Mist Wood yet. I got the bare minimum from just running through Moo Shu’s wooded areas (Grizzleheim may come to the rescue, here). And Marleybone crafting needs metric tonnes of scrap iron. I haven’t found any of that yet.

The key here is to hang out in an isolated area. Other wizards will harvest whatever they come across. The guides on Wizard 101 Central point people to highly populated areas to harvest. That leads only to frustration. Harvesting is a solitary activity.

While waiting on crafting cooldowns, I took Allison and Marissa back to Wizard City to finish some quests. Since Allison has been Tara’s constant companion through Moo Shu and Dragonspyre, she has leveled to 30 mostly by doing high level quests and instances and actually never — tis sad but true — even finished Wizard City. And Marissa needs everything, so last night, both wizards received the Three Streets Savior badge for brave deeds in Wizard City, finished their quest robes (pictured), and are poised on the edge of Colossus Blvd and the Sunken City before moving on to Krokotopia.

When Marissa turns 15 in two levels, I’ll see if Grizzleheim has opened up for her. If so, I’ll start mixing in those quests along with Krokotopia.

I spent some time in the Bazaar looking for fire resist gear. If I could get fire resistance up past 100%, Malistaire’s devastating attacks couldn’t touch me. Sadly, I was only able to get unbuffed FR up to about 45% — far short of what I’d need. I haven’t yet found anything that will ameliorate his meteor storm, but I’m working on crafting precisely because I think there is something that a master craftsman can make that will help. The forge RIGHT OUTSIDE Malistaire’s instance is an obvious clue.

The sad thing about crafting, and what I hope most they will change, is that crafters cannot be fairly compensated for the things they make. Either they use their crafted items for themselves or their alts, or sell them for a fixed price on the Bazaar. And I assure you, the vast material requirements for the highest level crafted gear far outstrip the meager price you can get for them in the Bazaar.

The Bazaar is a good first attempt. But it is not a rewarding experience, and by a rewarding experience, I mean one that results in gold. In a non-managed Bazaar, wizards who harvest what they come across could then sell these items in the Bazaar at a price they set, and the prices for these resources would quickly reach a natural level, quite higher than what they are today. Crafters would buy these resources at inflated prices so they wouldn’t have to go out and harvest on their own. The harvesting wizards would make good amounts of money, and the high cost of materials would tend to keep dabblers out of crafting and more inclined to sell their harvests.

Crafters could then make items and sell them for their natural price, which would likely be below the cost of materials in most cases. People looking for unique gear or home furnishings would have the chance to buy items they normally could never see, as currently, there is absolutely zero incentive for a crafter to make something for anyone’s use but their own.

A managed market is never a good thing. An open market could spark a thriving community of artisans. It’s just that simple.

Grizzleheim, the Bazaar, crafting, groups, open chat, and newly enhanced boss mobs comes to Wizard 101 July 1st, after an extended downtime.

Wizard101 will undergo an extended maintenance window on 01 July 2009 from 3am to approximately 5am Central US time. This downtime may extend beyond two hours and we will message accordingly.

Wizard101 is going offline to add Grizzleheim, Crafting, Bazaar and Enhanced Chat features to the game. For more information on what is being added to Wizard101 at this time, please see our Update Notes.