Procyon's . . . Allies?

Question from Mark Stormhunter:

Hey friendly Mark Stormhunter here and I have a strange question. When you go up to Procyon his speech says "I do not tolerate such healing magic, you would be wise not to cast such spells" but if you listen it says "my allies". Who are his "allies"? Thanks and your blog is awesome.=
Thanks, Mark!

For those who may not know anything about Procyon, he is one of the cheating column bosses in Stormriven in Celestia. Basically you can't heal during the fight or Procyon will unleash a meteor storm on you and your party. If you heal, you're better off casting a Bartleby spell (for the shield on each group member), relying on your pet's spritely, or maybe something like casting a quench on Procyon before healing. Column bosses don't have allies.


Now, on to Mark's question . . . here's a bit of a quick history here on Procyon. Procyon's dialog and method of cheating were reused from Unimatus in the Stellarium; however, a recent patch removed cheating from Unimatus's repertoire.

**UPDATE**
Heya, I made a stab at trying to answer this question, but I only knew half the story . . . Johnist in the comments provided the truth to the matter, so I'm going to repost his response here instead of mine:

"Regarding Procyon:

When Celestia first went live, Procyon, and the other Stormriven Pylon bosses had Minions. Procyon's Cheat was if he had 2 or more Open minion slots when you healed, the next round he would have 1 Hydro-Mech and 1 Water-Maton to go with whatever you had had left.

Procyon's Cheat (and Unimatus's) was later changed when they removed the minions and upped the Pylon bosses health to be a Meteor strike (should have been a 750 Meteor in my opinion) when a heal was cast instead of 2 minions coming out. Unimatus never cheated until the change to him using meteors."

And THAT helps clear up the mystery!

**UPDATE**


Happy Dueling

J. Todd Coleman is Number 1

:)

Something I forgot to mention from the most recent Beckett's MOG was that our own J. Todd Coleman was listed as THEE most influential person in MMOs for 2010.

Check it out:


And do you know why he's number one?

Oh sure the article cites 15 million registered users and growing company and whatnot, but we all know the real reason . . .

It's because of his cameo in my Selena Gomez video.



J TODD COLEMAN!

Gratz, Headmaster Ambrose!

Happy Dueling

Is Level 32 to high for Marleybone? And What Happened to your Fan Fiction?

Questions from Talon Nightshade (who is apparently Lord Nightshade's brother ;)

Dear friendly,

I know you don't have that much experience in the pyromancy department , but should a level 32 pyromancer be in mooshu? I'm stuck in the ironworks!!
Secondly, I was reading some of your older posts and started reading some of your fan fiction. It said that they were going to be 5 more installments but I haven't seen that in any new posts. Those were really awesome, by the way, and I just want to see if you're still making them.

As everybody knows, THE FRIENDLY NECROMANCER ROCKS!!!

Thanks a lot ,

TALON NIGHTSHADE,
LORD NIGHTSHADE'S BROTHER

Dear Brother to Nightshade,

I think that you're doing great where you are. You're probably level 32 because you've been doing a lot of side quests, but honestly, the low 30's are all about Marleybone and not Mooshu. If you skip too many of those side quests you'll end up asking me if level 39 is too low for Dragonspyre. ;-)

Ironworks can be a little intimidating, but I have faith in ya. :) Use a Hand of Doom pack to call out your brother, Lord Nightshade, to come help you out. hehe. Just be sure you don't forget to get your stray cat before leaving so you don't have to do the whole thing over again.

~~~~~

. . . oh yeah, my fan fiction. Yeah, I haven't thought about finishing it lately. It's just kind of one of those things that keeps getting slipped to the bottom of the pile that I never get to the bottom of.

According to my notes I never fully fleshed out Chapter five since I have a section called chapter 5.5 that I snuck in between my notes about chapter six and chapter five.

Hmmm. What to do . . .

Thanks for bringing it up! I may have to pull that out from the bottom of the stack here one of these days just to finish it up. :)

Happy Dueling!

Balance Gear Recommendations?

Question from Garrett:

hey friendly, sorry to bother you, but its a question about gear, soloing, etc... and i thought, who'd be better to ask than the great soloing necromancer himself? (besides ditto monster, but he's fire)

anyways, i recently made a balance wizard, and i normally role with fire wizards, so playing him will take some getting use to. on my fire, i can solo some things, but i want my balance to be a soloing machine, and i'm not really good at picking the right gear for my wizards, and i usually go with the crowns gear that gives you loads of health, but... i asked people which gear i should go with, and they said go with the gear that increases your damage, but i tried going with that, and it didnt turn out so well, i'm thinking of just sticking with the gear that gives you a lot of health. do you have any ideas? thank you for listening.

P.S.- i love your blog, read your post every day ;)

Thanks, man!

In most MMOs, poor gear can be compensated with good strategy/timing/skill. And actually, after you get really nice raid-level gear, you can play a little sloppy and still be ok depending on the situation.

In Wizard101, I've found that wearing NO gear can be compensated the same way. So, if you're good with strategy, then you don't really need the best gear out there. If you're not so good, better gear definitely makes things easier, and that's almost always to the tune of more health. It's my number one stat.

After soloing Angus with no clothes on, I can honestly say the things I miss most are Health and Power Pip. So, if you have to choose, those stats are where I'd go . . . unless you're casting outside of your class, then power pip is meaningless. (You really shouldn't be casting outside of your class for damage after Krokotopia.)

Mana is pretty insignificant outside of levels 1-10 . . . most rings come with it bundled with health, so . . . not a worry.

Universal shielding is super nice at high levels if you can get a hold of it, but I wouldn't trade health for universal shielding unless it was a high enough universal shielding and I was taking a lot of damage. For example, say you have a piece of gear with 4% universal shielding alone and you're wondering if that's better than a piece of gear with health alone. You have to figure how much damage you're actually blocking with the universal shielding during a typical fight. Say you take two hits for 400 points of damage each, a 4% universal shielding rating would only block a total of 32 hitpoints of damage . . . you're better throwing down an elemental or spirit shield. Now if you can bump that up to 20-30% universal shielding, that might be a different story. (part of the reason old school crowns gear was so hot.)

You are a balance wizard, so until you get Judgement, your spell damage is average. +damage rating is nice, but not nearly as nice as taking the extra round to blade and trap stack when needed, and because of that, I highly recommend that if you're looking at amulets or pets, go with some gear that has a blade or trap card. Blade cards are definitely > than trap cards . . . especially if you're using "AoE" spells like sandstorm. If you can get your hands on a dragonblade casting balance pet, then you're doing really well!

To recap, here's my order of importance with stats:

1- Health and power pip
2- Blade and trap card gear
3- Damage
4- Universal shielding
5- Class specific shielding (unless you're a death wizard, then move this up to the number three slot)
6- Mana

After a while, when you get up near the Celestia range, you'll find that some of these shift position a bit and you'll start seeing gear with +healing incoming and outgoing and +crit block and +to crit. Pay attention to the amount of power pip percentage your character has because if you go over 90% power pip, then you'll be cheating yourself out of some other stats you could be mixing into your gear profile like these because at this point damage and crit rating will edge over power pip. If you have a pet with spritely (which is highly recommended) and play with healers, then +healing incoming gear will overtake shielding.

*insert small rant: KI seems to have forgotten that death shielding is uber important for death wizards and with some of this new high level gear criting death with no death crit block and with no death shielding, it can make using sacrifice and empower extremely painful*

Hope that helps and thanks for reading. :) Be sure to check the comments for the discussion that's bound to happen.

Happy Dueling!

Beckett's (#30) Came in the Mail WOOT!

And now the traditional mag shot . . . except without me in the shot . . . I'm still sick and really not feeling up to showing my face today.


The Celestia's Chiefs of Cheatin' was a fun article to write, and getting screenshots of all the badguys at just the right moment was an interesting challenge. Procyon was a particularly awesome screenshot. It was right at the moment he was casting a minotaur spell, right before the minotaur appears. All my other screenshots of him were cutting off the top of his head for some reason.

I also loved going back through the history of cheating bosses at the beginning of the article as well. Remembering how it all unfolded was definately a trip down memory lane.

I hope you guys like the article. :)

The free in-game item you get from the magazine this time is . . . not my favorite, but getting free cosmetic clothing is better than nothing. ;-) Maybe I'll throw the no-stat Celestia robes on Angus and give him a new look. hehe. (I wish I had a say in what you guys would get for a free game item, but unfortunately I'm just the writer.)

. . .

As it turns out, I never took a shot of the previous article from issue #29 either . . . so here you go:


When I was writing the Gardening article, it was completely embargoed information. I was probably the first person outside of KingsIsle to know about gardening coming to the spiral. Of course, when you're writing an article that's two to three months out from hitting the shelves, it's really hard to "scoop" something. By the time the magazine hit the shelves, gardening had been out for a few weeks and was even on the test realm.

It's a little hard to write articles like these blind . . . I mean, when I was writing about Gardening I hadn't even seen screenshots of the plants let alone played it, but thankfully the people at KingsIsle are totally awesome with answering my questions and clearing up my misconceptions. Articles like those that are cutting edge definitely require a lot of trust and communication.

We worked it out, and I think the article did a pretty bang up job of explaining how gardening works if you ask me.

Again, the free in-game item was kind of a /boggle with issue #29, and again . . . wasn't my favorite. /shrug

Either way, it's been great adding another couple of articles under my belt. I haven't yet begun to write the next article, but I imagine in about a week, life will become very busy for me. :)

Happy Dueling!

Angus's Server of Choice? Gardening Tips?

Question from Nitasu987:

Heya Friendly! I've got a few questions (No duh) Ok so i was wondering, what realm do you usually play on as Angus??? I have a lv 36 Death guy ( Cole ShadowThorn) and maybe we could fight some bosses sometime. and also, do you have any tips for gardening? I'm rank 3 and i have a moderately sized garden.
Thx a lot

- Nitasu987

YO Nitasu! Thanks for the note and thanks for the kind offer to play Cole side-by-side with Angus. Angus is kind of a loaner (and a rebel) since I'm trying to solo this whole gosh darn thing without none no clothes on.



If someone runs into my battle, it's no big deal, but his friends list is pretty much closed. He usually hangs out on the Unicorn server (he is a UNICORNpants after all), plays early early in the morning, and basically tries to avoid contact with other wizards . . . if you happen to see him, SURE, run in and say hi. :)

Tips for gardening?! Hmm, well I wrote this up a little while ago; although, I gotta say that the new placement of the circles has me a little thrown off.

I had a cool system for growing plants in a circle, and now KI has gone and removed the "snap to" feature from gardening. All I used to have to do was run into the middle and put my mouse over the snap dragon in the middle. Now you just hover your mouse anywhere to cast with no "snapping." I was tending to my frozen fly trap garden this morning and totally missed one of my plants because of this new method! GRR!


I wish they'd make "snap to plant" a toggle option for gardening instead of just removing it. meh. I'll get used to it. /rant off

Pink Dandelions will take you a long way in the early ranks of gardening. Spending any amount of time farming bosses in Krokotopia will yield a number of them. If you can shift to Silver Trumpet Vine to level up at rank 4, then you've hit gold. I'm sold on leveling up gardening with crown plants. It just goes so much faster.

I avoid growing more plants than my energy can handle, and I clump them all together in a nice circle. Uber wife is under the impression that you can skip the middle gardening spells and save yourself some money, and she's pretty much right. I've only used the medium-sized plant circle for situational reasons, like three or four plants near each other with an odd similar like.

The main thing I tried to do is try to get as many liked things to surround my plants as possible so I get that elder harvest faster! I've heard of some people planting stinkweed near their garden to slow everything down so they "maximize their rewards" as it were, but I'm not a proponent of that. The elder harvest is the harvest you want!

I'm working on a spreadsheet for gardening like I have for the pets and housing items that I may add in the future.

For you, Nitasu, at rank three, Rye Bread Bushes, Helephant Ears, and Baby Carrots are your best bet for the "free" plants for leveling (or at least the ones with the most exp rewards).

Kevin Battleblood has a good series of gardening guides going over on his blog, that are an interesting read. If you're interested in Wizard101 Gardening, you'll find some interest there for sure. (Note: Some of his older information involves floating plants, which I believe no longer works.)

I'm sure my readers will have lots of tips as well. :)

Thanks for the note and questions!

Happy Dueling!

Amber and Kyle Get their Level 58 Spells!

Well, yesterday wasn't all bad. Yeah, I spent most of the day sleeping after going to the doctor and getting a prescription for this head cold. It's nasty. This was me yesterday:


But, something to turn my frown upside down was that uber wife had plans to finish off Amber's level 58 spell quest. After switching out a deck with some converts and a dracon polymorph or two in it and after escaping out a couple times until she was going first in the battle (simple genius there, right?), she finally was undergoing her fight with Gristletusk, a 13k hitpoint life boss.

Note that previously we had completed this fight with a group because it *was* the only level 58 spell quest that could be done with a group. That all seems to have changed now as we couldn't port the other Boom Kids (Kyle and Myrna) to help Amber out.

After a few rounds of fire attacks and a prismed Centaur spell, Gristletusk fell in defeat.


WOOT amber!

After that it was just a quick run over to Mooshu and Amber was soon hanging out with her own personally wookie.


GRRGRRGRROOOWWWMWMWMWMWMMMFFF!

Late last night I finally woke up and muddled around the house, but Uber wife pretty much demanded that I give Kyle's spell quest a go, so I did.

Kyle was up against Khai Tengri, a 7k fire boss with a 2k life minion. Easy, right? Dang, took me three tries! I should have used more strategy with my deck the first time through, but my I care button was broken due to being sick.


What finally won it for me was a series of storm minions until I could take out the life minion and then a Triton followed by a charged up Tempest. Here's a video of the last half and kyle getting his Leviathan spell.



WTG Boom Kids! All that's left is for Myrna to eek out another half a level and finish that level 58 spell quest. POWA!

Happy Dueling!