The Wizard City Underground Update |
Update Highlights
Mysterious trouble is brewing under Wizard City, and we need all Wizards to help discover the source!
In this update we reveal Wizard City Underground. Can you solve the Mystery of the Missing Landscaper and deal with what lies beneath? Also in this update; several new features to help your Wizard advance in the world, and coming soon, new event updates!
Update Highlights Include:- The Wizard City Underground new quests
- Olde Town Drains Instance
- Golem Court Drains Gauntlet.. And Deeper
- Spellwrighting System
- Backpack Butler
- Hatchmaking Kiosk Improvements
- Castle Magic Update
- Continued FTUE Improvements
- Expanding the Beastmoon Hunts
- Expanding the Deckathalons
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| The Wizard City Underground
The refurbishment of Wizard City has had some unexpected consequences, and now there's some seriously deep trouble brewing underground. What secrets lay buried beneath Wizard City? Is poor Landscaper Doug lost forever? And what’s with the funny smell coming from all the storm drain covers?
In the Wizard City Underground there are new quests, including a brand new low-level and a high-level gauntlet let players see a whole new side of Wizard City – it's time to see what lies beneath!
Olde Town Drains Instance
While Groundskeeper Renee Wooften and her crew of Landscapers were hard at work revitalizing Wizard City, they accidentally opened a small hole in the bedrock in Olde Town. One of the Landscapers, Doug, just couldn’t resist the alluring aperture and now poor Doug is lost in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Drains that run underneath Wizard City. Of course, he needs an intrepid Wizard’s help getting out.
Equip your best spelunking robe and venture into the Olde Town hole in search of Landscaper Doug in the Olde Town Drains gauntlet. Do be sure to mind your manners.. you wouldn’t want to bug anyone while you’re down there! If you manage to earn the trust of Subterranean Sanitation Operations Boss, he just might help you find the missing Landscaper.
To start the quest Dog Gone Doug, you must be level 15.
Golem Court Drains Gauntlet.. And Deeper
Ever wonder what happens to all the garbage a town like Wizard City produces? Well, wonder no more! Once your Wizard has completed a certain sacred Tree ritual (approximately level 130, or the beginning of the Empyrea part 2 story), Renee Wooften will call for you to help the Subterranean Sanitation Operations with a pesky little Trash issue they’re having down in the Wizard City Drains.
But Ravenwood’s roots go far deeper than Wizard City. It has endured as entire civilizations rose and fell, and its secrets have long been buried. The disruptions in the Drains will unearth ancient mysteries and terrible tragedies, and the lost history of the Spiral will be revealed.
To start the quest Subterranean Sanitation, you must complete the quest Make Like A Tree And Go at the beginning of Empyrea Part 2.
Note that within The Wizard City Underground there is a group of zones that require 6000 Crowns total to pass.
Spellwrighting System
We’re introducing the new Spellwrighting System which allows you to earn new spells and upgrade spells to different, more powerful versions! You’ll notice a new tab in your spellbook that unlocks when you qualify for at least one new spell upgrade and own one Spellement (the components you need to spellwright). This screen shows what spells you qualify for, how many Spellements you own, and more information about your spells' upgrade paths.
To upgrade spells, collect Spellements in battle, from Packs, and other various ways. A maximum of 999 Spellements can be collected at any given time, so be sure to upgrade your spells as you collect more Spellements!
Some spells have a simple path from Tier 1 to the fully upgraded version. Other spells have upgrade branches where you’ll have to choose how you want the spell to improve. Once you make a choice, you're locked into that path, unless..
Spent a bunch of Spellements upgrading a spell and now want to change paths? No problem! For 100 Crowns, you can reset a spell’s upgrade to its first Tier, recouping the Spellements you used to upgrade it. Tier 1 spells are never removed from your character during reset.
The first spells to use this system will be the new Daybreaker and Nightbringer utility spells. These Spellements can be found in the Wizard City Underground.
Note: A recent change was made where players can no longer pre-enchant spells to create Treasure Cards to keep in their sideboard.
New Utility Spells - Daybreaker and Nightbringer
Through battle with fearsome foes below Wizard City, you can collect Spellements for two new Utility Spells: Daybreaker and Nightbringer.
These Sun School spells allow you enchant a spell to “delay cast” it. Your pips will be consumed on the current round, but the spell itself won't cast til the next round. Enchanting with Daybreaker means the spell will go FIRST, before the spell you choose the next round. Enchanting with Nightbringer means the spell will go SECOND, after the spell you choose the next round.
For example, if you want to delay cast Balance Blade to be applied directly before a big hit, you would enchant it with the Daybreaker spell. If you want to delay cast Glowbug Squall to be applied after the Feint you cast the next round, you’d use Nightbringer.
Note that the first tier of these spells can only placed in your deck once, aren't able to be reshuffled, and the delayed spell costs 3 extra pips. However, these are all factors that can be upgraded through Spellwrighting.
Backpack Butler
You can accumulate lots of stuff on your travels! It can be a challenge to find an item in your inventory or storage after so many hours of play. Well, we’ve got an exciting solution for you! Introducing the new Backpack Butler.
The Backpack Butler allows you to search your character’s entire inventory from the backpack, bank, shared bank, all houses, attic, and all containers like the mannequins, aquariums, and vaults. Never before has it been this easy to keep track of everything!
You can only use the Backpack Butler to find where items are located. You can get the Backpack Butler from most housing vendors, including Aubert Quickhammer in Wizard City.
Hatchmaking Kiosk Improvements
There are big changes in the Hatchmaking Kiosk! The kiosk now shows an icon on the hatch page if that type of pet is in your pet tome. It's easy to see which ones you may be missing! This should make it easier for you to collect every type of pet to tell which ones you may have missing.
You can also use the kiosk to search pets by talent! You have the option of selecting anywhere from 1-10 talents from the list. Pets with matching talents are displayed for hatching. NOTE: If you have a pet listed in the Kiosk that was placed there on Live Servers, you’ll need to remove and add that pet again to make it searchable by talent.
To aid you further in hatching the perfect pets, the listing time has been increased from 1 week to 2 weeks!
As a fun bonus, you can also search your friends’ pets using the kiosk!
Castle Magic Update
Castle decorators rejoice! Castle Magic has expanded with 1 new utility spell, 1 new action spell, and 36 new effect spells.
The new utility spell is Remove PVP Sigil. Casting this spell will remove the PVP sigil from an area of your house. Like the Allow Mounts and Disallow Mounts spells, the spell target can be any item.
The new action spell is Teleport All Players. This spell will teleport all players in an area of your house to the target item.
The 36 new effect spells are: Fire From Above, Raging Bull, Krampus, Brimstone Revenant, Burning Rampage, Abominable Weaver, Snowball Barrage, Angry Snowpig, Handsome Fomori, Winter Moon, Snowball Strike, Glowbug Squall, Rusalkas Wrath, Catalan, Queen Calypso, Catch Of The Day, Call Of Khrulhu, Winged Sorrow, Deer Knight, Headless Horseman, Hungry Caterpillar, Wings Of Fate, Pigsie, Luminous Weaver, Sacred Charge, Gaze Of Fate, Nested Fury, Loremaster, Samoorai, Savage Paw, Mystic Colossus, Witchs House Call, Ninja Pigs, Athena Battle Sight and Keeper Of The Flame.
Also, some bugs with Make Invisible and Make Visible were fixed. Using Make Invisible on aquariums should work more reliably. Using Make Invisible and Make Visible on translucent house guests should work correctly now.
PVP Changes
There are three important PVP changes that were tested on Test Realm and overall well received. We are continuing to take feedback and will make adjustments as we release these changes to the Live Realms:
- Guardian Spirit has been changed to NO PvP. The purpose of this change is to see the viability in life in PvP beyond using this spell to “never die.” Changing this meta will reveal what strengths/weakness beyond Guardian Spirit we see in Life PvP. This change does not effect the functionality of Guardian Spirit in PvE content. The hope is that while Guardian Spirit is pulled from PvP, we will be working on re-balancing it with the intent of removing the NO PvP flag.
- Loremaster has been re-balanced to be more in line with its Rank. Loremaster remains a Rank 4 spell, but had damage reduced to 235 – 315. Its Weakness has been reduced to 15% and Accuracy debuff reduced to -25% . This change effects the spell itself and will have an impact in PvE. However, Loremaster is still balanced slightly above value, but has had its numerical advantages reigned in.
- Burning Rampage has had its delayed damage effect trigger after 3 rounds instead of 2. This allows the targeted player (from second to act) one additional opportunity to counter the effect before damage. This change does affect the PvE version as well.
As a team, we have been and are continuing to discuss PVP balance as we continue to get player feedback. Our goal is to remake PVP into a fair and fun system that will encourage more players to participate in matches. We want to start with straightforward changes, so that we may start collaborating with our PVP community to gather feedback. We can all jump into PVP matches and test out the changes, and talk about them after we have had a chance to get used to them. Once we give it a fair shake, we can either keep the changes ('hey, this feels and plays well, let’s stick with this one!'), reject them ('wow, that seemed like a great idea at the time, but.. no'), or continue to tweak them ('this spell is going in the right direction but it needs a little work').
Continued FTUE Improvements
As you may have noticed, we've been polishing the FTUE (First Time User Experience) for new players coming into the game. It’s important to make a good first impression! Since you all seem to like the changes we've made to the first couple of hours of gameplay, we’re continuing our efforts to refine the experience even further.
We're consolidating Krokotopia into 3 Access Passes priced at 3500 Crowns each instead of 12 at 915 Crowns each. We felt Wizards were hitting prompts to pay Crowns too often, so we combined access passes with a discount.
If you have purchased part of the new access pass, you’ll be granted the whole thing automatically. For example, if you own existing access pass 1, but not 2, 3, and 4, which were combined into new access pass 1, you’ll automatically be granted them and not prompted to pay until you hit new access pass 2 (which was old access pass 5).
Miscellaneous Miscellany
- Spiral Showcase changes: The Help a Team activity now works for the highest 2 worlds. The highest world and the one before it. The worlds that count are now displayed in the event window. Also, the Feed a Pet activity now allows players to earn points for the pet level fed. So 1 at baby, 2 at teen, 3 at adult, 4 at ancient and 5 at epic, mega and ultra.
- Remove level restriction (starting at level 2) on buying houses.
- All house guests should now be sellable at the Bazaar.
- Everafter Village was added to the housing sign options.
- When viewing your friend list, you will no longer be randomly forced back to page 1.
- Friend portraits now appear correctly on friend list.
- When a player gets a new teleport effect, it’s now automatically equipped.
- Beastmoon Hunt plants now drop idols for new Beastmoon Forms.
- A bunch of new pet decals were added to Photomancy.
- Resolved a couple of invisibility issues when on certain mounts.
- Jewel is no longer lost after stitching or placing wand in a house.
- Various performance and stability improvements.
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| Expanding the Beastmoon Hunt
As we teased leading up to Test Realm, a new type of map has been introduced to the event. Take your beast forms through an Avalon-inspired romp!
Our focus for this update was to shake up the Beastmoon “meta” a little bit. Overall, each match should play a little faster, with the following specifics: - Five new Beastmoon forms—a new tank (Ice Elf), more DPS (Storm Krokomummy), two new pip donators (Balance Fairy and Wolf Warrior), and a new minion-manipulator (Myth Minotaur)
- Stronger synergistic play between Beast forms
- Adjustments to existing Beast forms (Ice Colossus and Death Fairy)
- Across-the-board movement speed improvements
- A brand new map with vertical elements, for better vantage points and an emphasis on map mastery
- “Victory Pips” - if you win combat on any sigil, we’ll spawn some pip wisps to prep you for the next fight
- Quicker access to the center Spiral battle ring, and an increase in points for combat victories—all together, matches conclude a bit faster (20-25 minutes per match)
As a reminder, the Beastmoon Hunt is a team-based, goal-oriented event designed to bring Wizards together in a fun and friendly competitive event. Teams of 4-6 Wizards face each other in a contest of Domination. Each team gains points by defeating opponents and capturing and holding Battle Rings in the arena. A match ends when one team reaches 100 points, or the timer expires!
You’ll earn Reagents, Recipes, Craftable Seeds, and other rewards. These rewards will be extremely useful as you participate in future Beastmoon Hunts.
Expanding the Deckathalons
Fight the Professors!
Fight the Professors!
It’s a long way up to the top of the 30 floors of the newly expanded Deckathalon Towers, but each school’s Professor is waiting to duel Deckathletes that rise to the challenge! They don’t expect to battle many opponents the first time around as it’s a significant challenge simply to get there, but you never know..
Limited Entries
Previously, each Wizard had four entries per day and could purchase more at the price of 1000 gold. From now on, we’re offering every Wizard THREE entries per day only. You can log in and claim your entries each day and use them any time the event is running, but once you’re out you’ll need to wait for the next day to claim more entries and enter the Deckathalon tower.
Endurance Mode
Since you only have three chances at the tower, we wanted to open it up and let Wizards show us what you’ve got! Instead of being limited to three floors per entry, we’ve added what we call endurance mode. This allows you to continue your way up the tower until you’re either defeated or run out of spells. How high can you go?
New Rewards
As you approach the top floors, you’ll gain the ability to craft new rewards. Should you battle your Professor, you’ll find they drop some familiar and coveted items and award some new and prestigious badges.
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| There have been a few additional update needs identified thanks to community feedback. This morning we resolved the following:
Highlights- Crafting quests in Azteca and Zafaria now have proper UI
- Nightbringer and Daybreaker Utility Spells available for purchase and upgrade with Spellements (Note: delay casts cannot be used on multi-round Polymorph or Shadow Form spells)
- Modified this week's Storm Deckathalon Credit cost to 1 Gold
- Devourer will now release devoured players once defeated
- Prince Viggor and King Detritus should now have Boss Loot
- Various Beastmoon Hunt event UI fixes
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