OK, buckle up because this is going to be a heck of a ride.
First off, I like customization. I play a card game called Magic: The Gathering, and there are five colors, similar to our seven schools of magic. The difference is that in Magic you are free to combine colors any way you want. There are 32 possible color combinations, including entirely colorless. I’d like to see some of that in Wizard101.
So, secondary schools. It’s pretty heavily implied if not outright stated by professors that you should spend your Training Points on a secondary school. Whoever decided to say this should be slapped with a live trout. Why? Because secondary schools are pretty useless. I’m thankful that I figured out that Fire Elf wasn’t going to do me much good on my Death wizard before I spent a fourth training point and lost the ability to buy them back for free. Aside from Death to Feint, Ice to Tower Shield, and maybe Life to Satyr, there’s little reward for investing training points into other schools for non-utility purposes. I would really like to see wizards who use an additional school to hit with. For example, instead of being just a Death wizard, you’d be a Death-Storm wizard, or a Death-Fire wizard, or a Death-Life wizard. Instead of seven schools, there are now 42 possible combinations of magic to wield.
So why don’t I just do this? That’s my second point: because the gear doesn’t really support it. The only close to good gear that can boost more than one school is pack/bundle gear, and usually each piece of that is missing at least one important stat that school-specific gear has. On a semi-related note, pretty much every robe after Darkmoor, with the sole exception of the Tenni’syn robes stink from a PvP standpoint. They have no damage and little pierce, and they don’t give significantly better offense over Darkmoor/Rattlebones/Tenni’syn robes, so they’re pretty much unusable. How do I propose we fix this? We allow wizards to make their own gear from scratch.
The idea I would propose is called Forged Gear. You would craft a basic Forged item with some reagents, but it would have no base stats. After you craft it, you need to add additional reagents (I don’t have a clever name for these, so let’s just call them MacGuffins) to add stats to the gear. To ensure that the statistics on those gears don’t spiral out of control, there would be two caps: a hard cap to the total number of MacGuffins applicable to the gear, and a soft cap that would cause increasingly higher MacGuffin requirements for additional stats beyond a certain target value. For example, if we decide that it takes a base amount of 50 MacGuffins to increase a forged robe’s universal resistance by 1%, and the target value is 15%, then after 15% each additional percentage point would cost, say, 25% more MacGuffins. So from 15 to 16 resist you would have to use 63 MacGuffins, and from 16 to 17 you would need 78 MacGuffins, and so on. This allows your gear to be perfectly customizable: I can add any stat I like to my gear, as long as I stay within the MacGuffin cap. This can tie in with the thoughts above by setting the hard cap high enough in comparison to the soft cap that there isn’t a large cost to having both Death and Storm damage over just Death. If you do want to focus on a single school, your stats will still be better, but it won’t be overwhelming.
Aside from the cool factor, here are some potential benefits: More money for Kingsisle if MacGuffins are available in crowns purchases/crowns are used to reset Forged gear. (DO NOT make them crowns exclusive. I’m willing to throw money at you guys for this, but I won’t appreciate being forced to do so) A possible self-balancing effect on the various schools in PvP. School X is less OP if other schools can use most of its spell loadout effectively. Let’s face it, this is really cool and that’s a benefit in its own right. The ability for players to adapt their gear to their chosen role/playstyle. For example, I don’t particularly care for critical. I find that it isn’t reliable enough to be used as a secondary damage buff. With Forged gear, I could focus all my stats into damage and resist.
Things I’m NOT proposing: A change to the trainability of certain spells. If you want your Death-Ice wizard to cast Abominable Weaver, you’ll need a Treasure Card version of it (which is in itself its own cost to this strategy as treasure card damage < enchanted trained spell damage). A change to the way Mastery Amulets work. You’ll still need an amulet that provides a mastery effect to use a second school. I would consider Forged amulets that could give you mastery of more than one additional school, but that would come at a cost to the stats of the amulet and probably be less effective overall due to having to split stats on forged gear.
