September 19, 2021 December 30, 2021
Beastmoon Form Design
Beastmoon currently has over 30 different forms, each with 10 unique spells, and all forms have a unique purpose. Can KI really make 70 forms to have one school for each of the 10 beast forms? In this article we will walk through how Wizard101 chooses which forms to tackle next and then I will show you and explain my 5 personal forms that I have designed (in 5 separate articles linked below). Throughout those articles, we will be discussing how Beastmoon Form design works, the different formulas used, all-around form balancing, and how to implement new mechanics.
Current Beast Forms
Below is a graphic I made displaying the current beast forms in the game right now as I’m writing this. They’re broken up into the 7 schools and into 3 tiers. The 3 tiers are between Large/Tank forms (Colossus, Cyclops, and Wolf), Medium forms (Draconian, Krokomummy, Minotaur, and Pig), and Small/Squishy forms (Elf, Fairy, and Rat). As you can see, Kingsisle has given the forms consistent health based on their school and tier. This is what I used as my starting point as to figure out what the new forms are most likely to be!
Future Beast Forms
Now, in the Beastmoon Roundtable from a while back, one of the Devs mentioned that they were working on 5 new forms. 2 updates ago, they added 2 forms: Myth Pig and Life Minotaur. and in the last update they added 3 forms, Fire Cyclops, Ice Fairy, and Death Draconian. Since there are 10 total form categories, I assumed it would be natural that they would choose to design forms for the 5 forms that hadn’t gotten a new form in the past couple updates, and that would be Colossus, Elf, Rat, Krokomummy, and Wolf. That may or may not be a correct assumption, but we’ll talk about that later.
Now when it comes to schools, there are 7 of course, and with 5 forms that’d mean only 2 are left out. The past update had 3, so we can likely conclude that the 4 schools not added last update (Storm, Myth, Life, and Balance) will get a new form, plus one additional school out of the most recent forms (Fire, Ice, and Death). With our schools and forms mostly figured out, let’s see what we can conclude from most to least obvious.
Storm Colossus
Storm is one of our main 4 schools, and if you look at what forms Storm already has, they have literally 4/5 of the forms we decided are most likely! Elf, Rat, Krok, and Wolf! By easy process of elimination, we can conclude Storm Colossus will most definitely be a new form.
Myth Wolf
Out of this chart, there’s one blinding hole in there that I’m sure your eyes were drawn to immediately. That’d be the Myth Tank forms! There aren’t any! I totally understand why KI took this long to make one since Myth has been quite overpowered in the past and giving it a whopping 575 health form would be scary for everyone! Anyhow, they’ve got to add them sometime, and with the Colossus taken, Wolf is the only large form left, so it’s got to be one of the forms.
Balance Rat & Life Elf
With Storm and Myth out of the way, that only leaves Life and Balance as the 2 definite schools for new forms. Balance already has a Krok as a form, so we can eliminate that one. Another important thing to consider here is they try to keep it balanced between the 3 tiers of forms. With the exception of Myth, all forms have 1 or 2 forms in each tier, and NO schools have ALL the forms in a single tier. With this in mind, we can guess that Life is most likely to get a new Small form since Krok would put it at 3 Middle tier forms. From this, we can assume that we’re getting Balance and Life paired with Rat and Elf in some way.
This brings us to one more factor; KI seems to like designing forms such that there’s not a lot of crossover between schools that have the same forms. As you can see, there’s a lot of diversity between the columns and they try to minimize how many forms the schools have in common with each other. This being said, we can look at which forms already have rats (Storm, Myth, and Death) and see that Storm has a Rat, Krok, and Wolf, which, if added to balance, would give Balance 3 forms in common with Storm, and if Rat was added to Life, it would have 3 forms in common with Myth. With this, we can’t draw any conclusions, so let’s look at Elf!
Right now, if we look to Ice and Storm, those schools have Elf, Krok, and Wolf in common, and I highly doubt they’d add Elf to Balance making 3 schools having 3 forms in common. If we add Elf to Life however, there only becomes 1 school with 3 forms in common, Fire. Through this long journey of logic, we can guess Life Elf and Balance Rat are how those forms will be paired.
Death Krokomummy
With the 4 schools chosen, that just leaves us with Ice, Fire, and Death to be the new Krokomummy. We can obviously see Ice already has one, so that’s off the table. Between Death and Fire, it’s important to keep this in mind… Medium and Large forms both have the same DPP (Damage Per Pip), and although they have different health values, it’s important to keep this connection in mind when balancing. That being said, if you look at Fire, adding a Krok would give Fire 5 forms in the top two tiers vs. 1 form in the lowest tier. No other schools have this even after the previous 4 additions I proposed, so with this, we can conclude Death Krok is more likely than Fire Krok at this time.
Ice Pig and Other Alternatives
Although the previous 5 I talked about are all the forms I personally designed, that prediction was predicated on the idea that they value varying up the forms over varying up the schools. This could however not be the case. If you take a look at the chart one more time, you should notice one glaring issue with the Krokomummy. EVERY school that has a Krok, doesn’t have any other medium tier forms! There’s a good chance KI could look at this and want to fix it, making Minotaur or Pig a new form to fill in one of those slots, since they weren’t used in this most recent update.
Of the Krok schools, Storm and Balance are already taken, so Ice is the obvious choice. Between Ice Mino and Ice Pig, I checked the forms, and based on forms that the school’s have in common, Pig would be the choice. However! It’s important to note that this “forms in common between the schools” thing that I’m talking about is pretty low on their priority list when it comes to decision making, and of course they can break the rules due to what assets they already have to work with and ideas they have for the forms, so although I found my method pretty accurate, just know this isn’t a completely accurate science. That being said, forms like Fire Krok and Ice Mino could also be possibilities.
Cam’s Beast Form Concepts
Once I picked out the 5 forms that I wanted to design, I got working on the 10 spells for each of them! I made them taking into account current forms and how they work, school identity, filling holes in the meta, adding fun new mechanics, and some personal wishful thinking 😉 That being said, EVERY spell of these 50 spells is balanced according to the current formulas that I found. Also, it seems that KI tends to only add 1 or 2 more new concepts to each form, and a few of mine have much more than that, which could definitely be split into multiple forms. Just thought I’d pour my ideas into these forms as long as it’s not too much!
After I designed these bad boys, I went to work in Photoshop to create what they’d look like in game! With the artwork / animations, I followed their formula of reusing some old spell animations while adding some new ones as well that don’t currently exist in Beastmoon. It was NOT easy to make these, but I hope you’re able to appreciate the work I put into this and enjoy reading my explanations for them! When it comes to spell naming, I came up with all of them myself, and most of them are self explanatory, but I will explain some of them if I find it necessary. I either go with names that refer to spell utility, the animation, or both to describe the spell and I also made sure there was nothing closely named in game currently.
Naming the spells was a fun part of it, and as you can see from previous forms… KI tends to have fun with it, as I have. For each form’s article I will give a quick overview, go through each spell in detail, and then discuss the health, pips, and tiers of the forms and number of copies of each spell. I couldn’t fit all the form explanations in this article, but the links are at the bottom and the future articles will be published when ready.
In case you’re unfamiliar, this graphic I made will help you understand the symbols on the cards…
Final Thoughts
This was super fun for me to do! I’m not sure if I’d ever do 5 in a row like this ever again, because it was a lot of work! There’s a lot to think about when designing Beast Forms, and I really appreciate what the designers do to give us the content that they do. I didn’t count the hours I spent on this, but I would estimate it took me at least 50 hours from concept to completion. This has been in the works for a long time, and I’ve been really excited to show y’all! I hope you’ve found my ideas interesting and I’d love to hear your own!
Beastform Concept Series
Check back here for more form concept such as the Balance Rat!