Things I wish Pirat101 had from worlds, additional mechanics, companions etc PART 2
the "on-the-side" features
normally I A) do not care about these B) barely use them and C) not my jam
but dammit, wizard101 has so many little side gimmicks that it pisses me off that Pirate101 barely has pets SO, here's some extra side things I wish Pirate101 had, some are similar to wizards and some I think would be unique to pirates and more importantly I WOULD PROBABLY USE
side gimmick 1: Crafting
How in the hell does Pirate101 not have crafting??? Wizard101 had crafting before it had ANYTHING ELSE, even the pets system (you could have pets in early game w101, but they were just like for show. They were cute little animals that followed you around and didn't do much else. If you were lucky, you could find one that would add a spell to your deck, all the level 48 pets were this, but that was pretty much all they could do, and yet the crafting system was still around)
Plus p101 has so much MORE potential when it comes to crafting than w101 does. w101 you mostly get reagents from 1) wandering around and harvesting them in the wild 2) drops and 3) gardening. although there might be a secret fourth way besides shops, idk it's been a while since I've actually sat down in the game and played it. But Pirate101, you also have companions who can go looting for you, and you can explore a lot more different types of areas due to the ships
I just really like the idea that we could craft our own more powerful weapons that could be unique to crafting. Plus, we could add some more variety to it, like w101, things are either open to all schools or LOCKED to only one. Sure, p101 has that with a lot of gear too, but not weapons. (Okay yeah, neither does w101 on weapons but bear with me, w101 weapons aren't as complex as p101's). I would love for crafting to not only have like ABC recipes but also teach you that if you combine X+Y+Z you could get something specific. like okay, uhhh let's say you wanna make a sword that's good for priv but that's hard cuz they're will based. One of the ingredients could make it that the weapon itself draw power from will, even with weapons that normally wouldn't. Like you can customize where the weapon draws power. Maybe you could even grab two weapons like a gun and a sword and combine through crafting it to make one of the classic dual class weapons and the more flare/add ons you give it, the more powerful it will be. Maybe you could even craft with combos that would grant extra epics or abilities
also, many of the dual class gear that w101 has is exclusive to crafting. P101 desperately needs more early game gear that helps support ppl who dual class in the game besides just weapons
plus like, there are a couple houses you can craft on wizard101, and sure I'd like them here too but specifically, I really think it'd be cool if we could craft SHIPS
side gimmick 2: Fishing
Okay I actually really like fishing in games, and I was genuinely both shocked and thrilled with wizard101 added it. But a game where we literally have boats has no fishing??? come onnnnn let me fish in the sky COME ONNNNN
AND GIVE ME LIKE .5% CHANCE OR SOMETHING TO FISH A FISH MOUNT OR SOMETHING PLEASEEEEEE
like just have little fishing hotspots in the skyway that you can approach with your boat, once you're there you'll be prompted anchor if you want and then go to a special spot on your ship where you'd cast a line and fish
come onnnn it'd be so good and DIFFERENT than wizard101's
side gimmick 3: gardening
I don't care about gardening or farming on average BUT I do use it from time to time to get pet snacks or farm for reagents. Give us gardening dammit
side gimmick 4: wizard101 has monstrology, pirate101 can have... recruitology...?
bear with me. I know we got like little sidequests to recruit more companions, and we got those whole "defeat this obsidian door boss 25 times so you can BUY them on the crowns shop :)" but imagine if we could like combine these two things? Like some form of monstrology on pirates where you could do the equivalent of extracting anima, and once you gather enough, you can place a pseudo ghost of the enemy in your house, and once you gather enough of THOSE, it's enough to actually recruit/generate a companion? Monstrology already sorta has that mechanic but in pirate101 it could be a full blown actual companion
if we wanna go extra fancy, it could be like the undead version of the enemy because we're "killing" them so many times, which means witchdoctor class might also get a slight bonus on these, similar to how the school of myth has a bonus of being able to use a monstrology minion as well as their own, because witchdoctor is already an offshoot of death magic summoning dead things to their aid
enemies that are already undead might be easier to recruit too
Got some more monstrology-esk ideas down below
side gimmick 5: SCREW IT WE'RE GOING FULL MAGIC HERE
if w101 is allowed to get extra magic-y gimmicks late game SO SHOULD WE DAMMIT
what if, we get some trainers from the 7 schools around, and depending on what we pick (we can only pick alignment with one), we get an extra battle epic on our pirate, able to learn up to idk like 3-4 total (epics, they should have different ranks tho, so you'd have to pick between level 1-2 of multiple epics or maxing out or doubling down on just one track)
FOR EXAMPLE if you were to align with fire, every attack your pirate does on enemies can cause a burn status effect and it either can stack up to 3 or increase in damage each rank up or increase probability of happening, or if you had life, if your HP drops below a certain level, you can get a minor auto heal or that happens for your team. Storm magic has a chance to summon lightning to strike an enemy you attack that ignores all defense, death auto-grants bloodsucker WHICH IS ALREADY IN THE GAME BTW JUST ADD JUST SHOVE IT IN THERE, myth basically gives you charming gaze or better yet, a chance to summon a weaker clone of an enemy that attacks you every time you crit against them. Ice has a chance to make you immune to X amount of damage per round, balance could either randomly access a weaker version of any of these each battle or could be more companion support based
IDK GO WILD. For balancing purposes it would need to be limited to like 1 school per pirate and I think we'd need to limit the epics. Other ways it could be implimented, similar to how sun spells can enhance normal cards, maybe some of the magic school abilities are sunspell-esk enhancements you can add to abilities too?
side gimmick 6: recruitable god allies (late game stuff)
WE'VE ALREADY GOT GODS IN THE SPIRAL, WHY CAN'T EACH CLASS GET THEIR OWN GODLY ALLY??
now I know there's the whole, tHeY'rE iMmOrTaL so if they die or get defeated in battle it's kinda like... mmm not really a god anymore SO
I PROPOSE
instead of having them be full blown companions, they can instead grant boons once per battle, but what boons you have access to is randomized. Maybe one type of boon is an additional epic to your whole team for the entire battle. Maybe it's additional health boost. Maybe it's a small healing over time factor. And then the rarest one is you can summon the god to directly aid you in battle for 1-2 rounds only. They appear as an ally ergo you cannot control what they do, but because they're a god, they can do giga chonks damage to the enemy but will vanish after 1-2 rounds therefore eliminating the whole "oh but they died??" problem.
hell we can even collect like 1-3 of them, but we can only have one equipped at any given time, and everyone gets to start with zeus because we have his baby boy on our team, but there could be so much more
and because I love sidequests, I'd love it if this feature were like, a sidequest we'd get to choose to do, each area would offer 3 different god options, but once we pick a sidequest corrolated to a god, we cannot do the other 2, that way we have some agency on what god we're getting, or idk screw it maybe do more with the choices we make at the beginning of the game like places we were raised??? idk
plus this would open up opportunities for more spiral lore
side gimmick 7: Gracie added building or idk more monstrology-esk thing
what if after a gracie promotion, she unlocks this feature where, any enemies that are mechanical, if we fight them enough times, they'll begin to drop mechanical parts, and if we gather enough of those, we can go speak to her in a tavern and ask her to build us a new robot companion???
or there is a new NPC at the start of the game that requests machine parts and will build you robots/automatons if you bring them enough
AND YES THIS WOULD INCLUDE THE ARMADA
hell we could pair this with crafting, some parts we personally have to meld together before we can bring it to her, or there are some parts that aren't drops at all, we have to craft them. I think espeically if we wanna craft the more gigachad armada dudes like Queen and rooke and whatnot, it needs to be harder than it would be to craft a regular clockwork
(yes I am aware of the ashes of the armada thing, I still love this idea because it would include golems and other mechanical guys we find in the spiral )
like these guys, who are also technically robots
and ya know, marleybone has those golems too? IDK I WANT MORE OF THIS
side gimmick 8: companion pairing
so, they've introduced synergy type stuff with mustang sally's new move that needs El Toro on the team in order to work. What if there was something else. We could "pair up" companions so to speak, having one be the "face" and the other be the "back-up" (aka one "equips" the other companion) and this could give the "face" an added bonus, like idk an extra epic from the other one, one of the others abilities, and if it's something like el toro and sally, they could give a SIGNIFICANT boost to the other compared to if it was a regular companion.
I'm mostly saying we should add this because a lot of these gimmicks I'm proposing is creating the opportunity for a much larger crew, so it could be a way of utilizing crew members we otherwise never touch to bolster the ones we do use
also just for funsies, if a companion is equipped to another one, they cannot run tasks for you, but to compensate, they do earn a little bit of XP each battle that the companion they're equipped to shows up in, maybe even around the equivalent of what they'd get when off on a task for XP grinding themselves
side gimmick 9: REVAMP THE COMPANION SYSTEM AND COMPANIONS IN GENERAL
first: I want ALL companions to be just as good as some of the main class companions, not just the main class companions. Maybe it's just a playstyle thing, but I really wish I could just pick from any companions and not need to deal with a nerf or a shit companion. I hate that if I want a guarantee good battle, I only have like a handful I can genuinely pick from. for example, I LOVE Lefty, his range is insane, but I wish he had a bit more abilities and epics. I would use him more if that wasn't something that would make or break a battle. What we end up seeing is people using the same team of companions over and over again, so having more side companions be revamped and boosted could lead to more unique companion combos and teams
It seems like kingsilse is already doing this with some companions so let's hope they keep going
second: if we do continue with this trend of adding more and more crew members, we NEED additional features from them beyond just "weee extra toy soldiers to throw on the battle field :)" Like there could be situational bonuses where some companions might get boosts compared to others, like idk maybe mooshu companions get +10% accuracy when in mooshu, just spitballing here
third: a way to sort them in a way that affects how often they show in battle. P101 oldie here, I actually really miss the whole, the closer the companions are to the top, the higher the likelihood that they'll spawn in battle with you. Now listen, I understand why they changed it. After so many companions, due to percentages, sure the ones up top might have higher chance to enter battle than the others, but you have a larger group of others you don't want/don't care for showing up, taking up a larger percentage collectively (like say one in your top row is 25% chance of showing up, but you have idk 30 side companions all on the 1% chance, there is a higher chance you'll get one of the duds rather than the specific one you like). But I wish there were a way where we could categorize the companions in different pages? page 1 is like your favorite favorites, page 2, if you have random companions on, is like rarer chance of showing, but will never outcompete with page 1, page 3 are companions you never wanna see/use for different things
also, if we're gonna include stuff like fishing, gardening and whatnot, I don't see why we can't add that type of stuff to the type of things we can send them out to do. We can send them out to gather crafting materials and every time select a world we could send them to. They can gather seeds or better yet, some companions we could place at our house specifically to tend our garden. If we dunk enough points into it, a handful of companions could have the garden completely automatized. One could be there for watering plants within a certain range, one could be there for sunlight needs, one could be there as pest control etc
also ALSO (really gonna show my p101 age here), the original tutorial covered this, when you enter broadside combat, tokens spawn onto your deck. If you go interact with them, it removes them. These tokens will either spawn into traps or fires etc once you enter combat if you do not remove them, or can heal your ship if you interact with the health one. They have since omitted this from the tutorial entirely and players don't know they exist. Guess what. They are still in the game. You can still run around on your (or a friend's) deck while in broadside combat and interact with those tokens. Since they're still there, might as well utilize them right? HAVE COMPANIONS BE ASSIGNED DECK SWABBING DUTY WHERE THEY WILL BE THE ONES CLEARING TOKENS WHEN YOU ENTER BROADSIDE. Obviously they won't be as good as a real player but if you're soloing it should be a neat addition that helps