After spending a couple of weeks soaking on the Wizard101 Test server, KingsIsle yesterday released the underwater-themed expansion to the wider world. By the time I logged in, there were already many wizards halfway through the run from level 50 to level 60, and every world and every zone of Celestia was filled with spells and wandfire and confused, dazed looking monsters with WTF? looks on their carapaced faces.
As in, “Huh? First this tiny expedition of Marleybone hounds, and now an invasion?”
It looks like the Celestians may have been just trying to save themselves when they closed off the portals between Celestia and the rest of the Spiral. But those resourceful Marleyboners took an airship across the Spiral and provided an anchor to help Headmaster Ambrose of the Ravenwood Wizarding School and his friends re-open the way.
And now, invasion. Millions of wizards poured through the portal yesterday, intent on mastering the secrets of Astral Magic and killing every creature they could find. Excitement for the new expansion couldn’t be higher.
As far as the astral magic goes, I’m still unsure of it. I had the chance on the test server to try out all three of the new schools — sun, moon and stars. While I had to grin when I used Moon magic to polymorph into a ninja pig and cast ninja pig death magic, I found myself feeling less useful. Polymorphing replaces your carefully tuned short deck with a random selection of spells specific to the polymorph. I’ve heard the treant polymorph, which turns your character into a healer, has some utility, but the fart-powered gobbler and the necromantic ninja pig were not improvements.
Now, the Sun school — card enchantments — did find heavy use with me. Adding one of their super-strength enchantments to my life wizard Centaur card turned it into a real one-shot killer. And my friend Michael works the Star school — buffs — pretty heavily. Sun and Star cards will likely find homes in my deck; I might stash some ninja pig polymorphs on my sideboard, though.
What can I say about my own first night in Celestia? I got to the Grotto, which is precisely as far as I got in the quest chain on Test (I spent the rest of my time helping friends farm the higher level instances). Celestia is a beautiful expansion, but for all that it is said to have 300 hours of gameplay, I imagine regular players will be finished with the expansion far sooner than that.
Not that it’s a race, of course, but finding groups to farm the final instance for Legendary gear will be much easier when there’s still crowds of people looking for the groups to do it.
1 thought on “Wizard101: Diving into Celestia!”
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man! that sure is a text-filled screenie 😉