Thursday, October 24, 2013

Test Realm is Online -- Khrysalis Part 1 and more!

Get thee hence and read these here Update Notes from Professor Greyrose!

That's right, Khrysalis Part 1 is on the Test Realm with a bunch of other game changing improvements -- Castle Tours, Shadow Magic, a new gardening level, 5 more player levels, and more! WOOT!

Time for a couple quick stories from the office:

First story . . . So, one day, Professor Greyrose was out and she asked me to attend a weekly Wizard101 meeting in her absence. I went and took notes for her and when they revealed Shadow Magic at the meeting, it was pretty freaking awesome. The Wizards in the room saw I was having a fan moment, and they called me out on it. When it came time for reports from around the room they asked me if I had anything to say from the Pirate101 folks . . . I said, oh nothing, just we're getting shadow magic too. (Of course I was just deadpanning and letting my jealousy show through.) I will say that I did read through a very thick documentation packet about Shadow Magic a couple days ago, and it sounds very interesting! I hope it's awesome in application.

Second story . . . one afternoon a couple months ago I went out to eat with Gary Smith and his daughter, and he let me know about the upcoming Castle Tours system he was working on. Again, I was pretty blown away. The idea is genius. And . . . wow, that's just not a very interesting story . . . but I guess from now on there will always be a part of Castle Tours that will remind me of Japanese Hibachi Steak, which I guess is a good metaphor . . . at least it wasn't a Mcdonald's cheese burger lunch, eh? ;) Enjoy your steak, everyone!

Can't wait to hear your reactions and play through this new world.

Happy Dueling!

Raffle over! Thanks!

Heya all,

Yup! The Raffle from the last post is now over and we had some awesome hints given to us. Thank you so much for your participation!

I ran out of time this morning, but I will be picking winners and sending out codes within the next couple of days.

Until then, hamster dance:


Um . . . and the gummy bear song:


and, uh, how about some duck song for good measure, yeah:


Soon!

Happy Dueling!

Monday, October 21, 2013

Doing the Aquila -- RAFFLE!



Doing the wah wah Aquila. Doing the wah wah Aquila.

Seeing that my quest arrow was pointing me toward's Zeus's demise, I snagged one Bailey Skystaff to come help me out. Neither of us had played through Aquila, and it was HIGH TIME, my friends, to conquer Aquila . . . and we did!

ZEUS!


POSEIDON!


Yeah, the first two dungeons didn't provide much of a challenge for us, but I imagine conquering those at the level they are designed for would be quite an accomplishment!

Loved this statue for sure though, right?!


I was going to post more here about my thoughts, but, again, I'm behind the curve on Wizard101 blogging, so I had an idea.

I've created a raffle.

First rule, Only enter once per household -- I will delete entries that are duplicate IP addresses.

Second rule, do not enter this raffle if you're under 13--let mom and dad enter for you.

Third rule, you must use the Rafflecopter app below to enter, and you must leave me a comment in this blog post with a hint, tip, or link to some helpful Aquila information.

Prizes? I don't know, not everyone will win, but I have some spare stuff here that I've never given away, and I may have a surprise gift or two, plus I have a number of Galvanic Hammers to give away!

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Thanks! I can't wait to see all the advice you have to share.

Happy Dueling!

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Crab Alley done, now, what . . . what the ZEUS?!

I'm all . . . la la la!


And la la la!


Yay, Crab Alley is done! That was fun, and yay new badge! :)


Hmmm, I wonder what comes next?


WHAT THE ZEUS?!?! Ok, well, wherever the wind may blow or the gods may dwell . . . lead on quest arrow!

Happy Dueling!

Friday, October 18, 2013

Thomas Lionblood does . . . Crab Alley? Crab Alley!

I logged on Thomas and I said to myself . . . ok . . . I'll just let the quest arrow guide me, go! I've got a ton of side quests in my quest log that I've never done, so I might as well clear them out.


Yup, I've never done Crab Alley on Thomas. I thought for sure I had, and I was just following the arrow to some random side quest in Crab Alley, but . . . nope! It was the full deal. (Not that Crab Alley isn't just one huge side quest anyway.) When I had done it before I was playing Myrna, duh.


Memories came flooding back to me (see what I did there?) about writing an article for Beckett's about Crab Alley. Good times!

I started out killing stuff and it was suddenly apparent that I had Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too deep of a deck for Crab Alley. Are you insane? Wait . . . don't answer that question. ;p

I started fishing through my decks to find one that was empty and that's when I realized . . . on yeah . . . you can rename your decks now. Thus Death Small Deck 1 was born!


By the end of my play time today, I was swimming in Deep Warrens and ready to EXPLORE MINI-CELESTIA! I can't believe they didn't name this zone mini-celestia! ;) jk.

Until next time, this is Thomas Lionblood, just blowing with the wind, er, rolling with currents in Wizard101.

Happy Dueling!

...

p.s. This video! (wish I could take credit for that video, but I was just a small part in its making -- silent props to the three people that helped make it happen AND, really, the entire team and fans for being awesome, would never been made without all of you and the work to make this stuff happen.)


Happy Dueling!


Thursday, October 17, 2013

Quick Ramble - NXP, some links, and Syfy

Heya! So I have like 10 minutes before I need to get up out of this chair and get ready for work. I've been grinding Nautical XP in game this morning solo.

Oh Bad Pedro . . . look at you . . . level 58 in Aquila and you've had to rush back to MooShu to grind on ships to level. tsk tsk.


I really don't have much to write about today. I would like to share a couple more selfish links to posts I've written for the KingsIsle blog:

Realmscon Visit
Writing Update Notes and more

. . . I want to go back to the beach! That was a lot of fun there in Corpus Christi for the fam. I was tweeting pictures of Zoomer getting soaked in the ocean hehe.

As for real life, the one show Uber Wife and I really love to watch religiously is Syfy's FaceOff. There's nothing quite like watching stressed out Creature Creators racing against the clock to put together really cool make ups.


CREEPY STUFF. That'll help you get into the mood for Halloween costuming!

It's pretty fun looking through their photo galleries. There's a Pirate Gallery from Season 3 that's awesome!

Ok, I'm out of time.

Happy Dueling!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Happy Birthday Pirate101 from TFN

I'm tired . . . it's been an exhausting year, but that's not why I'm tired. *yawn* I just woke up. Let me see if I can string together a few sentences here about Pirate101's birthday from my point of view.

It seems like in life we like to plant flags in certain dates because it helps us separate time. HERE ENDS THE PAST! HERE STARTS A NEW BEGINNING! Missing that opportunity would be incredibly unfortunate, and so I'm very happy that we were able to do that yesterday, and I think we did a pretty good job, and it's been a pretty spectacular year at KingsIsle IMHO with both games rocking out stuff.

We didn't throw a grand party at KingsIsle -- too much work to do! We did, however, gather together at one point during the day where Josef Hall gave a short speech about how impressed he was with all the Pirate101 team had worked on this year. We haven't slowed down since launch. Marleybone and Aquila was a huge undertaking, and we've been working hard on . . . other stuff yet to be released. :)

Then Jay and Mike passed out cookies. Wheee! Cookies! nom nom nom.

I won't rehash our birthday too much since you're all well aware of the hat (hehe, leaking the hat on Puppet Pirates with Jeff Toney was fun ;)) and the decorations and all the Halloween stuff happening simultaneously. You guys all know that, and if you haven't seen it yet -- log in! Whatcha waiting for! :)

The best part of yesterday for me was playing Pirate101 with my youngest after work and watching him get excited over the Parrrty hat and pumpkin eyepatch for his level 5 character and getting him the new Haunted Galleon. He loved his spooky new ship! :)

And that was awesome . . .

Happy Dueling!

Monday, October 14, 2013

X and Y invade the Friendly Household!

Saturday afternoon we went to Gamestop to pick up our reserved copies of Pokemon X and Y for the kids.


Woo woo! There was some intense bargaining from the kids at first about who was going to play which version . . . Amber wanted X and was very staunch on that stance, and this made Kyle want X as well. It took a bit of talking, but everything worked out based around fairy-type Pokemon and Yveltal, the dark/flying type pokemon (if I remember right . . .uh yes, thank you Forbes), and Kyle became convinced that Y would be his game. whew. Crisis averted. ;)

Since we pre-ordered, the folks at Gamestop were nice enough to give us this cool timeline poster showing all the Pokemon games throughout history.


:) Timelines are awesome. I can now coordinate the birth of my children to a specific Pokemon game. LOL!

After a couple of days here, they're both around the 3rd or 4th gym battle and chugging along. My daughter proclaimed her Pokemon X to be the best Pokemon game evar! I trust that endorsement.

Happy Dueling!

Friday, October 11, 2013

Missing Reagent Maps--Call to arms?

Yesterday one of the designers who sits behind myself and Professor Greyrose, spun around and yelled "I need Scrap Iron!" HAHA! It was awesome to see that real-life reaction that pretty much every player has that undertakes crafting. Greyrose and myself were like, "Marleybone!" and "Bazaar!" He went on to explain he had been trying to snipe reagents in the Bazaar by refreshing every 30 seconds, but it was driving him a bit nuts.

Then I remembered! Oh yeah! We started making awesome maps of where all the reagents are out there in the world . . . hmmmm.

I linked him to my posts, and he jokingly said, "The Friendly Necromancer? Who is this guy?" Sadly, none of the maps I ever made *had* the wonderful scrap iron spawns he was looking for. Then I linked him to Evil Theurgist's Reagent Map site. And that did have some good info, but I could clearly see just from looking at the map to Regent's Square that a lot of the spawn locations were missing or incomplete. Fail.

Are these the best we have?

Really?

It seems like every person (myself included) that has begun to take this task on has crumbled at the sheer amount of work it involves or lost interest in continuing the project. Where's the Celestia, Avalon, Zafaria, Azteca, Wintertusk, and Aquila maps?

Looks like Jester has the maps and is willing to work with someone based off of this thread (hehe, someone tried to repost my maps here, which in this case I am totally ok with btw.)

If there's a site out there that's good for this kind of information, please let me know about it!

Happy Dueling!

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Riffing . . . Old Times, New Pet!

I logged on this morning and played the good ol' dance game a few times to level my Frakenbunny a bit.


Yay! Old enough to hatch!

I stopped by Professor Falmea's office yesterday and told her that I liked the new Halloween quest and we talked a bit about it and had fun riffing on possibilities. I love that. I don't know one Wizard101 fan that doesn't love riffing on the possibilities of how to improve the game. In fact, I don't know a fan of anything that doesn't love riffing on the possibilities of whatever it is they are a fan of. It's just ingrained in each of us. I highly doubt anything will come of our discussion because it's all in good fun, but it is fun!

Speaking of being an old fan of things . . . I was digging through some old CDs this week because I'm desperately trying to track down a CD that contains the files I need to run my Halloween Light Show (and failing btw *sobs*). I found a great old CD full of old Everquest screenshots. LOL, this was my less-than-uber Female High Elf Cleric back when I'd take up the phone line for the entire evening using dialup to play with my friends online:


Oh how that game has changed over the last decade plus!

Happy Dueling!

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Rethinking Angus for Celestia?

The announcement that the rules on Reshuffle in Wizard101 were changing happened several months ago, and with it I mentally signed off Angus Unicornpants. I logged him on this morning and did a couple of Halloween quests and a couple of old quests I hadn't done yet. I noted that it was pretty funny he didn't look out of place doing his battle training quests at all even though he's level 49.



I have several old side quests in his quest log that I never finished, and perhaps now is a good time to look back at those and finish them off in an attempt to level him a bit before attempting Celestia. After all, my real interest in Celestia was the Polymorph spells with Angus, and I think going back and padding his level a bit might just be the key that will help me progress. Defeating Malistaire with Angus has definitely been my most grueling pve experience in Wizard101 to date, but Celestia would be near impossible for Angus because of the difficulty ramp. Polymorphs seemed to be the answer to wearing no gear since they supposedly have their own statistics, unfortunately, I don't think crit block and critical are amongst those statistics.

Perhaps it's time for some new rules for Angus as well . . . maybe a larger deck is now allowed because of the reshuffle rule change? Maybe he can only equip a base set of crit block and crit gear? I don't even know if that exists! Meh, or I could just keep him au natural and just see how it goes.

Hard to say. What do you think?

Happy Dueling!

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Nosferabbit . . . it's spookies!

Hallowe'en is a big deal in Wizard101. It was their first and only really big holiday content season. Sure, there's vendors and fun stuff for the other holidays, but when Halloween hits, there's towers, and quests, and decorations a plenty! It's fun, but after the hour or two of fun is finished, you were kind of like . . . yeah, I've done this before. yawn. next! However, that feeling coupled with all the in game legends about "what's behind the door next to the storm drain tower", and there's just a lot of awesomeness about this new holiday update for Wizard101!

Mmm hmm! It's a simple quest (at least for level 90 characters) that's cute and short, but it's awesome and a lot of fun too.

Sorry Professor Diapermancer, it took a few years, but now your answer to Bailey Firesword's question is incorrect.



It was Bailey's Skystaff's birthday yesterday, and (for a little bit of fun) we decided to give this new content a run through.

Dworgyn gave us the skinny.


Eek! Sure enough there was a sigil right there in front of the doorway that had been abandoned for so long.


Who knew it would be fortune seeking moles to break in there first and awaken the thirst of Nosferabbit and his undead veggies. After we entered, I ran ahead to check things out.


Bailey calmed my fears *cough* and in the end, we were just a couple meteor strikes and a Deer Knight away from Defeating Nosferabbit and getting to the real prize of this instance! Cheep Bird transformations and a Frankenbunny pet!


I think the Wizard101 team did a great job on this quest, and it was a lot of fun to play through with Uber Wife on her birthday.

We tried to run through Aquila as well, but we ran out of time before we needed to pick up "Professor Diapermancer" from school. :) I'll just save any discussion of Aquila for later.

Happy dueling!

Monday, October 7, 2013

First Things First

I logged on Wizard101 this morning and set to checking my character out, and the first thing that was glaringly obvious was that . . .



. . . yeah, I look really weird and why am I in Wysteria? I was wearing a mishmash of things that just showed no thought or consideration into what really matters . . . looks. duh! And Wysteria? Really? Oh yeah, that's right . . . I was looking at the rabbit guards in Wysteria one day at work after talking with the writers about where all the rabbits in the game come from. That's right!

Anyway, I decided to head back into my old death house where I had a mannequin stashed with some old familiar clothes on it. It was time . . . time to get the goth TFN look back!



Yup! You know the one! Santa boots and all! It's the one I talked about in this post before stitching was even possible.

Awesome.

I'm back in business for the moment, and totally ready to hit the Halloween quests with Uber Wife today. I took the day off of work to celebrate her birthday with her (please feel free to wish her a happy birthday!), and the first item of the day after getting the kids off to school is definitely hitting Aquila and checking out the new Halloween quest in Wizard101 with her.

I'm all set. :)

Happy Dueling!

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

A few selfish links and some explanations

Heya all! I know it may seem like I'm quite quiet here lately on my blog, and . . . ok, it doesn't "seem" that way . . . it "is" that way, but that's mostly because I've been actively blogging and talking other places. One of those places is the KingsIsle Blog.

Now, most people in the Wizard101 and Pirate101 communities are totally aware of this blog and follow it, and, while I'm sure no one would mind, I'd rather not reblog these posts over on TFN -- but I would like to link to them just so I have them cataloged here for myself. (Yup, I guess sometimes a blog is just for purely selfish reasons like that. LOL.)

Pirate101 Tips – Understanding Talents
Spotlight on Community Leaders 1
Spotlight on Community Leaders 2
Pirate101 Tips – Picking Your Perfect Pirate
Girl Power in Pirate101!
KingsIsle take a trip to the Library

You can also find a lot of tips and writing from me on the Pirate101 Newsletter.

. . . and of course the Update Notes page.

(I'm actually writing another blog post for the KingsIsle blog at the moment that talks about the amount of work that goes into these creations.)

I do wish I had more time to blog just for me and my readers, and I wish I had more inspiration about blogging in general for the Friendly Necromancer at the moment. Rest assured I am very much still playing Pirate101 and enjoying my time there! In addition, I'm playing a few other games . . . I fired up Guild Wars 2 the other day, and Uber Wife and I are playing a lot of DCUO. I've also played some Free Realms, Dragon's Prophet, and a bunch of other games as well, including things like Pikmin 3 and Mario Bros for the Wii U.

I don't know . . . Would you all be interested in hearing about these other games? I've done a couple of other (non-Wizard101) things too like these YouTube videos:





I do feel bad for letting this blog sit for a month without any updates, but to be honest, it can sometimes be difficult to talk about Pirate101 and Wizard101 on my free time in addition to the 9 hours or more a day I spend at the KingsIsle offices thinking and talking about these same games.

I'll keep thinking about how I can participate in the Wizard101 community again, but I really hope you understand where I'm coming from as well.

Talk!

Comment.

Let me know what you think!

Happy dueling!