Wizard101: Open Enrollment By Mark David Magat @marki_bear
Imagine with me for a second. You’re back in 2008. It’s after school, you’re done with all of your homework. You prop a kitchen chair up to the family computer, and remember a little game you’ve been hearing about on TV. Some of your friends have tried it and it has become the talk of the playground, between all the running, screaming and little Johnny throwing tanbark at the teachers. So you ask your parents to make you an account for Wizard101. You don’t think much of it. It’s cute, It’s weird but nothing compared to your Xbox. But then you find you’ve been on it till 10pm and your mom is yelling at you to go to bed. “It’s a weeknight honey!” She screams. But you just need to go one more level. One more spell to learn. One more turn! It’s weird talking to friends about Wizard101 now as an adult, but it seems everyone around my age has at least tried the game. And even though it’s not in the mainstream eye as much as other online MMOs such as League of Legends or World of Warcraft, it doesn’t mean this little guy is dead. Far from it actually! It seems there’s a strong and dedicated community of young wizards who still log on. So will you join me through the world door and enter the spiral?
Wizarding basics:
When you begin the game, you’re asked to create a wizard and pick a school of magic to study, and the school you choose is actually very important. Some schools lend themselves to certain advantages that other schools don’t. Do you want to be a tank and be able to take a huge amount of damage? Go Ice or Balance. You want to hit hard in exchange for some durability? Go Storm. If you want to support with heals and keep the team alive; some of these fights will have even the best wizards bend to their knees, go life. At its heart, Wizard101 is a turn based, combat oriented game. It’s about either rushing an enemy before they can build up a hit or building up a hit to hopefully oneshot the enemy. With how the game is structured, there are a lot of tools at your disposal to build strategies for certain fights you’ll get into. From blade stacking to traps to useful buffs and debuffs to conserving pips for a strong hit, it all feeds into the strategies you’ll play. For those of you who think a kids’ game wouldn’t require a lot of strategy, this game gets hard. There are some battles where you need a full team of varied magic schools and extensive knowledge of the battle to get by smoothly. The game is divided among arcs and the first arc is pretty easy, but arc two and three get up there in difficulty and the fourth arc from what little we’ve seen isn’t lightening up. In the second arc they introduce bosses who cheat and that is a total game changer for strategies going into the battles.
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Group Work is a Majority of Your Grade:
If you choose the right school, you can solo most of the game and only need to team up for critical boss fights. But even then you’re going to need help with bosses giving you a hard time and having a few friends will most definitely help. Thankfully the game has a lot of mechanics to help you find friendly players. Making friends in this game is actually really easy. A ton of wizards are very helpful and want to actively help you. I remember creating my fire wizard and starting the game. A few seasoned wizards were waiting at Unicorn Way, the starting area of the game, to give me free cards to use or sell. And there are a lot of these things throughout the game. Wizards wanting to hatch pets, share cards, help with dungeons or even just have a funny conversation. And for those struggling to make friends or regular friends, the longest running mechanic for teaming up has to be the Team Up Kiosk. If you stand in front of a battle entrance, or dungeon, you have the option to either press the X button and join whoever is going in at that time, or press the Team Up option to wait for another player to join the battle. You can control the number of players you’d want to join and to label if you’re doing a quest or farming a dungeon for gear or other wanted items. For major dungeons such as Darkmoor or last world dungeons, most of the time you don’t have to press the team up button and just join whoever is waiting there since there are usually a few wizards waiting for a full team. Now the newest addition to the game is friendly players tags. Let’s say you want to join an open fight due to a quest but don’t want to ask if you can join, with the friendly tag you can instantly see if they’re open to help or open for you joining. A fun feature of this is that you can look at a list of wizards in the current world you’re in, of all the friendly players and see what quests they’re currently on. So maybe you can join a random player who’s on the same quest as you and you just now made a new friend. But even with a team knowing what they’re doing, some dungeons are commitments. “A crazy dungeon run was my first time questing Darkmoor,” said Milena Skrobanovic, a New Jersey Wizard101 player. “The whole thing took hours, especially the final Malistaire battle which took 2-3 hours of struggling. My gear and experience was lacking at the time.” Granted, Darkmoor is one of the harder dungeons for the level you’re going into, but with the right team and right strategies, the gear is going to be very worth it. Volume 6
