YMMV / Wizard101

• Anvilicious: The game's Central Theme of about how Love and Friendship will always prevail is about as subtle as a sledge hammer to the head.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • A common complaint with many of the worlds (especially during the second arc) is that they can go on and on for what may seem like an eternity.
  • Special mention to Azteca, widely considered one of the longest and most tedious worlds in the game. Between its enemies that now almost always start the fight with a hard-hitting spell, the obnoxious amount of bosses, and the constant backtracking to older areas, it has an infamous reputation amongst players.
  • This is especially true with the first part of Khrysalis. A lot of quests required backtracking even more. Thankfully, the developers listened to feedback and drastically lowered the required backtracking for the second part. Since then, subsequent worlds have been made much shorter.
• Ascended Meme: Around the time of the Zafaria update, KingsIsle released a video about an employee traveling to Africa to record animal sounds. It ended with a joke where he returns to find the developers considering doing a world called "Penguinonia" instead. Players briefly latched onto the name of the world, and several years later the Penguin revolutionaries in Polaris got "Viva la Penguinonia!" as their battle cry.
• Awesome Moments: Over the course of your journey through the Spiral, your wizard will have thwarted the rise of undead, freed a race of Manders from being enslaved, stopped Marleybone's most wanted criminals, saved the lives of both an Emperor and a King, established peace across all of Zafaria, and much more, but most importantly saved the entire Spiral from four major threats!
• Awesome Music: 90% of Nelson Everhart's score for the game is nothing short of glorious.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In PvE, the most common School players seem to play as is Death. Since Death's entire gimmick is sucking the life out of your opponents to heal yourself, this makes dueling easier due to being able to deal damage and heal yourself in the same turn, unlike the other Schools which force you to have separate Spells for damage and healing.
  • Regardless of the School they play as, a common strategy players use to defeat common enemies in PvE is to just build up their damage bonuses before casting a Spell that damages every opponent. This strategy can work on bosses as well, provided the boss doesn’t have a special gimmick that throws a wrench in the strategy.
• Complete Monster: Queen Morganthe Malory, a student of Ravenwood, got banished into the void after she tried to study black magic in order to defeat Malistaire, her professor, . When someone discovers her plans, she then attempts to kill them then sell out her brother to Malistaire to get into his good graces. After escaping the void, Morganthe seeks the power from Celestia by ravaging the entire world in a war. It was also revealed that she tricked a king of Avalon into wearing a cursed crown, and when said king turns against Morganthe, she attempts to poison him. In Azteca, she summons the spirits of the dead, which she uses to capture and torture the inhabitants so that they could make her a weapon. Morganthe then summons a meteor to destroy Azteca. Before the final battle, she mocks the player about the destruction of Azteca, and when defeated, attempts to erase the former's memory. A cruel, sadistic and selfish sorceress with a massive god complex, Morganthe eventually goes on to attempt to destroy the world to recreate it in her own image.
• Demonic Spiders: The Haunted Cave's Field Guards are unusually powerful for Wizard City - although technically rank 2, their 395 health more resembles that of a rank 3 creature. They're also Storm, meaning they get access to the most powerful spells at that level, including Storm Shark, which can deal up to 435 damage. That's enough to take out a majority of the health of most wizards who are at that point in the quest line.
• Difficulty Spike: Due to the inclusion of a lot of features that weren't present in Dragonspyre (Astral spells, additional base stat factors - such as critical -, the cheating bosses, more demanding/severe quests and enemies, etc.) Celestia, especially at its initial release, was this, and the rest of the Morganthe arc only gets harder. Its been nerfed since, but is still a rather challenging experience when compared to Dragonspyre (which itself was a bit of a jump from Mooshu).
• Fandom Rivalry: One popped up with Hogwarts Legacy after the official Wizard101 Twitter fired a Take That! to the game. Fans of Wizard101 often dislike some of J. K. Rowling's views and don't want to support her work, whereas Hogwarts Legacy fans claim that W101 is an Allegedly Free Game.
• Funny Moments: Ozzy is practically Wizard101's Deadpool, with his constant ramblings being both hilarious and Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Any fan of Arthurian Legend will figure out that King Artorius and the Pendragon are one and the same, or at least have a connection, long before The Reveal, considering that King Arthur's (Artorius' inspiration) last name is Pendragon.
  • The name that The Nothing chooses for itself (Dasein) is a German word meaning "being there", "presence", or roughly translates to "existence", acknowledging that it is no longer nothingness, but now an existent being.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Cyrus Drake originally sees the protagonist as an incompetent child, especially if they chose Myth as their starting school. He even tries to expel you for merely talking about the trolls revolting on Cyclops Lane. However, once you finish Mooshu and are about to start Dragonspyre, Cyrus starts to believe you might be able to stand a chance against his brother, and after a duel with him, he believes you are ready to visit Dragonsypre. Once Malistaire is defeated, Cyrus's opinion about you has completely flipped on its head, and if you're a Myth wizard during the graduation ceremony, Cyrus will have this to say.
  Cyrus: My, my. Look at you. When we first met, I saw a toddler in oversized robes. Yet Headmaster Ambrose knew you had a special something, deep within. He encouraged me to test it, nurture it, make it strong. What you have done for Ravenwood, the Spiral, for my family, cannot be overstated. You are a remarkable Wizard, and one I am tremendously proud of. Keep your mind open to the wonders of Myth that are still to be discovered.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Balance is intended to be the Jack of All Trades class, but PvP tends to highlight how they control the battlefield a little too well, with a lot of strengths and no weaknesses to counterbalance like the other schools. Their healing often competes with or overplays that of the Life class.
  • When Death got the spell Bad Juju, which does about the same amount of damage as Sacrifice or Dark Pact to yourself in exchange for putting a -90% Weakness on your opponent, they became this for a while until the spell was partially nerfed.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Quite a few examples of this. The game is made in mind to be easily playable for those who don't play games that much, have never touched an MMORPG, or even if it's their first time ever playing any video game. The developers even put out a guide that has some gameplay tips for those who have never played games.
  • Very notably in the community, the developers did a "audit" of many spells, making some of them considerably weaker. People were concerned that it was just designed to make the game harder unnecessarily, so the developers responded by just cutting down the health of many bosses down by 20%.
  • The game itself does have quite a few powerful options if people choose to take them. A well known one are the sun school damage enchants, which increase the base damage of a spell. For example, if you have an enchant that adds +250, and you apply that to a spell that only gives 100 damage, that's 350 base damage, and that comes first in the damage calculation, so weak hits get considerably stronger, allowing players to easily roll over bosses.
  • The final boss of Khrysalis, Morganthe is considered to be this. The dungeon before her was a boss rush against stronger versions of bosses previously fought in this world, which is very difficult even for those who bring high levels to help out. Once you get to Morganthe though, it's considerably much easier, despite the fact that you fight 4 forms of her at once. Some teams are even capable of beating her in just 2 turns.
  • The Medulla, Titan's Trident and Hall of Heroes fights were given a "challenge mode" in an update. Players were excited to try out the harder versions, as the game allowed people to try challenging versions of the fight, still allowing people to try out the original version. Unfortunately though, at least until the summer update of 2023, the "challenge mode" was nothing more than the way that the fight was released, and "normal mode" was just easier versions of those fights. Later on though, the challenge mode fights were changed to be actually genuinely harder, but players can no longer do the fights the way that they were when they came out, so you can only either do the considerably easier fights, or you can do the challenge mode fights (except you can't do this the first time you go through for your quest), which are excessively hard for players who don't understand the mechanics from the newer spells, and many spells that the players are used to using are banned. Additionally, the spells that you ARE allowed to use change around a lot, making it very difficult to build a strategy while the developers keep changing things around.
  • Malistaire in Dragonspyre was originally a very difficult fight. At launch, he was known to have 100000 health, but that got scaled back to 10000, where it now sits at 8000 after nerfs. A lot of players laugh at him now as he uses weak attacks, despite being the "master of death".
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Of course, the game is prone to this too.
  • Recently, the game introduced guilds for the more hardcore players to have a large group of people to do things. One of them is called raids, similar to other MMORPGs that have a similar concept. They are definitely a heavy step up in difficulty, but do have some great rewards. However, for most people, they are very inaccessible for more casual players, making them not be able to stand a chance. In fact, the newest raid they came out with, Crying Sky, has not has a single guild complete it ever since it came out. One guild got to the final boss, but got defeated quickly. The developers also have been making lots of changes to it, some to make it harder, some to make it easier. It's hard to even get practice for it because the game enforces a 1 week cooldown between raids and you have to gather a lot of materials to even be able to start one. Granted, this may not be hard if you have a full group of 50 pitching in to help out, but for smaller and more casual groups, this asks for a lot. Also you can't bypass the 1 week cooldown by joining a different guild, because once you leave a guild, a 2 week cooldown is placed on your wizard before you can join another one.
  • As mentioned above, the challenge mode bosses have been excessively difficult for most players. It's not even easy finding a group looking to do them because the gear that they drop is no longer worth farming for when you can get better gear in later worlds.
  • When the Titan's Trident was released, most people found the fight to be excessively difficult as it required a very specific strategy. If you didn't have a death wizard that could spam bad juju, don't even bother trying. The boss simply did far too much damage to the team, especially with a cheat where it could just randomly disappear and be impossible to target. If you don't weaken his attacks, he's happy to smack the team for over 5000 damage. The intimidating 1000000 health didn't help either. The intended way to beat the fight was to damage him 3 times for at least 30000 damage each (the game never tells you this though, but it was lowered to 20000 health, and now it's 7500 health). After doing this though, he'll summon 3 myth refractions, all of which have extremely annoying spells like virulent plague or legion shield. Again, this has been nerfed since, but it still was definitely excessive.
  • The final boss of Novus changes the players to a different form with different cards. However, they used new symbols and terms that players didn't recognize as they weren't present in the game before and there's no tutorial or even a good explanation offered, so it wasn't obvious what they did. A lot of people asked around on platforms like Reddit what they did and what they meant, many calling them hieroglyphics.
  • Even though a lot of spells were nerfed, a lot of bosses still carry pre nerfed versions of spells, allowing them to have devastating effects to players.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Storm wizards have a very rough first half of the game. They're insanely fragile, and their brawny spells are so inaccurate that battles tend to blow up in players' faces if they aren't lucky enough to get it over with quickly. Storm is essentially pigeon-holed into keeping Life as a second class just to survive.
  • Continuing Storm's difficult time was the minion, which was hated outright due to nigh-uselessness due to crappy AI. The idea was that it would draw fire away from the Storm Wizard that summoned it, hence the Taunt spell, but this didn't work in practice. Minions have incredibly low aggro to begin with, and the Water Elemental often failed as a meatshield. Combined with how frail Storm wizards already are and how frequently they need healing, seeing the minion constantly apply healing Sprites, Elemental Shields, and Life Armors to itself over the dying summoner felt like a kick straight to the teeth. Eventually, this was finally fixed so that it focused heals and wards on the summoner instead.
  • The Ice spell "Draw Health", which sacrifices a summonable minion to heal the player. Quite bizarrely, considering Ice's heals and armors are a heavy focus of the Stone Wall playstyle, it is the weakest spell of its kind, killing a very useful minion for a mere 350 health when this will comprise maybe 25% of your total HP by the time you get it. With the Balance class offering 500 health for the same cost from the same trainer, the difference is too great to bother with keeping a class-exclusive deck.
  • In a gentler example of this, Ice Armor. It is a a self-only armor spell that absorbs 125/135 damage per pip, which is pretty cool but limited in team play. Later on it is rendered obsolete by Frozen Armor, which does the same thing, but buffs for 175/185 per pip and can be applied to teammates.
• Memetic Mutation: You are an anime protagonist. ^ExplanationIn the world of Mirage, you gain an ally in the form of Istar, who manages to fit the standard "anime love interest" role: She's a ditzy non-human female who wears a (slightly) provocative outfit and continuously refers to you as "Master". The fandom had a field day with the comparison.
  • Olde Town Road.^ExplanationRapper Lil Nas X posted a meme of Merle Ambrose holding a gun on his Twitter. Since one of his songs is called “Old Town Road,” and one of the locations in the game is called Olde Town, the pun was just waiting to happen.
  • Make Wizard City free.^ExplanationDue to the first paywall coming a few hours into the story combined with how much content is locked behind said paywall, quite a few players believe that the entirety of Wizard City should be a Free-to-Play rather than the first few areas of it. It's worth noting that the developers have been experimenting with allowing more of the game to be free. As of January 2023, they are making the entire first arc free for the rest of that month and are looking into making it permanent if the "metrics support it", as they have said.
  • POLARIS BEST WORLD! ^Explanation On the Wizard 101 subreddit, a user by the name Death To Heretics really enjoys the world Polaris to the point that the developers have acknowledged this and implemented the badge "POLARIS BEST WORLD!" due to not only them, but also the community's general appreciation of Polaris (probably because it was much shorter than the previous 2 worlds being the longest worlds in the entire game so far.
  • Server Dude. ^ExplanationOn September 2022, a rogue employee or hacker managed to gain access to the game's server notification system which is normally used to alert people of things like upcoming maintenance. Instead, they used it to spread messages like "dick and balls", telling people they will gain crowns for doing specific actions, asking players to send emails to the support address asking to give him a raise, saying that "the next world is my boss's asshole", among other messages. People on the subreddit were quick to meme about him, dubbing him "Server Dude". It currently is unknown if it really was someone who worked there, or a hacker. Since then, the developers have responded by giving all accounts free membership for the rest of the month, as well as publicly apologizing for what happened. Since then, when a developer was asked about them, they said "Although Server Dude was funny, we cannot condone that behavior".
  • X of Celestian Y. ^Explanation In the Spring update in 2020, one of the additions was to add something called gear set bonuses. The idea is that you can choose to wear items that belong to a specific set, and if you wear enough of them, you get buffs like additional damage, more resist, or even other things like getting a free pip whenever you kill an enemy. This is very infamous with the set of items that come from Celestia. If you bring a wizard through that world now, you are basically guaranteed to get plenty of that gear. This was deliberate by the developers to encourage people to try out the gear sets. The complaint is that the bosses drop them way too liberally and ends up clogging up backpack space. One post on Reddit humorously posted this saying "to stock up on your pet's favorite". This refers to the fact that the items cannot be sold in the Bazaar, so people just feed them to their pets to quickly get rid of them.
• Moral Event Horizon: Morganthe destroying Azteca using the comet Xibalba was the moment she cemented her status as a truly irredeemable villain.
• Narm: In-Universe. Captain Pork's frequent speeches about peace and tolerance are criticized by the denizens of Empyrea for being incredibly cheesy; But then again, there are some who take his speeches to heart.
• Narm Charm: The ending of the Castle Darkmoor dungeon is so over dramatic that it would qualify as Narm in literally an other scenario, but the fact that it has Malistaire finally reunite with his deceased wife, Sylvia and end a plot line that's been around since the beginning of the game on a note that is both heartwarming and sad makes it extremely satisfying to watch.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In Wizard City, you'll largely be fighting ghosts who simply sink into the ground, skeletons who fall apart, or monsters who comically pass out when defeated. Once you reach Kroktopia, you'll be fighting seemingly living anthropomorphic crocodiles who disintegrate into sand with a scream of agony when beaten.
  • The way Morganthe dies isn't the best way to go. She gets so overwhelmed with power that the ground beneath her collapses, causing her to fall into the Void between the Worlds. It should be noted, however, that Malistaire eventually landed Darkmoor after being sucked into the Void at Xibalba, so Morganthe might have landed somewhere else.
  • The cutscene at the end of Empyrea's first act is kind of terrifying, mostly due to how cold Raven's reveal of her plan to end the Spiral is. Hearing the game's kindly, ever-present narrator as a villain is jarring, especially for long-time players. The ominous music definitely doesn't help, either.
  • In spite of being known for being a sugary sweet world, Karamelle has these in the form of the cavities that pop up all over the world. The other characters are only able to see them as regular holes instead of vortexes that seem to be tears in reality itself, and they emit an ominous, chilling humming sound that, somehow, only you can hear. Then comes the finale of the world, where you see just what is on the other side of the cavities: a dark distorted version of the real Karamelle, very similar in appearance to the Upside Down with floating objects, rooms that connect to each other in Alien Geometries that the real Karamelle does not have, and shadow-like versions of the wizard known as aberrations. Then there is also a shadow version of Sybil, which has glowing blue eyes, produces an unearthly screech and produces a light bridge from its mouth leading to a floating void holding Grand Nana captive. Finally, we see the monstrosity responsible for the cavities itself: from the black hole floating in the void, pulsations appear, then a pair of glowing red eyes that flash out of the black hole as the gargantuan form of THE DIVINE PARADOX forms.
• Periphery Demographic: Many teens and adults play the game due to its fun gameplay, surprisingly deep story, and side activities (especially PvP). The later sections of the game are noticeably darker, perhaps as a result of this.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Spellements, when they were introduced, were meant to be a way for players to upgrade spells as part of the experience in an enjoyable way. However, many fans detest the system due to the excessively low drop rate and the fact that spellements are not easily acquired. Even paying players who spend large amounts of crowns on SPELLEMENT BUNDLES, which are supposed to primarily drop spellements, struggle to get enough to upgrade their spells. Even worse is that it takes at least 75 spellements just to upgrade to the first tier. And further attempts to upgrade will cost increasingly more spellements for that particular spell (almost 700 to reach the final tier), and the result is one of the least liked features ever added to Wizard101.
  • What makes this even worse is that if you had already completed Celestia, you are permanently locked out from ever gaining low tier spellements as drops from bosses in the previous worlds (Wizard City through Dragonsypre), save for a very convoluted way that involves grinding certain housing gauntlets for a pet talent that's slower than if you could farm bosses from the first arc.
    • Slightly mitigated after the Spring 2024 update where people could temporarily scale their wizards down to a lower level, allowing people to farm bosses with reduced stats and a lower variety of accessible spells, which makes it better. However, the sheer number of spellements that need to be farmed makes it a herculean task.
  • Archmastery also was not entirely appreciated by the community. For the most part, it's a partial replacement to mastery amulets. The idea is that you got the ability to generate power pips that can work for another school. This made using other schools more viable without needing a mastery amulet, giving players access to stronger spells of other schools. However, the developers also changed all lore spells to make it so that school pips were required to use them. Not a bad deal so far. The actual issue is how they are generated. The generation rate is based on who has the highest archmastery rating, and it is based on them. If 3 players all have the same rating, they all will (usually) get 1 per turn, provided the enemy doesn't have more). However, if a 4th person joins with more than they do, then those other 3 players will not get their school pips as quickly, and a lot of the newer spells lock people out of getting their school pips. Because of the existence of jewels that boost the archmastery rating even further, trolls dedicated to just being annoying can just optimize their build to as high archmastery as possible, making it so people either don't get their school pips, or they get them very slowly.
  • The damage cap. Many players really do not like this "feature", given that it intentionally weakens the stronger attacking schools by making it so they can't get more than a certain amount of damage. It barely affects the schools with lower damage. The intention was for players to use more balanced sets and increase variety in gear, rather than just going all into damage and sacrificing everything else. However, the developers keep making gear sets with increased damage, encouraging people to run more and more damage anyway.
  • Roshambo spells. With newer additions to add to school identity, many roshambo mechanics were implemented for more options. A lot of them were confusing to players and they couldn't understand the new symbols. And unlike previous spells, they are prohibited from being used in regular PvE scenarios, so a casual player cannot try them out on weak enemies to see what they do or understand how they work. In practice, they do some useful things, like remove weaknesses from the player and give them shields in exchange. Of course, because players can't try it out, they won't know that.
  • The minigames. Throughout the worlds, there are optional minigames that can be played, typically to quickly fill up your potions. However, they don't really offer more value than that. Higher scores give people a very paltry amount of gold, and maybe a low level piece of gear. There are leaderboards too, but people have been cheating to get impossibly high scores. A lot of players don't really find them that fun. Some people play Potion Motion simply because you can click and drag randomly to get around 1000 points, which is enough to fill up a potion for free. Since gold is relatively easy to get, the far more popular option is to just flat out buy the potions with gold and get back to what you were doing.
    • Probably the worst offender of this is a minigame called Whirlyburly, which appears to be some kind of strategy based game. They don't really do a good job of teaching it that well, so most players probably will lose their first time playing it. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't required for the main story, but thankfully, the player only needs to finish a match, not necessarily win one. Most players with multiple wizards after knowing this will typically go AFK and let the game play itself.
  • Play As Your Pet. This was a feature that was berated by the community when it came out. There isn't much of a point in the system, aside from just show. Although it's not really hated per sé, it definitely just felt like something put there just to be there. A few quests use it, but it's quite obvious that it was just forced to be there, with a lot of players expressing concern that the development time used in creating for it could have been used for other things like bug fixing.
  • Crowns Rewards Events. The idea is that you spend crowns (the game's premium currency) during a certain time period to get certain rewards. Many community members were enraged with the first one because it had an exclusive cosmetic item expecting players to spend 550000 crowns (around $700 with a sale) in the span of 3 days. The developers did not give people any advanced notice about this, and it took place about a month before Christmas. People made fun of this saying that there are a lot better uses for $700 than a mount that just goes slightly faster, such as jewelry, paying rent, a new gaming console, a new PC, donating to charity, and so on. The developers have taken note of this, and although these events still do take place, the crown cost is nowhere near as massive for the rewards. However, the community will not let the developers forget about that decision. Incidentally, less than 20 people got the mount. Later on, the European server before getting temporarily shut down (to be moved over to a new ownership by Gamigo) released the gear obtainable from this for a very small price as a Take That!, likely in reference to how severely overpriced it was.
  • Gear sets. The idea here is that there are a few sets in the game that give people rewards for wearing different items of the same set (like a bit more health or damage). Although this is mostly fine, one of the biggest dislikes came from the fact that the most popular gear set is on a mount and pet, which discourages people from using different mounts and pets because there's a set that's considered meta (specifically the Bronto mounts with the Frillasaur pets, which gives additional damage). Perhaps for this reason, set bonuses have not been added to any new gear since then. Especially when they got involved with events that were supposed to be skill based, like the deckathalon (a limited time event that consists of a tower. One notable set was one where if you wear the full set, you get an extra pip every time an enemy is defeated. The obvious problem with that is that being able to get pips faster through gear only obtainable through spending money inherently gives paying players an advantage over others in events that are supposed to reward skillful players.
  • Cantrips. One of the more controversial updates was in Spring of 2022 which introduced features that not many people really cared about. This was another of them. The idea is that they are spells that can be cast outside of a battle that just do things for fun, like showing an animation where you casually float your spellbook in the air for a bit, or levitate slightly. Although these were in good fun, the thing people don't like is that using them requires energy, which takes away from other activities where energy is used like gardening or pet training. There are some genuinely useful ones, like ones that allow you to passively heal from anywhere, but making them is a headache as some of what is required is very rare.
  • Scroll of Fortune. This was implemented to be similar to most battle pass systems. The idea being that players can do certain activities to passively gain more and more points and redeem rewards. Although this is nothing new, the actual issue is that some of them are locked behind purchasing the scroll itself to be able to access certain rewards (which are typically better than the free ones). Although the developers were quick to say that it isn't pay to win because even if you paid for the scroll, you'd still have to grind the points like everyone else, they later silently added a feature where you could "advance" the scroll by paying money and then just taking the rewards, completely contradicting the literal purpose of grinding for them.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: In recent updates, the developers have implemented an option where you can just lock your level. The original intent was because they separated PvP into level specific leagues to prevent people from boosting (getting someone to deliberately allow you to win in order to inflate your rank artificially), they wanted to allow people who wanted to stay the same level to be able to do so without levelling out of their league. The self imposed challenge is that you can do this at any level as long as you have at least 1 wizard on your account that is at least level 50, including level 1. Previously, you could only get up to Celestia by doing this, but after player interest developed in getting as far as possible at that level, they removed all the level requirements for unlocking worlds.
  • Another challenge involves beating the game F2P without giving the developers any money, using only crowns unlocked from quizzes. This is much more tedious than challenging, because you can only get 100 crowns per day as well as a small amount from in game events and areas cost upwards of 1000, making you have to wait potentially weeks before making any progress at certain points. Most people who do this do it on a secondary account so their main account can help them quest.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Malistaire losing his wife, Sylvia, is a level of pain many people experience in real life. Through backstories, it's shown that he was once a Cool Teacher, but grief has caused him to unintentionally put the Spiral at risk. After defeating him, his Villainous Breakdown expresses he just wanted to be with Sylvia again.
  • After reaching Xibalba, you arrive too late to stop the comet from destroying Azteca. This is a major change from how every world prior has ended. Originally, you would always prevent a major disaster from occurring, ranging from preventing Manders from becoming enslaved again to saving the lives of thousands, including the Emperor of Mooshu and King Artorius, but unfortunately, Azteca can't be saved. Even the music reflects how doomed the denizens are, and the music will play no matter where you go, in addition to the shards of Xibalba forever raining from the sky.
• The Scrappy:
  • Koyote Ghostmane is hated by many thanks to his crafting sidequest.
  • You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually likes Nolan Stormgate, due to his self-centered attitude.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: The game has many, ranging from gardening, pet training, fishing, etc. but none hold as much of a sway on the player base than PvP, with many investing in the game solely to engage in combat with fellow wizards.
• That One Achievement: Multiple of these are present
  • As badges are the equivalent of achievements in this game, there are lots of them that are an extreme pain.
  • For example, one of them is Undead Executioner, obtained for defeating 20000 undead creatures. Although there are lots of undead creatures in every world, defeating 20000 is a huge undertaking.
  • Empyrea has a few notable ones. There's one for defeating Medulla 100 times, and then in a later update, another for defeating him 1000 times. Additionally there's one for completing the Beastman Fight Club (a very difficult side quest set of bosses) 10 and one for 100 times.
    • With the release of Empyrea part 2, the developers also introduced a game called Whirlyburly that you have to participate in for the main quest. However, you are not required to win the match, leading lots of players to just leave the game running so it finishes automatically after a long enough period of time to be able to just continue with the main quest. The matches can feel quite drawn out to some players, and there are badges for winning once, 10 and 100 times.
  • There have also been many cases where badges have just been straight up glitched and not possible to obtain. A very recent case was when the new housing gauntlet Night Mire was released, there was a badge for defeating the final boss 50 times. The issue is that the game did not keep track of any completions after 25, so even after they patched this one, players were not given credit for completions after 25. Another impossible to obtain badge was supposed to be granted for obtaining your first Azoth treasure card according to one of the developers when asked.
  • One other set of badges that doesn't too bad in theory are the team up related badges. These are awarded by using the team up function and helping people with dungeons. The intention behind team up is to get help with a dungeon you may be struggling with. The easy way to get this is to just help a lot of people in lower level worlds like Wizard City. However, a huge flaw is that if the person being helped decides to not be present in the battle, then the person offering help will NOT get credit toward the badge. Additionally, in harder areas like Darkmoor or end game content, people may find a hard time with other people not cooperating with a strategy, which is why a lot of people grinding for a badge like this would help in dungeons where they can easily take out the enemy on the first turn.
• That One Attack:
  • Weakness. For the first half of the game (starting in mid-Krokotopia) up to Dragonspyre, every enemy knows it regardless of class or playstyle, and since it's free to cast, they'll be using it liberally. It cuts a 25% chunk off your next spell, and for such a math-heavy game, its liberal use is a headache considering this often means spending an extra turn on monsters that shouldn't be much of a hassle, or for bosses, wasting time with expendable "whack" spells to remove the Weakness while hopefully not using up any stacked charms. What's worse is that as of the Spring 2021 update, its accuracy had been buffed so that it can't miss (unless you cast either a Black Mantle or a Smokescreen on the enemy beforehand); before this, it still had a 10% chance to fizzle.
  • Black Mantle is another common spell among enemies, particularly bosses, that begins to crop up more and more starting in Marleybone. This spell is particularly damning because it tears a lump sum out of your accuracy. Much like Weakness, it can and often will force you to either use wand spells to get it off or waste the spell that you intended to cast, which can get annoying because you might have to dig through your deck to get it back.
  • Tower Shield is the ward equivalent to Weakness, only worse because it reduces damage by 50% (compared to only 25%). While it is generally restricted to Ice enemies (unlike Weakness), it is irritating nonetheless.
  • Many damage spells with secondary effects applied to the target can work as this:
    • Earthquake is also quite irritating to many players going against myth bosses. It wipes out all blades and shields on the opponent's team while also dealing damage to them.
    • The rank 8 spells, Efreet, Leviathan, and Medusa all have their own bothersome capabilities. The first is not just one of the stronger rank 8 spells, but also once left a massive -90% weakness that decreased the damage of your next attack by 90% unless you were to cleanse charm it off. The weakness has since been reduced to -45%, but that's still nearly half of your damage lost. The second one is also, as a storm spell, the strongest of the rank 8 spells and will remove your two most recently placed blades (unless one or both of them is aegis-protected). The third is about as strong as Efreet, but also the only spell that will leave a 2-round stun, compared to some other spells, which can only stun for one round.
    • Glowbug squall was once one of the most dreaded spells that storm or shadow enemies could cast. With just a few blades and high pierce, it could easily annihilate your whole team. And if you managed to survive it, its secondary effect was the complete removal of all unprotected blades from the side that was hit with it. And if you got hit twice with it... well... say goodbye to your setup. Though the shadow variant used by some shadow enemies only removes three blades from each player on the attacked team, that's still considered formidable by a lot of players. Though the main storm variant no longer has the ability to remove blades, other variants used by enemies still exist with blade removal capabilities.
    • Myth Imp, which any Myth creature in Arc 2 will know. While it doesn't deal that much damage, it has the nasty side-effect of dispelling any Life and Death spell, forcing them to fizzle and taking your pips with it.
  • Impede, which doesn't see much usage by enemies, but is still a headache. The idea is that it applies a negative aura that prevents the player from gaining pips for 4 turns, which in some cases, may as well effectively be a 4 turn stun.
  • Bad Juju, a death spell which does 300 damage to the user, in exchange for leaving a -90% weakness, just like Efreet. The developers had a hard time balancing this one for usage in PVP circles. At first, it could be used there freely. Later, they made it still usable, but every usage of it took 25% of the caster's health, regardless of any shields or resistances. Eventually, they just banned it entirely in all advanced combat settings.
• That One Boss: Belloq is one of the most infamous bosses in the game. He's a cheating boss, but unlike other cheating bosses up to this point not fulfilling his cheat (which is to hit him every round) will allow him to cast a 0 pip Ra which has a gigantic amount of damage by this point in the game. Players will really need to team up here because he's insufferable if you're attempting to solo. he reappears early on in Azteca, where he doesn't cheat, but reappears again towards the end, where he will catch many a wizard off guard by cheating again, and to make matters worse, this time, his minion will remove any damage over time spell by cheat-casting the triage spell that would reduce the necessity of having to hit him every round.
  • Tantrum. Near the middle of the world Novus, this solo boss was made to simply be as annoying as possible. Randomly, it uses a global that limits everyone's damage to just 500 (at the level you do that world at, 500 damage is just paltry) unless you bring a spell to change it, as well as stacking many debuffs. It got really bad to the point that the developers nerfed the fight, toning down the debuffs.
  • Oogie Boogies. In Karamelle, close to the end of the world, the player is tasked with defeating these minions to progress the story. On the surface, it looks like a typical run of the mill mob fight, leading players to just simply just a typical area of effect spell to progress past it. However, there's a mechanic where if you knock out any of them, you lose about a quarter of your health (ignores modifiers like shields or resistances), so players that attempt to do this will be in for a surprise when they attempt the fight and get killed by being hit by this attack 4 times.
  • The Abyss. This is a boss that is actually invincible to all damage, there's no way to deal damage to it. Instead, the way the player is intended to do the fight is to use healing spells on the boss itself. The boss permanently has an aura where any heal it takes will heal it for a negative amount, essentially dealing damage indirectly. Seems easy on paper, but the boss is very much targeted around preventing exactly that the same way as Tantrum, except with heal debuff spamming.
• That One Level:
  • Sunken City. The bosses are fairly normal and can easily be defeated by lower-leveled wizards with the help of friends or solo if you're higher-leveled, but many players hate the dungeon because it is extremely easy to get pulled into battles with Mooks, even if you're on the supposedly "safe" sidewalk. However, either this was a glitch or Kingsisle was listening to complaints because it doesn't do this anymore.
  • The entirety of the Drains/Catacombs quests were relentlessly difficult in response to players complaining that the game was too easy. Thankfully, these were optional.
  • The Beastman Fight Club. Easily probably the hardest content for the world that it was in. The cheats are quite off the wall, including bosses being allowed to just kill player characters in a single hit regardless of health.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The quest for retrieving leaves from the Green Men in Wysteria. Even though Wysteria is a short side world, to complete it you will have to do this. For whatever reason, the drop rate on these things is insanely low, to the point that you can go through dozens of Green Men and still not get any leaves. You might fight anywhere from thirty to sixty of them before you have all 4 drops. Innumerable forum posts complaining about this sidequest abound, and many of them have reported running out of mana before completing the quest. Collection quests are usually far more forgiving than this, but this issue was never fixed. It doesn't help that the Green Men, as life opponents, are fairly annoying, with both a heal and an armor they will use liberally.
  • When the revered wands recipes came out for the players at level 125, the idea was to have the wand be challenging to craft as crafting it required doing a lot of optional tasks like fishing and PvP. PvP at the time was quite well known for being toxic and having an unforgiving difficulty curve and an excessively high point of entry due to requiring pay to win gear to stand a chance. Some people have circumvented this by joining tournaments and intentionally losing to receive the tickets from last place. In a recent update, the developers have addressed this by removing the requirement to PvP.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans were not happy with some of the recent updates, the most prominent being the change in voices for many of the NPCs. Some of it is Justified, since in the cases of characters like Mr. Lincoln, their older lines remain intact, making the contrast highly noticable.
  • A lot of players were also unhappy when the developers implemented a "damage curve" system, scaling back the damage and resist stats of players who accumulated over 150% damage from their gear. Although the purpose was to encourage more balanced builds, people still criticized it saying that if it's the gear that's overpowered, change the gear itself, not punish players who put in hard work getting to the stats that they have now. Since then, this has been mostly reverted around when Novus came out, except they raised it from 150 damage to 220 before cutting back on people's damage, which is nearly impossible for any character to obtain without the usage of certain very rare items or elixirs as of April 2023.
  • Another unpopular change was in the Summer update of 2022 where the developers have changed the way how gold skeleton keys are obtained. Originally, they could be obtained from many bosses, but since then, the developers have removed them as drops from most bosses to encourage obtaining them from other locations. Some of these though are still pay to win, like having to spend member tokens to obtain them (and even then, you can only buy 3 per account per month this way).
  • The new Novus update in which Hoard and Lore spells have been modified to require the new school-specific pips from the new arch mastery system has been heavily criticized for that aspect, as it restricts usage of spells that many players paid for and renders it all but impossible for players under level 50 to use those spells. The developers responded by offering arch mastery jewels that allow players to be able to acquire a small amount of archmastery, but many players view this as a rather weak attempt to rectify the issue. One of the biggest flaws with archmastery is the fact that the generation rate is based on whoever has the highest rating, so if an ally has a higher rating than another player, the player with a lower rating gets punished with a lower generation rate.
  • As of the 2023 Spring update, the developers have introduced bosses that they call "Challenge Mode". In reality, what they actually did was make a "normal" mode of some bosses where they are much easier and made the bosses in their original form be the challenge mode. During your first time questing through a world on a given character, challenge mode is disabled until you have defeated the boss. "Normal" mode does not allow gear drops to take place. An example of the normal mode being easier is in the Medulla boss fight at the middle of Empyrea, all players are automatically given special spells that allow them to take Medulla's minions away from him, essentially 1 hit KOing them. The idea behind the normal mode is to make it so the harder bosses can still be completed by those looking to finish the story without being walled at a difficult fight. Some people find the changes to be overkill, such as the final boss of Lemuria where all of the bosses in that fight had their cheats removed and their health basically halved.
• Useless Useful Spell: With the wide variety of spells available for players to use, there will inevitably be some spells that will see little-to-no use:
  • Beguile is a unique and interesting spell that can have major effects on the battlefield, causing enemies to cast spells that benefit the players for one round. However, it consumes 3 pips and does not see much use in situations where your enemies' moves are unpredictable, and as such, using it could potentially wreck a damage build-up strategy against enemies with high health upon which you plan to eliminate with OHKO strategies, or they might end up doing nothing or just cast a blade on themselves or give you a blade you can't possibly make use of. Not to mention its useless in PvP if you go second, as the affected can simply pass or cast a spell on themselves to avoid harming the team strategy. As such, stun, which costs no pips for a single target, or two pips for the entire enemy team, is far more popular alternative, even with the implementation of stun block preventing chain stuns.
  • Pacification spells and taunt spells in theory could alter the threat level players have against enemies and influence whom they attacked. However, this affect was minimal for rank 2 spells when players oftentimes did large amounts of flat damage or healing, which did a lot to draw enemy fire. And the idea of using all of your pips with the X-ranked mega variants was even less popular, and the mega pacification and taunt spells saw little use. They were also never used in PvP, as they didn't really do anything to affect the spells players cast. Though they now force their target to either not target the caster, or force them to target the caster with regards to enemy-target spells, it still does not such significant usage. Especially because it does not prevent enemies or players from just using a multi hit (area of effect) spell to circumvent them.
  • The moon school's polymorph spells were very popular and interesting when they were first released in the 2010 Celestia update, as it allowed for you to get a brand new deck set and change your stats for about 6 rounds, providing a change to the game's meta. However, once players reached higher levels, the lack of improved stats compared to the average player equipped with gear made the usage of polymorphs fall out of favor, and player specializations as either tank, attacker, and healer overrode any player interest in polymorphs, compared to the other two astral schools, Sun and Star, which continue to see frequent use in combat.
  • Similar to the moon school polymorphs and beguile spells, summoning minions or buying henchman could wreck your damage strategy, were unpredictable spell casters , and had relatively poor stats in high level combat situations. Not to mention that the minions tended to take up a slot that could be used by players who can strategize, and they were viewed as a waste of deck space, player space, and pips. While life henchman were slightly more on the popular side due to their healing abilities, especially after they were updated to focus on healing players, and minion casting strategies were made more intelligent, not much has changed in the years with regards to their popularity.
  • Theoretically, accuracy boosting spells (such as guidance, precision, and lightning strike) could have been useful in preventing spells from fizzling. But due to the fact that for low-pip cost spells, it would be more efficient to risk a fizzle, and at higher levels, players had improved baseline accuracy, such cards were often considered a waste of deck space.
  • Though not as significant an example as most variants of this trope, global spells are not considered as popular as they once were. Though they still see some use, as they can affect damage and healing spells in the duel, they have some downsides. First, they cost 2 pips to cast whereas most damage or healing boosting buffs cost 0 or 1 pips. Second, if the enemy could cast healing spells, or damage spells that were in the same school as the global spell, the global spell could boost their output as well. Lastly, they could be replaced if another global spell was cast, especially if the enemy could cheat cast global spells in response.
  • The sun mutate spells pretty much see zero usage. Each mutate spell changes the school of the spell it is meant for, but only applies to that specific spell. This requires that the caster have that spell learned in their deck, either purchasing it with training points or being in the unmodified spell's school. If you are in the school of the original spell, you would be wasting power pips on an out-of-school spell. If you are in the school of the mutant variant of the spell, you would need to spend training points on the original spell. And since all mutant variants are damage spells, which have many options, they are an option nobody chooses. Lastly, the mutate and mutant spells themselves are no PvP. When you have better options for casting damage spells, such as those of your own school, its really not hard to determine that its a bad idea.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: While the game itself is targeted towards kids, it also deals with a lot of heavy-handed subjects such as death, grieving a lost loved one, slavery and oppression, and insanity.