Gear Shocker

Some friends and I were dueling with a Myth, Storm, Life, Balance combo of wiz tonight.  After the duel and the usual rudeness dispensed by the more stunning team... I "statted" their myth wizard.  I was more than a little shocked to see 48% resist all myth gear!!!!!!!!!!
The best outfitted Ice I know has about 55%!  Maybe it's possible to set up more than that for ice gear but I've not seen it yet. 

I have to admit it's frustrating to be the "tank" class and not actually be a tank compared to bigger hitting classes.  What's good for Myth is certainly good when they get together with storm it seems.  Frustrating that the health/shielding isn't really working for ice with pierce stat and the pierce that comes with accuracy boosts.  And that's just on the shield side... a lot of the wizards now have roughly the same health as Ice.  In the old days Ice had at least 30% health on most of the schools.  Now it's lucky to have 5%.  But the sadness doesn't stop there... the main damage schools are hitting harder percentage wise as well with incredible tough plus and insane critical.  This leaves ice in the dust in several statistics where ice's shielding would usually put it on par or close footing.

Critics would say the big per-pip ice shields are the balancing factor, but with pierce, and the other shield breakers readily available and quake and readily available, steals etc, you can't keep them on for long. (believe me, I've tried)
Something to ponder if you're about to start an ice wiz with the intent of growing him up for arena.  Other schools are almost as good at tank and hit way harder.
Vale

p.s.  This last post is a lot of frustration talking.  I'm frustrated in general with PVP at the moment.  Death weakness spam seems to be the staple of 3v3 and 4v4. Paired with a storm to throw Siren that makes all your blades go away and hits you for an insane amount and put a fizzle on everyone.  I've also been gearing up for a rant about insane life dispel casting as well but that's another story.  Maybe in time I'll see some way around the spam, but for now I'm leaning toward bringing back the wall of shame that I used to have for chainers.  I'm not going to say who was spamming tonight but his name rhymed with Jeffrey Dragonbunter ;D  Thanks Jeffrey for reminding me to speak up about a growing problem.

Merry Christmas! - Peace and good will toward all

I was having so much fun today I almost forgot to post.  The twins Cody and Logan were not thrilled about having Christmas on a Sunday.  This year being the first that we haven't had guests or family to help the time feel extra special. Add on to that, we didn't have snow this year and everything seemed a little odd!  However the spirit of the season and pumpkin pie fix just about everything even snow-less, guest-less holidays.

From our IRL family and Wiz family to yours, we wish you peace in this new year.  I hope you will also find opportunities to be charitable as it seems like there is a lot of trouble in the world these days and extra kindness is needed in a big way.

If you have any projects or ideas on charitable causes via your blogs etc please let me know and I'll try to help you promote them and or assist.  All in all, make this the year of making a difference.

Peace and good will to you!
~Vale

Changing realms for fun and profit

Wizards who have played Wizard101 for a long time know things that are hard for new players to figure out especially for those without open chat.  So in answer to a question on a crafting post I thought I'd show those that don't know how to change realms a quick how-to.

Changing realms can help with:
a) finding more crafting material including more items per pick-up unless someone has beat you to it
b) getting away from a crowd if you can't get your team into an instance because there are too many random people joining
c) help you collect more items quickly in collecting quests
d) can help you find more of a particular kind of monster to fight
e) can increase your chances of collecting drop items

 First click on the Gear on the far right tab.  Then click on the dark spheres on the top tab set. (These are the realms)  You will then see the Realms controls below...

You will generally want to pick a realm that is in the normal to perfect range.  If the computer serving up the realm is big it may have several areas within that realm.  They're basically like additional realms just on that same server.  When you pick a realm and go to it you will notice that everything is the same except there may be fewer or more people.

So play around with it if you haven't used it and if you do use realm hopping you probably know these tricks plus a few.  Do write us with tips or ideas you think new and old wizards need to know.

Thanks!
Vale

It's about time I decorated for Christmas!

My friends were prompting me to get into the spirit and change my header.  They were sporting some holiday colors so I dug up some old clothes out of my backpack, ironed them, dyed them.  We tried to get some photos in the commons in front of the big tree but ended up having to go to Amber Song's house to get pictures in front of the Christmas tree.

Duncan, Kestrel, Amber and Kelly were kind enough to wait through about 20 minutes of photo taking (or so it seemed).  In the end Kestrel, the photographer in real life, got better shots than I did.
I appreciate my friends and how they make my life brighter.  I appreciate my readers for being willing to put up with me and make my job feel worthwhile.  I hope that you all get to be near family and friends whether IRL or on Wizard and make some memories. (And maybe take some pictures!)  See the post Virtual Tourist in a Virtual World to find out about taking pictures and how to get good camera angles and get rid of the clutter on your screen.
See you around the wintry spiral!
Vale

Code for Wizard free lights

Wizard101 is giving free Christmas lights to decorate your house with.  Sign into the web site and redeem your code lights

https://www.wizard101.com/game/twelve-days-wizard/free-lights

I had trouble getting in with IE9 so you may want to try Chrome or Firefox if the page won't load.

On the 11th day of Wizard...

Check out the Wiz poetry contest!  The winner gets 60,000 crowns and a special mystery holiday pet!

So be thinking up some good winter themed rhymes and go to Wizard's facebook page to enter or to this URL: poetry contest entry page

Have fun WINNING!
~ Vale

The 12 Days of Wizard

On the twelfth day of Christmas Wiz gave to us... a moose?  Well, that's how the song goes anyway.  This one is not a promo for them to give away, but it's for sale. Proceeds go to charity so this is a good moose to have if you want to have a nice ride and know that you're doing some good at the same time.
This one seems to go 40% faster than your wiz and provides presents of some mysterious type.  We'll have to wait and see what that's about but I'm guessing maybe it gives a crafting or few wiz coins each day.  IDK.  Let me know if you get one before me.

https://www.wizard101.com/game/twelve-days-wizard/chrismoose

See you around the spiral ~ Vale

Spells I most want to see

Do you have any cool spell ideas?  Here are a few that I'm hoping KI will consider adding.

Spy - Allow you to peek at an opponents spell selection.

Immunity - Pick a player on the opposing team. See a standard set of their school's attack spells.  Pick one and if it's the one they actually cast you have immunity against it.  Doesn't work on non-attack spells.

Blind - Make an opponents card hand appear greyed out.  They have to guess which of several cards they can't see is the one they want.  They can still cast but they don't know what it is they cast.

Proc My Pet - Make your pet have a 90% chance to cast it's may cast spells for 3 turns.

Rescue Pet - Put your life force into your pet for one turn. X-pips.  This makes you immune from hits for one turn. Your health is returned from your pet on the next turn.

Reverse - Just like in Uno, this spell changes the caster's turn from second cast to first cast.

Love spell - Make someone on the other team your helper for the entire battle. 14 pips.

Switch lives - Put your opponent into your spot where they receive the hit meant for you. (kind of like beguile but puts you on your opponents team as well for 1 turn.

Poisoned pill - Cast on yourself for 1 turn.  If an opponent kills you it kills them instead even if you only had 10 health and they hit you with a minor strike for the killing blow.

Ultra-charge - sacrifice yourself to add the ultimate blade 100% to your team mate.

Upside down - make the tough rating on cards opposite so that strong hits are weak and weak hits are strong.

Final sacrifice - give up your remaining life points in a match to fully heal your team.

Violence ward - increase likelihood of being missed by a spell entirely.

Bull in a china shop - a huge bull runs around critically and randomly damaging players unless they have a significant amount of Violence warding.

If you have some cool spell ideas please comment and I'll add them.

Vale

Fire PVP and Rowan's book launch

My buds and I jumped into all fire PVP tonight with a couple high level wiz and a couple level 60.  Except for a lot more fizzle and therefore some untimely deaths it was pretty easy pickings.  It seemed to me that my fire was missing some gear but I haven't heard that's been a problem so I have to assume my memory has gone bad or something.  (7 crit block is just nasty for pvp)  It also felt like crit procs are down even though my wiz stats are the same.  Has anyone noticed this?  Storm wiz didn't have any problem throwing crits constantly which is great if you're questing with one but not so cool on the receiving end in pvp.

We took some turns in 3v because there were no teams in 4v and reported a few people, complemented a few people, won some and lost some.  But most of all it was nice to see my buddies again.  It's been a busy week with the launch of Rowan's YA paranormal book "Become". (Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com)  We just got through with her IRL launch party and book signing at the karate studio.  That was fun!  Wish you all could have been there to join the fun and see the demos.

See you online!
Vale