West Karana

There’s nothing as sad as seeing any empty quest journal. Er, assignment book. We are, after all, all wizards at Ravenwood, and in between saving all the worlds of the Spiral from the renegade Death professor, Malistaire, we’re meant to be getting in our assignments on time and are graded on neatness!

I’ve done all the assignments, been to every alley of Wizard City, every monument in Krokotopia, every rooftop in Marleybone and every temple in Moo Shu.

Many times.

I think I would give up EQ2 and Spellborn together if I could log into Wizard 101 tomorrow and find Dragonspyre open for business.

I even spent the weekend farming Onis for gear I probably don’t need. My alt went from level 9 to 21 pretty much on experience from instances.

So now that I’ve been everywhere and fought everything, what have I learned?

A much-appreciated dryad brings me back from the brink of death in a fight with the Jade Oni.

Every fight is different. Because of the card battle mechanic, no fight ever plays out the same way. Sometimes you win easily; sometimes the cards just aren’t there, but they seem to be there for the other side. Sometimes your Sprite Guardian spends the whole fight healing herself as your life plummets downwards.

Just saying.

Deck construction becomes an art. The best decks are constructed for specific fights, and usually tend to be only about 20 cards or less, nearly guaranteeing the cards I needed and not expecting any surprises from the foes. Fights against unknown enemies or many different sorts at once meant a more expansive and general deck.

The schools of magic of the enemies always called for certain responses. Life beats Balance and Death. Fire beats Ice. Spirit and Elemental magic don’t mix. You can’t effectively ward against Balance. Go Ice if you don’t like taking damage but can take it better than anyone else. Go Storm if you want things to die fast (and wear +Accuracy clothing and accessories at the expense of anything else). Go Myth and never fight alone.

The need to weigh all these factors means fights are never “hit autoattack and get some coffee”. Nor are they especially fast. Sometimes you’d LIKE fights to be over in just a couple of seconds.

A mystery in Krokotopia: What IS that island? It’s not the Tomb of Storms, that’s to the left and below. It’s not the Krokosphinx — no sphinx (and it’s clearly visible, just not in the picture). It’s not the secret island, because I’m standing on it. It’s a mystery.

Bad parts? The quests are almost always unimaginative kill fests — kill ten cats :) kill these until you get five of this rare drop. Bring this to that person. The missions break the tedium of the kill quests; some of them are pretty imaginative, and they get better as you proceed through the worlds. If only a young wizard could level solely through missions — which have the best loot, usually. To stop players from powerleveling by repeating easy, high level instances, though, KingsIsle added diminishing returns. You get to do any certain mission twice; after that, no experience.

That places an effective cap at leveling. After you have emptied your assignment book and done every mission twice, you’re between 44 and 46, depending on how much additional killing you did. The level cap is 50, but only those who got there before the diminishing returns patch are there now.

Tara and Allison speak with Wavebringer after defeating the Plague Oni in Shiritaki Temple

This points out Wizard 101’s greatest failing: You can run out of things to do. The diminishing returns patch removed any way to progress your character after a certain point. There’s gear to get, but any specific gear takes so long to get that it takes a Herculean effort to run the same instance just one. More. Time. And then the next.

If gear were tradeable, it would encourage people to gather their friends and keep on fighting the bosses to get their loot. But to do Plague Oni four or five times now and see my class boots keep going to people who can do nothing with them but sell them to a merchant? That’s painful. To run the Krokopatra instance (which is admittedly pretty fun) (you can’t put lipstick on a lizard and you look silly if you try) and to have the rare robe drop for Tara twice but not for Allison who needed it after all the times we ran it (it’s a pretty quick instance)? Disappointing. Crowns armor available for huge sums of gold from merchants, making it so that most people have that armor as a baseline (and a crutch)? Disappointing.

The almost total lack of a community in the game is absolutely distressing for an MMO of this quality. In the name of protecting children from imagined threats (games where kids and adults mix freely, such as World of Warcraft or any game on Xbox Live, show the hollowness of the threat), KingsIsle has made it nearly impossible to meet real life friends in the game without extensive out of game communication. The text filter makes it extremely difficult to discuss how to even play the game in any useful way, meaning to actually play the game well, friends need to use a third party program to talk with each other around the game.

Wizard 101 played with Ventrilo is a different game.

Wizard 101 played with Menu Chat, as you must do when kids join your group, is like trying to sing with your mouth taped shut.

Guilds and clans let people who play many games build a community and an identity through friendship. Guilds are a good way of making real the idea that if I like you and I like her, then maybe you will like her. And you and she like him, so maybe I’ll like him. And maybe when I log on, I can say hi to everyone in my guild at once, and we can perhaps group up and do some instances you need, or decide to take on Kensington just for the fun of it.

Without any community tools, there can be no community, and so Wizard 101 feels emptier than it is.

W101 is a great game, it’s a fun game, it’s an innovative game, but it’s a game that has bought into the hysteria that every adult is a real or potential child abuser, completely disregarding that children are in considerably more danger from people they know in real life than from anyone they might meet playing a video game. That attitude cripples an otherwise amazing game. Adults wonder why they are being suspected of being criminals. Kids wonder why a game company thinks they can’t take care of themselves. Everyone just wants to have fun and play the game with friends.

Well, apparently, all the demons in Wizard 101 are elephants. Who knew? The Plague Oni went down in the concentrated fire of three wizards after a long, long instance.

I found out why Moo Shu is so dead for me. I was in a low population realm — AKA server. Unlike SOME games, you can change servers any time you like just by selecting your new server from a list. Wow, changing servers without having $25-50 deducted from my checking account. How is that even possible?

Anyway, I selected the most crowded server, Ambrose, and Moo Shu was suddenly full of life. I finished up my Kishibe Village quests, and sat myself down in front of Shiritakai Temple while I went and got a snack. When I returned, there were bunches of people (um, three) in front of the instance pads; I stepped on, they did the same, and we were ported into the instance.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

Finished Moo Shu’s first quest hub, Hametsu Village. It’s nice to have kinda-safe sidewalks to run around in; there’s nothing more annoying than the Marleybone rooftops, where the middle of the roof is safe, most of the time. Unless the mobs have decided to use that roof to turn around, in which case — grats on being chain-pulled into encounter after encounter.

The night started off with one last Knight’s Court quest, in Marleybone. I had to talk to a lady there about her purse. Well, I guess she had borrowed it from someone else, it got torn up, needed to be repaired, was really someone else’s, and her purse had been stolen, so needed to defeat larcenous kittens for that one, then re-deliver everything to everyone, and so on — this kind of quest chain is really common in Wizard 101, and I think the main purpose of this quest series is to get you to run along those traitorous rooftops some more :P

While I was there, I bought an airship ticket to Kensington. Not because I was about to do it, but because taking the airship there was the final airship trip out of Digmore Station, which gave me the Aeronaut badge. Don’t see many people with that one, so why not?

Back to Moo Shu afterward.

(more…)

It took the better part of two days and the help of a handful of friends, but I finally finished the story line missions in Marleybone to unlock Moo Shu, Wizard 101’s fourth (and so far, final) world.

What was the hurry? None, really. But — I love Wizard 101. It’s original, has deep, strategic gameplay, it’s different, fun and funny… So when EQ2’s expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, comes out, and Chronicles of Spellborn, I don’t want to just dump the game.

Just like World of Warcraft was for me, when I played, what I like about Wizard 101 is that it’s a MMO you can finish. There is a storyline that runs through the game, and each “world” is another chapter in it. And though you can’t finish the story yet, you can play through the first four chapters — the corruption and evil of the Professor of the Death School, Malistaire, in Wizard City. His search for the source of ultimate evil, the Krokonomicon, in the Egyptian-themed world of Krokotopia. Following the book to the Victorian, steampunk world of Marleybone, where it had been shipped unbeknownst to the Royal Museum. The theft of the book by master criminal Meowiarty, who sold it to Malistaire, who took it too his home in the world of Dragonspyre. Traveling to the Oriental world of Moo Shu in hopes to discover a path to Dragonspyre.

That’s as far as the story goes. So I figure I have about a month to get to the end of the story and to help all my friends get there as well, and then I can put the game away until Dragonspyre is opened .

So as of this afternoon, I am in Moo Shu.

But first, the clothes. There’s such an enormous variety of outfits in the world that after awhile, you have several sets that have decent enough stats that you can pick out what looks best to you. And you can dye them any combination of colors.

Here’s mine :)

Level 30	Level 31	Level 32-33
Level 34	Level 35

I liked the black one in the center the best. I wore that for a long time. Around the same time I picked up a steam-power staff which you just have to admire for the sheer kookiness of it. It casts Myth magic which, unlike my previous Life magic staff, doesn’t trigger my Life blades and traps, so it makes it a little easier to play my hand for maximum damage.

The robe in the last picture is an RMT robe from the Zeke in Moo Shu. Why buy one? My old robes weren’t bad by any means. But I had the Crowns, so why not? I got to level 35 without them, so the better stats and the special card that comes with it — I didn’t need.

Besides, I had my Sprite Guardian to keep me alive and a bunch of friends to help the time go by swiftly.

(more…)

Marleybone’s Regent’s Square at the end of last night’s adventure. New staff, the Staff of Rejuvenation; my school, of course, which is kind of a bummer because using it triggers all my Life traps and blades, but with careful planning, it works. Its advantage over Britt’s Flamelicked Staff? 75 Life damage vs 70 Fire damage means slightly more damage and somewhat more effective against Fire enemies. It also gives an extra pip at the beginning of every battle which means getting the good spells out becomes significantly faster. Since I begin most boss battles by trying to bring my four pip Sprite Guardian out to handle healing, being halfway there on the first round — and with luck with power pips, 3/4 of the way there — is extremely powerful.

(more…)

Kinda embarrassed to have fallen asleep while grouping with Kasul in Chardok last night. Sorry, Kasul :( It was weird, though. Wake up, at the keyboard, no idea how long you’ve been out… I just shut down the computer and went to bed.

Adora did hit 70 last night, though. This puts her in the right place to take advantage of the Shadow Odyssey’s Moors of Ykesha solo zone, though. She has done barely any of the RoK quest grind, but I find that having done it twice, I can’t bear the thought of doing it even once more. Maybe the Moors will help make the 70-80 run more exciting.

Notes, notes, everywhere notes. I’m a bard at heart.

This morning I ducked into Wizard 101 and finally managed to find Baxter. They SAY he’s at the Warehouse, but the Warehouse instance didn’t work for me. He’s actually at the little map location that says “Baxter” on it, clear on the other side of the map.

Oops.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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:

—

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.

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.

I don’t really like visiting the Gobbler King. Aside from being really stinky AND making a habit of snacking on the architecture, he is always shoving food into that maw of his and speaking with his mouth full and splattering food all over you. I know Gobblers see weight as a sign of rank and power, but isn’t he fat enough?

The Gobbler King is so fat, when he jumped in the air, he got stuck. I mean, he eats a LOT. He eats so much, he has a lifeguard in his cereal bowl. I mean, he’s so big, that when he goes to the movies, he sits next to EVERYONE. It’s true. He weighs so much that when he stands on a scale, it says “continued on NEXT scale!”. I mean, he’s so fat that when he takes a bath, every toilet in Wizard City overflows. Heck, he’s so big that his fleas had a revolution, and now he’s known as the People’s Republic of the Gobbler King.

He’s a big guy.

After that unpleasantness was over, since it was getting a little late to be starting up in Krokotopia, I decided to visit Ms. Bastilla in Firecat Alley and see if she would hand me the 55 point Life wand, the troll pet or the dark fairy pet, but after half a dozen times battling her, I got three Chokers of Ferocity (gives a troll card), two Chokers of the Swarm (gives a fire crab card), and a hat.

I did level to 15 while I was there.

There’s so many people who rushed through the game and are now sitting in Moo Shu waiting for Dragonspyre to come out. What’s the sense in that :P

But I’m ready to move on from Wizard City.

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.