West Karana

Still working on Shoshuni Village quests. I cleared out all the quests in the Cave of Sorrows, a place of treacherous paths and ramps and stuff that you have to cross dozens of times, and am now purifying the shrines in the other zone off Shoshuni, Kimise(?) Village. That is home to three shrines that will, when cleansed, weaken the Plague Oni enough so that I can defeat it.

I am 95% certain that the end result of this Life school quest will be the Dryad spell — a spell that heals for more depending on how many pips you spend on it; the Life school’s answer to Balance’s Judgment, maybe. I don’t even have any heals in my battle deck, and the population in Moo Shu has REALLY thinned out so that I’m lucky to get one or two groups a night, so the only reason to have heals in my deck — to keep group mates alive — isn’t really a factor.

Guardian Sprite is all I need so far. Now, if Moolinda Wu hands me an upgrade to the Guardian Sprite… I will be EXTREMELY happy. She’s absolutely fantastic just the way she is, but in groups I have to use a healing deck which really cuts down on my damage. so the more healing I can pass on to the Sprite, the happier I am.

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I didn’t intend to spend all night playing Wizard 101, but after I finished the Hallowe’en quests and finished the Krokotopia quests I’d ignored to get to Marleybone, I met up with a couple of friends and we spent the night working on Hyde Park quests.

So this is going to be kind of a long post.

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Professor Grayrose added something new to the patch notes:

I forgot to add something!

You will find a new setting in your Options panel under “Show Names”.
The selections are now
Everyone
None
Players
Non Players
All Others

This will allow you to only see everyone that is not a player, such as creatures, shopkeeps and items.

Yay!

Very useful. I usually go with names OFF when I am in public spaces. You kind of need them ON to see the primary schools of the monsters you battle — and this is the best of both worlds.

After being a one-wizard elimination team on the Niriki royalty, it turned out it was all for nothing. Professor Winthrop told me with an astonished tone that the missing Order of the Fang was on an *entirely different island*. Not in the Pyramid of the Sun *at all*, it turns out.

So, I had just gone through and spread terror throughout the Pyramid *for nothing*?

Just so.

All those hours, all those endless card battles, all of that — and I was on the wrong island the entire time?

Sadly, that is the case. And now, would you hurry along to the Krokosphinx and get on with the killing?

How do I know that the real evil won’t actually be on that mysterious looking Temple of Storm island nobody is talking about yet? Why can’t I just skip right there? HUH?

At least I got to see the cool Map Room, which certainly has nothing to do with the Map Room Indiana Jones discovers in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bah, who am I kidding? Krokotopia has such a love affair going with Raiders that it almost hurts. From the music, to the quests, it’s all there. Just give me a whip and a fedora, please.

Thankfully, the Krokosphinx is the home of creatures that use Ice. My secondary school, Fire, was mostly useless in the heat of the Pyramid of the Sun. But nearly every critter in the Krokosphinx will be baking in the cleansing fire of my Sunbird. Especially if I can get to level 22, my next spell level, before I get too deep. I think this level is the meteor storm, that does fire damage to every enemy.

The Pyramid of the Sun quests left me off partway through Level 21, so I’m just about there.

Last night I had to “de-friend” my first “friend”. I normally approve all friend requests — and why not? But when one of these random friends kept teleporting to me in the middle of a boss fight, I had to let him go. It didn’t matter so much in these instanced fights if people join the fight and immediately leave, because the fight won’t get any harder. But if that had been an open fight, a fight tuned for just one wizard could quickly turn impossible with the adds an extra wizard would bring, but who wouldn’t stay to fight them.

Some people say this is a cheesy way to PK someone, where people will intentionally try to make fights so hard that you’re forced to flee or die, but I don’t think it’s that malicious. These were likely just kids — it’s nearly always children — who were hoping I would be heading to Marleybone or Moo Shu and they could hitch a ride with me to those higher level zones. When this kid saw I was just fighting the final bosses of the Pyramid of the Sun, he lost interest.

But I just couldn’t have him, in the future, pulling this stuff in Marleybone or Moo Shu where that kind of behavior would get me killed, so I de-friended him. Today’s patch, that limits the size of the friends list, will likely have me de-friending a lot of the people I don’t know.

Wizard 101 released a huge patch this morning, but it doesn’t seem to have fixed that many things. The notes, such as they are, are below:

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Big News!
1. All new pets dropped by bosses will no longer only be named Baby Abbey, they will now have a randomly generated name.

All boss-dropped pets were named “Baby Abbey”, the default name for everything. I wonder if Baby Abbey pets will become rare, now? I still haven’t found a dropped pet…

2. The floating book pedestal in Crimson Fields appears to have been fixed.

This has long been an issue with people trying to complete a certain Moo Shu quest. It’s been said to have been fixed in each of the last couple patches. So we’ll see if it finally is :)

3. Choose your friends wisely. The size of the Friends List is no longer unlimited. Each character can have a maximum of 100 friends, if you have 100 or more friends now, you cannot add new friends until you remove enough people from your list to bring the total under 100.

So much for indiscriminately adding friends :P

Spells
1. Steal spells now describe the “steal” action.
2. Accuracy for the Stun and Freeze spells has been increased to 70%
3. Quench spell Rank has been reduced to 2
4. Melt spell Rank has been reduced to 2
5. Dissipate spell Rank has been reduced to 2
6. Rebirth’s spell accuracy has been reduced

Krokotopia
1. Djeserit Dwellers will turn to dust when they are defeated in a duel.
This is a really cool effect — like when vampires get dusted in Buffy.
2. Oka looks much more like his portrait.
3. Players can no longer interact with the Frozen Forge multiple times.
4. Zan’ne may ask you to do the Tome of the Fang quest again.
5. Desert Golems give credit for both Elemental and Golem badges.
6. Completing the quest “A Fang in Hand” is no longer be required for “Master of the Oasis” Badge.
7. Shackled Slaves will no longer have the word ‘Shackled Slave’ over them.

Moo Shu
1. The Myth Wand available in Moo Shu is now available for all schools of Wizards to use.
2. Players can no longer use “Teleport To Friend” when another player is inside Fushiko’s dojo in Village of Sorrow, since it is now a single-player instance zone. You are meant to complete this on your own as a test of your ability.
3. The floating book pedestal in Crimson Fields appears to have been fixed.

Misc
1. Cyrus has been busy with his red corrective pen again, this time he’s been correcting grammar and spelling.
2. Many treasure cards have new cinematics when they are cast.
Oh, cool :) Treasure cards are always so much fun to use.
3. At the Wizard Creation screen, buttons have been added to rotate your character during character creation. You can still use the mouse to do this as well.
4. The names of all the mini games can now be said in Text Chat.

What with open grouping and a broad kid appeal, Wizard 101 is a pretty friendly game. Jumping in to an instance to help a friend is just a click away. This is a GOOD thing. But the devs saw ‘exploit’ with players repeating instances over and over (something explicitly encouraged in the very first instance on Unicorn Way, Rattlebones’ Tower), and so have sliced the experience you get by repeating certain tougher instances — the ones you would most appreciate the help of friends.

Instanced quests have a new dynamic that decreases the amount of experience rewarded after repeating the entire instanced quest. Instanced quests such as Sunken City, Throne Room of Fire, Crimson Fields and other similar instanced quests will be worth 100%XP the first time you complete the quest, 50%XP the second time you complete the quest and 0XP the third time you complete the quest. You will still receive the full experience rewards for the individual duels, and you will still be able to earn badges and items.

You get the quest automatically for the instance when you zone in, if you didn’t already have it. (Open groups and public quests, what other game claims to be the only one with those? Hmm…) But now, given half experience the second time you do it and no experience thereafter, will it be as easy to gather some friends to do an instance which might easily take an hour of their time?

Apparently there is an instance in Moo Shu which gave thousands of xp quickly without requiring any killing. I can’t possibly imagine anyone repeating Sunken City purely for the xp.

They also fixed the feature where the first person in to the dueling circle starts off with the most aggro.

The first position in a duel will no longer be targeted at a higher rate than the other positions. Target is now random but can still be affected by any spells that are cast on you to draw or deflect aggression.

Groups had been sending in the member with the most health first to draw initial aggro. There are taunt (and de-taunt) cards you can get for your deck, but most people won’t use them for regular battles. This is almost certainly to prevent power leveling, where a high level character steps into the circle first, then followed by lower level wizards. It does make it harder to set aggro order right off the bat, though.

I hope I can take credit for this next one.

You may notice that there is now a delay between changing Realms of one minute.
You will see a countdown timer on your Realms panel.
This lets you still meet up with your friends on a different realm, however it prevents people from “Realm Hopping” to exploit chests and boss encounters.

I wrote about this in a previous post :) It was obviously an exploit then and I’m glad they addressed it.

Nostalgia guildmate Davic brings news of the latest patch notes from EverQuest! I knew the EQ2 GU48 stuff was coming, but I was totally blindsided by THESE!

– Voice chat now in EQ, same as it is in EQ2 (and can we chat between EQ and EQ2?)
– Groups can automatically merge if there is room. I have three spots free in my group, so do you, I invite you, one group all together!
– Coin no longer has weight! No longer can we ridicule people who took out a lot of money from the bank in the Bazaar (where weight doesn’t count) and then left the zone… unable to move…
– Linkdeath timer is now one minute rather than three! So you can get back into the game faster…

Good stuff! Read the full patch notes here!