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.

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…)

And I have the title to prove it.

I didn’t reroll as an Ice wizard :) I was just spending my mornings as I often do, killing Bastilla in Firecat Alley to try and get one of her rare pet drops — it KILLS me that I haven’t gotten a rare pet yet — and she dropped, along with a rare staff, some rare robes, Chillcloak. For all that it looks like Luke Skywalker’s second best clothes, it’s a pretty unique look. Half cape slung casually over one shoulder. Matching hat and shoes to complete the outfit.

If you look behind Tara, you won’t see the crowds of Wizard City or the blinding glare of Krokotopia. Tara is standing in the central square of Marleybone, its eternal night lit dimly by the glow of shop windows and the flickering magics of the minigame portals. She finished Krokotopia. Well, that’s not *exactly* true. But she did earn the right to go to Marleybone; she didn’t get there by tagging along on someone else’s ticket.

The Arena Master.

I started off Saturday night, after getting back from helping my son move to college, having just barely achieved access to the Krokosphinx, the second quest hub in Krokotopia. The main storyline for that section is the rebuilding of the Order of the Fang, an ancient society that once protected the Krokonomicon from misuse by those undeserving of power. That vile tome was stolen and the Order killed or scattered. Those wizards who venture into the Krokosphinx are there to gather them together once more, both the living and the spirits of the dead. And if the situation of the servile Mander people may be improved, so much the better.

I met up with someone who was just a quest or two ahead of me. He helped me catch up, and we worked together through the Grand Arena and the Vault of Ice.

In the Grand Arena, the Arena Master sets you ever greater challenges to prove your worth to (if I remember right) earn one of the three badges that identifies the bearer as a member of the Order of the Fang. That, and a trip through the Vault of Ice, earns you the right to defeat the minotaur champion at the front of the Sphinx. There’s always people willing to help with that boss, who has 2000 points of health and three friends, because he has some interesting rare drops.

The Order of the Fang sends their love.

That fight ended the night. This morning, I soloed the Emperor’s Retreat instance (which I did again later to help someone with the scarab collection quest), and that earned me my second badge and membership in the newly invigorated Order of the Fang. I left them to continue the good fight and headed into the Temple of Storms.

Somewhere along there I picked up a friend, Oran Ogrestrider (or something like that, call him Oran O.) He was level 10, and I’d probably met him while farming Bastilla at some point. There was definitely no reason for him to be in Krokotopia — 15 is really the minimum level for the second world. But, what the heck.

Unlike most kids who zap in to high level zones, he would stay to fight. Even low level people can be somewhat effective, and while I wouldn’t want level 10 people popping in in Marleybone or Moo Shu, Krokotopia is still easy enough that it doesn’t matter so much. Farming boss mobs so much gives me fairly decent gear (though no rare pets…).

I’d been hanging out with ANOTHER Oran (call him Oran T.), helping him with some boss kills, and zapping over to Oran O. to help him with boss battles in the Krokosphinx, a place he couldn’t even get to without help. I enlisted them both to help me in the final instance of the Temple of Storms. I could use the help, and the final ten bosses or so might drop good loot for folks.

There’s plenty of other things to do in the Temple of Storms, but I was getting impatient to get to Marleybone, just the same way I’d been eager to leave its sands behind when I played in beta. The secret is, you only have to finish the storyline quests to move to the next world. There’s a lot of quests left waiting for me in the Temple, but…

I didn’t get the kill shot. It sure wasn’t my Guardian Sprite who, like usual, was making her own healing her number one priority. Oran T had some sort of lightning elemental pet, probably that got the kill shot. But — DUST! The Buffy fan in me screams with glee.

This is me and Oran T. dusting the ultimate boss of Krokotopia. Oran O. was helping, but left mysteriously during the Trial of Strength. Oran T. asked me why I kept Oran O. in my friends list when he was kinda annoying. That was a good question. I’d been thinking about removing him from my friends list so he couldn’t tag along all day, but didn’t.

I told Oran T., finally, that if we were playing a kid’s game, we kinda had to expect kids were going to act like kids.

So I don’t think I’ll be removing him. But I do hope he learns to call first before porting.

Some Marleybone pics (you’ll be seeing a lot more of these as my friends and I work through this alternate version of London):

Marcel Meow… hey, I don’t name ‘em.

By Jove, Holmes, you can’t be serious!

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:

—

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.

Dragon Mouth Cave

The Pyramid of the Sun doesn’t look that large, but somehow it contains miles and miles of corridors, archaeological digs, and monsters who spend their entire existences slowly pacing back and forth, hoping for an unwary wizard to accidentally step off the sidewalks.

Always kind of cool to have an MMO that emphasizes such traditionally-ignored skills like staying on the sidewalk and looking both ways before you cross the street. It’s almost sad to note that the Marleybone rooftops don’t work the same way.

Hand this dog a deck and make him do his OWN fighting.

Given the problems the dog-folk of Marleybone are having at home, it’s odd they are spending so much time dealing with problems abroad, specifically in Krokotopia. They have soldiers stationed everywhere, and these are the least effective soldiers known in all the Spiral. They lose their weapons. They lose their ammo. They lose their food. They lose their water. They find themselves entirely unable to deal with Rank 2 trash, much less the bosses. The only ones who can haul their butts from the flames, are novice wizards such as yours truly.

Last night, I cleared the Chamber of Flames and the Royal Halls portion of the Pyramid; I also helped a few random people with boss fights. I’m always happy to help with these — the more bosses I kill, the better the chance of getting a rare pet or staff. I haven’t gotten any pets yet, but I do have a nice staff waiting for me at level 20.

The Dig Site in the Royal Halls.

I posted a couple of suggestions to the forums, asking for a way to respec our secondary magic school, because this seems like a choice you should be able to do over if you find it doesn’t work for you. I also asked if there could be a way to save specific decks. Mobs in the Pyramid are typically fire based, but a significant number go with Ice, Myth and Balance. Each one requires I rebuild my deck.

Since my secondary school is Fire, I pretty much have to build my deck solely around Life when facing these. Versus Ice, it’s the opposite — emphasize Fire, their opposite element. The others require a more balanced deck, one with plenty of Life heals but also not forgetting Fire dps.

I got a great reply from someone who pointed out you could have multiple decks — one built one way, one another — and just equip the one with the spells I needed. One person even has a deck built around Treasure cards. I imagine that one is tuned for boss fights where you really need to bring out the big guns.

I dunno, do I really look like a Storm wizard?

In between all this, I was working on my Level 17 spell quest. My new spell summons a Sprite Guardian minion, a companion that joins the group and casts heals. During one fight, I died, and I figured the fight was over and I would be sent, in defeat, back to Wizard City. But she cast a major heal and followed it up with a Heal Over Time the next round. I won the battle and ended the fight pretty much at full health.

I love my little Sprite Guardian.

Another evening should see me done with the Pyramid of the Sun and moving on to the Krokosphinx. That’s the shortest of the three quest hubs in Krokotopia. I’ll probably be level 20 by the time I get there; I’m level 19 now. I don’t have many problems staying alive, but I might look into the RMT gear after I ding and see if there’s anything really nice.

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.

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.

Wizard 101 went live days ago, but I’ve been insanely busy with real life lately (son going off to college and all), so I didn’t get a chance to sit down and PLAY it, other than making my character and reserving the name, until this morning.

The School of Life

In beta, I was a Myth/Fire wizard. That wasn’t the best combination, because it was all dps and no healing. What’s worse, is that they were both high fizzle schools. Wizard 101 balances dps by adjusting the fizzle rate of your spells. DPS schools such as Storm and Ice do massive damage, but pay for it by fizzling up to 25% of the time. Support schools such as Life, Balance and Death fizzle much less, but don’t hit quite so hard.

So the smart thing to do is to take a DPS school as primary, then back it up with a secondary support school. But seeing the huge, long long long fights in Marleybone and Moo Shu, I opted to flip it around and make Life my school, backing it up with Fire so I would have immense healing and decent dps.

With the old Myth/Fire combo, once I had used the three heals every character gets, I was out of the fight. EVERY W101 character MUST pick a support school with some healing (Life, Death) to complement a DPS school. Life is the school for people who intend to group a lot. Death is for soloers — its heals are self-only.

So if you chose two DPS houses — take my advice. Start over. You will be happier in the long run. If you want real fun, choose Balance as a your main school. It doesn’t have heals, but you can absolutely shut your opponents down. A Balance/Life wizard would be the ultimate support combo. Medium dps, a selection of group heals, and think of the fun when the big bad boss monster can’t make a single attack while the rest of your group brings it down.

Myth does have one thing I myth. Er, miss. And that’s the minions. Summoning a companion to help even the numbers on some larger fights almost made up for the lack of healing.

Merchants are not your friends

In beta, I made the mistake of going to the various merchants, seeing what they had for sale, and actually buying that stuff, only to see it drop as loot again and again and again. The stuff merchants sell is overpriced and you WILL find better. You can get a sense of the true worth of a thing when you try to sell it back. You’ll pay 16 gold for this? How nice. Do you remember selling it to me for 860 gold? No? You don’t want to see the receipt?

Well, OKAY then.

Oh yes, this is Tara in Krokotopia and in her new quest duds. And is she a Wizard City Protector? Yes, yes she is.

There is only ONE vendor you need to see. And that is the one that sells decks. Decks drop rarely as loot (though some battles in the second world, Krokotopia, seem to drop them fairly commonly), and they determine how many spells you can have ready, how many you can have in reserve, and how many dupes you can have. A weak deck means a weak wizard. Get the best you can use at all times.

You might also want to stop by the wand vendor. It’s useful to have a wand that casts magic from a different school than yours, so if you come up against mobs that resist your magics, you can always wand them to death. The starter wand is fairly weak. You can find starter wands from other schools as rare loot from battles in Unicorn Way. Wands drop fairly frequently in Marleybone (the third world), but you’ll need to upgrade your starter well before then. Your primary school of magic also gives you a quest for one in your mid teens, but that is, of course, a wand in your own school, so not quite as useful.

My advice is to stick with your starter wand until Krokotopia, and then buy one there if you haven’t found one in Wizard City. Krokotopia is a giant leap of difficulty higher than Wizard City, with the possible exception of Colossus Street, the zone where you are trained for Krokotopia, and Sunken City, which is harder than most of the encounters you will find until Moo Shu, for the level you get the quest.

Wands don’t deplete your magic, cost no pips and are 100% reliable (unless you are facing Balance magic, anyway). You may have a deck full of showier spells, but your wand will never (well, see above) let you down.

Lastly, pets. Pets begin dropping rarely as loot from boss mobs in Krokotopia, and by the time you get to Moo Shu, you’ll likely have several. They don’t fight for you, but certain pets can grant you a new card for your deck. So if you’re gonna blow your money on a pet, make it a pet that does something for you.

My unicorn, Millie, does not do anything for me. I got her because the group heal spell is cast by a unicorn, and I thought it kinda went with the profession.

On the other hand, because I don’t buy stuff from vendors (aside from my level 10 deck), I have lots of gold.

Prospector Zeke, the Item Shoppe

As a beta tester, I got 600 free Crowns to spend at the Wizard 101 item shop. Aside from some level 5 gear of dubious quality, everything cost more than 600 Crowns. So they are mostly a teaser to get you to look at the item shop, look at your meager supply of Crowns, and rush to the web site to buy more.

2500 Crowns will run you $5. 5000 costs $10. $12500 Crowns is $25 (plus 1250 Crowns FREE!). Well, they say that. I call it $13750 Crowns for $25. But that’s just me. And so on and so on until you get to 40000 Crowns for $80 (plus 20000 Crowns FREE!). (So, can I just have the FREE Crowns? Because FREE!! to me means, I don’t pay money for it.)

Anyone who actually buys the level 5 item shop garb is an idiot. Sorry if you did, and think I’m picking on you. But you’re going to hit the level 10 stuff maybe two hours later. Sure, the stuff is better, but as long as you’re in Wizard City, the fights just aren’t going to be all that hard, and usually there will be plenty of people to help. If not, just switch realms :) but more on that later.

In beta, when they gave us a bunch of Crowns to try out, I bought the level 25 outfit. And it was SIGNIFICANTLY better than the stuff I had on, most of it from Marleybone. If you’re going to pay for better gear with real money, at least wait until it would do you the most good. Even with the better gear, btw, I couldn’t solo the Emperor’s Throne Room in the Temple of Storms at 28. Good gear won’t overcome a bad spec.

I’m not averse to RMT, but I’ll wait until 20 or so and then see if I am doing poorly enough that I need a boost from uber cash gear. It’s not something you will be wanting to buy every five levels.

Building a Deck

If you aren’t rebuilding your deck every time you move into a new area, you’re DOING IT WRONG and you’re making yourself look foolish to your group mates. The mobs have little icons showing their major school of magic. So you can get an idea for what sort of spells they may be weak to. Mobs also pretty much know what they are weak to, and often have defenses to protect themselves. If they are the same school as YOU are, swap out your wand and severely de-emphasize your primary attacks in your deck to focus on your secondary school.

There are several different kinds of cards in your deck. Direct damage cards — your bread and butter. Resist buffs — VERY IMPORTANT that you can reduce the damage you take from boss mobs. Auras that increase the power of your attacks. Debuffs that decrease the power of enemy attacks or increase the effect of your spells on them. Prisms and mutation spells that change the school of your magic. Spells that make a certain school of magic more powerful for an entire battle. Damage over time spells. Healing spells. Healing over time spells. Minions. Spells that damage every opponent.

I guarantee, you don’t have room in your deck for every kind of spell you have. And if you try, you’ll always be madly discarding cards to find the ones you need. And then you’re gonna run out of cards. So, look at where you are and what you are fighting, and who you are fighting with, and build your deck accordingly.

Here’s a little trick, though. If you want to make sure you always have some quick dps cards you can play when your hand is full of non-dps cards, go to your local librarian and buy some power cards. They look like a clenched fist, with a modifier, like +25 for the one in the Wizard City library. Fill up your treasure card tray with those. Next time you’re in a fight and have some spare dps cards, draw a power card, merge it with a dps card — which turns it into the Treasured variety of that card, usually with more damage and less fizzle — and just discard it or not play it. Keep doing it until you have a full tray of absolutely instantly available, low fizzle, high damage cards that you can pull out and use anytime you need.

It can get expensive to do that too often, but it’s just the thing to have for emergencies. Also, use the treasure cards that you get as loot. They don’t do anyone any good filling up your card book.

And just a note about Myth minions: Don’t be a noob. Wait until you have done some damage to mobs to pull out the minion. Otherwise, the mob will just one-shot your minion and you will have wasted 1-4 pips for nothing.

And a note about Life school heals over times: Don’t be a noob. If you’re a Life wizard and you’re soloing, cast it on yourself before you need healing. If you are in a group and one guy has al the aggro, don’t wait until he is < 100 points before you cast it. Do it right away.

And for the DoTs of the other schools: Way more important to get those cast at the START of the battle than at the END. Think about it.

Realms

There’s a half dozen or so servers, from the crowded, Ambrose, to the newest, Wu. You can switch between them at will whenever you’re not in battle, so if you’d like to group up somewhere, you can switch realms until you find other people there, too. I was on the Wu server, doing Firecat Alley. Not a tough zone really, but you need to kill quite a lot of stuff there, and my secondary, dps, school is Fire, so it wasn’t the best match for me. I met just two other players there the entire time I was there. I switched realms to Ambrose, the street was CROWDED, I finished up all my kill ten rats quests and went back to Wu so I could loot all the wooden chests that spawn to give me, and only me on Wu server, gold. Pro tip/possible exploit: Since chests spawn in the same places on all realms, you can find a spawn and then flip through the other realms and loot it many times :)

Not that I did it. Aside from testing.

If I had to do it all over again…

This is my second time through the leveling process, and aside from the change of primary school, is 100% identical to my first time through. People on Ambrose are already through Krokotopia and probably hitting Marleybone already — but there’s no accounting for that sort of person who powers through. But even casual players will be seeing Moo Shu in a couple of months. KingsIsle ups the challenge of later levels by giving monsters insane amounts of health, so the battles that took a minute in Unicorn Way are taking fifteen minutes at level 35. So the battles are much, much longer, but the game play is pretty much the same. The card game at the heart of Wizard 101 is ALL THERE IS TO DO. Well, that and model different outfits.

But it’s the kind of thing you only do once. If I had stayed playing the beta and gotten to Moo Shu, I most likely would not be a subscriber today. This is the reason I stopped playing once I got to Marleybone and did a few of the quests. They promise to add things like housing and PvP, but the PvP will just be the card battle again, and you can get a taste of how THAT is at the dueling arena in Unicorn Way.

Other Players

The vast majority of the players I see have the little icon which means they are underage and can’t be freely spoken to. You have to use a menu-driven interface to say things, and those menus are entirely inadequate for teaching someone how to play the game. In fact, I don’t remember seeing a menu selection for “Why are you using a 400 point heal to heal your 100 points of damage instead of finishing off the mob with a wand nuke? Why are you buffing everyone in the group against damage that the monsters we are facing don’t dish out? And why are you wasting power pips by casting spells outside your primary school? HUH?”

It’s not anyone’s FAULT, it’s a game with its own rules and strategies. But unless people stumble upon posts like this one, they just can’t know. The facts are, the card game at the heart of the game is deep and strategic, and if you can’t play it — and can’t figure out how to play it — you will find that despite all the cartoony, kiddie trappings, you’re just going to be a liability to the people around you and will not be able to solo effectively.

So, in summary…

Wizard 101 is a kid’s game built around a Magic: The Gathering-level card game. It would have been better to keep the card game very simple so that kids could actually play it, or go for the late teen-young adult market that WoW aims for.

If they REALLY had wanted to make a Harry Potter-ish game, there’d be Quidditch, Beast Handling, Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts. And Flue Travel. By slamming W101 to the GAME side of the GAME<-->SANDBOX spectrum, they have mimssed an opportunity to make the kind of fully fleshed out world that Harry Potter fans would really expect from this kind of MMO.

If you like the Wizard 101 card game, you’ll be happy. If you don’t — write to J. K. Rowling and ask her when the Potter MMO is coming out, because there is nothing in Wizard 101 for you.

Me? I like the card game! And I like dressing up my character! So this IS the kind of game for me.