Ravenwood Ball and Student Teacher elections

Go to Diary of a Wizard, click on the Ravenwood banner and vote for your favorite wizards.
http://my.diaryofawizard.com/

And don't forget the Wizard101 Great Gobbler Give Away. I'll be wrapping that up this week so read the Gobbler Giveaway post and add your entries!
p.s. be sure to participate in the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

Info on Pets

If you're like me and sometimes you don't slow down to read quest popups do please read the following as they will explain a LOT of things about the new Wizard 101 pet features.







Let me know what your pets can do!

see you in the game,
Valerian Nightbringer

p.s. be sure to read about the GGG! Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

The great pet update is now in the spiral

Log in and see what's new with the great pet update!

Talk to Merle Ambrose first thing when you get there and you will be on your way to cool new pet features.

See you online,

Vale

The Latest Pet Reset

If you didn't notice over the weekend if you got booted off the test realm you probably couldn't get back on. Wizard101 is addressing this problem and the issue with the cannon game. They seem to be working on other items but there's no real info on what other changes are in the works.

Except...
Pets are going to be reset again. Your character will be loaded from the point they were on the 13th. Bye bye beloved adult wraith, I never got to know you or mix you with my defender pig. For all the hours I put in to grow you up I hope I have the energy to do it again some day.

Vale
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG! Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.
Ice Wizards Rule :)

Latest Pet Update

The most recent pet update included something interesting... the ability to make an huge variety of pet mixes. When mixing pets sometimes you get a copy of the original parent but other times now you will get a child pet that is a new named type with different colors. So mix it up in the test realm and tell us about the kind of pets you're creating.

Enjoy!
Vale


Here's another code for the first wizard to redeem it. It will only work for one person.
H379A-6L9HL-2Q85X-9LQ77

The Great Pet Reset

Test realm has been reset. This means that you have additional crowns again and that your pets that you have leveled are now back to their original level. It also means that any mixed pets are gone. Additionally, if you farmed any pets they are now gone. :( rip baby fire serpent :(

On the upside you can try different pet mixes and see what you get.

Valerian
Here's another code for the first wizard to redeem it.
T357A-2L5FQ-275QX-2L379

Party in the Test Realm

At 7pm today there is a party in the test realm. Wizard101 people will be among those in attendance at the pet pavillion. So download the new updates and jump in.

Vale
p.s. be sure to participate in the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

p.p.s. One reader was disappointed that I hadn't talked more about leveling pets so I'm going to spend a few posts talking about that. If you go back a little there are some posts about pets. A few quick tips:

1)Buy pet snacks for your pet's school type and for the aspects you want to train your pet in... intelligence, strength etc. When you play the mini games, feed your pet one of those snacks afterward. Find out which they like best and keep stuffing them full.
2) You'll get snacks from battles etc so you can collect them in your adventures or buy them.
3) For levelling I suggest the cannon game and maze game.

Chainers Never Prosper

My friends got together for some death 4v4 pvp. After waiting a very long time we got matched with Storm, Storm, Fire, Myth. Being taught by the school of hard knocks we immediately assumed they were chain stunners. We were not to be disappointed. Thanks to a timely fizzle on their part we had an opening. We threw them off their game however by beguiling their fire wizard so that he couldn't participate in the stun leaving their myth to use all of his pips each turn stunning. We immediately killed one of the storm who was landing wild bolts, followed by their myth a turn later. The second storm guy finally used a storm lord which threw the stun chain off again as it gave us stun shields against fire's next stun. We recovered our health the next pass with a round of crows across the board. With only one stunner left we were able to watch him run down his pips stunning us over and over. Finally he got desperate and used his last pips on helephant.

Watching them implode was a awesome as they began to panic without their backup stun. It was obvious the fire guy had packed almost no hit cards. If we had been on any other wizards it would have been hard to combat the stuns and periodic hits but on our death wizards we were able to heal fully between hits.

The offered to play us again without stuns. And this is where the maxim Chainers Never Prosper comes in, we could not trust them. Perhaps that's the key regarding why chainers are so widely despised. They lose all credibility and a lot of friends.

Our next match was sad. We were matched against a team of grand masters. Not knowing they were new to PVP we were hitting them hard... then we noticed that they were using non-school spells. Their death grandmaster used 4 power pips to cast a meteor. Their ice wizard used a Seraph. Suddenly we were struck by a sadness for them that they were throwing away their chance at beating us.

In arena you can't afford to use power pips on non school spells. Some people may argue this but it pays off so rarely that it's become a cardinal rule of PVP. If you need to use a convert or a shield breaking spell or simply have to hit twice, it's almost always better than using non school spells. I can't stress this tip enough. A shield or an extra blade or some other spell of your school's making is almost always preferable.

I expect my students to learn how to use their schools to their best advantage without chaining :)

Now go out there and have some fun,
Valerian

The Skinny on Shields

I'm about to crack a mystery for some of you that you've probably noticed if you've done PVP a lot before.

How do two shields get taken up with one spell? Does it annoy you when you shield up and someone knocks off two shields with a minor strike? It bugs me! And I died recently from this very thing so I'm writing to let you know what the deal is while it's fresh in my mind.

There are two ways in which shields can be knocked off with one spell.

1) If they are put on in the same pass. (ex: you put a shield on and a friend puts another one on you in the same round)

2) The shields are different. See the two spells below. They both have a storm shield in their configuration but they are from different schools. (BUMMER).





The upside of using shields of two different schools is that if you do get hit by a huge spell it will take almost all of the punishment.

So when trying to double shield be picky about which shield you put on. You're better off using one of the same type.

Tower Shields
Tower shields are awesome as they block part of any kind of spell. They work against balance and death as well as all other types of hits.

The same "different shield type" concept holds true for tower shields. Ice's learned tower shield is -50%, the one you get from the library is -55% and another one you can get in the bazaar is -60%. If you were to put all 3 on you'd find they will get knocked off in the same pass also.

That multi-layer damage absorb can help if you are versing a balance wiz when they have full blades, a feint or hex and are ready to nuke you. You can double up with different level towers (one under the feint and one over it) and absorb a huge portion of the hit.

Life Absorbs
Life absorbs work against all schools EXCEPT death. (Sierra Starsong correctly points out that death-tough spells such as skeletal pirate are blocked by absorb, but death steal spells such as vampire, wraith and scarecrow are not blocked by Absorbs) So you may want to save your pips for a heal or try to find an actual death shield or tower shield rather than an absorb in the event of versing death.

Life absorbs help take the blow of a Judgement which can be very helpful.

Ice Armor
Ice armor works against all schools EXCEPT death. Ice Armor is an excellent defense against balance. But if you use an ice armor you want to be careful as another ice wiz or someone armed with a steal may be able to take your shield and make you waste the pips you saved up for it.

As another astute reader pointed out Life Absorbs and Ice Armor can stack HOWEVER, if your ice armor is weakened significantly (say 900 of 1000 is used up) the next hit will go through EVEN if you have another 1000 tough ice armor on under it!!! So at those moments you are vunlerable to big hits! Your former ice armor has to be fully used up before the next one will take effect the turn following. I typically throw on a shield in the turn immediately after ice armor to keep it from being stolen. You may want to consider that as well.

Steal Shield
Ice's steal shield spell, when it works, will take the other guys shield. This is helpful sometimes but you will get the shield that was put on last. If someone uses a double or tripple shield combo it will steal the shield that is represented on the right most side of the card. If the shield they put on is an Ice/Fire, the steal will always take the fire and leave the ice shield still in place.

It's adviseable to keep steals for single shields unless you are certain which shield is right-most shield on the card they used.

Converts
When you shield against storm and a storm wizard puts a convert on you... what do you do?

A convert will cause your storm shield to not block the hit. Your storm shield will sit there happily and you will get nuked with a myth blast. So how do you stop it? You can't put a myth shield on at that point because their hit starts as storm so it gets past the myth shield, then gets converted to myth just in time to bypass your storm shield... so that doesn't work. The trick is to shield one more time against storm. Their spell will hit as storm, take up the shield, then take up the convert and will hit you for a smaller amount. Afterward you will still have your original storm shield on.

So when you are in PVP with a heavy hitter it's adviseable to have 2 shields handy just in case they put a convert on you.

The safest way to protect yourself (and this is necessary primarily only with storm)is to immediately shield myth and storm asap. I know few warlord storm that don't pull a convert out during a duel. So watch out.


Enjoy PVP!
Vale
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

Mothers Day Party

Logan Thundgergem and Cody Skyrider put on a world class Mother's Day party the other day. There were few in attendance but everyone that did come had a ROFL moment as we interacted with the pets, virtual guests and the waiters.

This was probably the best part setup I've seen on the game so far.












A reader asked how one follows this blog in order to be part of the Gobbler Giveaway. There are basically two steps...

1) create a google account (should be for any google site)
2) scroll down to the Follower's gadget on the right hand side of the blog (may be 1 or two scrolls down) and click the Follow button.

Here's another code for the first and fastest wizard who redeems it... LL4LA-8L77L-2QN9X-QLL78

Valerian
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

Info About Pets and Battles

So I'm gradually learning more about the pets and how they influence your wiz in battle. For me it's all about battle so please forgive me if I limit my comments to the battle aspect of pets and not the derby.

As your pet grows through the four stages:
1) baby
2) teen
3) adult
4) epic

At each of these 4 stages it appears that your pet learns a helpful action or attribute. See Patchnotes for more information.

As your pet grows in statistics it will reflect it's new found abilities on your character while in battle.

Strength = more damage, greater power pip chance, resistance
Intellect = more mana, accuracy, power pip chance
Agility = heath, accuracy, resistance
Will = health, mana
Power = all of the above

Now the following graphic from the Patchnotes holds the key to the mystery of HOW pets actually physically help (IF they do help).


As you can see a pet can potentially give you blades, disarm, or put weakness on opponents and I've heard that some will cast spells eventually if they are grown enough.

Other pets obviously will only give you additional stats, such as more shielding, power pips or a card etc. (like my colossus).

It seems that these talents and powers are uncovered typically one talent per level of your pets "age". For those that don't have a pet to the epic level yet and are sad that your pet doesn't cast anything... you can hold out some hope.

To me the ideal pet would be a school pet with school boost stats mixed with another pet that gives blades or debuffs. I think that pet could be an ideal helper.

Keep working on leveling your pets to uncover their talents. Let me know what your pets do as you get them leveled. Perhaps we can make a list of traits and see what pets are best to mix with.

Valerian

Here's another code for the fastest wizard: It will work only for the first one to redeem it!
9L9QA-6LQ25-2QN5X-8L678

To Follow This Blog

A reader asked how one follows this blog in order to be part of the Gobbler Giveaway. There are basically two steps...

1) create a google account (should be for any google site)
2) scroll down to the Follower's gadget on the right hand side of the blog (may be 1 or two scrolls down) and click the Follow button.

Here's another code for the first and fastest wizard who redeems it... PL78A-5L6X7-247QX-2LQ72

Valerian
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

Pets Fighting With You

I've had a number of people comment that your grown pets will eventually cast a spell in battle but from what I hear and have experienced you could get old and grey before they do. And if they do it seems to be the wizard city spells like bloodbat and imp etc. Hopefully this will change to a more frequent occurrance.

Keep writing in with info on the pet spells.

Thanks,
Valerian

New Pets In the Test Realm!

Check out central for some awesome pet drop lists...
Here's a link to the unofficial list Aura Champion Spoink's List

Another excellent list with pictures is Nightstalker's List

I SOOO want the Icezilla and Death Ninja!

Another code for the quickest wiz (but it will ONLY work for the first wiz to enter it!) FL57A-4LQF8-222QX-5L879

Valerian
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

The Mystery of Pets Helping in Battle

So far in my testing I found that pets don't SEEM to help in battle yet. I'm not sure if that's because that feature is yet to be released or if your pets have to be grown to the Epic stage. I'll ask around and see if I can find out from KI.

What is your experience with pets helping in battle on the test realm?

Valerian :)

Another code for the quickest wiz:
CL9LA-LL644-22SLX-4LQ72

Valerian
p.s. be sure to read about the GGG!Great Gobbler pet Giveaway.

Recovering From Disconnect

Getting disconnected during an instance or PVP can be a real bummer. The best method I know to recover from an inconvenient disconnect is to to open a new copy of wizard. Once you have logged in on the same character then shut down the other copy by pushing the X button on the title bar of the window or closing it in task manager. You may want to leave it open and disconnected while you finish what you were working on.

I have found this will USUALLY keep you in your battle or instance.

Enjoy,
Vale

2L9QA-QL3D4-2L67X-QL572

Fun With Pets

When you're at your home you can use your object placement feature to place your pets in your housing area. You can put them in a pen, in a room or outside. If your pet likes the area they will dance and or play. If you pet doesn't like the place it will be sad.

When you have pets placed in your housing area try using your emotes and see how your pets react...

When you dance your pet will dance too! Try the other emotes to see the fun ways you can interact with them.

Valerian
p.s. be sure to read about the great gobbler pet giveaway. And thanks to Autumn Duskhunter for allowing me to rip off her cool gobbler graphic. ty ty

T89LA-4L6X3-25B9X-6LQ65