Blog Archives
Crafting Benefit
Through Sunday, Unlimited Crafting and Double Reagents for members.
Also for an unspecified amount of time:
Spiral Showcase
KI recently introduced the Spiral Showcase. I missed the beginning and it only has a couple of days left but I gather it will periodically reappear.
While it’s happening you collect special event points for feeding a snack to a pet. catching fish, crafting an item, completing a daily assignment quest and/or joining a team at the kiosk from the highest world you have achieved.
The points are given for what you do each day. The points themselves add up but you re-start on the activities each day.
For me the team-up one worked out strangely as I was trying it out with a lower level character. She’d gotten the key to Krokotopia but hadn’t done any quests yet, which meant she had no access to any of the bosses. At the kiosk that means none of the bosses show up. I tried doing a WC boss quest from the kiosk but no points.
I ran her through the first couple of quests and then the Biti Nirini fight. Since she was already in Krok I just took her to the sigil and clicked team up there. No credit since it wasn’t the kiosk.
Seems like an odd restriction to me since (a) you’re teaming up either way and (b) in order for a team to get started and show up in the kiosk somebody has to choose team up at the actual sigil. And the “highest world” ought to be the highest one at which you have access to a boss. But only a kiosk team-up works and if you’ve gotten the key to the next world, that has to be the one where you team up.
I was disappointed they started something that gives points for activities other than fighting but left gardening completely out. Between the lack of double garden events and now this I’m beginning to think KI wishes we wouldn’t garden.
Another little odd thing. The prizes you can buy for points you’ve achieved are lined up above the chart. The ones you don’t have enough points for allow you to click on them to see what you would get. I was looking through those and accidentally clicked on one I DID have enough points for. Instead of showing me the prize or asking me to confirm I wanted this one, it just took the points and gave me the prize, which wasn’t one I wanted.
It’s a nice little addition for being able to earn some stuff for activities you might participate in anyway.
Daily Assignment Reward Bonus
KI started a reward bonus on Daily Assignments today, Wednesday, December 5, 2018. The assignment doesn’t name the end date though there are reports that this goes through January 6, 2019. I’ve never seen one extended that long, so I’m hesitant to guarantee this will be true.
Personally I generally don’t find the extra rewards are enough to justify the time it takes to do the assignments unless they’re easy ones like going to Unicorn Park or something similar. But if you like the assignments, the reward boost definitely makes it nicer.
Supposedly the items received from the chests include nicer ones. Can’t prove it by me as I get the same crap during the extra rewards I get the rest of the time. And particularly annoying is that, among a long list of potential items, my wizards pretty much always just get repeats of the same stuff (which also happens a lot in farming…).
Daily Assignment bonus goes on
In an unusual move, when KI changed the news feed on the opening window of the game Monday, they took off the Daily Assignment Bonus news item though it’s supposed to continue through Sunday, June 17. Generally these events stay on the feed through their entire run.
I’m only vaguely participating in the event but I did the assignment with several wizards to check out the rewards and they were all still receiving double rewards and the rewards page still says “bonus” on the top. It doesn’t seem to be meaning anything much for the treasure chest days except if you get a temporary mount it’s for 15 days instead of 7. Otherwise, it’s mostly drops temporary mounts and weird housing items (and the same ones seem to show up repeatedly) it doesn’t seem the chests really give much extra.
If you like doing the Daily Assignments you apparently still have through Sunday even though they’ve dropped the announcement from the news feed.
Daily Assignment event and Pet-a-Palooza
June 1, 2018 KI announced a Daily Assignment Rewards Bonus started today and will run through June 17. They’re also offering Pet-a-Palooza, wherein you can buy pets and some pet-related items in the Crown Shop for a sale price.
The previous Daily Assignment events offered double rewards but I noted they’re carefully not saying double. I haven’t done any of the assignments yet so I’m not sure what the “bonus” will turn out to be. Since I haven’t found the Daily Assignments to be worth the time they take and have been less-than-impressed by doing it even for double rewards, I’m skeptical about how likely it is we’ll receive anything that justifies wandering to far flung corners of the spiral to fight battles that take as long as finishing quests with far greater rewards.
The pets can be up to 50% off, which means many will be less off. Personally I’d say go to the hatching kiosk and find a pet with the talents you want with which to hatch. Many — if not most — in there require gold only and the ones that require paying something in crowns offer way lower crowns prices than the pets in the shop.
Or better yet find a friend (there are also Facebook groups you can join where you can ask to hatch for specified talents and many people who generously offer pets who have just what you want. You can also specify the type of pet and the talents so you can get one for whom somebody else has already hatched to the perfect talent set. No crowns at all.
But if you’ve had your eye on a favorite Crown pet and you can’t find someone with whom to hatch, now is a good moment to save.
And Double Pets returns again
Miss Gigi at Mega
Double Pets started March 22 and will run through Sunday, March 25, 2018. You receive double XP from pet games and snacks so training pets goes much faster.
I’m still at a place where I’ve had so many disappointments weighed against how little I enjoy pet training, I didn’t do anything on day 1. And I’m feeling pretty lethargic about bothering at any point…
The Double Daily Assignment event ended this past Sunday. I participated with 10 wizards on two accounts (one wizard on each isn’t high enough level). I like to open two accounts at once and port wizards to one another to speed up doing the assignments. Even double rewards wind up leaving me feeling ho hum. Since I garden a lot I don’t really need the gold and it arrives in amounts that would mostly only help wizards who are too low level to participate.
The arena tickets received are in such tiny numbers that for people like me who don’t collect tickets from PvP or Pet Derby, they add up to pretty much nothing. The crowns are sort of a nice feature but in such small amounts I’m not sure if the total for each account equaled enough to buy one pack after two weeks of daily double rewards.
And the treasure chest, which theoretically could be the most fun part, for me mostly provides temporary mounts I don’t need and housing items I don’t want, both of which can’t be auctioned so I wind up either trashing or feeding to pets pretty much everything I get from the chests.
As I’ve noted before, I find the rewards, when stacked up against the time it takes, aren’t really worth it. Particularly for my high level wizards, I can do a short quest and pick up more XP, more gold, more drops (most of which can be sold) in the same amount of time. I know I see on the Facebook Adult Non-PvP group that some people do the assignments routinely but I rarely do and I’m not sure I’m gonna bother again when there’s a double reward event.
I’m interested to hear from people who like the Daily Assignments and why.
BOXES and Double Daily Rewards
The Five B.O.X.E.S. have been going for a week or so and a double experience for Daily Assignments event just started. Both will end on March 4, 2018.
I started to do a little farming in the WC box for sonic springs, but as usual, one spring in multiple runs through. It’s 4 battles in there plus running around quite a bit and I lose heart when I keep having to put in that much time and not one of the battles produces a sonic spring.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t find the rewards for Daily Assignments to be worth the effort they often entail, so I rarely do them. I check to see what it is and mainly only do the ones that involve just going some place easy to get to. They like making you fight a battle (and often some place remote) or to go to some obscure place that takes quite a while to reach. In the same amount of time I could generally earn more XP and more drops doing other things, so I have yet to see the value.
However, I am slightly more interested when the rewards double. Not sure what I’ll do tomorrow as none of the doubles received today were all that exciting…
If you haven’t done the B.O.X.E.S. yet, they’re kind of fun initially, have some special drops and, the first time for each box gets some decent XP. If you like the Daily Assignments, this is a great opportunity to get more for your effort. Have fun!
Using two accounts for Daily Assignment
Since the Daily Assignments started I’ve written several times about being under-impressed. I continue in that opinion, but I have found a way to move it along a little faster and make it somewhat more worthwhile: using two, sometimes three, accounts at once.
My wizards on the two main accounts are roughly grouped in three similar levels. Some assignments seem to clump at certain levels and some assignments are given to wizards at numerous levels, so frequently many wizards have the same assignment. For the most part I don’t bother with assignments that require a battle, so I’m looking for the ones that say to go to the hat shop in the Shopping District or go to the deck shop in the Oasis, etc. I’m getting so I won’t even do those if it’s a long complicated haul to the location…
I open one account, start taking wizards either to Aegon Statz or their Gravulum Lodestone and the first one who gets an assignment I’m willing to do I take to the location. Then I log into another account and the first one who gets the same assignment I port to the first account’s wizard. Then on the first account I check for another one who gets the assignment and port to the second account’s wizard. And so on. I just keep switching back and forth between accounts and porting wizards to one another. Gets the reward for sometimes all 12 wizards in a small amount of time.
So today, for instance, a bunch of my wizards got an assignment to go to Sapphyra’s Tower in Wizard City. Haley flew from Aegon to the tower, then I ported Lindsay, from another account, to her, closed Haley out and brought in another on the same account whom I ported to Lindsay, etc. Sometimes I also mark location by Aegon for one of them and, at the end, I use the same method to get everybody back by him so I’m all ready to get the next day’s assignments.*
On the rare occasions that I decide to do a battle assignment it’s generally easy and in WC or KT and I use porting to have two wizards, one from each account, battle the required creature at the same time so two knock off the assignment in one battle.
Since the rewards are rarely equivalent to what you could gain by taking the same amount of time to complete a quest** — especially if it includes fighting a boss — it really helps to do it with two or even three accounts open and porting wizards to one another. That way you don’t have to take the time to run (or fly 🙂 ) every wizard through a world or two to get to the spot and, if you choose to take battle assignments, you can get the rewards for two or three times as many wizards per battle.
*They all have the Gravulum Lodestone at or in houses, but, since you can’t place anything right by the world gate it takes moving at least down the ramp or if you’ve put it in the house even farther, so I kind of like leaving wizards by Aegon where I can just log them in and click to find out if I want to do the assignment or not.
**You could argue that the periodic crowns add up, especially if you’re completing assignments every day for six wizards, but I feel like I could get as many in a day or two of doing the quizzes at Freeki Games or using the “earn crowns” feature in the game to watch some videos as I can get in a month of doing daily assignments for six wizards.
Otherwise, the gold, if you garden or farm for valuable stuff and constantly hit the gold max, is negligible and since I don’t do PvP or Pet Derby the tiny amounts of arena tickets don’t add up to enough to buy anything worthwhile with them. A few times I’ve gotten okay pets but mainly on the treasure chest days I get stuff I just sell, generally for minuscule amounts of gold, or temporary mounts I wind up trashing since they take up room in backpacks and can’t be sold or traded.
Picking and choosing Daily Assignments
The Daily Assignments have been around for six or eight months now. I’ve criticized them before. So up front I’ll admit I frequently go for days or weeks without picking them up.
I’m still getting assignments that require going places to which the wizard in question hasn’t yet gotten access, which has become one of the reasons I’m sporadic about even looking at them.
Another reason is how long some of the assignments take relative to the rewards. Some of the assignments are pretty easy and just take going to some easy-to-reach spot. As soon as you arrive you get the reward. Others require either going to some remote spot that takes 10 or 15 minutes to reach or defeating some kind of mob creature or both (remote spot and mob creature to defeat there).
Most of the rewards are small amounts of gold, tiny amounts of crowns and arena tickets and treasure items I mostly feed to pets or trash. As my health has been getting better I’ve been cutting back on how much I play the game. Sometimes I’m just in for long enough to tend gardens and I log off.
So I’ve reached the point of weighing the kind of progress I can make from doing a given task against the time it’s going to take and what other things I could accomplish. Along with small rewards, xp for doing Daily Assignments is negligible (mainly, I think, for the quests you get occasionally and whatever you get for a battle) and they don’t advance you in the game.
In 10 or 15 minutes I can defeat a boss in Azteca and collect say, 25,000 XP, a chunk of gold and a list of drops that might sell for 25,000+ gold (not to mention that I’ve just moved myself along in the game). Even if it’s just Marleybone or Mooshu where a wizard is questing you’re still talking about hundreds and sometimes thousands of XP, decent gold, drops and advancing farther in the game.
If I look at an assignment and I’m either gonna have to spend a long time getting to the far reaches of some world or traveling to and then fighting a mob, I just quit for that wizard and “play” the next to check her assignment. Some days I look at a bunch and don’t do any.
I’m curious how others are finding the Daily Assignments. Do you love them? Ever do them? Find the rewards worth the time spent?
Wizard101 Basics for Beginners 