As part of Wizard101′s second year celebration, every account gets a ninja pig transformation potion. Now everyone can understand for fifteen minutes how Myth wizards feel every day of the year.

Awesome.

In the September Producer’s Letter, Leah Ruben drops some hints about upcoming features, and precious little about Celestia! My number one Celestia question? Not that anyone asked, but if I could have her answer one question in her NEXT producer’s letter, it would be how come Celestia is an underwater realm? The old Celestial Armor, before it was removed from the game (and later returned to the Crowns shop) had wings all over it. We know Celestia brings us Astral magic, based on the Sun, the Moon and the stars — things of little concern to undersea critters (except the Sun). Well, arguably, both the Sun and the Moon affect tides and….

Do the worlds of the Spiral even HAVE moons? I’ve never seen one, and the Spiral worlds are so incredibly tiny (Wizard City itself is built among the roots of a tree) that I can’t imagine any of them could capture a moon…. I also don’t recall seeing a moon, not even in Marleybone, except when Orthrus summons one in order to howl to it.

Anyway.

Last (but certainly not least), we’re trying to incorporate fixes to legacy issues or those little “thorn in your side” issues. Ever sold an item you spent a whole bunch of crowns on? We’re going to make sure there is a confirmation for that (and that it’s defaulted to “No”). Tired of your Life Minion healing itself when it doesn’t need to? We know that stinks, so Minions are getting some love. Are dye costs breaking your bank? We’re reviewing those, too. Is selling and buying one reagent at a time getting you down? Us too… so we’re fixing it.

Oh, I don’t know about this one. My Sprite Guardian’s capricious behavior gave her tons of personality in my book! About the only thing that could possibly stop her from healing herself would be me dropping feints, prisms, or traps on a monster. She’d have to make sure to send an imp to erase them all.

I just don’t know what I’d do with a minion that actually helped. Helped me, that is. She’d let me nearly die while healing other party members who didn’t need it. She had a particular fondness for a certain necromancer.

Yesterday, KI dropped a press release with some more news about Celestia. It said, in part:

In early Fall, the next chapter in the Wizard101 story will begin with the introduction of the world of Celestia, the game’s largest and most ambitious expansion to date. In Celestia, Wizards will achieve new heights of power as they progress to level 60, discover extraordinary new spells, venture beneath the ocean and learn the deepest secrets of long-forgotten magic.

To promote the launch of the new world, later this month KingsIsle will launch a quest featuring one of the hottest teen icons on the planet. The quest, which will introduce players to new underwater environments and preview features of the upcoming Celestia expansion, will be available to all players in the game.

If Celestia doesn’t bring a new damage spell for Life wizards better than Centaur, put it back in the oven, it ain’t done. Just saying.

So anyway, who is one of the hottest teen icons on the planet???

Not being a teen myself, I did what anyone would do — asked Google.

First result was KI’s press release. Well, that’s less than helpful. Second and third results were a collaboration with Yet Another Kid Social Networking Site. Because we need a few hundred more of those.

The fourth one down is something called “FOX TEEN CHOICE 2010!”, where all the teens across the land come together to vote on….

You’d think the aftermath of all the teens across the land coming together to vote would be big news, but it took a fair amount of digging to come up with the results.

So, here’s what the teens of today are choosing:

• Sandra Bullock, for her work in The Blind Side. Middle aged women rock. Not surprised.
• Sandra Bullock, for her work in The Proposal. Go go, Sandra!
• Tina Fey, for Date Night. Woot! Older women rock!
• Sandra Bullock and Betty White for Best Dance, in The Proposal. YOU GO GIRLS!
• David Beckham, teen choice sports icon, for a sport almost nobody follows in the US. (That sport would be soccer.)

So there you have it. America’s hottest teen icon is Sandra Bullock. What’s the quest going to be? Davy Jones’ Hurt Locker? While You Were Sleeping With the Fishes? Two If By Seaweed? Speed 3: Cruise Controlled? Near Miss Congeniality?

I can’t wait to find out!

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“Wizard101 the game will be offline on Friday April 24 from 3:00am to 4:00am Central US Time. During this downtime you will not be able to log in to the game, and players in the game will be prompted to log out.

The website will also be unavailable during this downtime. Thank you for your understanding while we continually improve the game and the website for all our players.”

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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.

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Halloween is gone from Wizard City at last, and hot on the heels of Spooky Bob comes Harvest Hannah with a whole new inventory of crown gear to sell you. Don’t have any crowns? She also brings a way to earn crowns without paying for them, and she says she has placed Harvest Festival treasures on various boss mobs around the world.

That’s all well and good. But I find it kind of ironic that the wizards and witches of Wizard City would want to dress in pilgrim gear after all of those Salem witch trials. That’s a lot like deciding to wear a Nazi SS outfit in the streets of Tel Aviv, isn’t it? Just not a real good idea?

I half expected to see Headmaster Ambrose dressed up as Cotton Mather, but no such luck.

Anyway. Here’s the stuff Hannah Puritana sells.

Cotton Mather (by the way) seems to be a pretty cool guy, reading his Wikipedia article. He was concerned that the Puritans were losing their way, and urged these second and third generation immigrants to return to their roots, stop their worldly ways and get back to that good old religion, and why not burn some witches to show just how godly we all are?

Hey, you want the headdress of an oppressed Native American as much as the next person, but you can’t quite bring yourself to pay for crowns. There is a solution! Bringing friends into the game will earn crowns for both you AND your friend! Here’s the complete details:

“Invite friends and family to play Wizard 101! You will earn 1250 Crowns for each person who subscribes or buys $10 worth of Crowns (in a single purchase). Plus friends and family who subscribe will also get 1250 Crowns.”

Where was this LAST month?

Ah well :)

KingsIsle, I love the new outfits, but it’s way past time to give us appearance slots so we can wear fun but stat-less gear like this over our magic robes, hats and boots! Otherwise, the outfits are bought, worn for awhile, and then, reluctantly, put away, never to be seen again. And that’s sad!

Appearance slots, please!

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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.

Dr. Katzenstein greeted us with a warning. With a…? WHO? I thought I killed you back in Marleybone! Oh well, looks like even pretty well polished games like Wizard 101 still has some bugs.

I like to hold off on “Kill X” quests in W101 because you often end up fighting things that count toward that total; sometimes as guards in boss fights, sometimes because you went left instead of right and found yourself in a battle. That was the case in Shiritakai, when some elemental fights cleared out a couple of quests I hadn’t done yet. It’s nice when things work out that way.

It’s a long, long level, so we split into two groups for some smaller fights and then teleported to each other when finished. That saved a LOT of time. Now that I’m in my 40s (41), it’s really cool to see how high level players work together. It’s such an incredibly different game. Everyone has pretty much all their spells, so you see the big guns, HUGE magics… and my heals. I got some centaurs out, but they are my last damage spell!

Anyway, even with a nearly full group (someone left along the way), it still took an hour to do the instance. The group leader got his rare sword (you can see him holding it), and I got my penultimate Life spell, which was Dryad, as I guessed. Another spell for the “do not use, ever” deck. Well, it does replace Fairy, it’s true, but I don’t use Fairy, either. It’s usually better to kill faster than to waste pips in heals while the monsters continue to beat on you, I find.

My last spell, which I will get next level, is Sanctuary, a spell that makes all Life spells more powerful for the duration of the battle. Yours, AND the monster’s. Put that right next to Dryad in my “do not use, ever” deck. Sure, it would be handy, but not at the cost in pips. Kill faster, less healing needed.

I changed up my outfit a little. Redyed some items to look classier. I was admiring people’s outfits in that Plague Oni group, and I was a little embarrassed to be seen in my crappy clothes and unimaginative colors, so I did something about it.

This ties in to what I like and dislike about MMOs. I felt my time, ultimately, in EverQuest and especially World of Warcraft was wasted because I did nothing but play the game the designers decided I would play. WoW is so on rails. Just knowing that I was doing the same things in EXACTLY the same way as millions of other people disgusted me. I was paying $15/month just to move from Point A to Point B and hit Button C for Treat D. Rats in a maze. Rats in a maze. That’s all we were. Devs gleefully snickering and rubbing their hands together as we did our parts and sent them our money, just like the people ahead of us had done and the people behind us were about to do.

In Wizard 101, you can look however you like, but more importantly, you can PLAY how you like. Since training points may be freely spent to learn spells from other schools, or to learn utility spells available to anyone, HOW you play is uniquely you. Though as a Life wizard, I have an edge in healing — I can heal other people, and with power pips can play better heals faster than people who just bought the spells from the trainer — that’s just part of what I can do. In fact, I’ve mentioned time and again that I don’t do all that much healing. By playing my Fire spells, I can become a fairly decent Fire wizard any time I want to play that way. And I’m thinking about picking up some necromancy as well.

Nobody plays like I do, because nobody has the same sort of character I do.

My MMO car has run off the rails, but it’s pretty amazing what you find when you leave the tracks. There’s a whole ‘nother world out there.

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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.

About halfway through level 40. Since the instance xp nerf makes it nearly impossible to hit 50 (quests run out around 45; you can re-run any instance once more for half xp, after that, no xp aside from killing things for vastly lower xp — 1000 spiders, anyone?); I figure I’m about halfway through Moo Shu. Dragonspyre is said to be coming soon which will likely raise the level cap (I’d assume) to at least 55, and I just want to be ready for it when it gets here.

All the people now sitting around, done with Moo Shu, waiting for Dragonspyre will all be running the new zone when it opens. I’d rather be able to run through it with people, rather than largely soloing, as in Moo Shu. It was easy to find groups from Wizard City through Marleybone, but MS, perhaps because it is so spread out, just feels empty.

Good news for RMT haters. As of the most recent patch, all the regular RMT clothes Zeke the Shill sells are now available for purchase with regular gold. So now, there’s no reason not to have the best outfits you can afford.

The prices are somewhat steep — the level 35 hat I’m looking at above costs in the neighborhood of 35,000 gold, dyed in the colors of my school. I only had around 50,000 gold (and the gold cap is 99,999), but what else am I going to spend it on? So I bought the hat. I couldn’t afford the shoes, but my regular old shoes are nearly as good, so I’m not anxious about it.

Special holiday items or other rarer things will still be sold only by Zeke or his pop-up window loving friend, Spooky Bob. But for all those people who wanted the RMT gear but didn’t feel like paying extra for it — you can buy it with gold.

This is a fantastic solution to the problem. The best stuff is available to everyone. Those who want to spend a little, can just get them without having to farm gold. Not that you need to; once past level 5 or so, you never have enough things to buy that would put a dent in your gold, unless you rely heavily on treasure cards or just must have every pet in the store…

There were a bunch of cosmetic changes and a slight redesign of the quest journal to make it easier to deal with multi-part quests, so it’s all good.

Number one question on everyone’s mind is, though — when is Dragonspyre opening? Lots of people are sitting in the Spiral buildings with their Dragonspyre keys gripped tightly as they wait for the mysterious door to open…

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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.

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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.

While working on Hametsu quests, the girl I’d helped with Katzenstein’s Lab last week ported into one of my fights, brought an add, and then used the exploit to fade away. I notice KingsIsle has somewhat fixed the exploit; you no longer come back at a safe spot, but just where you were when you ‘sploited. Still free of the fight, though.

I sent her a tell, asking her if she had just ported to me and left after bringing me an add. “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”

Yeah, I’m sorry, too, I muttered, as I removed her from my friends list. Then I had to flee an encounter which had become too hard for me to win.

Compare that with Oran OgreWielder, the lower-level wizard who had been helping me with the last of my Krokotopia quests a few weeks ago. He needed help with a boss on Triton Street, so I helped. He asked me how the pig killing up in Moo Shu was going. I suggested he come see for himself.

A few minutes later while I was fighting some ninja pigs, he showed up, and stayed and helped with a couple of fights. That’s what friends do! Then he apparently went AFK and got dragged into a fight solo…

Having multiple decks really worked out well in Hametsu; there were a lot of Life mobs, which fell to my prism-heavy (converts life to death magic) life deck; and the mobs from other schools who didn’t last long against my more balanced deck. The trick is not to engage mobs where they are mixing different types, like Life trees walking along with Balance samoorai or Myth ninja pigs. Once you find a spot where there’s only one type, you can tune your decks for maximum pwnage.

The end fight was against a (YAWN!) troll sergeant. Wow, are we back on Cyclops Lane? So that was pretty dull. Picked up my first book there. Actually, given the design of the arena, you can sneak around and just safely grab the book if that’s all you want to do. Fight was simple; don’t think I even needed any healing.

Looking forward to the more interesting (ie, PHAT LEWT DROPPING!) mobs.

I started in Tatakai Outpost. Where the NPCs in Hametsu were managing fairly well, though the village was in flames, in Tatakai, the inmates have taken over the asylum and the good guys are forced to camp along the road. The new most fearsome monsters are the horse people. Not centaurs; these are people with the heads of horses and the bodies of people. Reverse centaurs, I guess. You can see one up in Golem’s Court in Wizard City and another in the Krokotopia Oasis. Well, now we know where they are from; they are from Moo Shu. And they are red to me, so meeting them should be a laff-a-minute.

Just barely into level 37. No new upgrades, but I have gotten some interesting new hats which I’m gonna try to make into outfits. Moo Shu is one of the larger worlds, so I think I have a good shot at making level 45 before I finish there.

And a bit of a correction: I talked with the Emperor who was lying on his sickbed in the Jade Palace, and he told me that Malistaire had been after him for the key to Dragonspyre. So I guess Malistaire hadn’t been there yet. He has the key now, and if I finish freeing Moo Shu from evil, the Emperor will give it to me as well.

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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.

This picture seems so long ago. Here I am trying to convince a dirty stinking rat to give up a secret code. At my side is my faithful kitty, Millie. She actually gives a card that lets her attack occasionally, so unlike most pets, she isn’t just for show. She is fiercely intimidating that rat, and he does end up giving me the code.

They always do, in the end.

Ah, the nefarious Dr. Katzenstein. The boss, as you’d guess, of Katzenstein’s Lab. A friend and I were doing Katz’s Lab, but in different instances, and we could simply not get over to the others’ instance, so I ended up doing it myself.

This is where I got the steampunk staff, by the way, though I didn’t start using it until afterward, when was back in town and going over my loot and found it.

After Katty’s defeat, you have to help Katz’s assistant, Grunt, try to figure out who is controlling the clockwork army by making a clockwork out of parts and powering it up using the immense devices in the lab. It’s a regular fireworks show. The answer led to a prominent monument in Marleybone.

But there was a little side quest you could do. There seemed to be more buildings out back, and if you just built a little bridge you could cross over to them. Hidden in the back was a huge clockwork named Smogger, along with a sneaky friend.

It was late and I wasn’t paying careful attention, so it was a few rounds in before I noticed that Smogger had four. Thousand. Health points. I wasn’t sure I even had that many points of damage in my deck. I’d been doing my typical play style of madly discarding through my deck until I had the cards I wanted to play in my hand.

That had to stop immediately. I would need every single card I had. Luckily, I hadn’t played or discarded my Judgment card. Judgment does 125 points of damage for every pip spent, so in theory, playing that card can take down any monster in one hit — if you wait long enough. Since it’s a Balance school spell, Life power pips won’t count for double, but 4000/125 = 32 pips = 32 turns of passing or playing cards without a pip cost would kill it. I dealt with the add before they killed me. There’s only so much damage a Sprite Guardian can heal, but once I was facing just the boss, it was manageable (though one of Smogger’s AE killed her, so I had to spend four pips to bring out another).

I’d recently put some very high rank cards in my deck; the rank 5 heal over time (50 points + 1100 points over three turns) and the rank 6 centaur spell. When boosted by Life Blade, the centaur can do over 700 damage (I have gotten it over 900).

I’m not sure how long that fight took. It seemed nothing I could do with it budged its health. But eventually, I whittled it down until he died. I had to help out my Sprite a couple of times with those massive heals over time. My only worry really was that I would run out of cards with which to do damage — in which case we lose — or my Sprite would run out of cards to heal me with — in which case, we lose, unless I have another Sprite in my hand.

Which I did, the one time I needed it in the fight. I’d stopped discarding any cards. I only had 30, plus another 10 on my sideboard.

Anyway, that eventually ended. I was so keyed up, I continued on even though I was exhausted, and went on to Big Ben, which I knew was the last storyline instance in the game. I struggled through Counterweight East somehow, and collapsed afterward into bed.

I helped some friends with some quests and boss fights when I sat back down to the game around noon. I convinced one of them to help me with the other side of Big Ben, Counterweight West. That went fairly well. Neither of the Counterweights are really all that exciting; eight or nine or ten battles, culminating with a boss fight at the top.

Naturally, once we finished with Counterweight West, it was my turn to help with instances. Here’s a friend and I traveling to the Ironworks, with the faithful Mr. Personality at the controls of the balloon taxi. We finished Ironworks in short order. This being my third time through it, I got no xp from it. Thanks, KingsIsle. Exp for helping friends? Pshaw!

After a couple of hours of helping with boss fights and instances, I delicately broached the subject of a couple of easy — EASY — fights in a small clocktower. Ten minutes, TOPS.

Heh… no, I was up front about it. I knew it would take at least an hour, and I think it may have taken a little more. Seemed like we were in there for a long time.

Not sure how many floors there are, with a boss fight on most of them. Maybe a dozen? The fights were actually really well-paced. After a few fights, there’d be a rest floor with mana and health wisps. So after each fight, you could run back down to the most recent rest floor and get full health and mana before moving on.

One floor, we found a bottle of milk. My friend Andrew tried to pick it up, but it spilled (he didn’t cry, though). A few floors up, he found another, and spilled that as well. A voice whispered to him that he ought not do that again, or there would be trouble.

A few floors up, there’s ANOTHER bottle, and Blaze, the level 13 wizard who’d tagged along, knocked it over on purpose.

That triggered a really tough fight. We grumbled, but it was all good.

Big Ben is pretty much a level 30 instance. I was 34, Andrew was 24 I think, and Blaze was 13. One of Wizard 101′s strengths is that low level and higher level people can group and still be totally effective. Blaze even ended up tanking in some battles. He and my Sprite grew very close. I was unsure about having him along, but he did so well that I soon was relying on him.

At the top of Big Ben, we found Malistaire taking the Krokonomicon from Meowiarty. Malistaire paused to insult us, then fled off to his home in Dragonspyre, leaving us for Meowiarty to deal with. The Friendly Necromancer had warned us to take out the Life wizard first, so we did just that. It was a long fight, but the end was never in doubt, and in the end, when we’d divided the loot and run around and gotten the quest bits in the area, when they asked NOW what, all I could think to say what I do after each fight.

Take screen shots :)

So that’s what we did.

Andrew is the wizard in the red tux. Blaze is the colorful one.

I’m in the middle, along with Baby Ben, one of the two rare pets I obtained while helping Andrew and his friend, Richard, in the Tomb of Storms in Krokotopia. So yes, I finally have some rare pets. The other one is an orange Mander, looks awful so I don’t let him out.

I didn’t really want to continue, but I really wanted to level to 35. I was so close to it after Big Ben. I went to Moo Shu at 34, did some of the first quests — the Test of Body, a combat test, is pictured above. You can see my faithful Sprite. Without her, I’d have to heal in groups. Well, heal more. It’s not like I never heal.

I don’t know what the scroll reads. My Kanji dictionary has the top and bottom kanji to mean “mosa” (moe-sa), a brave man. The top kanji has the meaning of brave, ferocious, fierce, and can be read as “take” (ta-keh), as in the name Takeshi.

The center kanji I couldn’t find in any dictionary, not paper and not online. So I dunno what it all means, probably something about being a brave man.

So, Moo Shu at last. I have to return to Marleybone and finish up some quests in Knight’s Court. My plan was to completely finish with Knight’s Court before doing Big Ben and moving to Moo Shu, but I got impatient and took advantage of having friends on to help.

But since I have fifteen levels to make up and with the fast xp exploits closed (which is indirectly why instances only give experience the first two times you do them), I can’t afford to leave any quest undone.

From what I understand, Moo Shu is one of the largest worlds, but with the xp exploits closed, I keep hearing there’s only enough content to bring you to your mid-forties even so. Once you’ve finished all your quests and done every instance twice, you literally cannot progress (straight killing gives nearly no experience). There’s a lot of people sitting in their 40s, waiting for Dragonspyre to go live so they can finish leveling.

Sorry for the picture-heavy post :P

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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.

Freddy Nine Lives demanded I kill him nine times in a row to get my level 27 Life spell, a powerful heal over time.

Shakes O’Leary was one of the many mice I had to rough up in the Ironworks.

The clockwork boss of Chelsea Tower.

I started the night out by returning to Hyde Park and finishing up the various quests I had going there. They may be boring FedEx and kill quests, but quests are how you advance in Wizard 101, and I’m looking toward the future. I don’t want to get in to Moo Shu and run out of stuff to do before I hit level 50.

In one Hyde Park fight, a wizard on my friend’s list flickered into a fight, brought an add and fled, which earned her a removal from my friend’s list. I had an angry kid on the W101 forums take me to task for not freely accepting random friend invites because I was tired of kids flickering in to my fights, bringing an add and fleeing, but… it happens, it happened last night.

A young fire wizard joined that same fight, he was maybe level 24 but had the title and pet from killing the Jade Oni, the final Moo Shu boss I believe, so I immediately pegged him as someone who randomly friended people and then ported to them, hoping to get lucky. The very first words out of his mouth were, “friends?” And at least he was fighting, which is all I ask of any W101 friend, so I said, “Sure!”. And then he pleaded with me not to delete him. Not because he recognized me, but because, I guess, he’s been removed from friends lists before.

Rest of my time in Hyde Park, he’d be flickering into my fights (but staying to help kill), bugging me to give him my Mutate cards (which I did, why not?), and so on.

Newgate Prison, the next quest hub.

On to Chelsea Court, a section of Marleybone centered around the massive Chelsea Tower. The whole place has been overrun with clockworks, and they have Baxter, the moll who has the goods on the infamous crime kingpin, Pops O’Leary, penned up in the tower. I joined with another Life wizard to take on some of the random trash clockworks, and we made short work of them. A couple of mini-boss fights later, I had access to Chelsea Tower, defeated the clockwork boss and rescued Baxter.

The whole zone was so short. I did ding level 30 during it, but I was kind of disappointed. I was hoping for more.

Sherlock Bones requested I meet him and Baxter at his home at 221B Barker Street and plan our next move against Pops.

Baxter revealed that Pops ran things from his factory, known locally as The Ironworks. A depressing place filled with the worst of the criminal element. The law would be no help, as all the bobbies were at tea, and the heroic detectives like Sherlock himself, would go but, alas, he had a masterclass scheduled with a violin maestro who was visiting Barkingham Palace and just couldn’t tear himself away.

Not to anyone’s surprise, least of all my own, I would once again be sent off to battle Marleybone’s greatest criminals, entirely by myself.

Whoa. City of Heroes flashback.

The Ironworks is an instance, meaning I had to complete it in one sitting. Pops O’Leary was no dummy; I couldn’t go two rooftops without being challenged with a code phrase, or a special knock, or a chimney puzzle to solve. But ya know, that might work for your every day household pet, but not with a wizard straight from Wizard City. Headmaster Ambrose don’t graduate any stupid wizards.

I was apprehensive about doing the entire instance without seeking help, but I have my Sprite Guardian, and nothing much gets past her. Unless she herself gets hurt, then she forgets entirely about me.

Seriously, though, she’s my absolute best companion in the game. I even have removed most of the heals from my deck because she does such a great job or keeping me healed. This comes back to bite me when I join a group and they expect me to heal and I’ve forgotten to add the heals back in. Oops.

Anyway, the Ironworks was no challenge, which was fine by me, as I was distracted watching the debates. Ironically, when I finished the Ironworks instance and returned to Regent’s Square, there was a doggess right there with a quest for me to collect crates… in the Ironworks. So I suppose I’ll be heading back.

Full experience the first trip, but only half experience the second trip, and none thereafter, so unless someone asks me for help in the Ironworks, this next trip will be my last.

Chim Chimeree, Chim Chimeree, Chim chim, Cheroo…

After the Ironworks, I was asked to drop everything and head to Kensington, Marleybone’s answer to Wizard City’s Sunken City. The W101 forums paint Kensington as a punishing, two to three hour instance with no rewards, so… I’ll probably skip it unless I see other people about to do it.

Sherlock Bones sent me to talk to his compatriot, Dr. Watson, on the rooftop of Scotland Yard. Because, that’s where meetings are normally held. Or something.

Anyway, Watson warned me that the situation had just become more dire. Professor Meowiarty was on the prowl, and certainly up to no good. I needed to head into Newgate Prison and confront him there.

Meowiarty is the final boss of Marleybone, so the game is afoot!

I better cool it with this game, or I’ll be done far too quickly.

The game was challenging when I was a Myth/Fire wizard in beta. Once I earned the Sprite Guardian in the live game as a Life wizard, though, I no longer had to particularly worry about losing a fight (though I have had to pick up my own heals once or twice when it took too long to bring her out).

Her heals may not be up to the task later on, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.

Related posts:

1. W101: The long journey to Moo Shu It took the better part of two days and the...
2. W101: On to Chelsea Court Kinda embarrassed to have fallen asleep while grouping with Kasul...
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