Test Realm: The Magic of Celestia, Weekend 1

Now that my speech class presentation is over and done with, time to catch up on blogging!

I'm sitting at work on Friday, occasionally checking my cell phone after it vibrates, keeping up with a few Twizards (Wizards who are active on Twitter) and following the gaming convention hype vicariously through Friendly and Leesha.  As soon as word drops from Tom that the Test Realm is out and Celestia is featured, my concentration levels drop, my body becomes jittery, and my eyes dart towards the computer clock profusely.  "How much longer until I'm getting out of here!!?!"  

Nothing could have ruined my day though, as soon as I was out of there.  No, not even the long line I had to wait in at the end of the day to renew my parking pass, and especially not the clerk who refused to validate my entrance pass.  Heck, I just had to talk to Maureen the ticket window lady about my issue, and she took real great care of me, and signed me out at my own fee rate.  And certainly, not even Lady Gaga's annoying "Telephone" song, played simultaneously on two of my favorite radio stations, could annoy me; I drove down that highway with it blasting, windows rolled down, and possibly drawing looks of disapproval and rolled eyes from those I passed.  Celestia was out for rolling around in, and that was all that mattered.

During my ticket pass re-registration, Fallon Deathslinger was more than generous enough to relay to me the Update Notes over the phone.  So, my mind was constantly reeling over what "Critical Hits/Blocks" were, and I tried to imagine the Astral magic spells based on what I learned from Deathywiz.  That kept me so busy that I didn't notice I was already off the highway and back in my residential area (and luckily not in a ditch).  

After finishing the Test Realm patches, I hopped into the Spiral, and was instantly greeted by notifications from Merle Ambrose and Dueling Diego while in the Bazaar.  Ronan Dawn began relaying to me through chat  his observations and amazement at the new content.  

Me being me, I took the odd, slow road, and instead of blasting through the door into the Headmaster's office, I began scanning around my current surroundings, and talked to the Master Merchant for any new items.

First, I want to point out how amazed I was when I saw how my Test Realm screenshots turned out.  Currently on the Live Realm and previously in past Test Realms, taking in-game pictures included a portion of my desktop because I play in windowed mode.  Thus, I was always finding myself manually cropping the image down to just the game window before displaying them.  But, this picture is unmodified!  I wonder why this user-friendly update wasn't included in the notes?

Anyway, as you can see here, a new column was added in the Treasure Card category: Astral treasures!  However, at the time of this snapshot, there weren't any cards for sale.  Oh well!

I later made my way over to Dueling Diego to see what news he had for me.  Neela Mythslinger, aka Miguel Wildthorn, teleported to me to also check out the information on Critical Hits and Blocks.  While we didn't find out in detail how the values were determined based on the boosts on armor, we got a neat Spartan helmet giving us some Critical Rating.  From just some observations of Criticals in battle, it looks like players are given a chance to double their damage, after Charm and Wards have been calculated.  I'll definitely be testing further into this over this next coming weekend.

I zoomed and hovered over to Ambrose, who gave me a new mission: check out a new world called Celestia.  I went above and beyond that task.

Whenever new content of anything is presented to me, I will dissect and explore as much of it as I can; I love and yearn for the aspects of "how" and "why", not just "what."  As soon as I entered the underwater realm, I hugged the wall from left to right to check out NPCs and vendors to get a better understanding of each character's role.  Through this, it allows me to establish a primitive mental map, so I'm not as lost as someone diving straight into quests without direction or a point of reference.  

As soon as I saw the Pet Vendor, I went straight into "work mode" for the Petnome Project.  Yeah, that's me being me, again, I know, I know.  

Check these two cards out:  

The Jewel of the Feint is sold directly from the Amulet Vendor.  The Test Realm happened to copy my character after he bought back Training Points around two weeks ago, so including this wonderful trap to my deck as an equipment card made me very happy, since I didn't have to spend 7 TPs!  You can see that this will stack up with the regular, Bartleby, and crafted Feints!  (I'll put up a post on another day to show how you can eventually stack up to five).

The Iceblade Vial is actually a crafted item, but is way too useful to pass up the Grandmaster Crafter badge; this spell will stack with the Iceblade given from Ice Bird and the one from my own school!  That's Ice damage amplified by 2.744 times from those three buffs.  While Feint may give me a whopping boost of 70%, that's only on one monster.  As Ice, I would want to pack in some some decent damage to either knock out the smaller minions in a boss fight, or gain their attention while my Storm and Fire allies lock and load with their blades and traps.

Speaking of which, here's my planned Astral build, which I'll write more about in another post:

I've noticed a lot of people exclaiming their concern about replenishing their mana and how they're lost on where to do so.  I don't recall seeing any mana wisps in Celestia; I've mainly resorted to teleporting back to the Celestian Base Camp (CL's "Commons") to play the minigames available there.

As  you can see, the sigils are hidden just by Prospector Zeke; a little frustrating to find for those who like to speed through ;)

I'll end with my favorite boss to fight:

DAGROLOTH; I was in Gobbler Polymorph (notice my health orb)

"Purple Hulk" was initially frustrating to fight against, given that he had 5,000 hitpoints, uses a Satyr that heals for five thousand, and towers every time a Charm (negative or positive) or Ward (negative or positive) was used by a Wizard.  He does drop some really cool Double Power Pip weapons, though....yep, Double Power Pip...meaning you can start out with 5 or 6 equivalent Pips.  We do have to wait until Level 55 before using them, but it's worth it!  I'll create yet another separate post on how to beat this gargantuan.

He's located in the Grotto, in the dead middle of the map where my shining green arrow is:

Oh yeah, make sure you have a Tank in the Sun Spot, because he has a chance to do this on the very first turn:

Holy mackerel, and I had 26-30% Universal Resist!

Thanks for reading!