West Karana

Meet the War Oni, boss of Crimson Fields. I’ve been told Crimson Fields is the longest instance in Moo Shu, and so far it seems to be. Not like Sunken City or Kensington, though, it can be soloed… and for about two hours late one night, that’s what I did.

I had no idea what I was getting in to!

It’s not called Crimson Fields because it’s a field of lovely red flowers. The crimson is blood, and the fields are a battle field. The Warlord, once one of the Emperor’s closest advisors, betrayed Moo Shu and left a trail of death and destruction through Hametsu Village, Tatakai Outpost and the once peaceful dojo now come to be known by its bloody moniker.

It’s just the remains of a battle that the good guys lost. My job was to pick up the pieces and take on the Warlord himself.

While running around the battlefield, strengthening the barricades and summoning earth golems to be the front line against any attack, I found four banners I could raise. I didn’t have a quest for it or anything, didn’t know what they were for, so I raised them. Why not?

After I’d sufficiently cut off any hopes of reinforcements for the Warlord, he sent out an army from the dojo — and since I’d raised the banners, one of his generals decided to accept my challenge and come out as well. He was a 5,000 health testament to pain, but I was ready for a huge fight this time, so it went much easier than the 4,000 health Smogger fight in Katzenstein’s Lab. I had plenty of centaurs in my hand, my sprite was healing her little heart out, and all went well.

Defeating the general and his army took the majority of my time in the instance. This would have been way easier with some friends to help, but none were online.

I went on and confronted the Warlord in his dojo, and wasn’t all that surprised when, at defeat, he revealed that he wasn’t the Warlord after all, but the dread War Oni, one of the many demons that have infiltrated Moo Shu. Back into battle, but aside from his bad habit of tossing Heckhounds at me, the outcome was never in doubt.

Somewhere in the madness I dinged level 38, and I got a message from the Life school teacher, Moolinda Wu, that I should stop by when I had a chance, because she had a new quest for me. These usually result in class-defining spells that people who choose Life as a secondary school never see, so I thought I should get over there as soon as possible.

She sent me first back to Krokotopia to get a key. This dryad showed up to help me find it. Could my new spell be this dryad? She wasn’t saying, but I did find the key. Next up was to find the chest the key opened.

Moolinda said Grubb, the boss of Sunken City, Wizard City’s heroic instance, had that chest.

This instance is somewhat easier solo at 38 than it was duoing at 14, but it’s still a tedious slog by any measure. Eventually I finished it (this took me what time I had left over from playing LittleBigPlanet last night), opened the chest, got the book from inside, returned it to Moolinda and… she mentioned something about a Plague Oni.

The Plague Oni is apparently in Shirataki Temple, an instance off Shoshuni Village, but it’s not lit up, so I guess I have to finish the quests in Shoshuni before I can defeat the Plague Oni. Not the worst news in the world; it was my next quest hub after Tatakai, anyway, so I was already heading here.

I did happen to finish my Halloween costume — a ninja! (How original, I know :P )

Rumors are swirling in game about the next world, Dragonspyre. Some say it may be out as soon as next week, some say November, some say the new year. I have gotten some info on Dragonspyre, so watch this space for more about it soon.

Thought I’d never finish the thirty gathering missions necessary to get the “Guild Hall Constructor” title. I’d get bored, or find something else to do, or… pretty much anything else. But I did want to get the title before the event ends. After all, what better way to tell the world you’re an obsessive-compulsive whose probably going to try and sell you something?

It would have been harder without Stargrace’s sage advice. She would grab a mission and head to Sunken City. Few people went there. If she couldn’t finish the mission there, the Graveyard was a short hop away, and it would have the stuff.

I made sure and harvested all the creature and shrub nodes, because neither one was needed for the tier 1 harvesting quests, and it would be best if they were harvested so they might respawn as something useful. On the way back, I’d see which harvest was most plentiful, and make that my next assignment.

Worked pretty well. It was awfully dull, though.

GU 49 looks a lot more exciting — there, you’ll kill and craft to help drive back the invaders. ANYTHING but that tedious harvesting!

Anyone want some waxed leather armor? A lot of it? Just let me know.

A friend was having trouble in the Sunken City and asked for some help. I was in a battle of my own and was low on potions, so I told him I’d be there in a few. Finished the battle, played a few rounds of my potion-filling minigames of choice, and the teleported to him.

If you want to talk about innovative gameplay mechanics, you have to understand how being able to teleport to friends and instantly be part of the battle and also get the quest for the instance automatically changes the game. The parts you don’t need a group for, you can do yourself. When you need help, you look at your friends list, see whose free, and there’s no travel time — they’re right there.

Given that everyone in the game is a wizard of some sort, it doesn’t break any rules — teleportation is one of a wizard’s traditional powers. The open group system means that even if nobody has asked for your help — you can see what they’re up to anyway, and almost always the help is appreciated.

if you’re level 5 and your friend is lever 40 and my teleporting in you made another monster join the fight, a monster your friend is going to have to handle, maybe you’ll want to send your friend a tell before you pop over.

I spent the day helping out friends and working my way through the Pyramid of the Sun quests in Krokotopia. For a game where it doesn’t make a huge difference what class you are — what school of magic you learn — the choice to take a support school like Life as my primary school was kind of questionable. Since everyone can heal themselves to some extent, why choose Life?

As I get higher level, I appreciate being able to absolutely keep someone alive even when they’re being punished by three elite mobs and a boss, more and more. And I could never trust anyone else to heal me if I chose, say, the storm school, the highest damage school of them all, and kept drawing aggro.

Given that you can buy taunt and detaunt cards, the potential is always there to make groups with more traditional classes. But given that my secondary school, Fire, is at the exact same level as my primary school, Life, I can ditch the heals and just be a fire wizard (though without any benefit from power pips). It’s all in which cards you put in your deck.

While we were in Sunken City today, someone said they had THREE schools of magic, and another person said they were thinking about taking FOUR. Which is, bluntly, insane. If you have extra points to spend, get those optional cards you can buy in Nightside and in the secret card store in Krokotopia.

Wizard 101 is still fun to play. Yeah, it’s just doing card battles again and again, but I don’t feel all tense like I do when playing Vanguard, where I think my computer is going to crash any second. It’s just fun and relaxing and strategic; the kind of game where you’re always learning, and where skill matters.

I just would like the game to explain the concept and benefits of ‘focus fire’ in some tutorial or something, so I wouldn’t have to.

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.

It is SO difficult to hook up with your friends in Wizard 101. Even once I figured out where to enter the “True Friend” code, it didn’t work. Meeting up with Gnewton and his wife in game took a frenzied batch of emails which ended with their “We are standing with Ambrose right now … 11:40″ and my “omw”.

Once we were each others’ friends, we could talk, and so we spent half an hour just talking … and fighting the filter. It was a lot of fun, meeting them, though naturally Ellie, Gnewt’s wife, was wearing the same outfit I was wearing. I guess at our level everyone is still wearing the clothing you get from the Olde Towne quests.

One thing we all agreed on: There should be ADULT-ONLY servers where people could talk freely, and where we wouldn’t have to play with children.

Valerian (Gnewt) and Ellie eventually left to finish up their Wizard City quests before heading off to Krokotopia. Even though I had opened up Krokotopia, I was far from finished with Wizard City, having most of Colossus Boulevard left to do, so I left to do some turn ins before turning in.

One of the quests I turned in opened up Nightside, the subterranean world that lies beneath Wizard City, and that in turn gave me the quest to explore Sunken City, a particularly hard instance I’d never found people willing to do while in beta.

When you walk in, you are immediately attacked by three Rank 3 Elite ghosts. That kind of thing happens again and again.

There was a Fire wizard looking like she was about to try it, so we stepped together onto the pads, and started 90 minutes of brilliant teamwork. We were mirror-specced, I as Life/Fire, she as Fire/Life. It was amazing how well that worked, in practice.

This was the first time I’d ever had to play the healer as opposed to just another wizard, but the kind who wears green. After we narrowly survived the first fight, we re-arranged our decks — mine for as much healing and warding as possible, she for more damage and additional warding. I also swapped out my Myth wand for a Storm wand because almost every mob in Sunken City seemed to be from the Myth school. For some reason, I have found a bunch of wands in my travels. Well, this is why you need more than one.

The hardest encounter wasn’t the last mob, Grubb, though he and his friends had more health than anything else we’d killed to that point. The hardest encounter was the tower we’d just cleared, six increasingly difficult battles in a row. With no way to get health or mana back, we had to not only defeat the monsters, but also end each battle at full health, or as close as we could come, since we could not heal between battles.

It was a good run, even though it didn’t reward much besides a new title, “Sunken City Survivor”. But it pointed out a couple of issues.

First, this game is VERY fun in a group. Knowing you can rely upon your teammates to do their job, and that they are counting upon you to do your job, is just a blast. That’s the engine that drives all the best MMOs, learning to work as a team.

Second, this is NOT a kid’s game. W101 being what it is, I group with children a lot, since groups are open to all who want to join. (How can you tell they are children? There’s an icon next to their name that shows they are too young to use open chat. It’s a speech bubble with a slash through it, marking them as players you cannot talk to). A child in a group plays cards seemingly at random and tends to flee from the battle if things get too difficult. You can get through most random encounters like this, but I have never seen a child stick through an entire instance. Am I prejudiced against kids? Not at all. You just can’t rely upon them to play correctly, and they become a real liability the further you go. In beta, most of the children had been weeded out by the time I got to Marleybone, and I never saw any in Moo Shu except the ones that high level players were summoning in to have a look around toward the end of beta. KingsIsle either needs to simplify the game so that randomly playing cards will win all battles, and lose adults and older teenagers, or make a server for adults where we can TALK.

Third, there desperately needs to be guilds in the game. Friends lists are inadequate, for me anyway. I accept all friend requests as a matter of course. And there’s no way to share my list of good players with anyone else. A group of decent players who know each other and play together often would make the game so much more fun. There’s no good reason NOT to. Make guilds part of the adults-only server if it’s an issue with having kids around.

Wizard 101 is an MMO that makes it very difficult to play with other people in more than the most superficial way. You can join any group with room automatically, something I understand Warhammer Online does as well. But without going through the ritual of adding everyone you meet to your friends list, that’s where interaction with other players begins and ends. People drift into the group and they drift out. You can’t even talk with the other people in your group if it contains a child without going through a cumbersome menu system which prevents teamwork. Not being able to say, “I’m going to grab aggro with an AE, keep me warded and healed, we are killing from left to right, boss last. Joe, focus on DoTs, please” would be acceptable if there were no need for it. But there is.