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School Mechanic Tweaks (Myth, Moon, and Monstrology)

AuthorMessage
Survivor
Jul 09, 2010
10
Taking a break from purely side content ideas, I wanted to address two schools that I feel are particularly lacking in the game but that both synergize well. Those been the schools of Myth and Moon. Alongside them, I wanted to take a look at Monstrology and see how it could be improved and expanded upon also.

If you'd like to see some of my other suggestions to date (they might help put these ideas into better context) you can see them here: Low Level Side Content (Photomancy & Mail) and Mid Level Side Content (Celestian Chariot Racing).

Premise:
Myth, as a school, is all about summoning minions to aid you in battle, but as a Myth wizard levels they no longer depend on or benefit from summoning minions. Minions also tend to have a mind of their own and don't strategize well with wizards. Likewise, Moon serves to change all the base stats of a wizard to better suit different encounters, but it is almost always better for a wizard to keep their original stats. So, something needs to change to make these slightly more viable.

For Myth Specifically:
The ability to control minions directly might be out of the question for the current mechanics of the game, but it is still very possible with slight modifications to existing mechanics to make minions slightly more useful.

One way to possibly change this would be through taunt or pacify enchants. Taunts are a mechanic in the game that also see little to no usage, with their goal being to increase the "threat" level on your wizard, making enemies more likely to attack you. Working as an enchant to minion spells, they would generate threat on the minion (the minion would be more likely to be targeted) when the wizard summons them, or they would reduce the threat on the wizard via pacify (the wizard would be less likely to be targeted).

Additionally, these mechanics could extend to the minion themselves. Instead of directly summoning the minion as soon as the card is clicked, the player could provide a target for the minion, or multiple targets (like your 4-pip shadow spells) and the minion would be "taunted" by them (a threat would be generated for the minion as if it came from the targets the player chose, and so the minion would be more likely to target them for the course of the battle.)

This could extend also to targeting the wizard. One could target themselves when summoning a minion, and the minion would try to cast what they have to the benefit of the wizard.

One last form of possible enchants for minions could come from enchanting them with regular sun damage enchants. For damage enchants, it could cast a version of the minion doing its natural attack on the targeted enemies, and then summon itself into battle. This would fit with the theme that Myth established early on with Minotaur of a small hit and then another action.

And lastly, Myth minions, after joining the battle, should get the number of pips that were required to summon them, conserving pips from the caster to the minion. At current, the higher the pip cost of the minion the more time in a battle is wasted and the better off one is for just choosing to not summon a minion.

In Short:
  • Allow minion spells to be enchanted with a taunt or pacify to make enemies target the minion preferentially to the player.
  • Allow minion spells to be cast like 4-pip shadow spells, where picking a target on the spell's initial cast causes the threat of enemy to be high for the minion. Also allow the player to target themselves for the minion to focus helping the wizard.
  • Allow minion spells to be enchanted with damage enchants to perform an initial natural attack hit to an enemy and then summon the minion with a threat on the enemy that was hit.
  • Give minions starting pips equal to the pips required to cast the minion to make it less of a waste for the wizard.

Monstrology for Moon and Myth:
As it stands, Monstrology is an interesting and versatile mechanic that allows players to collect animus from various monsters, summon them as companions in battle, turn them into housing guests, or battle them in the monstrodome. It feels mostly complete, but it could benefit from a few tweaks mainly aimed towards Myth.

Going from world to world there's a wide variety of mobs, but they are generalized by their different types in monstrology - gobbler, mander, spider, pig, etc. As the player goes to later words, mobs get stronger. Cyclops from Krockotopia are generally stronger than a cyclops from Wizard City, and so on and so forth. What Myth should be able to do is upgrade their existing school summons through the spellements mechanic and be able to craft the spellements they need to do so from the animus of the type of creature their summon spell is based off of.

To give an example, think of the levels of Golem Tower with increasingly stronger golems. A Myth wizard gets a golem minion. Each tier of the golem minion could be one tier of golem in Golem Tower - needing animus from each tier individually to craft the spellements of each tier of upgrade for the minion. Making minions upgradable would make it so minions would scale alongside the player.

On a similar note, the Moon school could benefit from a similar mechanic. The various polymorph forms could be upgraded to better tiers of polymorphs through monstrology, or with existing monstrology mechanics, polymorph treasure cards could be made (trade and pvp locked) to polymorph into all of the forms we already have as housing guests and treasure cards.

In Short:
  • Allow crafting spellements by using animus from matching mobs. These spellements would be used to upgrade myth minions of a matching mob type or for upgrading polymorphs of a matching mob type so as to scale by level.
  • Allow crafting polymorph treasure cards for the existing monstrology mobs.