What do Distract and Pacify do?

Hello all,

I have a good question from Mycin Ravenblood that I'd like to address:

Question=First I want to say you are an example
and hero so to speak to us Necromancers
just starting out, I read your blog to
try and keep head of the game. Thanks for
having this. Second, is my question. My
twin brother and I (both Journeyman
Necromancers now) were wondering if
you could explain a couple of spells
we've come across for us. First would
be Distract. What exactly does this
do? We can't seem to figure it out. The
second we can't figure out is
Pacify. All we can find is what the
card says and well, that's not a whole
lot. So if you could please explain for
us what it is, we would be most
appreciative.

Thanks.

Mycin Ravenblood of the Ravenblood twins.

P.S. There are others like that
we've seen, but not since earned to try
out. If you know what those mean, it
would help us in the future on whether or
not we actually get them.

haha. Thanks for the praise. I try to do the best I can and "represent for the Necros, yo," and you're welcome. Actually I try to represent for all Wizard101 players! But, thank you. I appreciate it. :-)

Ok, so on to your question. Right, so there are two or three cards that a lot of people don't get (or use). Distract, Taunt, and Pacify. The idea behind those cards stretches back through many many fantasy games.

You see, in traditional MMOs you usually have a group of people that the slang users like to call "tanks." Tanks are the people that generally have large hit point counts and serve as the protector of the group. Tanks (who usually wear large bulky sets of armor--thus the name "tank") usually try to gather all the incoming monsters and get their attention so they are only attacking them.

Why?

Once again, in traditional MMOs you usually have a group of people that the slang users like to call "squishies." Squishies are the players who generally have low hit points but put out huge amounts of damage or heal a lot of damage. If a squishy player (who usually wear cloth robes) gets the attention of all the monsters, they are usually dead in a few hits.

Tanks usually come armed with all kinds of tricks to "taunt" the monsters into attacking them. In the game Everquest, Fighters would hit their "taunt" button over and over so as to save the squishies. They would also hunt down special weapons that would generate taunt, which people called "Building agro." meaning, the were building a lot of aggression against them.

In wizard101, everybody is a caster who wears robes; however, it's kind of set up so that ice and life wizards are the ones who have a lot of hitpoints, and storm wizards are the ones who don't have a lot of hitpoints. In other words, ice wizards were meant to be the tanks of Wizard101 and storm wizards were meant to be the squishies of Wizard101.

So Kingsisle gave us a few cards that they probably thought we'd be using a lot more than we do, namely, Distract, Taunt, and Pacify.

Distract and Taunt do pretty much the same thing. If you cast it on a monster, you build threat on your character so they are the focus of the attack. Distract is a zero pip spell and Taunt takes all your pips.

Pacify does the exact opposite. If you cast it on a monster, you lessen the threat on your character.

Now, the other trick that some may or may not know is that you don't need these cards to build threat. You can build threat or aggression on one character by sending that character in first, letting them cast a heal or stun or something and then have the other characters join in the fight after the first or second round.

Here's the rub, these spells are pretty much a PVE only spell for the most part. If you cast any of those threat spells in PVP on another character, it's not going to do anything . . . it's wasted mana. I guess you could cast a threat spell against a minion, but . . . yeah, you just don't want to waste the mana.

How many times have I cast a threat spell? I think maybe once in Kensington Park. /shrug How many times have I cast pacify? never. But who knows? Maybe there will be a new use for those spells in Grizzleheim.

Also! (Before I forget) You'll notice that certain minions in the game do cast taunt spells quite a bit. In that instance (when I'm soloing), a minion casting a taunt has saved my skin a time or two . . . so the cards aren't completely worthless. Ya' know what I'm saying?

I'm sure the readers of The Friendly Necromancer can add their two cents if I missed anything.

Hope that helps!

Happy Dueling!