New house! Part Duex

I bought a new house today, the Imperial Palace, but I'm not wholly satisfied with it. The yard is great and has lots of space but the amount of space inside is insulting for the amount you have to pay. Looking back, I haven't been wholly satisfied with any of the houses I've bought.
The Wooded Cottage was nice, but is altogether too small.
The Metropolitan Manor again too small for my tastes.
The Royal Estate is the best so far. the inside is a nice size and the yard is pretty good, but most of it is taken up by the river.
I'll sit on the Palace for a few days and if I still don't like it I'll move back into the Royal Estate.

I don't really have a good answer for why I don't like them altogether. I guess it's just the all too common thought of "I can do it better." I don't know if I could do anything that others would prefer, but I know that I could do something that I would like better.

Mooshu

These past few days, I've been doing the area around Shoshun Village. I've just finished up Cave of Solitude and Kishibe Village, and I can honestly say that I won't miss them even one tiny bit.
The Cave had that bottleneck in the middle of the map that made questing incredibly tedious.
Kishibe Village wasn't bad geographically, but having to defeat 16+ Balance mobs for two quests soured me on the whole area. As a balance Wizard, I don't have the highest damage around and facing mobs that can resist and weaken my attacks slows me down even more.

Wizard 101 Stats/bonuses

The point of this here post is to provide information about the stats/bonuses you can find on equipment.
Every piece of equipment you find will have at least one bonus. The generic equipment you find will have one or two bonuses, while boss-drop equipment will usually have four different bonuses.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Bonuses are:

Health-
Adds a flat amount of health to your pool. The more health you have, the longer it will take enemies to KO you.
(found on hats, robes, shoes, rings and daggers)

Mana-
Adds a flat amount of mana to your pool. The more mana you have, the longer you can go before you need to refill.
(found on rings and daggers / also found clothing in Grizzleheim)

Power Pip Chance-
Adds a flat amount to your percent chance to get a Power Pip. Having a higher Power Pip chance speeds up your casting and makes battles go faster.
(found on hats, robes, shoes, rings and daggers)

Added Pip/Power Pip-
Adds a free pip/power pip to your ring at the start of each battle.
(found on wand/staves starting in Marleybone/Mooshu)

Accuracy-
Adds to the accuracy of your spells and therefore decrease the number of fizzles (in theory).
(found on hats, robes and shoes)

Added Damage-
Comes in two flavors: a flat amount and a percentage. Flat damage is only found in Wizard City and percentage starts showing up in Krokotopia. The max is, at this time, around 30%, it really depends on the school. The damage is either school specific or generic.
(found on hats, robes and shoes)

Resistance-
Allows you to ignore a percentage of damage dealt to you. The resistance is either school specific or generic.
(found on hats, robes and shoes)

Add Spell-
Adds one or two of a spell to your deck. Allows you to supplement your deck in areas you may be lacking. Can be pretty much any card in the game.
(before the end of the game, they can be only found on wands/staves, pets and necklaces.

Outgoing Healing-
Increases the amount healed by spells you cast. Can also work with Incoming Healing.
(AFAIK, only found on rings)

Incoming Healing-
Increases the amount healed by spells cast on you. Can also work with Outgoing Healing.
(AFAIK, only found on rings)

FYI: I omitted Crowns gear from the listing, because they sort of bend the rules.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Assuming you get every boss-drop for your school you don't need to be picky, but the world doesn't always work that way. What bonuses do you look for in an item?
I like to get battles over quick, so I look for +damage and Power Pip chance.

Item of The Day: Temple Guardian Statue

The Temple Guardian Statue from Grum Foultooth in Crimson Fields. Anybody who's been messing around on Mooshu has seen these statues staring at you from the other side of the Insurmountable Waist Height Fence and some of you have even said to yourselves, "I want that." Well, I've said that too and now I've got it. It's pretty neat in the wild but it's even more impressive when you can get a good look at it. I'd love to get a couple rows of these statues but it's limit-1, oh well.

Crafting: my 2 Cents

Most everybody else has weighed in on one side or the other of the crafting debate, so I figure it's my turn.
Starting off: I fall heavily on the side of "It's a good start but it needs a lot of work."
When I was doing the WC and Krok crafting quests, I didn't have a problem with the system but when I hit Marleybone I realized how messed up the system is. The first MB crafting quest alone required 80 pieces of scrap metal (I currently have a grand total of 10 pieces). As Tipa has pointed out, that requires hours spent running around the roofs in vain hope of finding a scrap metal node. Even after you've collected all the reagents, you have to make the rings and daggers. Since you only have two crafting slots at this point, it'l probably take you somewhere in the area of 15 hours to craft all 10 of the daggers and rings you need. And once you've spent the equivilant of a full day crafting, you get to turn in all your items to the quest giver who will give you another quest that will probably require just as much work.

There are things that need to be done, to make Crafting work.
Problem: A lot of the items you can make, particularly the housing items but not limited to them, require a large number of reagents to make.

EX.

This Housing item (stone Brazier) requires 18 Ore and 28 Bronze Gears (among others) to make. Ore is not too hard to come by but Bronze Gears only come from the Golems running around MB, so unless you're really lucky or you buy on the bazarr you're going to be spending a lot of time fighting golems for their gears.
Solution: for each reagent in a recipe that requires more then, say, 5 of an item cut the required number by half. Maybe 75% for large numbers of reagents.
=====
Problem: The quests are just way too time consumming and force us to buy recipes for items we're probably not going to make again once the quest is done.
Solution: One way is to do away with the quests entirely and just award the titles (and crating slots) the way the do with monster kill titles, except a bit different: to get the novice title and your second slot (everybody should start with one slot), you have to craft 5 rank-1 items then you get your title and slot and you can start on the next title track except you have to craft rank-2 items and so-on.

Item of The Day: Solar Decoration

I made this on the Housing Station today. It's a lot taller then I expect (it's about three times the size of my character) and the flames around the outside rotate. Pretty cool, if you ask me.


Also: spider butt, it makes everything better.

Item(s) of the Day: Fire Salamander and Incense Plate

It's official, the game is messing with me. While looking for parchment, I got my third pet drop in 12 days: the cool looking Fire salamander.


I also got this neat Incense Plate from a quest in Tatakai Outpost.

Pets: part 1

Here's some of the pets I've gotten so far.

Black Spider

Summer Dragon

Happy Piggle

Grumpy Snowman

Defender Pig

Blue Cyclops

Bounceback?

I spent sometime on my Lowbie Life wizard and hit 10. I swapped in the new equipment my 37 Balance wizard had gotten while trying to get housing drops and headed over to the Life School to get my sprite spell. I happen to look over at the left-hand chalkboard and noticed this:


Cast a Bounceback. Sounds like it would be a reflect-type spell that would 'Bounce Back' the next spell cast against the target.
Was this a spell that was dropped cause they couldn't get it to work? If it ever existed, is it gone forever or will we see it again when they raise the level cap.

Atlantia, hypothetical water world (without Kevin Costner)

With all the worlds we've seen on our way through the Spiral, it seems at least possible that there is a water world out there somewhere. I remember from when I was doing the Marleybone book quest, that one of the books said that the Marleyboneians (?) believed that all the worlds of the Spiral had once been part of the same planet. If you believe that, then the oceans must be out there somewhere.
Now, I'll admit a world comprised mostly of water does seem kinda out there even to me, but somethings holding the other worlds together and providing them with air. So that something could keep all the water from slipping away into the void as well.
I'm not sure what the driving force would be but depending on where it falls in the time line, it may or may not involve the big M. All I know is that something is driving the undersea people to invade the land.
The way I imagine it, the commons area would a semi-large island. with all the merchants and what not, and the 'streets' would be mostly underwater. Fighting the enemy underwater would allow for 3 dimensional combat like Autumn suggested. The first 'street' could be mostly above water with a little underwater and the main quest line would have to do with you helping build some magical diving equipment that would allow you to go underwater longer.
I'm not sure about the natural inhabitants of the world, all I can think of is otters and turtles. But a good idea might be to have races from all over the spiral fill the holes in the population. Ignoring pirates completely, wouldn't a mander dressed up as a sailor with a bandana and everything be incredibly cute.

A trip to the Zoo and Pirates

So, I went to the zoo yesterday and took lots of pictures. A bunch of them came out quite well and I think this one is one of the best.

Now, this brings me back to the title of my post. Wizard 101 has a lot of great stuff in it but it's missing two important things: Monkeys (yes, I do realize gorillas aren't monkeys) and pirates (we have ninjas already, so where are the pirates). So to kill two birds with one stone, KI needs to introduce Monkey (and Great Ape) Pirates.
So, who's with me?

(disclaimer: I do think pirates should be added to W101 in time, but really I'm just being silly about the monkey part.)

That aside, I think a sea/island world would be pretty interesting. We've had Egypt and Turn-of-the-century London, a weird mix-up of Chinese, Japanese and possibly other Asian cultures and a fantasy styled norse/viking world. Wizard City and Dragonspyre seem pretty original to me. And Maybe we've got Celestia coming, which with it's Gobblers and fairies and witches sounds like it may have a fairy tale vibe to it. So, a South Seas/spanish main based world would, IMO, fit in pretty well.

Wizard 101 Travelogue

All of the older Wizards will know who Micheal Palin is and for those who don't know, he was part of Monty Python. He's been doing travelogues for the last 20-odd years. He's done the Himalayas and the Sahara and most recently the countries that lay behind the iron curtain.
Maybe this is something I shouldn't be admitting but I haven't paid to much attention to the flavor text for quests and object, etc. So I thought I'd start a new character and travel through the spiral paying close attention to everything and writing about it.

Item of the day: Grumpy Snowman

When this 'Item' dropped for me today, I had an epiphany: the Loot Drop System (LDS; "I think he did a little too much LDS.") is toying with me. It refuses to give me any equipment I can use and then turns around and tosses RARE pets at me left and right. Oh, Well.

Grumpy Snowman from Jacques the Scratcher in Knight's Court

BTW: I want this so much. If there's a housing item for this, I want it. And if there isn't, there needs to be, cause I still want it.

Krokosphinx statue in the Royal Museum.
(what you can't see is me drooling on the glass)

IMO: I love Wizard 101, but...

Like every other W101 blogger in our little community, I love the game. I do have one big complaint though. I agree that both Crafting and the Bazaar are good but incomplete ideas. And making Boss fights more difficult so people can't solo them is a step in the right direction but making them so hard that nobody at all can beat them is two steps in the wrong direction. But these are not my big complaint.
My big complaint is quest rewards, equipment specifically. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on MMOs but I've played my fair share and in every one I've played quest reward equipment, barring any special circumstances, is supposed to be an upgrade and even if it's not it's a unique item found nowhere else.
Now I can understand quest rewards not being an upgrade if you have a high level character providing equipment for the lower level character. But if the character you're playing is the pioneer, blazing the trail for characters to come, then the equipment they get from quests, barring any incredibly lucky drops, should be superior to earlier quest equipment. I haven't found that this to be the case, in fact i've found them to be quite mediocre. I don't expect them to be as good as boss drops, cause boss drops are always the best for their level, but I expect a quest robe in the East Counterweight to give better then 4% balance damage. Not only is a lot of quest equipment inferior, it's also not unique. On a few occasions, I've gotten equipment (usually daggers) that are normal 'trash' drops'.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry for making you sit through that, had to get it off my chest.

P.S. I'm sorry I missed the Bloggers meet-up

Item of The Day: Black Spider

I was working my way through Knight's Court today and when I got to the Black Widow, she gave up one of her babies. I have to say this is easily the cutest and most terrifying thing I've seen in game to date. I'm afraid that if I look at it wrong, it's going to leap out of my monitor and eat my face, in the cutest way possible of course.

"Here, have two Sprites."

I was tormenting the bosses of Wizard City for their Housing Items and I spent a good chunk of time on Alicane with two other wizards. I didn't get a single Housing Item from Alicane but for some reason he gave me two of his Sprites. They made for my fourth (and fifth) pet and my first dropped pet.

Item of The Day: KI salutes Mac Tonight

Come on, you can't tell me that the Krok Moon Plaque doesn't feature Mac Tonight's head. It'll be painfully obvious to anybody who remembers him.