Welcome to the Wizard101 Message Boards

Alright, I'll begin this post by stating a fact; the school has been neglected for too long - arguably from it's release. The spells themselves have a low life expectancy to anyone who learns them, IF they bother with them at all. In this post, I hope to detail their flaws as well as ways to improve them.

First, I'll talk about the school in general. This school of magic is the magic of "change"; in particular it revolves around the player changing themselves from their statistics to their deck of spells, going through a complete make over to change your play-style to meet the situation by changing into different creatures. Okay, neat. It's a very unique concept that none of the other schools can really replicate(outside of that was derived from the corrupted ) and brings some interesting game-play choices to the table - or at least it should.

For example, need a hitter? No problem, there's a polymorph for that. Teammate down? Don't worry, polymorph has it covered. Boss causing you problems? Some of these polymorphs have some big resist towards their intended school, polymorph into that and tank through. On the surface, it seems like they have valid reasons and should be an incredibly flexible school. But it isn't. Why? Well, lets get into it.

The Problems:

Point 1: Incredibly underwhelming even at the levels you learn them.

For starters, most of the creatures you can turn into are incredibly less potent than say a player of that same tier would be. Consider this, we learn these in Celestia. The levels you can learn these in Celestia range from 50-58. Given the levels we learn these spells, I'd assume that the creature we turn into would be of a similar tier. But they're not. In fact, they're hopelessly under- powered. I'll use as an example. The offensive polymorph, Cat Bandit, only has a damage boost of 20% and a critical rating of 150. I don't know about other storms, but when I was in Celestia - 20% damage is laughable. In addition, the spell deck is severely limited - the best single hitting attack being a Stormzilla and only Tempest as an AoE(which honestly isn't too bad, I suppose.). Now, don't get me wrong - I don't want a polymorph to be point-for-point equal to a wizard of that tier. However, it should at least be capable of doing SOMETHING near the level you get them at. Think about it, at level 54 you can learn a spell that lets you imitate a wizard during their time in Mooshu in CELESTIA. You're learning a spell to help you in a 50+ area by turning in a wizard from a 30-40 world. I can't even believe someone would look at that sentence and think it's fine. This trend happens for more than just these early polymorphs though. Even in Azteca, the Pteradon's best attack is.... Leviathan, and the AoE is still just Tempest. Let me say that again. In AZTECA, A LEVEL 88 POLYMORPH'S BEST ATTACK IS SOMETHING WE LEARNED IN CELESTIA. I don't even know what to say to further show the disparity in the correlation between the levels you can learn these and what you're getting for your training point.

Point 2: Their longevity.

As I stated above, their initial potential use is already questionable given the statistics AT THE TIME OF LEARNING THEM. The more you progress through the game, the more and more useless former spells become. Honestly, this is the most depressing aspect. is my favorite school of magic and I love the concept behind them. However, it's really frustrating to know that every single one of them is useless as you climb through to higher worlds. Their stats nor their spell decks make any of them relevant enough to even be considered, with the exception of maybe one of the polymorphs(and even then it'd be incredibly niche).Neither nor have this problem. Both of those two schools just give boosts, and will always be useful at any level. It's just sad to see get left behind, and as they stand now, I can't really blame anyone for ignoring it's existence.

Fixing their problems:

Luckily, fixing these shouldn't be too difficult.

Before I mention how to fix them, there are a few things I'd like to suggest or point out.

Given that we have multiple polymorphs for the same school, I think it'd be best to have each of them specialize in one thing. This already seems to have been the idea, as Cat Bandit is the more offensive polymorph of , while Storm Elemental is a tankier version with big resist that seemed to be intended to face off against bosses or other NPC. Keeping along that line, it should be clear to have Cat Bandit be the more offensive polymorph and keeping Storm Elemental as a defensive polymorph. However, with Pteradon also being offensive it might be better to specialize Cat Bandit and Pteradon even further. How you'd want to do this is completely up to you - you could have Cat Bandit be an AoE focused polymorph for mobs and have Pteradon focus on solo hits, or maybe have Pteradon be more about raw damage and give Cat Bandit more utility in his spells.

Proposition 1:

The first way to fix these would be to "Scale" to your wizard's level. As I mentioned before, as you progress, the worse and worse the becomes. A simple way to fix this, would be to use "benchmark" levels to scale a polymorph to. For example, say you were level 100. I'd propose that a polymorph used at that level should scale to somewhere between a level 80-90 wizard of that level in terms of statistics and spell deck composition. This would mean as you advance through the game, so too will your moon spells. Their statistics(health, damage, resist, critical, piercing, ect..) would increase incrementally as would their spell decks to include more powerful or versatile spells to become stronger as a whole.

Proposition 2:

This one is a little trickier, because I'm not sure how best would be to go about it. The idea is to essentially have a form of quests to enhance your polymorph spells in a similar vein to a wizard's "Spell Quest" in which they learn new spells. These quests would be handed out by various people, a few that come to mind being: The Archivist in Celestia, Zaylin Reedwalker in Azteca, Arkyn Moonblade or Sofia Darkside in Khrysalis, and Qyburn Stellargaze in the Arcanum.

In this path, you'd have enhanced static versions of the spells available at various points in the story.(For example , if you had Gobbler the enhanced would be Gobbler II, the next one Gobbler III and so on).

Long story short, I really like the Moon school and I hate to see it in the state it's currently in. No other school has been so neglected and I feel like Kingsisle either doesn't know what to do with it or just wants to pretend it doesn't exist.

Thank you for reading.