school identity needs to be brought back

[worldly gazelle]

Wizard101 I have fun with but every school needs to be different from each other like fire and storm with damage death getting half their health back I think some schools is lacking in their own field like myth we need stronger minions or more spells that hit and summons one like the witch spell

[final mist]

School identity is not gone.

What we need are new school quests like in Grizzleheim or Avalon, where you can get school-exclusive utility spells (not purchasable with training points).

This will make questing in a new world less boring for some, as you have an intermediate goal to work towards instead of just the damage spell at the end / mid and nothing at the end.

There are a lot of ideas for such spells, on discord ...

[shadow halo]

the bigger issue is that every school plays nearly identically in PvE, and drastic (and probably pretty unpopular) changes would need to be implemented (namely neutering or killing alpha striking, especially on schools other than storm and/or fire)

[worldly gazelle]

Ion have a problem with schools doing damages but we need some of them to be different that others like myth we should be able to have op minions or hit and have that same spell summon one like the witch death get their health back which is op ice could have like tower shields behind their schools hit spells myth is my biggest problem because that school suppose to be about minions and it needs to b more usable n my opinion.

[humble musk]

Minions changes are being discussed in a different thread. Beyond that, school identity is up to the player. My life wiz carried no heals and didn’t heal anyone up to the oogie boogie fight in karamelle. If I wanted to I could have done healing gear and only heals in deck. Beyond minions which are being looked at, it’s up to the players how they want to play.

[humble musk]

These would be unpopular changes. If you want to play a certain way, you can. Just don’t expect other people to not get impatient with you for shielding or healing in a fight that doesn’t need it.

[grim rapids]

Sure you can play however you want. But if you do, then your fights are slower, it’s harder to stay alive and win, you get drops extremely slowly, and there are no additional rewards for prolonging the battle. There is literally 0 incentive to play any other way than aoe spam. It’s an undeniable fact that school identity no longer exists in pve and any attempt to play the game the way it’s supposed to ends up punishing you in the long run.

[grim rapids]

I don’t think this is the right solution. I would immediately drop the game if this were implemented cause right now it’s the only thing making pve and farming bearable

Instead, enemies need to be made smarter. KI just adds more cheats to increase difficulty, but all that does is make players carry specific counters in deck and play with a set strat every time. Rather, enemies’ moves should be made more logical. They should be able to think 2 maybe even 3 moves ahead. By increasing enemy “smarts”, this would require players to shift their game style without outright removing a super popular aspect of pve gameplay.

[humble musk]

They tried making enemies smarter / harder (irks) and tons of people were upset and hard stuck x.x

[grim rapids]

Yea that would definitely have to be tuned. But it’s possible. For several years now, you can play chess against a computer at different difficulty levels. That’s just something KI will need to tune

[humble musk]

It’d have to be in a way players enjoy. Right now it’s stale but people like having only 7 cards and removing all the rng factors like accuracy pips etc.

[grim rapids]

Maybe they’d also need to look again at enemy stats. Perhaps making enemies smarter would mean they need to nerf their stats. But there’s a whole set of knobs KI can turn

[humble musk]

Can smart beat scald + incend or 4 people spamming wallaru aoes turn 1?

[grim rapids]

Main reason for this is abysmal drop rates. If they’re gonna make fights longer, drop rates would also have to be higher

[humble musk]

This^

Even if drop rates were guaranteed or really high people would still optimize and 7 card turn 1-2 everything

[grim rapids]

I think it very much could. There’s a reason people don’t use pve strats in pvp.

[humble musk]

They do tho. There’s like an entire discourse around it rn

[grim rapids]

People spam aoe or scald in pvp?

[humble musk]

No they buff stack into alpha strike

[grim rapids]

Oh. I did pvp a while back so maybe it’s changed I guess

[humble musk]

No worries, I think my concern is just that they’ve conditioned us for what to expect so at this point drastically changing the game requiring more than 7 cards with enemies that just counter ur stuff or have a ton of rng would be a problem for a lot of people

So like in Azteca or empyria if bosses just randomly turned your blades into weaknesses or could use centaur to counter your feints through indemnity / aegis people wouldn’t like it

[grim rapids]

If KI improves the enemy intelligence AND adjusts drop rates to account for longer fights AND somehow makes it so that alpha strike isn’t as feasible, then I don’t think this kind of change would be too unpopular. Especially since a lot of the player base is now a lot older and would appreciate a greater challenge over mind numbingly tedious gameplay.

Maybe they could test this out in a medium challenge mode for bosses. Something more difficult than standard but not as crazy as hard mode

[humble musk]

See raids / advanced content. People didn’t like it.

I think there are still people who run 40 card decks and play however they want who make it to the end of the game

[grim rapids]

Advanced content is kinda dumb the way it is now. It’s way too hard with not enough reward to justify doing it. It also severely handicaps what kind of moves you can make. And the “difficulty” simply comes from a boss with op stats and a bunch of cheats which isn’t fun at all.

And raids are completely different to this discussion

Just because those aren’t popular doesn’t mean that a smarter enemy AI will be unpopular too. Those two things are very different.

[solar pilot]

I think they should tone it down on the cheat and have boss function like a player would, cheats are honestly just annoying

[hoary bobcat]

this

would much prefer smart AI that can coordinate with eachother

[grim rapids]

Exactly. The cheats are getting out of hand at this point. Literally in the new nightmare dungeon, it’s impossible to do if you don’t have the right counters which for 90% of players means they need to grind a bunch of tc just to participate in the dungeon.