One of the most fun parts of creating a character on Wizard101 is choosing which school of magic your toon will use as they adventure throughout The Spiral. The Wizard 101 website has a quiz for players to take to guide them toward which school would suit their playing style and/or reflect their real life personality. Rest assured, you can pick whatever school you want to play no matter what the quiz results are!
Each school has pros and cons, and no one school is right for everyone (although The Friendly Necromancer might disagree with me.) One of the chief things to remember when weighing the pros and cons is that the school you pick will significantly affect the base amount of health (aka hit points) your toon will have before equipment boosts.
Six of the schools are split into two groups, Spiritual and Elemental. The seventh school, Balance, stands alone. This column skims the surface of the Elemental Schools (Fire, Ice and Storm.) The previous column did the same for the Spiritual Schools and the Balance School.
Elemental Schools: Fire, Ice and Storm
The three elemental schools have lower accuracy rates than the spiritual schools, but higher damage is built into their spells. There is a wide range of base health granted to students in the elemental schools, which is linked to the amount of damage each school deals.
Fire School students are called Pyromancers. Fire school spells have 75% accuracy and boost on ice school enemies. Fire school students have the second-lowest base health available to Ravenwood students. On the other hand, they have the second-highest damage spells available. Two of the most unique spells of the Fire school are Link and Immolate. Link does a small amount of damage to the enemy over three rounds and heals the Pyromancer for a small number of hit points over the same three rounds. Even if the enemy dies before the third round the Pyromancer still receives all three rounds of healing. Immolate does 250 damage to the Pyromancer in exchange for 600 points of damage to the enemy. Immolate is a really fun spell, but it’s very easy for Pyromancers to destroy themselves using Immolate. Even if it demolishes your enemy, if it takes the last of your hit points, prepare to see your toon defeated and doing the “Spiral Head Roll.”
Ice School students are called Thaumaturges. It’s hard for me to remain 100% objective about the Ice school, as my highest-level wizard is Ice! Ice school spells have a well-balanced accuracy rate vs. damage rate. The accuracy is 80%, but the base damage is not as high as the other elemental schools. As with any school, the damage can be boosted with equipment and buffs: the ice school is NOT underpowered! The ice school is the best school if you’d like to play the role of the tank. Ice school students have the highest base health of any Ravenwood school. The equipment available to ice school students provides the highest possible amount of extra hit points and/or resistance to damage of any school. While I typically don’t give advice on secondary schools, in this case I highly recommend using training points for Death spells through Feint, the Elemental Blade and the Elemental Trap. This will help you deal lots more damage than anyone expects. If you’d like to specialize in tanking as you reach higher levels, spend a training point on the Star School spell Fortify.
Storm School students are called Diviners. Being a Diviner is NOT for the faint of heart! First, Diviners have the lowest base health of any school in The Spiral. Second, Storm school spells have the lowest accuracy of all schools – only 70%. The best part of being a Diviner, or so I’m told, is that it has the highest base damage of all the schools. There is a delicate balance to being a Diviner. One one hand, if you don’t fizzle, you might kill your enemy long before they do much damage to you. On the other hand, if you fizzle a lot, it’s almost impossible to bring down the bad guy before you wind up doing the Spiral Head Roll. The signature spell of Diviners is Wild Bolt. This spell has the potential to do 1,000 hit points of damage.* Another unique feature is that Storm is the only Elemental school that can boost against two other schools. Storm boosts against Myth by design. However, if Diviner casts a Storm prism on a Balance Enemy, thereby turning the Storm spell into Myth damage, the damage boosts. As mentioned in the previous article, Myth school is a Spiritual school and all Spiritual school damage boosts on Balance enemies in PvE.
* Kings Isle severely nerfed Wild Bolt when the Celestia expansion went live. I’ll devote an entire article to the Storm school in the future, but for now I will say this: Boo! Hiss! Wild Bolt was ruined for PvE players based on lobbying from PvP players. This really wasn’t fair to Diviners who devoted time to leveling in such a challenging school and only play PvE anyway.
Different schools bring such a different gaming experience on W101. I’m sure everyone thinking of trying the game, will find your article useful.
I’ve tried Balance, is not very fun at low levels.
From what I’ve been told, once you level to the point of getting Judgement Balance becomes much less of a grind to play. I’ve found buddying up with a Storm wizard to be very fun when playing my Balance wizard. Also, the secondary of Death (up to feint) is incredibly useful!