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PvE and going second

AuthorMessage
Survivor
Oct 24, 2015
14
This has been bothering me for quite awhile. The difference between going second and going first in any battle in this game is actually rather significant for a few reasons that most players have quickly come to terms with. Going first keeps you one turn ahead of the enemy, allowing you to get to a kill more quickly and, in doing so, prevents potential incoming damage from the enemy you kill. Another important thing is it keeps enemies from blind siding you with a shield like they can when you go second. It can get pretty frustrating to go for a kill attack when you are second only to have it prevented by a tower shield, balance charm, heal/absorb. The last important thing I can think of is healing. It is much easier to heal efficiently when you go first as you can react more appropriately to the damage. When you go second you are simply blind to the moves the enemy will make.

Now the problem I have with this whole thing is that in Wizard 101 the player is never compensated for having to go second in PVE and of course that there is no system in place to equalize the enemies first turn advantage. I imagine the reasoning goes along the lines that you have a 50/50 to either begin the fight with an advantage or a disadvantage, as well as the concept of no need to fix what's not broken.

The majority of turn-based games with a decent following/reputation will compensate the player going second in a number of ways like giving them an extra card or other necessary resources.

I know that in pvp the player going second is given an extra power pip, which still is not enough to make up for the disadvantage of being second. In PvE though this seems like an oversight. It brings to mind quite a few questions about the games balance intentions such as if the game PvE is support to be balanced around the player going second and when the player goes first they simply have much higher success potential? My guess is that the PvE is suppose to be easy enough that the disadvantage of playing second can't become overly significant.

That line of thought, however, I find bothersome since I like to think of the game as a challenge that you need to strategically overcome. I instead think of it as just kind of a challenge when you go second and easier when you go first. I'm coming to the conclusion that I may have expected a better playing experience from Wizard 101 than it was designed to provide.

There are lots of possible adjustments to making the difficulty between going second and first less large. The intention of this thread was more to spark discussion and draw attention to the implications brought to PvE from the games set-up. A simple adjustment would just be giving an extra pip/Ppip to a player going second like they did with PvP (this would be a bit more complcated against PvE enemies). There have been more extreme suggestions like switching who goes first every turn and even taking full turns instead of all at once.

Am I just taking this game to seriously?