In the same vein as the “catch of the day needs to be buffed” thread, I bring an argument to the forums to make a fix to the school of death. I am posting this thread without any kind of “death is too weak” mentality, I’m coming from the place of death is an anomaly in this situation. This is going to be a LONG thread, spanning multiple posts, so please, do not reply until you’ve read the whole entire thing.
Here’s the issue: Other schools’ X-pip spells go towards the school’s strength, but death has one that’s totally out of character for it. Let’s start “doing the math” here.
First, if we look at the school’s description, found on www.wizard101.com/game/death-school, you’ll see that nothing there ever talks about minions, or anything close to minions. The very first line talks about “stealing and support themselves”. How does having an X-pip minion spell, on its own, achieve that? How does that play towards “steal and support themselves” as a PRIMARY function? It doesn’t. In this respect, the Animate spell is a failure to death school.
Second, let’s match up the 7 primary schools with their main (but not only) function and x-pip spell:
Balance has Judgement, an attack spell. Since balance focuses on everything, this makes sense. Many would make sense as this is a school that has some of everything. Arguments could be made for and against judgement, but I’ll leave that to others on another thread.
Fire has Heckhound, an attack spell that is a Damage over Time spell. Fire’s primary focus is strong spells that keep doing damage round after round. So, the x-pip and the school are in unison.
Ice has Ice Armor and Frozen Armor, both which are shield spells. Ice’s primary focus is defense. They’re supposed to shield up and try to outlast their opponent. So, the x-pips and the school are in unison.
Life has Dryad, a healing spell. Life’s primary focus is healing. They’re supposed to keep people alive to help outlast the fight. So, the x-pips and the school are in unison.
Myth has Troll and Cyclops, both minion spells. Myth’s primary focus, is to summon minions to help in battles. So, the x-pips and the school are in unison.
Storm has Tempest, a damage enhancing spell. Storm’s primary focus is to overwhelm the enemy with powerful attacks. So, the x-pips and the school are in unison.
Death has Animate, a minion spell. Death’s primary focus, as we saw above, is to steal from others and support themselves. Since this school focuses on healing itself from the life energies of enemies, animate makes no sense whatsoever. From the perspective of a school’s X-pip spell focusing on the school’s main purpose, it needs to be fixed; it’s totally out of character.
Third, let’s look at another argument some people have made on these very forums. One of the arguments people make against changing Death’s X-pip spell to an attack spell and giving Death a pip based minion spell is that it would give death more spells than the other schools. Let’s look at quantity of spells by school:
Balance has 45 Death has 41 Fire has 45 Ice has 41 Life has 44 Myth has 44 Storm has 39
If Death was given a new minion spell, and then an attacking X-pip spell, it would only have 42 spells (the third lowest in the game). How is that against a norm that doesn’t even exist?
Fourth, we can focus on the fact that Myth is the school of minions, not death. In myth’s description, it talks about minions. Myth has more minions available to it, from school taught spells, than every other school in the game, EXCEPT DEATH. This ONE spell totally breaks the logic. Why should a NON-minion based school have MORE minions available to it, than the minion specialist? Each school has 2 minions available to it that are school trained (NOT treasure card), EXCEPT myth and death:
Myth has 11: Golem (1), Troll (3), Cyclops (4), Minotaur (1), Talos (1), Vassanji (1) Death has 15 minions: Animate (14), Malduit (1)
Why does Death, a school whose primary focus is “stealing and supporting”, have more minions available to it, through school trained spells, than the school whose primary focus is minions? Death should only have 2, like the rest of the schools. Again, let’s look back to Myth school’s description right from https://www.wizard101.com/game/myth-school:
“The Myth School will train its student wizards to summon minions. Myth Wizards eventually get four different types of minions, each with a little different function.”
If this is true, how come they have less minions than a school that does NOT specialize in minions?
So, after all those examples, what do we do? Simple, we fix the problem, and bring death school back in line with its primary function, and back in line with all the other schools. The first thing we need to do is figure out what to do with the CURRENT incarnation of Animate. Our options are to:
1) Make it a myth spell - This option actually wouldn’t make sense. I know previously I have argued to make it a myth spell, but it shouldn’t be.
2) Make it a crafted spell – This option just causes more havoc that it’s really worth, and the outcome would be even more useless, by the time we’d be able to craft it, than most of the CURRENT crafted spells are
3) Make it a treasure card only spell - This is my personal favorite option. From a programming perspective, the ONLY thing they'd have to do is change Death's Animate spell to either the Crypt Watchguard or Ghoulish Retainer minion spell. The new minion spell could be a quest spell at L23. I chose 23 because it’s in the middle of when the other schools get their minion spells and also in between 2 quest spells for death (Curse and the new X-pip spell below).
4) Retire the spell – This is my least favorite option by far. I don’t want the spell out of the GAME, I just don’t want it to be Death’s first school trained minion spell.
Second, we'd need to give Death an X-pip spell. Now, I've given this a lot of thought and tried to balance the damage and healing factors. My thoughts for the spell are:
Accuracy: 85% Damage per pip: 80 Life Sap: yes Target: One monster Received by: Quest Level required: 28 Spell requirement: must have the minion spell from above
At 14 pips, it would cause 1,120 damage and 560 healing. Now, I understand that this would make the death spell the strongest one it has, but keep in mind, that’s at 14 pips. If we compare it to Dr Von’s (death’s strongest single target life sap spell), the new X-pip spell would do 300 more damage, at the cost of 5 more pips, making it LESS efficient. It does more damage than Khrulu yes, but it’s only to ONE enemy, unlike Khrulu, for almost three times the amount of pips.
Now, while we’re talking about the spell, I KNOW Storm users will chime in saying that Storm’s should be the strongest X-pip in the game, and it still would be. Let’s look at the numbers:
At max, Tempest currently does 320 dmg/pip (4 monsters x 80 dmg/pip) At max, death’s spell would do 80 dmg /pip (1 monster x 80 dmg/pip)
Sure, it does the same damage per pip, but it only does it to ONE enemy, so, the whole “storm must be the strongest” wouldn’t be violated. This new spell would be the WEAKEST X-pip damage spell (Balance does 100, Fire does 130), the weakest in regards to healing (Dryad does 5 times the health per pip), and can only heal the caster (Dryad can heal anybody). The reason why I feel it should life sap have been outlined above. All those who wanted Catch of the Day buffed because it wasn’t in line with the damage per pip formula, should also agree to this as well, because the X-pip spell is out of character for the school AND the trend; something brought up numerous times on that thread.
I think you should make the x-pip death spell an aoe, death doesn't have a low pip aoe and storm doesn't either, that's why they gave them tempest to compensate and waited until rank 7 to give them a proper aoe, the same should be for death so low levels won't have to craft deer knight. Here's my idea:
Soul Sapper/ Spirit Siphon: X-pips; 55 damage per pip to all & and steal back to caster
I think you should make the x-pip death spell an aoe, death doesn't have a low pip aoe and storm doesn't either, that's why they gave them tempest to compensate and waited until rank 7 to give them a proper aoe, the same should be for death so low levels won't have to craft deer knight. Here's my idea:
Soul Sapper/ Spirit Siphon: X-pips; 55 damage per pip to all & and steal back to caster
I'd like to keep the AoE and Xpip spells separated if possible. I think trying to use this anomaly to fix both would cause a lot more dissension, ire, and negative reaction. I can hear a lot of people claiming that the spell is overpowered (and we'll probably see the posts for it by the time this message comes through). I LIKE the idea of another AoE for death, but let's stick to the main issue if we could, so that there's a better chance of it actually happening. That being said, you are of course entitled to your opinion, and I appreciate the input :)
Soul Sapper/ Spirit Siphon: X-pips; 55
back to caster