Zafaria - Questing Deck Setup

My favorite street deck to quest with in Zafaria:  - You can find equivalent cards in most schools except perhaps Life and death which both take more pips to get a multi-hit ready -

main deck
------------
ice dome (in case of myth bad guys)
2 regular ice blades
dragon blade (from pet)
2 blizzard
1 frosty
2 tower shield
1 Satyr

treasures
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gargantuan cards

I typically put up a blade and maybe a dome and then make gargantuan blizzards as needed and I can usually do about 900 damage set up like this.  This is typically about half of the health the bad guys have.  If the blizzard goes crit then you're basically done super fast.  Your questing buddies should throw similar gargantuan hits of about 4 pips for a quick finish.  With one other good wizard set up this same kind of way you can get through the collecting quests pretty fast.  If you have 3 wizards or more then all the better.  Of course may-cast Spritely, or may-cast Unicorn pet with some shielding is always extra fluffy for questing so try to mix one if you get the chance.

I'll post about a Zafaria boss deck soon.

~Vale

What is your favorite questing deck setup?

What happens when you get reported?

Reporting or getting reported is probably one of the least understood things in Wizard.  So many times a person will go off swearing (usually in PVP) and end up getting reported.  What pretty much always follows is the reportee reporting everyone else because they think that they can somehow get you in trouble.  I will sometimes warn them to avoid that but they never believe me so I thought I'd paste in the official answer from Wizard 101 faq.

"When you report someone, or you are reported, a message is sent directly to Mr Lincoln that includes the chat logs of everything that was said before and after that report.

Mr Lincoln then reads the log and assess the situation. He determines how bad the offense was, looks up prior offenses for the reported individual, and based on that assessment he issues sanctions such as muting or banning and sends an email to the offending account explaining the violation and the sanctions.

If the report was falsely made, that is determined as well, and the player who made the false report is investigated as to whether or not they have made previous false reports. False reports are just a egregious as valid ones, and similar sanctions can be levied against repeat offenders of false reporting.

Everything that a player enters into the chat window is logged. These larger chat logs are also routinely checked for those infractions that are not reported."

So don't false report people especially if you're doing it out of revenge.  As a general tip most people usually get frustrated and say stuff and others will usually let it slide unless people keep going on and on.  So if you are the one losing it and you say stuff just count yourself lucky and keep your chats private.  It's also smart of you to police yourself so that if you ever do have to report a nutty person that you don't get yourself punished in the process.

See you around,

Vale

PVP in a new world

Something odd has been happening with crit and crit block.  In a PVP tonight we got hit with several waves of crit from fire wizards and our crit blocks didn't crit block!  What's up with 3 wizards with 115 crit block and 120 crit block having only maybe 1 block on one wizard out of about 4 critical spell waves?

I read through the forums on Wizard101.com and with all the questions about crit and crit block they were all answered very cryptically.  The thread master even closed the thread after specifically dodging pretty much all the questions about how it actually works.  But a number of astute wizards seemed to be insistent on a mathematical formula which doesn't quite bear out in practice.  The typical guesstimate is that every 5 points of crit give you a 1% + chance of critical hit.  This would mean, if true, that for 100 crit you have a  20% chance of getting a critical hit.  But this doesn't explain why fire wizards can crit pretty much every hit at around 170 crit which should only crit one out of every 3 tries. It also doesn't explain why crit block used to be almost rock solid at 110+.  There was a time when 100+ crit block blocked nearly all of the time.  Now that seems to not be the case at all.  So it leads back to my paranoid theory that we are looking at an adjusted percentage either from a recent game update or a synergistic effect between spells on the PRNG (pseudo random number generator).

Since Wizard hasn't announced adjusting crit and crit block in the update notes of late I have to go deeper down the rabbit hole and say that it's linked somehow to infallible or that crit block itself is being pierced by shield pierce stats.  Our PVP opponents seemed to be un-phased by the fact that were were constantly critted without block.  Either we were on the receiving end of the mother of all bad virutal dice rolling streaks in history or there's something to this theory.  (my luck has been known to be bad from time to time... my eyelid still twitches when I hear the word "bolt") 

I asked some of my savvy pvp friends and they didn't answer yet as to whether or not they've heard that pierce stats or infallible work this way.  I'll keep asking around, but based on the sudden extreme popularity of infallible domes in PVP I'd say that people have sensed that it's a game-changer.

Back to the question of the formula for crit and crit block my sense is that it's a sliding scale even if not by intent.  If you play a fire wiz and an ice wiz you'll know what I mean.  I think that the formula is probably something like this: 
if (crit% is less than 100) then crit-chance =  crit/500  
**** this is a straight 1/5 ratio or maximum of 20% or 100 crit = 20% chance****
if (crit% is greater than 100) then crit-chance = crit / 400
**** this would mean that 200% crit would give a 50% chance ****
I'm sure this would work into an equation that would accommodate the sliding scale from noob crit up to the super-crit of the 160+ range but I'll let you noodle on this for a bit.

Historically, crit block seemed to be the exact inverse of this.  A crit block of 100 would give you an 80% chance of blocking the spell.  Based on tonight's experiment something drastically reduced those odds.  I won't rest until I get some answers.

Let me know what your experience shows!
Until then, good luck in your battles.
Vale

p.s. Jose had a good point that the new higher gear seems to behave a little differently than the celestia in terms of crit per the numbers.
Also Eric has a theory that crit block gets minused from someone's crit number and then there is a chance given the remainder of crit for you to get nuked.  If people are actually getting into the 200+ range and a good block number is 112+ then you have a fair chance of getting hit.  I don't think it should be that you get critted 4/5 hits without any block.  That seems excessive in any probability model but until we find a link between infallable and crit block failure then this may be the best theory proposed so far.

Does your level affect card pack items?

Yes!  If you are close to level 70 but not there yet you may have reason to wait until you level up to open that new card pack you bought.  Some items you get from the card pack will apparently auto adjust down to the level you are or just below.  This is to keep you from winning items that you can't use - which is cool in a strange kinda way.

But you may want to consider leveling up to one of those magical cut off levels where you can get new gear.  (usually a level ending in a 2 or an 8)  In this case though I hear that you can score a level 70 wand if you wait until you're level 70 to open a Raven's hoard pack.  I haven't won anything like a wand yet in half a million packs *a small exaggeration* so I'm not the best judge of that!  But I hear it from very reliable sources :D  The level 70 wand rules from that stats that I've seen.

I wish there was an accuracy spell I could cast on myself just before I open a card pack so I don't get stuck with wallpaper, stones and chicken platters again.

Vale

Crown Sale

Check out test realm and while you're waiting for it to load go to the web site and buy some crowns.  There's no better time to get crowns than when they're 50% off!

In the past they've always realeased something amazing just after the sale ends!!! So you might want to buy some and hold on to them for a few days to see what the sweet new stuff is!

~ Vale

Test Realm is Out!

Time to train your pets and see what talents they get.  And test the new transforms while you're at it!

Log into the Wizard101.com web site if you don't have the test realm program and install it.

See you there!
Vale

New game at the KI Free Games

I'm a sucker for tower defense games.  They're kind of challenging and mindless at the same time.  So I was thrilled to see that KI has added a new game that gives you XP for your PET (by the way, if you didn't catch that I said for YOUR PET)  What's not sweet about that?

I played it and it's pretty basic even while being complicated at the same time.  Sadly it ends after two rounds and you may get about 4 pet XP for 4 of your Wiz's pet energy.  I'd like to see it go on until your pet food gets all eaten like what happens at our house when Rocky and Jack attack the food dishes.

Anyway, it's new and different and lets you train your pet while playing on the browser so what's not to like?

Vale

Here's a funny for ya.  Idk if you can follow it exactly but it's a little cartoon of a duel my friends and I had recently.  Sadly we don't duel so much any more due to death weakness spam (spam is anything that there is too much of).  But this duel was a fun one.  What made it really funny was that I messed up big time and dispelled their life guy just as my team-mate beguiled the life guy.  That usually leads to a wasted turn and the loss of the game.  This was one strange case where that didn't happen!  Their on-the-ball storm wiz fixed our problem for us with a rare move.
I have to give gratz to the other team.  They were really good and we wouldn't have won without first cast.

So if you can follow this zany little cartoon you may find it entertaining.

Reagent Buying

So it would seem that millions of you are embarking on your Zafaria crafting gear based on the scarcity of sand stone and stone blocks.  I went through all the realms on Saturday and collected a few stone blocks until a full trip of the realms produced 0 (zero) stone blocks.  It reminds me of the Zorg guy on 5th Element where he says "Zero stones, zero crates!"

I spent days at the bazaar trying to pick up some crafting items only to see several hundred available for a millionth of a second and then gone...  This happened so many times that after I took a breather to clear my head I began to experiment with the purchasing interface at the bazaar.  Within a few minutes I was able to do what I think others were doing that were ALWAYS beating me to buying the items.

THIS METHOD WORKS WELL ON FREQUENTLY ADDED ITEMS THAT ARE GOING TOO QUICKLY FOR REGULAR BUYING

Here's what you do:
1) Spot the item in the list that you want and click buy multiple (it will have already been sold out by the time you even see the item so don't stress out)
2) Click the slider on the buy multiple to the maximum or as close as you can. Clicking it one at a time will take forever and will only frustrate you so just click in the bar near the right side of the bar near the Max marker.

3) Click buy - it will probably say you didn't get any
4) Click on the Buy Multiple button again, and repeat steps 2-4 as quickly as possible.  Sooner or later you'll see this wonderful message!  (otherwise you're never going to see it)

Using this method you will eventually get some of the item.  This sniping method is the only logical explanation for how you can have 270 items and then 0 in less time that it takes to click "Buy" and "Ok"
I hate to give out these kind of tips because it means that I'll get fewer items in the bazaar when I'm desperate but given how frustrated I was the other day, I can't bear the thought of how frustrated younger wiz must be that can't manage to buy any crafting items they need.
See you at the bazaar until they add a good place to get sandstone :)


Vale
And P.S. for the people looking to find the Conga drum recipe... it's sold by the crafting guy in the commons of Celestia.  Why does Celestia have conga drums and not the more well-travelled Marleybone?  Hard to say but space aliens like music too!  So keep that in mind when you start your crafting quest in ZF.