Ultimate Wizard101 Beginner Guide - Final Bastion (2024)

You can find lot of Wizard101 guides all across the internet, but a lot of them aren’t too helpful for someone starting a new account. These guides often take for granted the concepts of gardening, pet training, farming, and other commonplace activities, activities that aren’t intuitive for a newcomer. And I must admit, I often did the same thing in my own guides. So, I’ve decided to create an Ultimate Wizard101 Beginner Guide. All the necessary information to kickstart your account will be compiled here, in one place.

In order to better inform this guide, I started a new wizard on a new account and decided to build this account from scratch. For instance, I wouldn’t purchase Couch Potatoes or Evil Magma Peas from the crown shop or transfer treasure cards to kick start my account. Everything was built from the ground up; well, my “empire” is still in the early phases. However, I did help myself questing with a second account. Despite using a second account, I still had to do everything the same as I would with only one account. Thus, the second account merely sped up the (often tedious) questing process.

Saving and Spending your Gold

Let’s start with the most obvious point. Save every piece of gold you can find. Don’t buy anything you don’t need. Are you running past a wooden chest? Open it, even though you’ll get only 15 gold out of it. Every piece counts in the early stages of the game. Furthermore, don’t buy anything from the Bazaar or other shops in the Spiral, even if it’s really cheap. Dropped gear is more than sufficient in the early game. This might sound obvious to some, but you’ll probably need well over 300,000 gold to kickstart your account – a specific house, a mount, seeds, gardening spells, hatching… the list goes on.

Where to sell

There are many places where you can sell all your junk items, but only one is worthwhile – the Bazaar. I know quick selling from your backpack is tempting, especially if you’re in the middle of questing, but don’t do it. You’ll receive minimal amounts of gold for doing that. The same is true for shopkeepers throughout the Spiral. On the other hand, Elik SilverFist from the Bazaar in Olde Town gives you a fair amount of gold for your goods.

What about “No Auction” and “Crowns” items? Those can’t be sold in the Bazaar! The best thing you can do with these items is to feed them to your pet. You’ll get some gold in return, as well as the occasional reagent or treasure card. However, you should exercise caution before immediately giving your pet a tasty treat. Make sure that you won’t have a use for the No Auction or Crown gear in the future before feeding it to your pet. Many of these items could be useful on other wizards.

Selling vs Keeping

To make things easier, you’ll want to sell things in every major category of item except for reagents. NEVER EVER sell any of your reagents. This list discusses the things worth selling.

Gear –sell everything you’re not currently using except for crowns gear or gear you plan on using later on.
Housing items –sell everything except for crowns items.
Seeds – Okay, this is tricky. Sell every non-crown shop seed that requires gardening rank 5 or higher or requires a large plot. Plant everything else to level up your gardening rank. As for crown shop seeds, keep Pink Dandelions, Key Limes, Couch Potatoes, Evil Magma Peas, Sunions, Ivy Leagues and King Parsleys. Feel free to feed other crown shop seeds to your pet, since they don’t provide anything vital for building up your account.
Treasure cards – Sell them all at the outset of the game. You’ll eventually start getting treasure cards you may want to keep in later worlds, but by then you’ll be able to figure out what’s worth keeping for yourself.
Reagents – I already said it, but I’ll reiterate my point. Never sell your reagents unless you have 999 (the maximum) of them or steady source of obtaining them (ie. plants that drop them).
Snacks – Sell snacks rank 4 and lower, keep the rest. Once you start getting a steady supply of mega snacks (rank 8+ snacks) later on in your development, sell everything except Mega Snacks.
Jewels – Sell everything at low levels. Later on, keep your pierce (circle) jewels, jewels named (School) -Ward (star) and ones that give extra damage (star). Also, keep any energy jewel you come across (star).

When to upgrade your gear

You’ll need to change your gear eventually, but dropped gear is good enough at early levels. You might reach a point where you won’t be able to progress because of a pesky Boss who always kills you. The first thing you should do here is change up your strategy. Try using more shields and heals. Also try taking out the minions first and only then focus on the boss. Try altering your deck. Experiment and learn. Rely on strategy rather than gear as much as you can. In the beginning, you can win fights with either gear or strategy, but later on you’ll need both in order to succeed.

Leveling Up

Unfortunately, there aren’t shortcuts to level up faster. Try to stick with the main quests, since they reward you with the most XP. You’ll need to do a few side quests from time to time or else you’ll quickly become under-leveled and struggle to defeat harder bosses. A good rule of thumb is to finish a main storyline world every 10 levels. That translates into finishing Wizard City at level 10, Krokotopia at level 20, Marleybone at level 30, and so on.

Finding friends or other people who are on the same questline is always welcomed, since it can drastically decrease the time you spend questing. While there aren’t a ton of players questing in the earlier worlds on new accounts, you can always help your chances by staying in Ambrose realm – the most popular one. Or you can use the Team Up function at bosses to see if there are any other players on the same quest as you are.

Outside of the main questline, the best source of XP is dungeons, so make sure to visit them again if you ever need some extra XP. Keep in mind how the XP system works in Wizard101 dungeons. Completing a dungeon once gives you its full XP. The second time yields only 50% – which is still a solid haul. Beating it subsequent times gives no XP. So if you’re after XP, don’t do the same dungeon more than twice. Additionally, one should know that a dungeon will never give you more XP than your level cap (i.e. you cannot level up more than once from one dungeon).

Optimizing Leveling Up

There are several ways you can make leveling up easier. The first one, which we’ve already mentioned, is questing with a group. In that case, always have one “hammer” (hitter), while the other wizards support. You should always pick the wizard with the most damage and a strong, efficient low pip AOE spell (a spell that hits all enemies) to be your hitter. For example, a storm wizard with tempest or a fire wizard with meteor is always a good choice. The rest of you will support by blading them, casting traps on bosses, and healing off damage. Learn to stack blades to increase the damage. Put several different blades on your hitter (like a pet blade, a trained blade, an elemental blade, tc blade, etc…) so you’ll use them all at the same time when unleashing the attack.

A similar concept applies if you’re questing alone. Focus on using blades, traps, shields, and healing as a set up for one big attack. That way of playing is way more efficient than just spamming low pip attacks over and over. While this might work in the lower levels, it won’t be that effective later on. It’s a good habit to have and it’s better to learn this skill early in game, as the early fights don’t punish you for suboptimal strategy.

When you level up, your energy will automatically refill. So if you need energy for gardening or pet training (covered later in this article), leveling up is an easy source of energy.

Training Points

However, there is still one more important thing: Training the correct spells. Don’t fall into the common mistake of training a school like storm as your only secondary school, just because it has high damage spells. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake. You should always focus to train utility spells and use your main school hits to attack. So for example, you’ll want to focus on training spells like Feint, Tower Shield, Satyr (if you plan on being a healer), Elemental/Spirit Blades and Traps (depending on which class you are), and later on, Sun School enchantments. There’s no need to train say, Phoenix, as a life wizard. You’ll get plenty of strong attacks as the game goes on that vastly outclass a 5-pip, off school spell.

The reason behind this piece of advice is how gear works. The best gear usually has the most damage boost for your own school, which means that your school hits will become much stronger than off-school hits with the help of gear. Power pip usage also plays into this idea. Unless you have a mastery amulet, your off-school attack will treat power pips as regular pips. For example, let’s say you’re a life wizard and have 3 power pips. You can either use Centaur for 6 pips (3 power pips) or storm shark for 3 (power) pips. Clearly, Centaur does more damage.

Running vs Teleporters

This element is often overlooked by many players, but it alone can drastically change your gameplay experience. From Marleybone forward, you’ll notice teleporters which can save you some running time. But using them isn’t always the best option. You will save some time, sure, but on the grand scale you’re losing out, especially in the first arc when there isn’t much running. By forgoing this running, you miss many valuable reagents on your way. And not only will that make your job easier for future crafting assignments, you will also learn where to find some reagents. Instead of searching the internet, asking on forums, and running throughout the game, you’ll already have a good idea where to find the necessary reagents.

Mounts

I briefly touched on where you should spend all of your hard earned gold. A mount is one of the most important investments on your account and should be your first priority. You can get a mount in either of the following ways:

Gear

Wizard101 has lots of gear to choose from. But (un)fortunately, only some pieces are viable, especially later on. When starting out, you should focus on gear with health, damage, power pip chance, and accuracy. So make sure to pay attention to these attributes when you’re equipping new pieces. You should be using exclusively dropped gear until you reach level 30. After that point, it’s time to start taking gear more seriously. The fights will become harder (especially after level 50) and strategy alone might not always be enough to proceed easily.

First stop – Mount Olympus, Aquila

Aquila is a side world with 3 optional dungeons at level 30, 70, and 90. The level 30 dungeon, Mount Olympus, will be your first big challenge at level 30, and best early destination for gear. Make sure to bring friends with you since this place is pretty tough to solo as a low level. During the dungeon quest, you’ll receive a new wand – the Sky Iron Hasta. Equip it, use it, and love it, as it’s one of the best wands in game, offering a 10% damage bonus.

As for your Hat, Robe and Boots, it’s a bit trickier. You’ll need to repeatedly beat the last boss, Zeus, in order to obtain his gear. The best set of gear has the prefix “Zeus’s”. You should try to get this set, but its alternative – “Senator’s” gear is good as well. Check this guide to learn more about Aquila Level 30 gear.

Next stop – Waterworks, Crab Alley

Zeus/Senator gear should be fine for a while. But at level 60, it’s time for an upgrade. However, it would be wise to buy level 58 gear from the bazaar first, as it gives great damage and resist to one or two schools. You can also craft level 56 gear from Wintertusk if you have access to it. This is done in preparation for the Waterworks dungeon, one of the first zones with cheating bosses. This means that if you don’t follow these bosses’ rules or cast certain spells, they’ll “cheat -cast” strong attack spells, causing a lot of problems for you and your team. Make sure to read up on the cheats before going inside. The gear you want will drop from the two main bosses in the dungeon: Sylster Glowstorm and Luska Charmbreak.

Third stop – Castle Darkmoor

Third stop is Castle Darkmoor, a Level 100 dungeon. Waterworks gear should work while questing until this level. However, if you enter Darkmoor without at least Waterworks gear (high level crafted gear and Hades gear are also fine options), you’ll be in for a rough time. The dungeon is tough, the cheats are really hard, but the gear is second to none. All the struggles will pay off once you get this new, gloomy outfit, dropped from the final boss of the third dungeon.

Next stop – Catacombs

A very popular farming location is a series of boss fights in the Wizard City Catacombs, where you can obtain level 130 Dragoon gear. In contrast to previous gear sets, this gear is a hybrid of sorts: part crafted, part farmed. You’ll ultimately craft the tier one gear pieces, but the reagents (which includes tier two gear) are farmed from the bosses and mobs in the Catacombs.

Furthermore, Dragoon gear isn’t a straightforward upgrade to Malistaire gear. This is unlike Malistaire gear, which was a strict upgrade to Waterworks gear. Although some pieces should be swapped without hesitation, with others, you should think twice. Thus, depending on your playstyle and needs, you might find Malistaire gear better than the gear from Catacombs. Click here to learn more about it and get our thoughts on it. In spite of all of this, Dragoon gear is still worth the effort.

Level 140+ – End of World Gear

If you already have Dragoon gear, you should be quite capable of completing the next few worlds without much trouble. Further gear upgrades are not always necessary, but may be desirable if you are looking for the best stats. From this point onwards, end-of-world gear is usually the best option. This is Karamelle gearat level 140, Lemuria gearat level 150, Novus gearat level 160, and Wallaru gear at level 170. The end-of-world gear sets are dropped from multiple bosses in their respective worlds, including cheating and finale bosses. It’s your choice if you would like to stop questing in order to farm for gear (which is usually a big time investment), or try to reach the end of the storyline first.

Other Gear Pieces

The dungeons mentioned above primarily drop Hats, Robes, and Boots. Your Ring and Athame are still important, but not as vital. You can craft them or use dropped ones. Go for ones that offer health, power pips, damage, and maybe heal boost (some examples of these are the bear claws from Wintertusk). Check with Ingulf The Grower in Vestrilund to see some nice crafted options.

Amulets aren’t too important until you reach level 100. Try to pick one from the bazaar with a utility card (like a blade or feint). At level 100+, you’ll be able to get an amulet that gives you a nice stat boost. There are 3 popular choices at high levels:

Morganthe’s amulet – 3% resist, 3% pierce, and 2 additional blades (Retired, so no longer obtainable on new accounts)
Shane von Shane’s amulet – 4% resist and 4% pierce
Rasputin’s amulet – 5 -6% resist

Energy gear

When you go to log out for a bit, you may want to equip your wizard with energy gear. This kind of gear has poor basic stats, but gives you extra energy. By equipping it, your max energy will increase, and you’ll be able to do more energy-based activities after you log back in. These activities include the essential pet training and gardening. Click here to learn more about energy gear.

Pets

A good pet is just as important as the rest of your gear, since it can significantly boost your stats. The process of making a good pet is already very expensive even if you do it right, so you need to avoid costly errors. There are 4 different attributes of a pet and I will rank them from the most important to least important. Make sure to follow these principles when creating a new pet in order to do it efficiently:

Talents – Talents are by far the most important attribute on your pet. Find a talent combination you want and focus on that first!
Stats – You’ll see some numbers on your pet’s talent page – power, will, intellect, …. The higher these are, the more you get from your talents. While you don’t need these numbers to be very high right away, try to avoid having one with really low max values. For example, having pets with max stats in the 240’s is still okay, while having low stats, say, in the 210’s or 220’s, should be a no go.
Cards – Some pets give extra item cards. While they’re nice to have, they aren’t nearly as important as talents. If you do focus on cards, try to focus on utility cards (blades, for example) rather than attacks.
Look – Look isn’t important at all, if you’re trying to optimize your gameplay. After you’ll get used to the game’s mechanics and get better gear and pets, you can start to work on making pets that look cool. But for starters, I highly recommend that you ignore how they look.

Where can I get my pets?

This part used to be really hard. You had to find a player with your desired talents and hope that they were willing to hatch with you. You could also do it from scratch, a difficult endeavor to say the least. This isn’t necessary anymore, since Kingsisle introduced the wonderful Hatchmaking Kiosk. You can search for already developed pets and save yourself lots of time. Furthermore, these pets are very good. Many will have 3 or 4 of the attributes we’ve mentioned before. They have good talents, high stats, and great cards. You just need to find a pet you like and hatch with it.

How can I improve my pet?

Okay, this is a tricky part that makes a huge difference in how costly pet making is. You can start with literally any pet. A pet from your teacher’s quest is probably the best choice, but you can choose any bought or dropped pet as well. Just make sure that you use a pet of your own school. For example, if you’re a myth wizard, use a myth pet, as a myth pet is likely to have some on-school talents. Once you’ve picked your pet, train it to adult (and just adult) and go ahead and hatch with a pet from the Kiosk. Now, here comes the most important part – keep the baby pet and train it to adult. Even if you get your own pet’s look back.

Let’s look at some hatching basics to get a better understanding why is important to keep the pet no matter what. Let’s call the two parent pets pet A and pet B. Each of those pet has 10 different talents and 5 different stat values (strength, agility, will, intellect, and power). Your pet’s talents and stats are horrible, while your partner’s pet’s are awesome. However, the baby pet manifests attributes from both parents. Meaning:

5 talents from pet A and 5 from pet B
The stats are in between both parent’s values. For example, your pet has 190 strength and your partner has 250. Your baby pet will have strength between 190 and 250.
It’s a random pick which pet type you’ll get back. Remember, this part isn’t as important. The look means nothing.

So, what did we learn so far? We get our pet back, which we don’t like. However, the talents and stats improved from this hatch. These are the most important attributes. This alone is good enough reason to keep the baby pet and train it to adult. Once it’s an adult, hatch again. Then apply same process as before. You can eventually train these pets further, but until you remove the undesirable talents, it’s probably not worthwhile.

Keep repeating the process and eventually you’ll transfer all the desired talents onto your pet and increase its stats to a respectable level. Keep in mind that you’ll need at least 5 -10 hatches to completely get rid of your original talents and increase your pet stats. That assumes that you’re sticking to the plan by ALWAYS hatching the NEWEST baby. Another important thing to keep in mind is that hatching is unpredictable. 5 -10 hatches is just an average. It can take many less or many more, depending on your luck.

What talents should I pick?

Although you’ve learned the basics about pets, you might be still confused about which talents to pick. There are lot of different combinations, but I would suggest picking 1 of these two options to start. Don’t get me wrong, all builds can be useful, but some need specific setups to make work. The following 2 setups are universal ones that you can never go wrong with:

Triple -Double –Oh the famous triple-double (and my favorite). This pet has 2 universal resist talents (Spell-Proof and Spell-Defy) and 3 damage ones (School-dealer, School-giver and Pain-giver). This generally provides a 15% universal resist boost (5+10) and 21% increased damage (6+6+9) to your school.
Ward pet – A ward pet is a more defensive option. Like the triple-double, it has 2 universal resist talents, but has 3 different “ward” talents. Each provides 15% extra resist to a single school. The most popular ones are Fire, Balance, and Ice.

Gardening

You probably realized one thing after starting your pet project – You expect me to do 5-10 hatches just to transfer all the talents and stats?!?! Training one pet to adult took ages, there is no way I’ll waste more time doing it again. No one said it’s going to be easy, but you can still make your job significantly less painful through gardening. Some plants are great sources of Mega-Snacks, which give 25-50 pet XP, as opposed to a meager 5 -10. Pretty nice, eh? And unlike pets, gardening is a bit easier to pick up on. It’s also a nice source for extra gold, reagents, and treasure cards! Having a good garden is an essential on any Wizard101 account, so make sure to start early.

Starting With Gardens

Anyway, remember how I said that you should sell every seed that requires gardening rank 5 or above? That’s because you’re going to make a garden of Prickly Bear Cactuses once you reach that level. They are seeds that can be bought with gold, will drop their own seed (called re-seeding), and can drop some 25 pet XP Mega Snacks!

Seeds have various stages while growing up. The most important are the mature and elder stages. Most plants drop the best rewards at elder, but there are some exceptions. Prickly Bear Cactus is one of these exceptions, since it drops its own seed at mature. Note that it isn’t guaranteed to drop its own seed at elder, an important contrast from the main Crown Shop plants, Evil Magma Peas and Couch Potatoes. Another nice example of a plant where mature drops are important is Ultra King Parsley because of it’s chance of dropping the rare reagent Amber.

A plant can progress from mature to elder more rapidly if it has certain items around it, called likes. For plants that have their best drops at elder, you’ll want to maximize your plants’ likes to get to elder more rapidly. However, for plants that have their best drops at mature (like the PBC), you don’t want to put likes near them. If you do, they’ll grow too fast they won’t drop enough seeds to replace themselves, forcing you to spend your gold again. Unfortunately, PBCs are the only Mega-snack providing, non-crown plant. The good news is that you can obtain crown seeds as a drop from monsters across the Spiral. But more on that later, as your first priority is building a PBC garden on your account.

More useful seeds

When you start getting a steady supply of mega snacks you can slowly start expanding to different kind of seeds. The best plants cost crowns, but when you reach the stage to plant them, you’ll either have some already or will have a strong enough wizard to farm for them.

Pink Dandelions –Rank 1 seed. It’s a great starter seed for gaining levels and rare reagents.
Key Limes –Another Rank 1 seed. Its drops aren’t as good as Pink Dandelions, but they grow fast and yield lots of xp.
Couch Potatoes –Your first priority when it comes to crown seeds. Great source for Mega Snacks and gold in general.
Evil Magma Peas – These are an even better source for Mega Snacks, but they don’t yield as much gold and are harder to farm for. If you decide to invest crowns in seeds, these are the ones you should buy.
King Parsley –Great source for Amber, a really rare reagent required to craft spells.
Sunions – Gives sun damage enchant treasure cards, which are must haves for higher levels fights. You’ll learn more about those once you reach Celestia.
Ivy Leagues – Gives good treasure cards that can be used in combat or sold at the bazaar.

If you’re hungry for more gardening knowledge, don’t hesitate to check Top 10 PvP Plants and How to Build a 3 Layer Stacked Garden!

Farming

Farming, or defeating the same enemy repeatedly until they drop loot that you want, is a necessary evil of the game. The three main things people farm for are gear, gold, and crown seeds. When farming, defeating a monster in 1 vs 3 turns makes a big difference, so maxing out a single wizard first is important.

We’ve already covered gear farming previously. Instead, let’s touch on seeds. The most important seed to farm for on a new account are Couch Potatoes. While we could argue that Evil Magma Peas are better for mega snacks, it’s much harder to farm for it and it’s not really worth the time. Couch Potatoes are dropped all over Grizzleheim and you can accumulate a good amount in a pretty reasonable timeframe. You will still get a few Evil Magma Peas during questing, but not many. You should still plant them, of course.

During your Wizard101 lifetime you’ll need a nice amount of gold. Pet hatching and learning gardening spells will deplete your gold in no time, so you’ll need a steady stream of income. Gardening for gold allows you to kill two birds with one stone. Couch Potatoes will not only give you Mega Snacks, but also treasure cards you can sell for a lot of gold. It’s a nice way to passively earn income. But sometimes this isn’t enough and you’ll need to farm gold directly. One of the most popular gold farming places in the game is Halfang in Wintertusk. His drops sell for a lot of gold and he can be defeated in a single round. It is also worthwhile to visit Castles with Daily Rewards through Castle Tours. These often give gold, Crowns seeds, Crowns gear, or other rare items.

More Wizards

You can create up to 7 wizards on a single account. 6 are available for free, while getting a 7th will require you to buy and use an Additional Character Slot Elixir for 18,000 crowns. For now, we’ll ignore the 7th character and focus on the first 6. Start by maxing out one wizard, and then use the remaining 5 slots as “supports” for the main wizard on your account.

At the start, you’ll probably need to experiment a little to find your favorite school to act as a “main” for your account. This is actually not a bad thing. If it turns out that you don’t like the school you chose initially after a few levels of questing, simply create a new wizard and leave the old one be for now. Once you find a school you enjoy, start questing and try to max out the wizard.

The remaining 5 wizards will be used for gardening until you decide to level them up. You should aim to get at least 64 available energy on your support wizards. That way, you can create a plot of 32 Prickly Bear Cactus and replant them in one go. If you have a level 15 wizard with the Seafarer’s Hat, Overcoat and Boots from Jordo Mistborn in the Arena you’ll have a total of 76 energy. Make sure to read our guide on Tournaments to learn more about this side activity, which is the best source for obtaining enough tickets for energy gear. This method has only one tricky part. You’ll need to find someone who can take you to the Mooshu, so you can grab spells that cover plant needs for a large area (necessary to garden PBCs).

If you want, you can level several wizards at the same time on one account. It’s a nice way to do something different and not watch the same spells over and over again. But if you want to develop your account as fast as you can, I’d highly suggest that you max out one wizard first. At a minimum, you should make it high enough leveled to make farming easy.

Starting a Second Account

You’re probably quite experienced already if you reach the point of starting a 2nd account. But the amount of work you need to do might still catch you off guard. Getting all the pets and seeds onto a second account might be a pretty difficult and tedious task.

There are some things that can make questing on two wizards a bit easier. The first is having a multi-person mount. Ideally you should have it on the wizard that’s questing, since it’s easier to follow a quest arrow. This might be a problem if you don’t want to crack packs, buy a bundle, or purchase a crown shop mount. There are couple of mounts you can get as a drop, but this is quite difficult for a low level wizard to do

Aquilan Dual Chariot – Obtainable from fishing chests in The Acropolis house.
Pirate RowBoat – Dropped by Captain Hockins.
Tyrannosaurus Rex – Obtainable from fishing chests in the Pyramid of the Lost Horizon house or dropped by Ixcax CursedWing.
Winter Treant – Dropped by Omen Stribog.

Having two accounts makes playing in windowed mode pretty much mandatory. It’s much easier to navigate between windows and to select your spells on time. Personally, I prefer on playing with resolution 800×600 and having both windows side by side.

Conclusion

Overall, there are a lot of pieces in this mosaic. If you want to master the game and establish a well-built “empire,” you’ll need to go through lot of challenges. This guide should have given you a solid jumping off point and taught you the most important things in the game. It might look overwhelming, but it’s worth taking your time and reading through thoroughly.