January 26, 2019 October 15, 2022

Wizard101 Gear for Questing
How Not to Die in PvE: Part 1

We’ve all been stuck on that quest because you couldn’t kill the boss in the dungeon you needed to do. Fortunately, I’m here to give you a few helpful tips and tricks for when you find yourself struggling with battles:

Part 1 (this article) reviews one aspect: your Gear and Stats for Questing
Part 2 reviews an even more important aspect: your Wizard101 Questing Strategy

Are you max level and looking for specific gear recommendations?

Feel free to check out our max-level gear guides:

Wizard101 Best Max Balance Gear
Wizard101 Best Max Death Gear (to come)
Wizard101 Best Max Fire Gear
Wizard101 Best Max Ice Gear
Wizard101 Best Max Life Gear (to come)
Wizard101 Best Max Myth Gear (to come)
Wizard101 Best Max Storm Gear

When looking for gear for questing, top priorities for stats are typically damage, resist, accuracy, and power pips. Let’s take a look at each separately.

Recommended Stats

Damage

Having a high damage percentage can make fights easier because you can output more damage to the enemy. When farming older content, having higher damage can be helpful. You can get through more runs in a shorter period of time in fights, like Loremaster or Halfang.

In more current content, where bosses can hit harder, having a mix of damage and resist can be more useful than full damage. When soloing, you want to have enough damage to be able to kill the bosses without neglecting resist. If you’re in a battle with a group, the hitter will more likely have the most damage compared to the others.

Resist

Having a higher resist percentage lowers the amount of damage you take from an attack. Typically the tanks of a group will have high resist while they are protecting the other wizards. When you reach 100% resist, it means you’re immune to damage in that school. You will take no damage! Immunity is a good idea in fights where there are cheats that can do a good amount of damage, like Belloq and Jabberwock.

In the case of soloing, the balance of your resist and damage is complicated. You need the resist to be able to take hits, and the damage to be able to kill still. In a group setting the wizards with the most resist will be the ones tanking the hits for the others.

Accuracy

Having good accuracy can decrease the chance of you fizzling a spell. Higher level gear has better accuracy than lower level gear. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways around it at lower levels. For example, at lower levels you can use accuracy enchant treasure cards. That way you won’t fizzle your spells until you can get gear with accuracy.

Everyone fizzles spells, but it can be dangerous in situations where your health is low. If you fizzle that heal and the boss hits that round you, you could die and have to restart the battle. If you need one last hit to kill the boss before it kills you and you fizzle, it’s game over for you. Hence, having good accuracy can be a deciding factor in PvE battles. As a team, fizzling isn’t as dangerous as soloing, since others can cast spells also to cover your fizzled spell.

Power Pips

Power pips count as two white pips to your own school or a school you have a mastery amulet of. When you have 100% power pips, you will get a golden pip each turn. As such, getting as close as possible to 100% power pip chance will be super beneficial. The higher your power pip chance, the less time you’ll have to wait to cast your spells.

Having power pips and accuracy comes hand in hand, so having a balance between both is the best way. If your gear is missing either power pips or accuracy, then you can socket a triangle jewel into your athame, ring, or deck.

Other Stats

Critical

Another popular stat you can build is critical. When you successfully land a critical on a mob or boss you do twice the damage or a critical a heal increases the health gained. Critical can be good for fire and storm because if they can land a critical they can double their damage and if the hit is buffed by blades and traps it can be super effective. For a life wizard critical can be very handy for their heals, as it does twice what the heal originally was.

Critical Block

The opposite of critical is critical block. Critical block is a chance to block an incoming critical. Critical is introduced in Celestia along with block. In Mirage and Empyrea, the bosses and mobs can critical more often making their critical be a possible problem you encounter as you quest through. If they critical their neutral attacks, it can do 2000 damage if you don’t block the critical.

Armor Piercing

Armor piercing counters resist. This percentage lowers your opponent’s resist and can reduce the resist of shields. If you had 20% armor piercing and the boss had a 50% tower shield on, then your attack would lower the tower shield to 30%. A popular aura for pierce is infallible; if trained gives 15% and gives 20% when used as a tc. Another way to pierce resist is using shadow shrike, a shadow spell learned towards the end of Khrysalis part 1 from Eclipse Tower.

In some battles having armor piercing would be useful like Neumian Lion. He has a cheat at the start of battle where he casts multiple tower shields. You have to either pierce or remove them all to attack the boss. There are other bosses, too, like the Spectral Guardians in Mirror Lake, where one guardian has a 90% tower shield until you defeat the other guardians.

Choosing Reasonable Gear

While it’s helpful to have the best gear in game, your gear doesn’t need to be perfect. Gear isn’t always the issue, but it can be one of several factors of dying in a boss battle.

Going for reasonable gear is good enough. When looking to upgrade gear there are many sources for where gear can come from with varying difficulties. This is something you can tweak to fit your needs. Firstly, there is Bazaar gear for gold (usually not the best choice). In addition, there is also dropped gear from mobs and bosses, which is superior most of the time. Most wizards farm Darkmoor and one shot gauntlets at level 100. Even though Waterworks gear is for level 60, it can last you until Darkmoor.

Farmed vs Crafted Gear

The two main ways to obtain gear are farming and crafting. Each world has its own set of gear that drops and a crafted set available. Which set is better though? It’s all up to what stats are you looking for. With so much gear available to be obtained the possibilities are endless with what stats you can create. You can build damage/resist, damage/critical, or many other combinations. It is also normal to have multiple gear sets created for different situations.

Farming Gear

Gear drops from the end bosses of most worlds. This gear has better stats than normal drops in the world from mobs you fight while questing. The downside is that this gear does need to be farmed for. You may need to fight the boss several times to get what you are looking for. You can get the gear on the first run, or fight a never ending number of runs. Most people will farm until they get every piece they need as this gear is better than crafted in most cases, but that isn’t for everyone.

Crafting Gear

Each world does offer crafted gear, but you need to have the right crafting badge to buy these recipes. Every world has a crafting quest and some are harder than others but not impossible. Make sure you have the correct crafting badge before you seek out this gear. The stats on crafted gear are often similar to the gear dropped by the final bosse. It can be used in place of farmed gear if you don’t have the time to farm a boss until what you need drops. Each school can have many pieces of gear in a world so make sure to buy the right piece.

Some Gear Guides on Final Bastion

Level	Source	World	Boss/Vendor	Type of Gear	Link
30	Crafted	Aquila	Khalkos Coppersmith	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
70-90	Crafted	Aquila	Khalkos Coppersmith	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
76	Crafted	Azteca	Shane MacGobhann	Block Boots	Link
100	Crafted	Darkmoor	Harker	Decks	Link
130	Crafted	Empyrea Part 2	Romar	All Gear Items	Link
40	Dropped	Barkingham Palace	Several bosses	All Gear Items	Link
70	Dropped	Ultra Dungeon	Meowiatry	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
90	Dropped	Aquila, Tartarus	Hades	Hats, Robes, Boots	Link
99	Dropped	Khrysalis Part 2	Several bosses	Amulets, Rings, Athames	Link
100	Dropped	Ultra Dungeon	Krokopatra	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
100	Dropped	Ultra Dungeon	Zeus	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
100	Dropped	Ultra Dungeon	Rattlebones	Hats, Robes, Boots, Wands	Link
100	Dropped	Darkmoor	Several bosses	All Gear Items	Link
110	Dropped	Polaris	Baba Yaga	Hats, Athames, Amulets, Rings, Decks	Link
110	Dropped	Polaris	Rasputin	Robes, Boots, Wands, Amulets, Decks	Link
120	Dropped	Mirage	Several bosses	All Gear Items	Link
125	Dropped	Empyrea Part 1	Corporal Tenni’syn	Robes	Link
125	Dropped	Empyrea Part 1	Several bosses	All Gear Items	Link
130	Dropped	Empyrea Part 2	Admiral Dynt	All Gear Items	Link

Jewels

Jewels are a nice addition to your grear. Jewels can be placed into sockets on wands, amulets, athames, rings, and pets. To socket a jewel, you need a socket wrench or crowns. Socket wrenches can be farmed from bosses. They can drop while questing, crafted, or be bought from jewel packs.

Jewels can contain all sorts of stats and item cards. Once a jewel is placed in a socket it can only be removed by shattering it. This will destroy the jewel. For more information, check out the links the some jewel articles on Final Bastion below:

Jewels for level 100+ wizards: here
Guide to Morganthe and aura jewels: here
Card-giving jewels: here
Polished piercing jewels: here

Pets

Pets can be an easy way to improve your stats. Pets are customizable, which makes the possibilities endless. They’re definitely a part of your gear for questing. Ever since Kingsisle added the Hatchmaking Kiosk, finding the dream pet has become easier. The Kiosk provides a bigger selection of pets available at any time without having to beg for hatches. You can read more about hatchmaking here.

The most popular pet talents are resist and damage talents. You can get these talents by hatching with a pet that has those talents already. It might take many hatches before the talent manifests on your pet. This is just down to your luck, so don’t give up and keep trying! It’s a good idea to try to find your “perfect” pet in the Hatchmaking Kiosk and try to hatch with it every single day as you slowly get closer to a good pet.

Good Pet Talents to Have

Resist Talents

The Spell-Proof talent provides up to 10% resist to all schools.
Spell-Defying give 5% resist on top of the Spell-Proof resist, allowing a pet to have 15% resist to all schools.

Damage Talents

There are two damage talents that give attacks of all schools a boost. These are called Pain-Giver (which adds up to 6% damage) and Pain-Bringer (which adds up to 3% damage).
Then, there is also a “Dealer” damage talent for every school (eg. Storm-Dealer, Life-Dealer, Myth-Dealer). Dealer talents provide up to 9% damage to a specific school.
You can combine that with a school “Giver” (eg. Storm-Giver, Death-Giver), which will add another 6% to your total damage.

By having a Dealer and a Giver and Pain-Giver on a pet, you can have 21% more damage on top of what damage your gear provides. That’s almost how much damage you can get from a blade.

Other Talents

Other talents that can be helpful are the may cast heals like fairy and unicorn. These can sometimes be dangerous talents, as some bosses cheat when you or your pet heals. Carry a pet without may cast pet heals for those battles!
There are also many critical talents that can raise your critical.
You can raise your critical block with block talents.

That’s it for part one! In part two, I will look at how to improve your strategy while questing. After all, your gear and your strategy should match up, otherwise you’ll end up dying or stretching battles unnecessarily often. While you wait for part two, check out this article on mmorpg.com as well!