Yet another bump!
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Completed Let's become the Destroyer in Might and Magic VIII
- Thread starter Pope Amole II
- Start date
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Part IV incoming.
But before that, I've wanted to talk about later M&M's combat formulas. Because, as far as I understand, they're not particularly well-known and most players don't understand what those "+1 to attack per skill point" or "ring of +25 armor" actually do.
Fun thing about NWC game designers is that they really hated simple formulas - if you want a hard proof of that, just search info on specialized spell damage bonus in HoMM 3. It was hardcore, oh yeah. And, while M&M's formulae are simpler, they're still not what you'll usually see in most RPGs (at least in the well known ones).
If you want to hit monster, it's (15 + PlayerAttack*2)/(30 + PlayerAttack*2 + MonsterArmorClass). Monster armor classes vary between different monsters, but the highest possible is 100. Let's look at the different implications of this:
Attack rating 0____ 25____ 50____ 100
Armour
0 _________50%__81%___88%__ 93%
25________ 27%__61%___74%__ 84%
50________ 18%__50%___63%__ 76%
100_______ 11%__36%___50%__ 65%
So what can we tell from this table? First, I'm not sure how to phrase it since my technical english is nonexistent, but the game really favors evenly spread results. Even if you're seriously outclassed, you still have a decent enough chance of hitting. Even when you're totally overpowering your enemies, you'll still miss relatively often. And the latter one is a real bitch - it makes warriors much weaker than they appear to be.
Second, diminishing returns galore. You can see yourself how quickly effectiveness of skill-point investment (because that's your main way of boosting your attack - through skill points) drops. Add to that the ever increasing costs of skill training and you'll see why this game is hell for melee classes. Heck, even attack rating of +200 (which is hardly achievable without some lucky loot and absolute min-maxing) gives you only 78% of hitting on 100 armor - that's a one quarter increase in total damage for, like, 50 GM armsmaster skill points (that's discounting armsmaster damage bonus, but still).
Third - that's ones of the reasons why dragons are powerful (they autohit and you see how greatly that increases your total dps) and why carnage bows (which also autohit) are so awesome for dark elves.
Now, monster use a similar formulae to hit your characters: (5 + MonsterLevel*2)/(10 + MonsterLevel*2 + PlayerArmorClass). Maximum monster level is 125, btw. I'm lazy so I won't do a similar table here, but since both formulae are pretty close to each other, you get the gist of it. And if you don't, just a quick example - that 125 lvl monster has a 70% chance to hit character with armor 100 and 55% to hit character with armor 200. What a fat protection increase, oh yeah. And mind you, getting armor that high without save-scumming is pretty hard task (for everyone but the dragons - singleton dragons can have anywhere from 500 to 700) and not really worth the investment, since it protects you only from physical attacks and most high-level monsters don't even bother to use those.
So, as long as you can have about 100 armor (and pretty much any character can have that easily), you're fine and don't need additional protection. Also that makes shields more or less useless and almost completely erases the difference between different types of armor.
KK, theory lesson is over, now for the gamey part:
(we'll be dungeoneering in this part and I think this track set's the right mood for it)
Troll tomb - looks like a nice, civil place, great for necromantic contemplations of world conquest and some casual corpse animation.
Obviously, the looks are deceptive - it's full of pesky gogs. Real pesky - they are not sturdy, but they hit hard enough and we can't use the shotgun tactics versus them as they die in a fiery blast, having the last laugh on us. We have to deal with them from range.
And it's not like our ranged damage is bad - toxic cloud deals some great damage, it's just that 15 mana per shot depletes our mana pool fast.
Just a couple of rooms and we're already almost out of it.
We can always use Longseeker, of course, but it's much slower and so we lose hps instead of mana. No good solution here.
Thankfully, we have those rings of regen so we can actually rest here, gaining enough mana & health to break through the last lines of defense.
And mission is accomplished. We're not wasting any more time here - there still remained some gogs to slaughter, but they simply weren't worth the effort. Our ambitions are bigger than that.
So we take the troll into our custody, jump to alvar...
And then kick him out almost immediately so we're not bothered by his no doubt annoying company. Trolls should be fucking banned, no tolerance to them.
Then we train, focusing on our meditation - you've seen how badly we need it.
The game continues to troll us, however. At least that's a decent form of trolling.
In responce, we're nuking dagger wound island - just for the kicks, as there's not much xps to be earned that way. Still, if we can massacre a village and get away with it, why shouldn't we?
Oh, and here are the stats of our artifact armor. We're not that far into game that mana regen is useless and endurance bonus is actually nifty. Of course, it gives us, like, +4 HPs and it's laughable, but endurance has another, pretty much hidden use. See, every time a monster hits you, you're given a recovery penalty, meaning that your next turn will come later. You can even get stun-locked if a large amount of monsters will bash you on a constant basis. And amount of that penalty is calculated by this formula: (20 - Endurance Modifier). Meaning that it ranges from 26 (at 0 or lower) to zero (at endurance 350 or higher). Our current 153 EN gives +13 modifier by the way and further on its +1 modifier for every 25 points (I've already gave the table in VII LP). And 7 recovery penalty per hit is still unpleasant, so we won't mind against having even more (but that's hardly achievable).
Remembering our unpleasant broken Longseeker incident, we harden it immediately - yeah, greyface's patch unlocked option of hardening artifact items and I'm using it. It's more a matter of convenience than game balance - we have all the money in the world to repair it and our combat prowess doesn't rely on it, we can survive it being broken, we just don't want to have extra hassle in our game.
Having dealt with routine issues, we find another assassination order, once again in the very same place.
Not that I mind, but you dudes seriously hate those ogres.
Ravage Roaming. Running past angry gorgons, we reach a peculiar opening in the ground.
Which happens to be a ventilation shaft leading straight into minotaur city, currently being overran with angry tritons.
Angry, but harmless (for us). In fact, this very incursion point makes walking through this dungeon effortless - we could've soundly completed it first time we were here, it's just that it would've been tedious. Extremely tedious, but doable. As you see, the starting shaft is short enough so we can shoot tritons and long enough so they can't hit us in return. They're also 100% melee, so we've won this location before we even began to explore it. It's just a matter of time (and bad design).
Even without that exploit, these long narrow corridors are perfect for kiting.
And that's again high tier tritons - low tier ones can hardly reach us.
We even afford us to cast a dragon breath to save time, because why bother?
Yet maybe we should've bothered more, because our mana is already gone and kiting with bow is efficient, but nowhere near fun.
17 dmg per shot are for really patient people. Mental clinic patient level, I guess.
Besides the starting glory hole, there's another exploit in this dungeon - tritons are prone to getting stuck in these wooden columns. Target practice time.
Regenning some mana, we head to another key point of minotaur city - central fountain.
Securing it makes our task even easier - drinking from it restores our health (now we can afford to be somewhat lax in kiting)
And, after we burn the remains of our mana to gas some tritons...
We ran to the exit, town portal to friendly city, heal in the temple then jump straight back to fight with renewed strength. Convenient.
Exploring Balthazar's Lair further (actually, we need to pull a series of level here as this dungeon is flooded and we need to drain the water away; this could've made for great puzzle dungeon, however, since you're giver solution from the start, it's more of a chore so there's no point in showing much of it), we get face to face (rather, ugly pike to, well, uglier pike, and I'm not sure which one of those is ours) with the highest tier triton. They hit hard, as you see. But what's the point if they're not ranged?
It's not like we can't regen our HPs - there's a damn fountain of healing here.
Near the end of our quest, we encounter the last bunch of invaders - this time, it's not just a couple of them, it's a whole horde.
But we have a certain spell for such special occasions.
And it's called dragon breath - those 10d25 of area damage sure do feel good (nor for their victims, obviously).
So the final enemy remains (almost - there's a group of foes here whom you can't reach before deflooding the lair fully, but they don't really count). Not for long.
We press the lever...
And the gratitude of minotaur chief is eternally ours. If only we actually needed it...
What we do need is the help of the air master, returning to his home once the crisis have passed (note that even if you clear this dungeon before the alliance quests, local denizens will be absent - you need to make a treaty to return them)
Jumping to alvar, we find first of the key air spells in elemental guild.
Training ourselves, we pass enough time...
And then find the second, and much more important of key air spells. Now we're all set up to initiate operation code name "Roy Batty".
For the starters, let's put all of our money somewhere safe. It's replenishable, sure, but I don't want to be left without a single coin.
Next, jump to dagger wound island. Destination - uplifted library. We enter it stealthed by invisibility spell and carefully sneak past local guards straight to the highest level (neat trick here is to use those elevators in TB mode, saving lots of invisibility time in the process - at master skill it runs out fast).
There, treasure chest waits for us.
Inside we find lost book of Khel (already taken) and an artifact staff.
Then we run out before our guise wears off. We could've fought through this place, but it would've taken some reloads - as you can see, rooms here are tight so you're pretty much forced into the close combat range, and our durability there is laughable.
Oh, and the staff is mediocre - taking 1 staff instead of 4 elemental rings is nice as it opens lots of extra slots, but it's not like we're using our elemental magic to deal damage anymore, it's not like we would be using those rings even if we found them.
And while, as I've written, having more than 100 armor may be not that advantageous...
We most certainly don't want 30. That's like asking to get killed.
However, just in case we're storing this staff in ravenshore's merchant guild warehose - who knows, maybe we'll change our mind (spoiler - we didn't so it's the last time you'll see it, I won't even bother to return here & take it away for sale).
Shadowspire. Which, by the way, has respawned, so more horseshoes, barrels and enemies to armageddon for us. Good.
That'll come later. Casting invisibility once again, we prowl into mad necromancer's lab. Jumping straight into that well...
We find ourselves down in some sort of maze. Wandering around it a bit...
We get real hurt by traps, but discover a wonderful chest containing lich jars...
And a quest spear Ebonest. It's more of a bonus - we really came here for the jar, it's the only thing that interests us around this point.
However, we're trapped - our invisibility will run out soon, we're in a room full of monsters and our way back is cut off by some pressure plate fireball throwing traps. How do we escape this ordeal?
Time to die.
But before that, I've wanted to talk about later M&M's combat formulas. Because, as far as I understand, they're not particularly well-known and most players don't understand what those "+1 to attack per skill point" or "ring of +25 armor" actually do.
Fun thing about NWC game designers is that they really hated simple formulas - if you want a hard proof of that, just search info on specialized spell damage bonus in HoMM 3. It was hardcore, oh yeah. And, while M&M's formulae are simpler, they're still not what you'll usually see in most RPGs (at least in the well known ones).
If you want to hit monster, it's (15 + PlayerAttack*2)/(30 + PlayerAttack*2 + MonsterArmorClass). Monster armor classes vary between different monsters, but the highest possible is 100. Let's look at the different implications of this:
Attack rating 0____ 25____ 50____ 100
Armour
0 _________50%__81%___88%__ 93%
25________ 27%__61%___74%__ 84%
50________ 18%__50%___63%__ 76%
100_______ 11%__36%___50%__ 65%
So what can we tell from this table? First, I'm not sure how to phrase it since my technical english is nonexistent, but the game really favors evenly spread results. Even if you're seriously outclassed, you still have a decent enough chance of hitting. Even when you're totally overpowering your enemies, you'll still miss relatively often. And the latter one is a real bitch - it makes warriors much weaker than they appear to be.
Second, diminishing returns galore. You can see yourself how quickly effectiveness of skill-point investment (because that's your main way of boosting your attack - through skill points) drops. Add to that the ever increasing costs of skill training and you'll see why this game is hell for melee classes. Heck, even attack rating of +200 (which is hardly achievable without some lucky loot and absolute min-maxing) gives you only 78% of hitting on 100 armor - that's a one quarter increase in total damage for, like, 50 GM armsmaster skill points (that's discounting armsmaster damage bonus, but still).
Third - that's ones of the reasons why dragons are powerful (they autohit and you see how greatly that increases your total dps) and why carnage bows (which also autohit) are so awesome for dark elves.
Now, monster use a similar formulae to hit your characters: (5 + MonsterLevel*2)/(10 + MonsterLevel*2 + PlayerArmorClass). Maximum monster level is 125, btw. I'm lazy so I won't do a similar table here, but since both formulae are pretty close to each other, you get the gist of it. And if you don't, just a quick example - that 125 lvl monster has a 70% chance to hit character with armor 100 and 55% to hit character with armor 200. What a fat protection increase, oh yeah. And mind you, getting armor that high without save-scumming is pretty hard task (for everyone but the dragons - singleton dragons can have anywhere from 500 to 700) and not really worth the investment, since it protects you only from physical attacks and most high-level monsters don't even bother to use those.
So, as long as you can have about 100 armor (and pretty much any character can have that easily), you're fine and don't need additional protection. Also that makes shields more or less useless and almost completely erases the difference between different types of armor.
KK, theory lesson is over, now for the gamey part:
(we'll be dungeoneering in this part and I think this track set's the right mood for it)
Troll tomb - looks like a nice, civil place, great for necromantic contemplations of world conquest and some casual corpse animation.
Obviously, the looks are deceptive - it's full of pesky gogs. Real pesky - they are not sturdy, but they hit hard enough and we can't use the shotgun tactics versus them as they die in a fiery blast, having the last laugh on us. We have to deal with them from range.
And it's not like our ranged damage is bad - toxic cloud deals some great damage, it's just that 15 mana per shot depletes our mana pool fast.
Just a couple of rooms and we're already almost out of it.
We can always use Longseeker, of course, but it's much slower and so we lose hps instead of mana. No good solution here.
Thankfully, we have those rings of regen so we can actually rest here, gaining enough mana & health to break through the last lines of defense.
And mission is accomplished. We're not wasting any more time here - there still remained some gogs to slaughter, but they simply weren't worth the effort. Our ambitions are bigger than that.
So we take the troll into our custody, jump to alvar...
And then kick him out almost immediately so we're not bothered by his no doubt annoying company. Trolls should be fucking banned, no tolerance to them.
Then we train, focusing on our meditation - you've seen how badly we need it.
The game continues to troll us, however. At least that's a decent form of trolling.
In responce, we're nuking dagger wound island - just for the kicks, as there's not much xps to be earned that way. Still, if we can massacre a village and get away with it, why shouldn't we?
Oh, and here are the stats of our artifact armor. We're not that far into game that mana regen is useless and endurance bonus is actually nifty. Of course, it gives us, like, +4 HPs and it's laughable, but endurance has another, pretty much hidden use. See, every time a monster hits you, you're given a recovery penalty, meaning that your next turn will come later. You can even get stun-locked if a large amount of monsters will bash you on a constant basis. And amount of that penalty is calculated by this formula: (20 - Endurance Modifier). Meaning that it ranges from 26 (at 0 or lower) to zero (at endurance 350 or higher). Our current 153 EN gives +13 modifier by the way and further on its +1 modifier for every 25 points (I've already gave the table in VII LP). And 7 recovery penalty per hit is still unpleasant, so we won't mind against having even more (but that's hardly achievable).
Remembering our unpleasant broken Longseeker incident, we harden it immediately - yeah, greyface's patch unlocked option of hardening artifact items and I'm using it. It's more a matter of convenience than game balance - we have all the money in the world to repair it and our combat prowess doesn't rely on it, we can survive it being broken, we just don't want to have extra hassle in our game.
Having dealt with routine issues, we find another assassination order, once again in the very same place.
Not that I mind, but you dudes seriously hate those ogres.
Ravage Roaming. Running past angry gorgons, we reach a peculiar opening in the ground.
Which happens to be a ventilation shaft leading straight into minotaur city, currently being overran with angry tritons.
Angry, but harmless (for us). In fact, this very incursion point makes walking through this dungeon effortless - we could've soundly completed it first time we were here, it's just that it would've been tedious. Extremely tedious, but doable. As you see, the starting shaft is short enough so we can shoot tritons and long enough so they can't hit us in return. They're also 100% melee, so we've won this location before we even began to explore it. It's just a matter of time (and bad design).
Even without that exploit, these long narrow corridors are perfect for kiting.
And that's again high tier tritons - low tier ones can hardly reach us.
We even afford us to cast a dragon breath to save time, because why bother?
Yet maybe we should've bothered more, because our mana is already gone and kiting with bow is efficient, but nowhere near fun.
17 dmg per shot are for really patient people. Mental clinic patient level, I guess.
Besides the starting glory hole, there's another exploit in this dungeon - tritons are prone to getting stuck in these wooden columns. Target practice time.
Regenning some mana, we head to another key point of minotaur city - central fountain.
Securing it makes our task even easier - drinking from it restores our health (now we can afford to be somewhat lax in kiting)
And, after we burn the remains of our mana to gas some tritons...
We ran to the exit, town portal to friendly city, heal in the temple then jump straight back to fight with renewed strength. Convenient.
Exploring Balthazar's Lair further (actually, we need to pull a series of level here as this dungeon is flooded and we need to drain the water away; this could've made for great puzzle dungeon, however, since you're giver solution from the start, it's more of a chore so there's no point in showing much of it), we get face to face (rather, ugly pike to, well, uglier pike, and I'm not sure which one of those is ours) with the highest tier triton. They hit hard, as you see. But what's the point if they're not ranged?
It's not like we can't regen our HPs - there's a damn fountain of healing here.
Near the end of our quest, we encounter the last bunch of invaders - this time, it's not just a couple of them, it's a whole horde.
But we have a certain spell for such special occasions.
And it's called dragon breath - those 10d25 of area damage sure do feel good (nor for their victims, obviously).
So the final enemy remains (almost - there's a group of foes here whom you can't reach before deflooding the lair fully, but they don't really count). Not for long.
We press the lever...
And the gratitude of minotaur chief is eternally ours. If only we actually needed it...
What we do need is the help of the air master, returning to his home once the crisis have passed (note that even if you clear this dungeon before the alliance quests, local denizens will be absent - you need to make a treaty to return them)
Jumping to alvar, we find first of the key air spells in elemental guild.
Training ourselves, we pass enough time...
And then find the second, and much more important of key air spells. Now we're all set up to initiate operation code name "Roy Batty".
For the starters, let's put all of our money somewhere safe. It's replenishable, sure, but I don't want to be left without a single coin.
Next, jump to dagger wound island. Destination - uplifted library. We enter it stealthed by invisibility spell and carefully sneak past local guards straight to the highest level (neat trick here is to use those elevators in TB mode, saving lots of invisibility time in the process - at master skill it runs out fast).
There, treasure chest waits for us.
Inside we find lost book of Khel (already taken) and an artifact staff.
Then we run out before our guise wears off. We could've fought through this place, but it would've taken some reloads - as you can see, rooms here are tight so you're pretty much forced into the close combat range, and our durability there is laughable.
Oh, and the staff is mediocre - taking 1 staff instead of 4 elemental rings is nice as it opens lots of extra slots, but it's not like we're using our elemental magic to deal damage anymore, it's not like we would be using those rings even if we found them.
And while, as I've written, having more than 100 armor may be not that advantageous...
We most certainly don't want 30. That's like asking to get killed.
However, just in case we're storing this staff in ravenshore's merchant guild warehose - who knows, maybe we'll change our mind (spoiler - we didn't so it's the last time you'll see it, I won't even bother to return here & take it away for sale).
Shadowspire. Which, by the way, has respawned, so more horseshoes, barrels and enemies to armageddon for us. Good.
That'll come later. Casting invisibility once again, we prowl into mad necromancer's lab. Jumping straight into that well...
We find ourselves down in some sort of maze. Wandering around it a bit...
We get real hurt by traps, but discover a wonderful chest containing lich jars...
And a quest spear Ebonest. It's more of a bonus - we really came here for the jar, it's the only thing that interests us around this point.
However, we're trapped - our invisibility will run out soon, we're in a room full of monsters and our way back is cut off by some pressure plate fireball throwing traps. How do we escape this ordeal?
Time to die.
Thanks for the mechanics explanation, that was interesting 
I never bothered to explore the mechanics in the series. Probably explains why the dear Pope was annoyed with my skill allocation in my LP. 
Still. I might do an LP of this game as well, from the casual gamer's view.
Still. I might do an LP of this game as well, from the casual gamer's view.
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 883
Yeah, it's odd that a game that constantly throws stats at you never explains what they actually do. Strategic skill distribution is hard when the player's ability to weigh trade-offs is so limited. Course, M&M dodges that issue by being easy enough that the only required strategy is "look at two numbers and try to identify the bigger one."
Pope, you're doing a good job of making the game strategically interesting, despite it not being that way out of the box. What's the motivation for that? (Feel free to just link the answer, if you've explained elsewhere.) You like the game system and rule set, but the content doesn't provide a challenge by default?
Pope, you're doing a good job of making the game strategically interesting, despite it not being that way out of the box. What's the motivation for that? (Feel free to just link the answer, if you've explained elsewhere.) You like the game system and rule set, but the content doesn't provide a challenge by default?
Yeah. The M&M games were cheap in that death was a viable option to get out of places you were stuck in. 
Especially if you deposit all your gold beforehand.
Especially if you deposit all your gold beforehand.
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Well, I'm kinda game designer (I'll be one once we bring at least one of our projects to fruition) so I guess making games strategically interesting is gonna be my job and I'm just deconstructing/reconstructing the system for the sake of practice. Something like that. Besides, it makes this LP more interesting for the people to read and for me to make.
As for me liking the system - I'm not sure about that. M&Ms were one of the biggest games of my childhood so it's more about loving them, meaning I can't judge them quite rationally. Their system & content has lots of flaws, that's for sure, yet you can still gain enjoyment from doing a playthrough and there's a reasonable number of ways to do it.
Though, as I've said in my VII LP, their main challenge is amount of real time you spend to clean the dungeon/map - even with min/maxed party you rarely can do this in one go, you have to do healing runs and, as you're not punished for it in any way, that's why time is the only important factor. But "see how much of your time it wastes" isn't a good challenge by any means, obviously.
Now for part V.
http://www.myspace.com/talktothedead/music/songs/flesh-boiling-from-bone-25948931
(couldn't find this track on youtube - it may seem that you can find just about everything there, but in fact lots of obscure projects are actually absent from it; and this particular dark ambient track is just perfect for this stage of LP)
So we got better.
Actually, when I was playing the game, taking screenshots & stuff, I had a different plan for this stage of LP - I planned to convince everyone that it was actually ironman LP and now, as the character died, it's prematurely terminatede. Like, I had considered saying "This LP is dead" directly, then, after waiting for month or two...
Making a ninja update, starting with: "NO, THIS LP IS UNDEAD!" Allcaps, obv. What a beautifully lame pun that would've been. But there can't be anything good in this world, right?
Anyway, having paid for it with our life in all meanings possible, we ascend to lichdom.
Boy, that sure does wonders for our looks.
And our hit points & mana pool.
And for resistances too - no longer we'll be bothered by body & mind magics (there are few monsters who actually use them, though) and we've gained +20 to elemental resistances. Now, I'll save resistance explanation for future update, but, basically, going from 0 to 20 is great.
Now let's us get back our money...
So we can get regeneration skill. It's a badly done skill, tbh. Each level of mastery gives you 1 hp per 5 in-game minutes, so you can get from 1 to 4 hp regen (depending on your skill level and class). The problem is, master & grandmaster are hardly worth it - gaining 2 hp per 5 minutes regen for 9 skill point investment is nice, especially in the early stages of the game, gaining 4 hp per 5 minutes for 54 skill point investment is not half as nice, especially since that regen begins to become unnoticeable once you get into mid-game.
We also gain 4 levels for our sufferings - those promotion quests give huge XP rewards.
Our points are channeled to achieve the newly available grand masteries of air magic, water magic & meditation.
We head to murmurwoods, which has already recovered from our previous visit.
That doesn't last.
Making the precious white potions available to ourselves...
We decide to complete a dark elf promotion quest.
After all, the fly spell gives us an ability to explore maps without risking much. Here you see us finding a special Tree (which is not hard to find as it's marked with a freaking big arrow on the ground). It can exchange various gemstones for different rewards and, in particular, it can transform diamonds into horseshoes, meaning we get 2 skill points for each diamond we find. That's pretty nice - always buy diamonds from the magical shops if you can afford it.
Challenges have strange interaction with area respawns - they change the attribute they test, and sometimes they can give you another skill point bonus if you qualify, sometimes they write that "you've already won". Maybe it's not about challenge's location, but about whether or not you've won such contest of that particular level? Like, if you've won +5 skill points personality contest in ravenshore, you can't also win it here. If, however, you've won a contest of intelligence there and here is personality - go ahead, shoot. But if ravenshore's contest will later respawn to be personality contest, it won't give a bonus to you. That seems reasonable.
Not sure if that's the case, though - maybe they're just bugged.
As you can see, our armageddons are too weak to finish the whole map yet - plenty of high-tier monsters remain. But we're not here to fight, we're here to rescue that statue.
Girl, what a chitchatting talent you have - you're the first person to make me blind by talking.
We use murmurwoods planar gate to enter the plane of air. We're going stealthily - don't want to fight here yet.
We just want to grandmaster our air magic. To be honest, it's more of a token grandmaster - we aren't going to use starburst (or other combat air spells, for that matter), and it doesn't improve either fly or invisibility that much. More than a hour of invisibility is excessive, and fly draining 12 mana points per hou is not a big deal. Well, we have some skill points to spend, so why not?
Then it's by foot to garrote gorge. Here we witness a peculiar area respawn, dropping lots of random reagents on the edge of the dragonslayers' camp.
But we really came here to achieve ultimate understanding of this world and it's rotten ways. That's another 28% increase, making us earn 179% of XP.
Time to test it on live subjects...
Excellent, just excellent (of course, that's not all from the gorge - that's also counting murmurwoods' armageddons)
And we still have some ground to cover - those tier-3 dragonslayers have almost a half of HP remaining. They lack ranged attack, though, so flight coupled with toxic clouds (and a temple nearby) makes short (but I'd preferred instant, really - even short is a chore when there's no threat) work of them.
Same goes for their enslaved dragon pets, whom we relieve out of their misery. They're breathless and so quite harmless, yet it takes lots of spell casts to bring their huge life points down to zero.
We're even finishing one in primitive "shoot it with arrows" manner as our mana runs out just when we brought it deep into red HPs.
We're also cleaning this camp to the west, as it's important for a dragon promotion quest.
We use dragon breath to speed up the process, though it's still far from devastating at this point. Great, but not devastating.
Then we clean up nagas - only high-tier ones survive and, as they're quite damaged, they don't offer much challenge.
We fly to the local obelisk
And discover some collateral damage in the process - obviously, armageddons killed some of the local dragons too. Eh, whatever, they'll just breed more.
It's, like, survival of the fittest & stuff.
More XP goes our way.
Jump to alvar, jump to shadowspire, grand master meditation.
Now it gives us 25 mana per skillpoint, almost doubling our mana pool. It's a really important skill for singleton.
Then we visit a red light district to have some fun & relax.
Umm, no. The only disadvantage of lichdom is that that ceases to be an option, so we're simply nuking another map.
As we're suddenly became short on money, we fly around the map, picking corpses for some spare change. Note how only the high tier bone dragons survive - there's also a bug here. They're supposed to be immune to dark magic, yet armageddon still harms them (as if it needs to be more broken).
TP to balthazar's lair, exit to ravage roaming, stealth flight to ogre fortress, all to loot a very special crate here.
No luck with the item, however.
KK, let's head to the nearby gate to elemental plane of water.
As it was with air, we're hear to learn, killing will come later. Unlike air magic, grand mastering water is a must - lloyd's beacon saves you lots of time and, together with GM town portal, servers as an ultimate escape mechanism.
Then it's some training, interrupted by a quick joint to Zanthora's lab.
We'll get our full revenge later - now it was just an assassination order.
The job done right leads us to our first bounty hunter rank - first is not really important, just a small XP bonus.
Here's what the relic shield does. Actually, it's a semi-decent item for shield-using characters - after all, you don't want those basilisk & gorgons to be insta-killing you. Even if you won't use it on a constant basis, it's good to have it stashed in the ravenshore, I guess. But, as we can't use shields, we're gonna be just selling it.
Sometimes, high-tier monsters surviving your armageddons (and you either forgetting to mop them up or simply missing them while doing so) can play to your advantage.
I mean, what if you're offered bounty for their head?
All those levels gained give us astonishing amounts of skill points - we double our dark magic skill and even decide to master the earth magic.
In terms of combat potential, it's pretty useless, however, telekinesis can give us some decent strategical advantage - we're frail and don't want to get anywhere near the monsters, so opening doors from afar sounds like a nice idea.
Well, not that frail anymore - we can take a couple of hits after all that training we've done.
We're not against doing some more.
Let's wipe out ravage roaming.
Gorgons are tough - even the middle tier survives. Also, they're immune to air & fire magics, so, despite looking totally vulnerable to meteor shower & starburst, they can't be killed that way. But who uses elemental magic in M&M VIII? They're not immune to dragon's breath and that's what counts.
All in all, the area doesn't provide too much of a challenge, however, there's a nice contest here.
We get low on mana so once again it's Longseeker time. Good toy, saves us some effort.
Flying around the map, we loot some corpses - as you've seen, I'm mostly abstaining from it in this LP as it's another chore the game offers, but we're low on gold after all that training so let's suffer for a while. We also loot chests situated in the walls of this fortress.
Those ancient wyverns are actually dangerous - they have a chance of insta-gibbing you. But that's if they get close, and you really shouldn't let them do so.
We jump back to civilization, to sell some of our loots. Returning to ravage roaming, we sell forged vouchers we've found in the smuggers' lair to some local swindler. Considering we work for alvarian merchants, that doesn't sound ethical, but we're turning whole cities into mass graveyards here - stealing a coin or two from our "boss" (and since when we actually agreed to have one?) will hardly harm our moral stance.
We loot dread pirate stanley's treasure, which those gorgons were guarding. Except for the diamonds, not much of interests here - just money, gemstones to sell and a fixed artifact.
Measure is mediocre - it's better than your average sword, but it's the worst out of artifact swords. I guess it's good against ogres, yet they're neither numerous nor challenging in this game. Well, maybe they're challenging for solo knight, but you need to defeat gorgons to get it and they're much tougher than ogres in the first place, so... Maybe with lucky fly scroll?
Dark elf can put it to use, though - you don't care about low damage since you shoot everything with your bow, you run from melee, and that +40 endurance can help you against stunlock. Yeah, that's a valid use. And, since it respawns together with the area, you can even get two of them for a +80 endurance bonus.
Jumping to alvar, we master our earth magic skill...
And use a considerable sum of gold to pimp our spellbook. Not that we'll be using majority of those, but it's nice to have pretty pictures instead of a blank space.
What's most important, we get a copy of Lloyd's Beacon book so now we're as mobile as possible in this game.
And another hit job is on the horizon - yeah, I'm really determined to get a maximum rank in the guild (and, once again, no save scumming in these affairs).
Sneak to your target...
Fry it with dragon's breath...
Have a large sum of money transferred to your overseas account (not true).
And, as we're great with the jobs, the fun just doesn't cease to end.
Awww, ain't he cute? And to consider he was such an ugly middle-aged dude...
(the point here is that we're gaining more levels and upping dark magic - as I've said, we're doing the assassinations in-between our training sessions)
Before that, we finally buy a telekinesis spell (we definitely want that skill point investment to pay off) - man, getting proper spellbooks can sometimes be hard without savescumming.
Then it's our last slog to murmurwoods - from this point, no more. We can teleport here instantly from now on, without wasting five days.
With flight, you can easily find some awesome ore around the portal gate, however, what's the point anymore? With one exception, we hardly need any non-unique items. And even that sole exception can be replaced with a certain artifact.
Unlike our previous victims, those air elementals don't go out without a fight.
Their lightning bolt attack is quite fast and not as easy to dodge with aerial maneuvers (at least in 2x speed mode). However, we have enough hit points to prevail in one swift and brutal (wasting half of our mana on one elemental, lol - those dragon breath's do dry you) combat.
We return in quite battered condition (but that was on our way back - elementals themselves do not distribute status effects; iirc, I used a potion of haste to increase my dps and got weak once it has ended), but the reward was totally worth it.
Then we're visiting Zanthora's lab for, like, the third time and still we're not here for revenge - we're really calm and calculating type, oh we are.
We're in for some fedex quests - go into lab, talk with a dude, jump to ravenshore, talk with a dude, get a gem...
Save the dude. Oh, how interesting it would've been if not for a town portal spell!
Enchanting a couple of rings we've found in our travels, we craft a +17 (maximum that you can get out of enchant item spell) ring of alchemy. Now we can start brewing those white potions.
And we complete a knight promotion quest (also dropping a beacon in garrote gorge) so we can gain our xps and get rid of that quest spear wasting our inventory spell. One obvious singleton hardship that I haven't mentioned yet is inventory space - there's never nearly enough for it. You're saved by the fact that money are worthless and you don't have to sell lots of different crap to get around, but still, at times it's really annoying, especially when it comes to hoarding alchemical reagents (considering you're using 6 of them per one white potion of healing/mana, you can never gather enough).
Damn, at this point we're more assassin than lich, even if there's no such class in M&M VIII.
And again we're saved by the grace of failing to exterminate some monsters
Gathering 30k total (you need 10k of rewards for the first one and 20k for the second one - quite a number of job), we gain another promotion and another small xp bonus. 30k to go 'til the final one...
As we're in ravenshore, we decide to breeze through some of the early dungeons. Yes, breeze because we're clearly overtrained for them. What can those wolfies do?
Take, like, a third of our HPs. That's a singleton run so let's not overestimate ourselves - everything hurts.
At least we're able to minimaze the amount of hurting we take from the chests, opening them from afar via telekinesis. Who needs disarm trap with it? (that's a huge design problem, btw)
Healing up, we co to loot the temple of eep. Ratmen & rats here - we've done them before, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Yeah, they drop relatively fast and we're even holding well in combat...
But they manage to get us diseased. WTF? We're bloody undead, we're supposed to have a body immunity, how can they get us diseased? Somehow, they can. Whatever, they're still dead.
And all their cheese now belongs to us.
Ravage roaming, chapel of eep. It's a really small dungeon, with some easy jumping puzzles and high tier rats.
We're still not tough enough for this crap - just one room of them and we're close to the red zone. Eh, we shouldn't conserve our mana so much - yeah, shrapmetal is expensive, but what's the point of having spell points when you're dead? (could've done lame pun about us being dead already, but no, enough is enough)
So that's what we do - spam shrapmetal to drop them almost instantly.
The sole conundrum here is those corridors blocking projectiles in some points, making us whiff on a couple of spells. Nevermind, we've got a plenty of them.
The room is trapped with teleporting floortiles - nothing intricate, getting to that chest is real easy, but we're once again using telekinesis, just to be fashionable.
Another ball of cheese for our collection.
Garrote gorge, grand cathedral of eep. Bigger than the previous two, but it works pretty much the first one - no fancy design, just slightly tougher enemies.
Using our freshly discovered "no conservants" tactics, we move to our goal without encountering much resistance.
Once all of the rat bastards are dead...
Third kind of cheese falls in our hands.
Not that we want to keep them - we're missing digestive system, don't forget about that.
Let's just peddle them to someone who actually values that crap so we can get more xps and moneys.
We finish a couple of other quests, done in the process of cheese-hunting...
And then we finish part V of LP.
(couldn't find this track on youtube - it may seem that you can find just about everything there, but in fact lots of obscure projects are actually absent from it; and this particular dark ambient track is just perfect for this stage of LP)
So we got better.
Actually, when I was playing the game, taking screenshots & stuff, I had a different plan for this stage of LP - I planned to convince everyone that it was actually ironman LP and now, as the character died, it's prematurely terminatede. Like, I had considered saying "This LP is dead" directly, then, after waiting for month or two...
Making a ninja update, starting with: "NO, THIS LP IS UNDEAD!" Allcaps, obv. What a beautifully lame pun that would've been. But there can't be anything good in this world, right?
Anyway, having paid for it with our life in all meanings possible, we ascend to lichdom.
Boy, that sure does wonders for our looks.
And our hit points & mana pool.
And for resistances too - no longer we'll be bothered by body & mind magics (there are few monsters who actually use them, though) and we've gained +20 to elemental resistances. Now, I'll save resistance explanation for future update, but, basically, going from 0 to 20 is great.
Now let's us get back our money...
So we can get regeneration skill. It's a badly done skill, tbh. Each level of mastery gives you 1 hp per 5 in-game minutes, so you can get from 1 to 4 hp regen (depending on your skill level and class). The problem is, master & grandmaster are hardly worth it - gaining 2 hp per 5 minutes regen for 9 skill point investment is nice, especially in the early stages of the game, gaining 4 hp per 5 minutes for 54 skill point investment is not half as nice, especially since that regen begins to become unnoticeable once you get into mid-game.
We also gain 4 levels for our sufferings - those promotion quests give huge XP rewards.
Our points are channeled to achieve the newly available grand masteries of air magic, water magic & meditation.
We head to murmurwoods, which has already recovered from our previous visit.
That doesn't last.
Making the precious white potions available to ourselves...
We decide to complete a dark elf promotion quest.
After all, the fly spell gives us an ability to explore maps without risking much. Here you see us finding a special Tree (which is not hard to find as it's marked with a freaking big arrow on the ground). It can exchange various gemstones for different rewards and, in particular, it can transform diamonds into horseshoes, meaning we get 2 skill points for each diamond we find. That's pretty nice - always buy diamonds from the magical shops if you can afford it.
Challenges have strange interaction with area respawns - they change the attribute they test, and sometimes they can give you another skill point bonus if you qualify, sometimes they write that "you've already won". Maybe it's not about challenge's location, but about whether or not you've won such contest of that particular level? Like, if you've won +5 skill points personality contest in ravenshore, you can't also win it here. If, however, you've won a contest of intelligence there and here is personality - go ahead, shoot. But if ravenshore's contest will later respawn to be personality contest, it won't give a bonus to you. That seems reasonable.
Not sure if that's the case, though - maybe they're just bugged.
As you can see, our armageddons are too weak to finish the whole map yet - plenty of high-tier monsters remain. But we're not here to fight, we're here to rescue that statue.
Girl, what a chitchatting talent you have - you're the first person to make me blind by talking.
We use murmurwoods planar gate to enter the plane of air. We're going stealthily - don't want to fight here yet.
We just want to grandmaster our air magic. To be honest, it's more of a token grandmaster - we aren't going to use starburst (or other combat air spells, for that matter), and it doesn't improve either fly or invisibility that much. More than a hour of invisibility is excessive, and fly draining 12 mana points per hou is not a big deal. Well, we have some skill points to spend, so why not?
Then it's by foot to garrote gorge. Here we witness a peculiar area respawn, dropping lots of random reagents on the edge of the dragonslayers' camp.
But we really came here to achieve ultimate understanding of this world and it's rotten ways. That's another 28% increase, making us earn 179% of XP.
Time to test it on live subjects...
Excellent, just excellent (of course, that's not all from the gorge - that's also counting murmurwoods' armageddons)
And we still have some ground to cover - those tier-3 dragonslayers have almost a half of HP remaining. They lack ranged attack, though, so flight coupled with toxic clouds (and a temple nearby) makes short (but I'd preferred instant, really - even short is a chore when there's no threat) work of them.
Same goes for their enslaved dragon pets, whom we relieve out of their misery. They're breathless and so quite harmless, yet it takes lots of spell casts to bring their huge life points down to zero.
We're even finishing one in primitive "shoot it with arrows" manner as our mana runs out just when we brought it deep into red HPs.
We're also cleaning this camp to the west, as it's important for a dragon promotion quest.
We use dragon breath to speed up the process, though it's still far from devastating at this point. Great, but not devastating.
Then we clean up nagas - only high-tier ones survive and, as they're quite damaged, they don't offer much challenge.
We fly to the local obelisk
And discover some collateral damage in the process - obviously, armageddons killed some of the local dragons too. Eh, whatever, they'll just breed more.
It's, like, survival of the fittest & stuff.
More XP goes our way.
Jump to alvar, jump to shadowspire, grand master meditation.
Now it gives us 25 mana per skillpoint, almost doubling our mana pool. It's a really important skill for singleton.
Then we visit a red light district to have some fun & relax.
Umm, no. The only disadvantage of lichdom is that that ceases to be an option, so we're simply nuking another map.
As we're suddenly became short on money, we fly around the map, picking corpses for some spare change. Note how only the high tier bone dragons survive - there's also a bug here. They're supposed to be immune to dark magic, yet armageddon still harms them (as if it needs to be more broken).
TP to balthazar's lair, exit to ravage roaming, stealth flight to ogre fortress, all to loot a very special crate here.
No luck with the item, however.
KK, let's head to the nearby gate to elemental plane of water.
As it was with air, we're hear to learn, killing will come later. Unlike air magic, grand mastering water is a must - lloyd's beacon saves you lots of time and, together with GM town portal, servers as an ultimate escape mechanism.
Then it's some training, interrupted by a quick joint to Zanthora's lab.
We'll get our full revenge later - now it was just an assassination order.
The job done right leads us to our first bounty hunter rank - first is not really important, just a small XP bonus.
Here's what the relic shield does. Actually, it's a semi-decent item for shield-using characters - after all, you don't want those basilisk & gorgons to be insta-killing you. Even if you won't use it on a constant basis, it's good to have it stashed in the ravenshore, I guess. But, as we can't use shields, we're gonna be just selling it.
Sometimes, high-tier monsters surviving your armageddons (and you either forgetting to mop them up or simply missing them while doing so) can play to your advantage.
I mean, what if you're offered bounty for their head?
All those levels gained give us astonishing amounts of skill points - we double our dark magic skill and even decide to master the earth magic.
In terms of combat potential, it's pretty useless, however, telekinesis can give us some decent strategical advantage - we're frail and don't want to get anywhere near the monsters, so opening doors from afar sounds like a nice idea.
Well, not that frail anymore - we can take a couple of hits after all that training we've done.
We're not against doing some more.
Let's wipe out ravage roaming.
Gorgons are tough - even the middle tier survives. Also, they're immune to air & fire magics, so, despite looking totally vulnerable to meteor shower & starburst, they can't be killed that way. But who uses elemental magic in M&M VIII? They're not immune to dragon's breath and that's what counts.
All in all, the area doesn't provide too much of a challenge, however, there's a nice contest here.
We get low on mana so once again it's Longseeker time. Good toy, saves us some effort.
Flying around the map, we loot some corpses - as you've seen, I'm mostly abstaining from it in this LP as it's another chore the game offers, but we're low on gold after all that training so let's suffer for a while. We also loot chests situated in the walls of this fortress.
Those ancient wyverns are actually dangerous - they have a chance of insta-gibbing you. But that's if they get close, and you really shouldn't let them do so.
We jump back to civilization, to sell some of our loots. Returning to ravage roaming, we sell forged vouchers we've found in the smuggers' lair to some local swindler. Considering we work for alvarian merchants, that doesn't sound ethical, but we're turning whole cities into mass graveyards here - stealing a coin or two from our "boss" (and since when we actually agreed to have one?) will hardly harm our moral stance.
We loot dread pirate stanley's treasure, which those gorgons were guarding. Except for the diamonds, not much of interests here - just money, gemstones to sell and a fixed artifact.
Measure is mediocre - it's better than your average sword, but it's the worst out of artifact swords. I guess it's good against ogres, yet they're neither numerous nor challenging in this game. Well, maybe they're challenging for solo knight, but you need to defeat gorgons to get it and they're much tougher than ogres in the first place, so... Maybe with lucky fly scroll?
Dark elf can put it to use, though - you don't care about low damage since you shoot everything with your bow, you run from melee, and that +40 endurance can help you against stunlock. Yeah, that's a valid use. And, since it respawns together with the area, you can even get two of them for a +80 endurance bonus.
Jumping to alvar, we master our earth magic skill...
And use a considerable sum of gold to pimp our spellbook. Not that we'll be using majority of those, but it's nice to have pretty pictures instead of a blank space.
What's most important, we get a copy of Lloyd's Beacon book so now we're as mobile as possible in this game.
And another hit job is on the horizon - yeah, I'm really determined to get a maximum rank in the guild (and, once again, no save scumming in these affairs).
Sneak to your target...
Fry it with dragon's breath...
Have a large sum of money transferred to your overseas account (not true).
And, as we're great with the jobs, the fun just doesn't cease to end.
Awww, ain't he cute? And to consider he was such an ugly middle-aged dude...
(the point here is that we're gaining more levels and upping dark magic - as I've said, we're doing the assassinations in-between our training sessions)
Before that, we finally buy a telekinesis spell (we definitely want that skill point investment to pay off) - man, getting proper spellbooks can sometimes be hard without savescumming.
Then it's our last slog to murmurwoods - from this point, no more. We can teleport here instantly from now on, without wasting five days.
With flight, you can easily find some awesome ore around the portal gate, however, what's the point anymore? With one exception, we hardly need any non-unique items. And even that sole exception can be replaced with a certain artifact.
Unlike our previous victims, those air elementals don't go out without a fight.
Their lightning bolt attack is quite fast and not as easy to dodge with aerial maneuvers (at least in 2x speed mode). However, we have enough hit points to prevail in one swift and brutal (wasting half of our mana on one elemental, lol - those dragon breath's do dry you) combat.
We return in quite battered condition (but that was on our way back - elementals themselves do not distribute status effects; iirc, I used a potion of haste to increase my dps and got weak once it has ended), but the reward was totally worth it.
Then we're visiting Zanthora's lab for, like, the third time and still we're not here for revenge - we're really calm and calculating type, oh we are.
We're in for some fedex quests - go into lab, talk with a dude, jump to ravenshore, talk with a dude, get a gem...
Save the dude. Oh, how interesting it would've been if not for a town portal spell!
Enchanting a couple of rings we've found in our travels, we craft a +17 (maximum that you can get out of enchant item spell) ring of alchemy. Now we can start brewing those white potions.
And we complete a knight promotion quest (also dropping a beacon in garrote gorge) so we can gain our xps and get rid of that quest spear wasting our inventory spell. One obvious singleton hardship that I haven't mentioned yet is inventory space - there's never nearly enough for it. You're saved by the fact that money are worthless and you don't have to sell lots of different crap to get around, but still, at times it's really annoying, especially when it comes to hoarding alchemical reagents (considering you're using 6 of them per one white potion of healing/mana, you can never gather enough).
Damn, at this point we're more assassin than lich, even if there's no such class in M&M VIII.
And again we're saved by the grace of failing to exterminate some monsters
Gathering 30k total (you need 10k of rewards for the first one and 20k for the second one - quite a number of job), we gain another promotion and another small xp bonus. 30k to go 'til the final one...
As we're in ravenshore, we decide to breeze through some of the early dungeons. Yes, breeze because we're clearly overtrained for them. What can those wolfies do?
Take, like, a third of our HPs. That's a singleton run so let's not overestimate ourselves - everything hurts.
At least we're able to minimaze the amount of hurting we take from the chests, opening them from afar via telekinesis. Who needs disarm trap with it? (that's a huge design problem, btw)
Healing up, we co to loot the temple of eep. Ratmen & rats here - we've done them before, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Yeah, they drop relatively fast and we're even holding well in combat...
But they manage to get us diseased. WTF? We're bloody undead, we're supposed to have a body immunity, how can they get us diseased? Somehow, they can. Whatever, they're still dead.
And all their cheese now belongs to us.
Ravage roaming, chapel of eep. It's a really small dungeon, with some easy jumping puzzles and high tier rats.
We're still not tough enough for this crap - just one room of them and we're close to the red zone. Eh, we shouldn't conserve our mana so much - yeah, shrapmetal is expensive, but what's the point of having spell points when you're dead? (could've done lame pun about us being dead already, but no, enough is enough)
So that's what we do - spam shrapmetal to drop them almost instantly.
The sole conundrum here is those corridors blocking projectiles in some points, making us whiff on a couple of spells. Nevermind, we've got a plenty of them.
The room is trapped with teleporting floortiles - nothing intricate, getting to that chest is real easy, but we're once again using telekinesis, just to be fashionable.
Another ball of cheese for our collection.
Garrote gorge, grand cathedral of eep. Bigger than the previous two, but it works pretty much the first one - no fancy design, just slightly tougher enemies.
Using our freshly discovered "no conservants" tactics, we move to our goal without encountering much resistance.
Once all of the rat bastards are dead...
Third kind of cheese falls in our hands.
Not that we want to keep them - we're missing digestive system, don't forget about that.
Let's just peddle them to someone who actually values that crap so we can get more xps and moneys.
We finish a couple of other quests, done in the process of cheese-hunting...
And then we finish part V of LP.
I really like the way your character's death coincides with becoming a Lich :D Also, played this game, like, 5 times. Only now did I learn that Liches can learn regeneration.
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Part VI.
(we begin part VI right where we've ended V, obviously, but the real clue here is the name of the album)
Browsing through the minotaurs' magical shop, we find ourselves an air magic medallion that grants a 50% bonus to the skill (meaning that if we have an air magic rank of 10, we'll have a +5 bonus). All in all, every "of magic" ring or amulet is a great item, although we're hardly in need of air in particular (liches lack lungs, you know) - as I've said, we're gonna use only fly & invisibility (oh, and a wizard's eye, I guess), and at 10 hours a cast they're already long enough. Still, we buy it just in case.
We also decide to get some dagger skills - we're still wielding that stupid club we got at the start of the game and that's, like, so-o-o 20 000 BC. As a modern and fashionable lich, we just could not have tolerated this any longer.
That's much better. Also, we could've used some new boots. Less greener ones, I suppose.
We've already committed a number of raids on ogre's fortress, but now it's time to finish them for sure. We use poison spray at range, just to save mana...
And throw shrapmetals once we get close.
Bastardly mages do curse us just before they die. Apart from the paralysis/stone/death/eradication (which defeat us immediately), "cursed" is the worst condition of the game - it makes us miss 50% of our attacks (irrelevant for us, but hurtful for any melee character; dragons & dark elves armed with carnage bow ignore those misses, btw, as they autohit, however, even they suffer from the second part of the curse - 50% of failing any spell you cast; that's really unacceptable).
We could've healed ourselves with a simple potion, but before we think of that we beacon out to the nearest temple, then return and dispatch the next bunch of mages as quick as possible. Those dragon breaths start to pack some punch.
We rescue the smugglers' leader daughter (boy, he's must be happy father to have a beautiful daughter like this, oh yeah)
And, as an additional reward, we're using some barrels located at the end of the fortress' dungeon.
Speaking of smugglers and barrels... We return to the ratmen cave to report us resolving the whole kidnapping situation and find that it has already respawned - this dungeon respawns every 6 months. And all those tasty barrels respawn together with it, so it's a good idea to visit it frequently - there's a significant amount of barrels here, maybe up to 20.
Shadowspire. Time to pillage the local vampire's lair.
On your knees before the true master of darkness, suckers.
Yeah, we probably could've come here earlier, as they don't offer that much resistance (apart from taking half of our HPs, that is).
The lair itself is pretty small, so we burst our way though it.
Even if they throw ghastly skulls at us, it won't help them much (not to mention that we're supposed to be immune to mind magic).
We've came there for vial of grave dirt, btw. Giving it to our client, we resolve another case.
Then it's time for some real challenge - let's see how we fare against the dragons on our own? Time for an epic battle!
Kind of. Couple of shrapmetals was all it took, and we're not even wounded seriously.
Maybe fighting couple of his mates at once will prove to be difficult?
Sorta. We're in the reds, but they're in the deads (horrible, I know).
And even if we're low on life, we still take that one - see, dragons have two branches in VIII. They look just the same, but one is ranged and the other is purely melee, and as this cavern is vast, we can kite it to our shriveled heart's content. Well, I guess if we dig it out of that lich jar we'll actually see if it''s content or not...
This cavern has a fixed reward in its chest - an artifact bow. Now, unlike with other artifacts, it's bugged - you can't identify it at the shops, only identifying skills will do and we don't have those. So I'll just describe it here - it deals 5d4+12 damage per hit (that's as high as it gets) and it's a carnage bow, meaning that its arrow explode when they touch anything, dealing area of effect damage. And, probably due to a bug, they autohit (which, as I've mentioned before, is awesome). The only downside is that you can seriously hurt yourself when shooting at close range and it deals fire damage, meaning that some enemies are immune to it. Still, it's a mainstay weapon for the dark elf class. We don't need it, however, so we leave it here as it cannot be sold.
We also get a charm of freedom from one of the dragons (great item for any singleton character - one of the endgame enemies can actually paralyze you and status effects go through that mind immunity)
And a better regen ring from another. TBH, I would've preferred a straight +25 HP ring, but we'll do with what we're looting.
We also have found a seriously ugly looking helmet for ourselves. Sheesh, better find some alternative to that. Man, I do miss angelic helmets of M&M VI...
Since we've developed a craving for some more hot dragon action, we travel to ironsands. It has respawned so we nuke it immediately.
The Rock (which, obviously, respawns along with the area) yields us another relic (later about it).
We Zyclon B remaining cyclops - as we've progressed in dark magic, now only the highest tier survives.
Win a local contest...
And dive into dragon cave, trying to find whose dragon breath is stronger - ours or theirs.
Unlike shadowspire cavern, there's lots of ranged dragons here, so we're forced to retreat.
While we port out, we see that the dagger wound isles has once again gathered some population.
Taking a note of that, we launch ourselves back into fray.
Thankfully, rest of the cave goes lighter on shooting dragons, so it's easier for us to shrapmetal our way through it.
Soon, only the last defenders remain...
And, as you've see from our mana indicator, we've withheld nothing to dispatch them. Our reward is a chest full of artifact goodies. Well, theoretically, they are goodies. Practially, they're worthless for us.
It's a decent crossbow for an elf, although Longseeker is much better - 5d2+10 is almost the same as 4d2+12, yet longseeker actually gives you 50 accuracy instead of removing it and, what's most important, it gives you +4 to your bow skill. Sure, that doesn't matter if you sport a 3x dark elf party (there you want both longseeker and lightning crossbow), but otherwise it's not as good.
Despite being named a club, breaker is actually a mace (meaning that only a character with mace skill can wield it while clubs can be used by everyone). And it's the best club in the game, sporting a nice damage stats and a nice body damage enchantment (unlike with VII, not everything is nearly or totally immune to body magic). It's only for trolls and clerics, obviously.
Supreme plate is great for knight in theory, but on practice it's spoiled by its bonus being pretty much irrelevant. Swift gives -20 to your recovery time, but as a knight you'll have an armsmaster skill of at least 40, meaning that you'll already have -80 to your recovery time (and, as basic time is 100 and the lowest limit for close combat weapons is 30, you'll hit it just by that). It's not a bad suit of armour, obviously, and it's great if you find it in early game, but it's not as good as it was intended to be.
Having honed our ogre slaying skills in alvar, we set our course for their main base in ravage roaming.
Nothing spectacular here, to be honest.
Just a routine slaughter.
Those narrow, long corridors give us some real advantage in positioning, so nothing can get near to us.
And even if it gets there, it's shredded to pieces by shards of molten metal.
Near the end of the dungeon, we loosen our self-restrictions, spamming dragon breaths carelessly.
And here you can see the Zog. Not the ZOG, all coincidences are intentional (although I do wonder, would modern game journalist accuse the game of antisemitism if it came out recently), just Zog, the local big honcho. He manages to curse us before dying, but the whole meeting is extremely anticlimactic - couple of times you've been told how dangerous and mean he is, and then he appears to be just slightly stronger than a usual tier-3 ogre mage (if stronger at all).
Decursing ourselves via porting, we smite the remnants of ogres...
And get our prize - a stolen dragon's leader egg. Guess these ogres were pro-choice, huh? And, since we've just squashed them, I'm sure liberal journalist wouldn't liked that too. Damn, maybe I should become one too - I already see beginning of majestic wishlist article about Ubisoft needing to redeem the series for their hateful & bigoted past...
Obviously, there was an assassination job involved - terrorism and murder is how you fight ZOG, kids. Or is it how ZOG fight us, I always confuse it... Well, they're radical either way.
Dragon leader is pleased to have his egg back.
Jumping to ravenshore, we initiate another exterminatus. Those elves are dark so they deserve it, right?
Getting that cleric to open The Tree for us once again, we get ourselves a great artifact swords (not that it's great for us).
Accuracy bonus is irrelevant, but it deals lots of damage, especially since light magic is hard to resist. But it's the knights who need it, not us.
Beaconing back to ironsands, we explore a tunnel under the lake of fire. It's filled with lake, who now are but a nuisance...
And tritons, who are a bigger deal, yet still can be categorized as annoyance.
Since tunnel is extremely short, we can give it our everything.
We open that chest with telekinesis - it's strongly trapped and, while we'll probably survive the blast, we've already suffered enough in this LP.
It contains another couple of artifacts.
Guardian is the best spear weapon that there is - not sure why it's priced at 15k, it's much better than everything else. Solid damage of the weapon itself, solid enchantment damage (solid for a weapon, that is - compared to our 374 dmg breaths it's absolutely ridiculous), minor stat bonus, no disadvantages. Fine tool for a knight.
Now these boots are the real deal. Unlike swift weapons, they give the 20 recovery time bonus to absolutely everything, making us perma-hasted (almost - haste gives 25, but then, they actually stack with haste). Now, they're not as broken for any sort of caster (spells too have a fixed minimal recovery time that, it seems, cannot be decreased even further), but they are a true treasure for dark elf as you can't have enough recovery time bonuses with them.
(I've searched for the video of Leo actually saying new shoes, or was it boots? well, it was to no avail)
Still, why won't we use them?
Alvarian judgment day - if only you'd stayed dead, folks, you wouldn't have to bother with all that short but painful demise once again. Learn from your mistakes, dammit. Not that I complain - more XPs for us.
Ogre fortress' secret chest also respawned, but it's a bogus - another artifact bow of carnage, the noblebone bow. Like, you get it in fixed chest in shadowspire dragon's cave, but you also can find it as a random treasure. Great for archer parties, but not for us.
Erase the shadowspire...
Then to garrote gorge, naga bank. Lots of nagas at the entrance, but we enter in combat mode so we're able to fire before they even approach us. Well, that doesn't matter for lich, but it would've been important if we were an archer.
Shrapnel shards just don't care.
And entrance point is the biggest challenge of this dungeon (if you dare to call this doghouse so) - rest is even easier. Especially for us.
Another telekinesis to avoid the trap...
And we get a combo of quest drum + tournament bow.
Once again, Longseeker is better than the relic - same damage, almost the same bow bonus, extra +50 accuracy is insignificant and no swift & armor bonus just sucks. It can be useful for archer parties, but not for singleton elves and for us it's merely extra money.
Another quest done. Dragons are our allies, but it's not like we're loyal to any other men, besides, most dragon hunters are too dead to do anything with said drum.
Surely we slipped an assassination job in the middle of this.
Then we remember we ought to nuke dagger wound isles. Not much exp to gain here...
But we're doing it for the fun, mostly - those lizardmen/pirate encounters respawn almost immediately so we can nuke them again (no unlimited xp loops here - they stop after a couple of spawns; there might be a loop if you just kill the pirates, but that's helluva tedious).
Flying around ravenshore to peruse some barrels after respawn (with our teleportation skills, we're absolutely schizophrenic in our exploration) , we find a semi-hidden chest in northwest corner of a map, accessible only by flying. Nothing fancy in it, though, but the game could've used more stuff like this.
Oh, since we've nuked alvar, we've also become eligible to finish another quest - like, we've already done before, but the games suffer from a strange bug where some of those genocide quests are only completable after a whole map respawn & the second and final death of victims.
We also begin to brew some white healing potions - we have plenty of reagents and backtracking can be a chore. We're not especially diligent with the alchemy, however, else it becomes an even greater chore.
The hills of alvar also feature some ore (well, already useless to us) and alchemical reagents (but we're too lazy to collect them in all their entirety).
We do have enough to have some fire resistance potions...
So we can solve another quest.
Then we gain an unbelievably late fire magic expertise - we have skillpoints to spare with dark magic costing 30+ sp a pop, besides, we're tired from running in the dark. Torchlight is a good spell (and, unfortunately, the best spell fire magic school has to offer in VIII).
Dark dwarven caverns, neighbouring alvar - a seres of twisted tunnels, filled with living boulders of various proportions. They sport a strange ranged attack so we don't kid with them.
And the bigger ones can break our items, so we're even more serious with them.
Dead serious.
We find the minotaur promotion quest axe, but that's just a half of it.
Opening a door with telekinesis (one of the few cases where it helps us to gain a better strategical positon) to mantain some distance we engage some dark dwarves. They're shooting attacks are strong, unlike their hp pools.
But understand me right - they're definitely no pushovers. Just not dangerous enough.
Though we do have to regen once before exploring this place completely.
Harshest part of it is not monsters, but this narrow passage. It features quite a number of pressure plates, each one of them triggering a release of rock blast spell from that hole in the wall. One is tolerable, but just walking straight will release dozens of them and that's certain death.
However, before going further we discover that our inventory is totally clogged, so we jump back to civilization to clear some space up (while completing promotion quest)
Then we go through it. Well, it's not that hard - we just have to jump a lot between those room entrances, avoiding as much of the corridor's floor as possible.
In one of the last rooms, we find the grandest prize of this dungeon.
Then we explore it fully, just for completion's sake.
And what's the prize? A ring of the planes which is simply awesome. And why it's awesome?
Well, I'll tell at the start of the next part.
(we begin part VI right where we've ended V, obviously, but the real clue here is the name of the album)
Browsing through the minotaurs' magical shop, we find ourselves an air magic medallion that grants a 50% bonus to the skill (meaning that if we have an air magic rank of 10, we'll have a +5 bonus). All in all, every "of magic" ring or amulet is a great item, although we're hardly in need of air in particular (liches lack lungs, you know) - as I've said, we're gonna use only fly & invisibility (oh, and a wizard's eye, I guess), and at 10 hours a cast they're already long enough. Still, we buy it just in case.
We also decide to get some dagger skills - we're still wielding that stupid club we got at the start of the game and that's, like, so-o-o 20 000 BC. As a modern and fashionable lich, we just could not have tolerated this any longer.
That's much better. Also, we could've used some new boots. Less greener ones, I suppose.
We've already committed a number of raids on ogre's fortress, but now it's time to finish them for sure. We use poison spray at range, just to save mana...
And throw shrapmetals once we get close.
Bastardly mages do curse us just before they die. Apart from the paralysis/stone/death/eradication (which defeat us immediately), "cursed" is the worst condition of the game - it makes us miss 50% of our attacks (irrelevant for us, but hurtful for any melee character; dragons & dark elves armed with carnage bow ignore those misses, btw, as they autohit, however, even they suffer from the second part of the curse - 50% of failing any spell you cast; that's really unacceptable).
We could've healed ourselves with a simple potion, but before we think of that we beacon out to the nearest temple, then return and dispatch the next bunch of mages as quick as possible. Those dragon breaths start to pack some punch.
We rescue the smugglers' leader daughter (boy, he's must be happy father to have a beautiful daughter like this, oh yeah)
And, as an additional reward, we're using some barrels located at the end of the fortress' dungeon.
Speaking of smugglers and barrels... We return to the ratmen cave to report us resolving the whole kidnapping situation and find that it has already respawned - this dungeon respawns every 6 months. And all those tasty barrels respawn together with it, so it's a good idea to visit it frequently - there's a significant amount of barrels here, maybe up to 20.
Shadowspire. Time to pillage the local vampire's lair.
On your knees before the true master of darkness, suckers.
Yeah, we probably could've come here earlier, as they don't offer that much resistance (apart from taking half of our HPs, that is).
The lair itself is pretty small, so we burst our way though it.
Even if they throw ghastly skulls at us, it won't help them much (not to mention that we're supposed to be immune to mind magic).
We've came there for vial of grave dirt, btw. Giving it to our client, we resolve another case.
Then it's time for some real challenge - let's see how we fare against the dragons on our own? Time for an epic battle!
Kind of. Couple of shrapmetals was all it took, and we're not even wounded seriously.
Maybe fighting couple of his mates at once will prove to be difficult?
Sorta. We're in the reds, but they're in the deads (horrible, I know).
And even if we're low on life, we still take that one - see, dragons have two branches in VIII. They look just the same, but one is ranged and the other is purely melee, and as this cavern is vast, we can kite it to our shriveled heart's content. Well, I guess if we dig it out of that lich jar we'll actually see if it''s content or not...
This cavern has a fixed reward in its chest - an artifact bow. Now, unlike with other artifacts, it's bugged - you can't identify it at the shops, only identifying skills will do and we don't have those. So I'll just describe it here - it deals 5d4+12 damage per hit (that's as high as it gets) and it's a carnage bow, meaning that its arrow explode when they touch anything, dealing area of effect damage. And, probably due to a bug, they autohit (which, as I've mentioned before, is awesome). The only downside is that you can seriously hurt yourself when shooting at close range and it deals fire damage, meaning that some enemies are immune to it. Still, it's a mainstay weapon for the dark elf class. We don't need it, however, so we leave it here as it cannot be sold.
We also get a charm of freedom from one of the dragons (great item for any singleton character - one of the endgame enemies can actually paralyze you and status effects go through that mind immunity)
And a better regen ring from another. TBH, I would've preferred a straight +25 HP ring, but we'll do with what we're looting.
We also have found a seriously ugly looking helmet for ourselves. Sheesh, better find some alternative to that. Man, I do miss angelic helmets of M&M VI...
Since we've developed a craving for some more hot dragon action, we travel to ironsands. It has respawned so we nuke it immediately.
The Rock (which, obviously, respawns along with the area) yields us another relic (later about it).
We Zyclon B remaining cyclops - as we've progressed in dark magic, now only the highest tier survives.
Win a local contest...
And dive into dragon cave, trying to find whose dragon breath is stronger - ours or theirs.
Unlike shadowspire cavern, there's lots of ranged dragons here, so we're forced to retreat.
While we port out, we see that the dagger wound isles has once again gathered some population.
Taking a note of that, we launch ourselves back into fray.
Thankfully, rest of the cave goes lighter on shooting dragons, so it's easier for us to shrapmetal our way through it.
Soon, only the last defenders remain...
And, as you've see from our mana indicator, we've withheld nothing to dispatch them. Our reward is a chest full of artifact goodies. Well, theoretically, they are goodies. Practially, they're worthless for us.
It's a decent crossbow for an elf, although Longseeker is much better - 5d2+10 is almost the same as 4d2+12, yet longseeker actually gives you 50 accuracy instead of removing it and, what's most important, it gives you +4 to your bow skill. Sure, that doesn't matter if you sport a 3x dark elf party (there you want both longseeker and lightning crossbow), but otherwise it's not as good.
Despite being named a club, breaker is actually a mace (meaning that only a character with mace skill can wield it while clubs can be used by everyone). And it's the best club in the game, sporting a nice damage stats and a nice body damage enchantment (unlike with VII, not everything is nearly or totally immune to body magic). It's only for trolls and clerics, obviously.
Supreme plate is great for knight in theory, but on practice it's spoiled by its bonus being pretty much irrelevant. Swift gives -20 to your recovery time, but as a knight you'll have an armsmaster skill of at least 40, meaning that you'll already have -80 to your recovery time (and, as basic time is 100 and the lowest limit for close combat weapons is 30, you'll hit it just by that). It's not a bad suit of armour, obviously, and it's great if you find it in early game, but it's not as good as it was intended to be.
Having honed our ogre slaying skills in alvar, we set our course for their main base in ravage roaming.
Nothing spectacular here, to be honest.
Just a routine slaughter.
Those narrow, long corridors give us some real advantage in positioning, so nothing can get near to us.
And even if it gets there, it's shredded to pieces by shards of molten metal.
Near the end of the dungeon, we loosen our self-restrictions, spamming dragon breaths carelessly.
And here you can see the Zog. Not the ZOG, all coincidences are intentional (although I do wonder, would modern game journalist accuse the game of antisemitism if it came out recently), just Zog, the local big honcho. He manages to curse us before dying, but the whole meeting is extremely anticlimactic - couple of times you've been told how dangerous and mean he is, and then he appears to be just slightly stronger than a usual tier-3 ogre mage (if stronger at all).
Decursing ourselves via porting, we smite the remnants of ogres...
And get our prize - a stolen dragon's leader egg. Guess these ogres were pro-choice, huh? And, since we've just squashed them, I'm sure liberal journalist wouldn't liked that too. Damn, maybe I should become one too - I already see beginning of majestic wishlist article about Ubisoft needing to redeem the series for their hateful & bigoted past...
Obviously, there was an assassination job involved - terrorism and murder is how you fight ZOG, kids. Or is it how ZOG fight us, I always confuse it... Well, they're radical either way.
Dragon leader is pleased to have his egg back.
Jumping to ravenshore, we initiate another exterminatus. Those elves are dark so they deserve it, right?
Getting that cleric to open The Tree for us once again, we get ourselves a great artifact swords (not that it's great for us).
Accuracy bonus is irrelevant, but it deals lots of damage, especially since light magic is hard to resist. But it's the knights who need it, not us.
Beaconing back to ironsands, we explore a tunnel under the lake of fire. It's filled with lake, who now are but a nuisance...
And tritons, who are a bigger deal, yet still can be categorized as annoyance.
Since tunnel is extremely short, we can give it our everything.
We open that chest with telekinesis - it's strongly trapped and, while we'll probably survive the blast, we've already suffered enough in this LP.
It contains another couple of artifacts.
Guardian is the best spear weapon that there is - not sure why it's priced at 15k, it's much better than everything else. Solid damage of the weapon itself, solid enchantment damage (solid for a weapon, that is - compared to our 374 dmg breaths it's absolutely ridiculous), minor stat bonus, no disadvantages. Fine tool for a knight.
Now these boots are the real deal. Unlike swift weapons, they give the 20 recovery time bonus to absolutely everything, making us perma-hasted (almost - haste gives 25, but then, they actually stack with haste). Now, they're not as broken for any sort of caster (spells too have a fixed minimal recovery time that, it seems, cannot be decreased even further), but they are a true treasure for dark elf as you can't have enough recovery time bonuses with them.
(I've searched for the video of Leo actually saying new shoes, or was it boots? well, it was to no avail)
Still, why won't we use them?
Alvarian judgment day - if only you'd stayed dead, folks, you wouldn't have to bother with all that short but painful demise once again. Learn from your mistakes, dammit. Not that I complain - more XPs for us.
Ogre fortress' secret chest also respawned, but it's a bogus - another artifact bow of carnage, the noblebone bow. Like, you get it in fixed chest in shadowspire dragon's cave, but you also can find it as a random treasure. Great for archer parties, but not for us.
Erase the shadowspire...
Then to garrote gorge, naga bank. Lots of nagas at the entrance, but we enter in combat mode so we're able to fire before they even approach us. Well, that doesn't matter for lich, but it would've been important if we were an archer.
Shrapnel shards just don't care.
And entrance point is the biggest challenge of this dungeon (if you dare to call this doghouse so) - rest is even easier. Especially for us.
Another telekinesis to avoid the trap...
And we get a combo of quest drum + tournament bow.
Once again, Longseeker is better than the relic - same damage, almost the same bow bonus, extra +50 accuracy is insignificant and no swift & armor bonus just sucks. It can be useful for archer parties, but not for singleton elves and for us it's merely extra money.
Another quest done. Dragons are our allies, but it's not like we're loyal to any other men, besides, most dragon hunters are too dead to do anything with said drum.
Surely we slipped an assassination job in the middle of this.
Then we remember we ought to nuke dagger wound isles. Not much exp to gain here...
But we're doing it for the fun, mostly - those lizardmen/pirate encounters respawn almost immediately so we can nuke them again (no unlimited xp loops here - they stop after a couple of spawns; there might be a loop if you just kill the pirates, but that's helluva tedious).
Flying around ravenshore to peruse some barrels after respawn (with our teleportation skills, we're absolutely schizophrenic in our exploration) , we find a semi-hidden chest in northwest corner of a map, accessible only by flying. Nothing fancy in it, though, but the game could've used more stuff like this.
Oh, since we've nuked alvar, we've also become eligible to finish another quest - like, we've already done before, but the games suffer from a strange bug where some of those genocide quests are only completable after a whole map respawn & the second and final death of victims.
We also begin to brew some white healing potions - we have plenty of reagents and backtracking can be a chore. We're not especially diligent with the alchemy, however, else it becomes an even greater chore.
The hills of alvar also feature some ore (well, already useless to us) and alchemical reagents (but we're too lazy to collect them in all their entirety).
We do have enough to have some fire resistance potions...
So we can solve another quest.
Then we gain an unbelievably late fire magic expertise - we have skillpoints to spare with dark magic costing 30+ sp a pop, besides, we're tired from running in the dark. Torchlight is a good spell (and, unfortunately, the best spell fire magic school has to offer in VIII).
Dark dwarven caverns, neighbouring alvar - a seres of twisted tunnels, filled with living boulders of various proportions. They sport a strange ranged attack so we don't kid with them.
And the bigger ones can break our items, so we're even more serious with them.
Dead serious.
We find the minotaur promotion quest axe, but that's just a half of it.
Opening a door with telekinesis (one of the few cases where it helps us to gain a better strategical positon) to mantain some distance we engage some dark dwarves. They're shooting attacks are strong, unlike their hp pools.
But understand me right - they're definitely no pushovers. Just not dangerous enough.
Though we do have to regen once before exploring this place completely.
Harshest part of it is not monsters, but this narrow passage. It features quite a number of pressure plates, each one of them triggering a release of rock blast spell from that hole in the wall. One is tolerable, but just walking straight will release dozens of them and that's certain death.
However, before going further we discover that our inventory is totally clogged, so we jump back to civilization to clear some space up (while completing promotion quest)
Then we go through it. Well, it's not that hard - we just have to jump a lot between those room entrances, avoiding as much of the corridor's floor as possible.
In one of the last rooms, we find the grandest prize of this dungeon.
Then we explore it fully, just for completion's sake.
And what's the prize? A ring of the planes which is simply awesome. And why it's awesome?
Well, I'll tell at the start of the next part.
Good stuff 
Aye, good indeed
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Part VII
So, I've promised to tell about resistances. Easy thing. Easy to tell, at least.
Each time you're dealt magical damage, the games uses a complicated way to see your chance of resisting. First it uses the formula of "1 - (30/(30 + your resistance stat + your luck bonus))" (yeah, game designers probably lived by motto of "divide and conquer"). Result is made into a percentage which serves as the check level. If that check fails, you're dealt full damage. Meaning that with luck bonus of 0 and resistances of zero, you're always getting dealt 100% damage.
If that check passes, incoming damage is divided in half and then the check is made again. And so it goes on until the check is finally failed or it passes four times in a row (meaning that in best scenario for you the spell will deal 1/16 of its initial damage).
Greyface, the author of great M&M VI-VIII patches, was so kind that he even calculated average damage reduction for different resistance levels for us (those are counted with luck bonus of 10, it seems):
0 100%
20 75%
40 60%
60 50%
100 39%
150 31%
200 26%
300 20%
What that means is that getting those resistance levels of 80-120 is crucial, and the rest is pleasant, but not half as important. Yeah, it's good to have resistances of 300 (and it's hardly impossible - even in full party mode you'll easily have a cleric with an effective light magic skill of at least 40, giving you a whopping bonus of 200 to all resistances), but you shouldn't go out of your way to gain those. This also means that, no matter how high you'll pump your resistances, you'll still get unlucky and dealt full damage relatively often, considering how much crap gets thrown at you on a constant basis. Lastly, as you can see, luck bonus is truly pathetic - it helps at early levels, but quickly gets almost redundant.
It is more important when it comes to the debilitating effects protection. Their mechanics is much simpler - 30/(30 + luck bonus + x), where x is:
for Weak, Asleep, Drunk, Disease, Unconscious, Age: endurance bonus
for Curse: personality bonus
for DrainSP, Dispel Magic: (personality bonus + intellect bonus)/2
for Insane, Paralyze, Afraid: mind resistance
for Stone: earth resistance
for Poison, Dead, Eradicated: body resistance (man, body resistance is really important)
for Break or Steal Item: item strength
As you can see, most of those bonuses are relatively low, so Luck does play a more deciding factors here. Despite that, even a maxed luck bonus doesn't offer a significant boost in protection, so don't bother with it too much.
Returning back to resistances - monsters use the same formula, but they don't have any luck (yeah, it's not fortunate to live in the same game world with us). One important note is that, unlike players, they have physical resistance, and you can see how even having a physical res of 30 (many high tier monsters have that much) will screw warrior classes even further.
Oh, and various debuffs you cast go at formula of 30/(30 + MonsterResistance + MonsterLevel/4). So if you want to paralyze a dragon, it's 30/(30 + 10 + 70/4) - 52%. If you want to mass distortion a dragon, it's 30/(30 + 35 + 70/4) - 36%. And it's even worse with the high tier monsters, so debuffs kinda suck.
Now for LP itself:
(just something arcane & mystical to set the right mood)
Equipping ring of the planes pumps our resistances from 20 to 60, meaning that instead of 75% damage we're dealt just 50% so we'll last 1.5 times longer now. That's almost hundred and fifty points of effective hps.
We also distribute our skill points in a truly predictable manner - just give us moar dark powers.
Then it's time to explore Alvar even further.
Those tents contain chests with lots of jump scrolls - useless for us, but probably treasure for most of the non-elemental magic characters.
Wasp hive.
Near the entrance we're greeted by just one insect, so we start easy.
They quickly grow in volumes, however, forcing us unleash our full power quickly.
Even that doesn't protect us from their sheer mass.
Nothing a good potion can't fix, though.
At least, however numerous, they do drop fast.
Soon, only a handful remains...
And then we exterminate the last defenders of hive.
Only one fleeting wasp got lost somewhere, but we're too lazy to seek it - let it be.
Jumping across the town, we're picking up an expert regeneration skill (yeah, comrade Storyfag, not only liches are able to learn it, they're able to expert it - as if they needed even more available skills in VIII)
And an expert dagger (just so we can look even cooler while dual-wielding).
Another lucky break - we forgot to harvest a couple of gorgons during respawn...
So we can earn a precious bounty reward for defeating them.
We jump to murmurwoods, only to discover it needing additional mortification.
Survivors are threatened with noxious vapors...
And then we gather all of the local horseshoes once more.
In one of the magic shops, we stumble upon an armageddon scroll - hmm, this can be used to deal some significant damage to one of the harder areas, let's hoard those.
Now it's the garrote gorge who just can't lay quiet. Actually, it's sorta vicious cycle - you armageddon the areas, gain xp, train levels and, once you've finished your training, areas respawn and you can nuke them once more so you train... It's not as perfect, but there's enough quest to fill the months in-between so you'll be leveling up and up and up as a Lich.
Our powers are close to cleansing the area fully. Close, but not there yet.
We're also able to finish this quest in this respawn.
Then, activating our thermo-optical camouflage, we decide to rob the dragons blind. They're kinda our allies, but a lich like us prefers to stand alone.
Somehow they do get angry, but you can't shoot at what you can't see.
Soon we get to their treasury and loot it clean.
(I'll admit that I had to reload here - lost control and bumped into one dragon; well, it's not like that's crucial - if I hadn't reloaded, I'd just ported out immediately, healed, beaconed back, recast invisibility and made another attempt, there's nothing hard here; the funny thing is - if you get in without any combat and then save & reload, dragons once again become friendly to you - eh, makes some sense, you're bloody invisible, after all).
Let's check our booty. Blade of Mercy is the best dagger in the game, made for the character that needs it the least. I mean, what's the point of lich to even actually try physical combat, when he can squash anything with his magic? Well, it's useful in a popamole parties, where you cast a lvl 40 hour of power and then fight by just mashing attack button in real time mode. It's not a fun way to play this game, though. It also can be useful if you find it Ravenshore, I guess - it's strong against really weak monsters.
Oh, and we find another dagger in the process...
So our fashion level gets even bigger.
Glomenmail is an okayish armor for dark elf. Like, in party games it's unneeded as you want to equip your elves with leather there, but in singleton it's decent enough, especially because of that resistance bonus. Resistances are important.
Lucky hat is trash. You've seen how great luck is. It's only good for the 10 skill points contests that require you to have 220 or so in their chosen attribute.
Hurr-durr, we go at it again...
Watching and watching how our damage output increases each time. BTW, seems like armageddon is totally irresistible - if it was another way (as it was in VI), survivors would have varied remaining HPs. But they don't.
Respawned treasure item is spiritslayer.
It's crappy - knight can use it, but he'll be better of finding a highest-tier vampiric halberd as it'll deal much more damage than this crap, and stat bonuses are more or less meaningless.
BTW, vampiric weapons give you either 20% of the damage you've done (all of the damage, including any bonuses and dual-wielded weapons) or 20% of remaining hps of your target, whichever is smaller. So, against a high level monsters, you'll gain roughly 20-50 hps per attack. If you dual-wield them, they both work, making that amount slightly more significant. In a singleton game, obviously - in party you just go for the damaging items, in singleton you'll think about sustainability of your damage.
Short trip to smugglers' cave to gather even more of those barrels.
Swift assassination of thunderbird on the plane of air.
They pay good for the heads of those elemental dwellers. Probably the feel of impending doom - meh, if they knew what to truly fear, they'd send some assassins after me... I wouldn't mind extra experience, yes.
Ah, our hundredth level - just one more hundred to go.
Murmurwoods, ancient troll home - it's about time we've solved this quest.
We came here relatively late because those wisps can hurt and because we need to kill those basilisk real fast or they'll stone/paralyze us.
That's why we show them no mercy. It's not like we show it to anyone, though.
I'm not sure how they'll relocate a whole village of trolls into one claustrophobic cavern, but hey, those are the trolls, let's not question their analytical capabilities and intellectual aptitude.
As we're in the ironsands anyways, let's choke the cyclops.
Shrapmetaling them may also work.
It's best to fight in the narrow passage - their gaze can paralyze you so getting surrounded and hit by them is a bad idea (we have a paralisis immunity pendant, yes, but we're so-o-o lazy to switch it with our current one...)
It's easier to snipe them from afar.
It takes no effort for us. Yeah, thats a nice dragon breath.
First quest item for the vampire promotion is ours.
Let's get the second one. Ravage roaming, crypt of Korbu. This dungeon has a real tough entrance guards. Luckily, since they're near the entrance, you can easily go with the scheme "get one down - escape - heal - return - repeat" (that's probably really important for singleton vampires).
We're fine without such trick, however.
Efreets are already beneath us.
There's also a sparks trap here, but it's sorta pretty fireworks for us already.
Rest of the crypt guards are nagas - meh, would've been easy 40 levels ago.
Main challenge here is actually putting this stupid sarcophagus inside our inventory - it takes literally half of it so we're forced to play some tetris before we're able to pick it up.
Whatever.
Let's get back on the story rails.
In the cleric vs necromancer business, guess whom we decide to side with?
Tough choice, tough choice.
The only problem is that we're forced to take this retard as our company.
Hope he doesn't die on us instantly. No sentiments, but we need him to show us a secret button.
Those clerics are pushover - the tier-3 cleric enemy is lvl 30. The tier-1 necromancer enemy is lvl 30. Figure this out (and tier-3 necromancer is lvl 57 and has pain reflection spell, meaning we can't kill him without taking 480 damage).
So we're here more for a flavor purposes - battling against necromancers is more interesting and rewarding (you get more XPs for helping the clerics).
It's not like we're interested in any sort of "dark forces camaraderie" (we're too sociopathic for that crap), however, promoting the cause of the church that actually teaches "destroy undead" spell to people seems like a bad idea.
This screenshot has some great potentiall for doing some "oi, dudes, what are you doing there, you're not catholic priests!" joke, but I don't like that sort of humor so I won't.
And lo, we find our quest item. Yeah, this dungeon is disgustingly plain and boring.
At least now we can kick that stupid cleric out and finish those last enemies on our own.
So the third and the final alliance is made.
Next destination - Regna.
Jumping to the dagger wound islands, we find a newly constructed building there.
Inside we discover a great deal of pirates.
Temporary great, anyway.
All those magical bolts being hurled at us force a drastic responce from our side - those pirate mages still pose a threat.
Some threat, maybe.
Dispatching a pirate leader, we find a key on his corpse.
It opens a chest with this particular sword.
And a passage to the submarine pen - time for some underwater travel.
Some guards provide an unfriendly greeting at the other side of our journey. Their loss.
Hello, Regna!
In local tavern, we give a fake report to the dread pirate stanley - bastard extremely rude, but we've already fucked him by stealing his life savings repeatedly so we let that slide.
Then it's the deciding arcomage championship victory - opp had a much better buildup than us (more of those broken "dragon" cards), but we've still won by resource race.
But most important for us is attaining grand mastery of dark magic - that means more shrapmetal shards and another armageddon cast per day. Oh, and an access to the strongest spell of the school.
We test our improved powers immediately on local population (they're worthless scum anyways, totally fit for human experimentation).
Only the highest tiers of enemies remain, and it's a near-death experience for them - groovy.
Then it's a business trip to the water plane.
Hitmen's affairs, y'know.
More levels, more progress.
Returning to ravenshore, we find a bunch of the pirate invaders messing around, bored by the fact that they have no one to kill as we've killed all the civilians already.
We relieve them of their boredom.
And so the city sleeps again.
BTW, that artifact sword? Terminus - decent for a knight. With GM armsmaster, it deals lots of damage, and the bonus stacks with the item enchantment one (so you can have a maximum of +17+7+8 from fleetfingers - 33, needing just 27 trained points in your skill). It's more a party oriented item, however - singleton knight would probably prefer to train his armsmaster up to 40, making the sword kinda redundant.
We also obtain a souldrinker spell - the grandest tool of the dark magic user. It doesn't boast the greatest damage of them all (just 25 + 1d8xdark magic skill), however, it does it to all monsters in sight and it heals you for the same amount (not that it doesn't even have to damage the enemies - you just have to cast it while seeing someone, even if that someone is magic-immune). So we have a self-healing spell, making us much more durable. The only problem is that it's extremely slow - it's roughly three times slower than a shrapmetal spell, for example.
Let's test it on some regnan dragons. Once they'll actually manage to damage us, obviously.
At this point, as long as we meet them in small numbers, they don't do much.
Now it's they who lack the durability.
Among their corpses, we find a great cloak. But later about that.
First let's suck some souls out of those beasties.
We're not using it as often, don't get the wrong idea - shrapmetal is quicker and more efficient.
We actually find another artifact on one of their corpses - a crappy belt. It might do something if you're aiming for 500 strength, but even then it's a damage increase of +5. Yeah, sure will help you against those 1k hp dragons. In other cases, it's even worse. As well as the stupid hat, it's only good for winning contests.
Cloak is also not that brilliant (in a party with cleric it's pretty much nothing), but for us those +10 resistance (and +5 freaking spell points) do have a meaning, so we'll use it.
We also gain acclaim as official arcomage champion.
Reward is another good sword that we don't need.
Then we kill all dragons in the outer areas of garrote gorge (what a good ally we make), but it's too late to complete that quests - you should do that before choosing to side with the dragons.
Doing some training, we invest some points into our meditation skill - yeah, there's still dark magic to be maxed out, but we want to cross that gap in a different matter. Besides, 1 point of gm meditation is 25 spell points so we've just gained 200 of them. That's a 3 souldrinker casts - more or less worth the price.
Then it's time to hunt even more dragons (we're the best ally they could've wished for!)
Now our dragon breath is definitely stronger than yours.
And even a simple toxic cloud takes a quarter of their HPs.
Only our limited mana pool prevents us from sowing endless pain and destruction.
But that's what lloyd's beacon is for - recharge and return to have more fun.
Ah, from individual dismemberment...
To collective torture.
And it pays off, damn right it pays off! Among their corpses we find the best thing we could find!
The crown to decorate us as ultimate master of dark arts!
Look how well does it fit us!
Then stare at this in awe - +20 bonus, gained in but moment.
(any of "dark magic" items are helluva difficult to find, so it was a cheerful moment - without it we'd have to train our dark magic skill to 60 and that would've made our walkthrough much grindier)
Yeah, this shrapmetal feels much sharper.
And dragon breath blasts as it never did before.
And 300 hp from souldrinker, oh, 300 hp from souldrinker...
BTW, the cavern has respawned since our stealth looting visit, so we find even more artifacts on the floor.
Finalty is horrible - it's damage can't compare with the damage of dual-wielded swords, and that recovery time penalty is really unpleasant. Sure, with well-trained GM armsmaster you can still have the lowest recovery time possible, but why bother? Just dual-wield some vampiric swords or the glomenthail/elsenrail combo.
Volcano is junk because it's an axe, that's all that can be said about it.
Ring of fusion is actually useful - "of water magic" makes our lloyd's beacons last longer so we don't have to return and reset them as often (that's a chore) and it's alchemy bonus stacks with other bonuses, so even if it's small it still improves your potion quality a lot. And endurance penalty is not as important - worst case scenario, you can wear the ring only when you actually brew the potions & cast beacons, that way it's pure profit.
Jumping to ironsands, we find it absolutely lively - how disgusting, let's correct that.
Surprisingly for ourselves, we barely survive our own armageddons. Should've thought about that - each armageddon cast is 110 points of irresistible damage atm, so 4x is 440 and we're only alive because of our regeneration items & skills. Yikes.
In The Rock we find a Havoc sword - it's only good for the dark elf, to boost your speed so you can shoot arrows even faster. Knight, as I've said, have no shortage of recovery time bonuses.
Another wipeout of ironsands brings us to level 120.
End of Part VII.
Each time you're dealt magical damage, the games uses a complicated way to see your chance of resisting. First it uses the formula of "1 - (30/(30 + your resistance stat + your luck bonus))" (yeah, game designers probably lived by motto of "divide and conquer"). Result is made into a percentage which serves as the check level. If that check fails, you're dealt full damage. Meaning that with luck bonus of 0 and resistances of zero, you're always getting dealt 100% damage.
If that check passes, incoming damage is divided in half and then the check is made again. And so it goes on until the check is finally failed or it passes four times in a row (meaning that in best scenario for you the spell will deal 1/16 of its initial damage).
Greyface, the author of great M&M VI-VIII patches, was so kind that he even calculated average damage reduction for different resistance levels for us (those are counted with luck bonus of 10, it seems):
0 100%
20 75%
40 60%
60 50%
100 39%
150 31%
200 26%
300 20%
What that means is that getting those resistance levels of 80-120 is crucial, and the rest is pleasant, but not half as important. Yeah, it's good to have resistances of 300 (and it's hardly impossible - even in full party mode you'll easily have a cleric with an effective light magic skill of at least 40, giving you a whopping bonus of 200 to all resistances), but you shouldn't go out of your way to gain those. This also means that, no matter how high you'll pump your resistances, you'll still get unlucky and dealt full damage relatively often, considering how much crap gets thrown at you on a constant basis. Lastly, as you can see, luck bonus is truly pathetic - it helps at early levels, but quickly gets almost redundant.
It is more important when it comes to the debilitating effects protection. Their mechanics is much simpler - 30/(30 + luck bonus + x), where x is:
for Weak, Asleep, Drunk, Disease, Unconscious, Age: endurance bonus
for Curse: personality bonus
for DrainSP, Dispel Magic: (personality bonus + intellect bonus)/2
for Insane, Paralyze, Afraid: mind resistance
for Stone: earth resistance
for Poison, Dead, Eradicated: body resistance (man, body resistance is really important)
for Break or Steal Item: item strength
As you can see, most of those bonuses are relatively low, so Luck does play a more deciding factors here. Despite that, even a maxed luck bonus doesn't offer a significant boost in protection, so don't bother with it too much.
Returning back to resistances - monsters use the same formula, but they don't have any luck (yeah, it's not fortunate to live in the same game world with us). One important note is that, unlike players, they have physical resistance, and you can see how even having a physical res of 30 (many high tier monsters have that much) will screw warrior classes even further.
Oh, and various debuffs you cast go at formula of 30/(30 + MonsterResistance + MonsterLevel/4). So if you want to paralyze a dragon, it's 30/(30 + 10 + 70/4) - 52%. If you want to mass distortion a dragon, it's 30/(30 + 35 + 70/4) - 36%. And it's even worse with the high tier monsters, so debuffs kinda suck.
Now for LP itself:
(just something arcane & mystical to set the right mood)
Equipping ring of the planes pumps our resistances from 20 to 60, meaning that instead of 75% damage we're dealt just 50% so we'll last 1.5 times longer now. That's almost hundred and fifty points of effective hps.
We also distribute our skill points in a truly predictable manner - just give us moar dark powers.
Then it's time to explore Alvar even further.
Those tents contain chests with lots of jump scrolls - useless for us, but probably treasure for most of the non-elemental magic characters.
Wasp hive.
Near the entrance we're greeted by just one insect, so we start easy.
They quickly grow in volumes, however, forcing us unleash our full power quickly.
Even that doesn't protect us from their sheer mass.
Nothing a good potion can't fix, though.
At least, however numerous, they do drop fast.
Soon, only a handful remains...
And then we exterminate the last defenders of hive.
Only one fleeting wasp got lost somewhere, but we're too lazy to seek it - let it be.
Jumping across the town, we're picking up an expert regeneration skill (yeah, comrade Storyfag, not only liches are able to learn it, they're able to expert it - as if they needed even more available skills in VIII)
And an expert dagger (just so we can look even cooler while dual-wielding).
Another lucky break - we forgot to harvest a couple of gorgons during respawn...
So we can earn a precious bounty reward for defeating them.
We jump to murmurwoods, only to discover it needing additional mortification.
Survivors are threatened with noxious vapors...
And then we gather all of the local horseshoes once more.
In one of the magic shops, we stumble upon an armageddon scroll - hmm, this can be used to deal some significant damage to one of the harder areas, let's hoard those.
Now it's the garrote gorge who just can't lay quiet. Actually, it's sorta vicious cycle - you armageddon the areas, gain xp, train levels and, once you've finished your training, areas respawn and you can nuke them once more so you train... It's not as perfect, but there's enough quest to fill the months in-between so you'll be leveling up and up and up as a Lich.
Our powers are close to cleansing the area fully. Close, but not there yet.
We're also able to finish this quest in this respawn.
Then, activating our thermo-optical camouflage, we decide to rob the dragons blind. They're kinda our allies, but a lich like us prefers to stand alone.
Somehow they do get angry, but you can't shoot at what you can't see.
Soon we get to their treasury and loot it clean.
(I'll admit that I had to reload here - lost control and bumped into one dragon; well, it's not like that's crucial - if I hadn't reloaded, I'd just ported out immediately, healed, beaconed back, recast invisibility and made another attempt, there's nothing hard here; the funny thing is - if you get in without any combat and then save & reload, dragons once again become friendly to you - eh, makes some sense, you're bloody invisible, after all).
Let's check our booty. Blade of Mercy is the best dagger in the game, made for the character that needs it the least. I mean, what's the point of lich to even actually try physical combat, when he can squash anything with his magic? Well, it's useful in a popamole parties, where you cast a lvl 40 hour of power and then fight by just mashing attack button in real time mode. It's not a fun way to play this game, though. It also can be useful if you find it Ravenshore, I guess - it's strong against really weak monsters.
Oh, and we find another dagger in the process...
So our fashion level gets even bigger.
Glomenmail is an okayish armor for dark elf. Like, in party games it's unneeded as you want to equip your elves with leather there, but in singleton it's decent enough, especially because of that resistance bonus. Resistances are important.
Lucky hat is trash. You've seen how great luck is. It's only good for the 10 skill points contests that require you to have 220 or so in their chosen attribute.
Hurr-durr, we go at it again...
Watching and watching how our damage output increases each time. BTW, seems like armageddon is totally irresistible - if it was another way (as it was in VI), survivors would have varied remaining HPs. But they don't.
Respawned treasure item is spiritslayer.
It's crappy - knight can use it, but he'll be better of finding a highest-tier vampiric halberd as it'll deal much more damage than this crap, and stat bonuses are more or less meaningless.
BTW, vampiric weapons give you either 20% of the damage you've done (all of the damage, including any bonuses and dual-wielded weapons) or 20% of remaining hps of your target, whichever is smaller. So, against a high level monsters, you'll gain roughly 20-50 hps per attack. If you dual-wield them, they both work, making that amount slightly more significant. In a singleton game, obviously - in party you just go for the damaging items, in singleton you'll think about sustainability of your damage.
Short trip to smugglers' cave to gather even more of those barrels.
Swift assassination of thunderbird on the plane of air.
They pay good for the heads of those elemental dwellers. Probably the feel of impending doom - meh, if they knew what to truly fear, they'd send some assassins after me... I wouldn't mind extra experience, yes.
Ah, our hundredth level - just one more hundred to go.
Murmurwoods, ancient troll home - it's about time we've solved this quest.
We came here relatively late because those wisps can hurt and because we need to kill those basilisk real fast or they'll stone/paralyze us.
That's why we show them no mercy. It's not like we show it to anyone, though.
I'm not sure how they'll relocate a whole village of trolls into one claustrophobic cavern, but hey, those are the trolls, let's not question their analytical capabilities and intellectual aptitude.
As we're in the ironsands anyways, let's choke the cyclops.
Shrapmetaling them may also work.
It's best to fight in the narrow passage - their gaze can paralyze you so getting surrounded and hit by them is a bad idea (we have a paralisis immunity pendant, yes, but we're so-o-o lazy to switch it with our current one...)
It's easier to snipe them from afar.
It takes no effort for us. Yeah, thats a nice dragon breath.
First quest item for the vampire promotion is ours.
Let's get the second one. Ravage roaming, crypt of Korbu. This dungeon has a real tough entrance guards. Luckily, since they're near the entrance, you can easily go with the scheme "get one down - escape - heal - return - repeat" (that's probably really important for singleton vampires).
We're fine without such trick, however.
Efreets are already beneath us.
There's also a sparks trap here, but it's sorta pretty fireworks for us already.
Rest of the crypt guards are nagas - meh, would've been easy 40 levels ago.
Main challenge here is actually putting this stupid sarcophagus inside our inventory - it takes literally half of it so we're forced to play some tetris before we're able to pick it up.
Whatever.
Let's get back on the story rails.
In the cleric vs necromancer business, guess whom we decide to side with?
Tough choice, tough choice.
The only problem is that we're forced to take this retard as our company.
Hope he doesn't die on us instantly. No sentiments, but we need him to show us a secret button.
Those clerics are pushover - the tier-3 cleric enemy is lvl 30. The tier-1 necromancer enemy is lvl 30. Figure this out (and tier-3 necromancer is lvl 57 and has pain reflection spell, meaning we can't kill him without taking 480 damage).
So we're here more for a flavor purposes - battling against necromancers is more interesting and rewarding (you get more XPs for helping the clerics).
It's not like we're interested in any sort of "dark forces camaraderie" (we're too sociopathic for that crap), however, promoting the cause of the church that actually teaches "destroy undead" spell to people seems like a bad idea.
This screenshot has some great potentiall for doing some "oi, dudes, what are you doing there, you're not catholic priests!" joke, but I don't like that sort of humor so I won't.
And lo, we find our quest item. Yeah, this dungeon is disgustingly plain and boring.
At least now we can kick that stupid cleric out and finish those last enemies on our own.
So the third and the final alliance is made.
Next destination - Regna.
Jumping to the dagger wound islands, we find a newly constructed building there.
Inside we discover a great deal of pirates.
Temporary great, anyway.
All those magical bolts being hurled at us force a drastic responce from our side - those pirate mages still pose a threat.
Some threat, maybe.
Dispatching a pirate leader, we find a key on his corpse.
It opens a chest with this particular sword.
And a passage to the submarine pen - time for some underwater travel.
Some guards provide an unfriendly greeting at the other side of our journey. Their loss.
Hello, Regna!
In local tavern, we give a fake report to the dread pirate stanley - bastard extremely rude, but we've already fucked him by stealing his life savings repeatedly so we let that slide.
Then it's the deciding arcomage championship victory - opp had a much better buildup than us (more of those broken "dragon" cards), but we've still won by resource race.
But most important for us is attaining grand mastery of dark magic - that means more shrapmetal shards and another armageddon cast per day. Oh, and an access to the strongest spell of the school.
We test our improved powers immediately on local population (they're worthless scum anyways, totally fit for human experimentation).
Only the highest tiers of enemies remain, and it's a near-death experience for them - groovy.
Then it's a business trip to the water plane.
Hitmen's affairs, y'know.
More levels, more progress.
Returning to ravenshore, we find a bunch of the pirate invaders messing around, bored by the fact that they have no one to kill as we've killed all the civilians already.
We relieve them of their boredom.
And so the city sleeps again.
BTW, that artifact sword? Terminus - decent for a knight. With GM armsmaster, it deals lots of damage, and the bonus stacks with the item enchantment one (so you can have a maximum of +17+7+8 from fleetfingers - 33, needing just 27 trained points in your skill). It's more a party oriented item, however - singleton knight would probably prefer to train his armsmaster up to 40, making the sword kinda redundant.
We also obtain a souldrinker spell - the grandest tool of the dark magic user. It doesn't boast the greatest damage of them all (just 25 + 1d8xdark magic skill), however, it does it to all monsters in sight and it heals you for the same amount (not that it doesn't even have to damage the enemies - you just have to cast it while seeing someone, even if that someone is magic-immune). So we have a self-healing spell, making us much more durable. The only problem is that it's extremely slow - it's roughly three times slower than a shrapmetal spell, for example.
Let's test it on some regnan dragons. Once they'll actually manage to damage us, obviously.
At this point, as long as we meet them in small numbers, they don't do much.
Now it's they who lack the durability.
Among their corpses, we find a great cloak. But later about that.
First let's suck some souls out of those beasties.
We're not using it as often, don't get the wrong idea - shrapmetal is quicker and more efficient.
We actually find another artifact on one of their corpses - a crappy belt. It might do something if you're aiming for 500 strength, but even then it's a damage increase of +5. Yeah, sure will help you against those 1k hp dragons. In other cases, it's even worse. As well as the stupid hat, it's only good for winning contests.
Cloak is also not that brilliant (in a party with cleric it's pretty much nothing), but for us those +10 resistance (and +5 freaking spell points) do have a meaning, so we'll use it.
We also gain acclaim as official arcomage champion.
Reward is another good sword that we don't need.
Then we kill all dragons in the outer areas of garrote gorge (what a good ally we make), but it's too late to complete that quests - you should do that before choosing to side with the dragons.
Doing some training, we invest some points into our meditation skill - yeah, there's still dark magic to be maxed out, but we want to cross that gap in a different matter. Besides, 1 point of gm meditation is 25 spell points so we've just gained 200 of them. That's a 3 souldrinker casts - more or less worth the price.
Then it's time to hunt even more dragons (we're the best ally they could've wished for!)
Now our dragon breath is definitely stronger than yours.
And even a simple toxic cloud takes a quarter of their HPs.
Only our limited mana pool prevents us from sowing endless pain and destruction.
But that's what lloyd's beacon is for - recharge and return to have more fun.
Ah, from individual dismemberment...
To collective torture.
And it pays off, damn right it pays off! Among their corpses we find the best thing we could find!
The crown to decorate us as ultimate master of dark arts!
Look how well does it fit us!
Then stare at this in awe - +20 bonus, gained in but moment.
(any of "dark magic" items are helluva difficult to find, so it was a cheerful moment - without it we'd have to train our dark magic skill to 60 and that would've made our walkthrough much grindier)
Yeah, this shrapmetal feels much sharper.
And dragon breath blasts as it never did before.
And 300 hp from souldrinker, oh, 300 hp from souldrinker...
BTW, the cavern has respawned since our stealth looting visit, so we find even more artifacts on the floor.
Finalty is horrible - it's damage can't compare with the damage of dual-wielded swords, and that recovery time penalty is really unpleasant. Sure, with well-trained GM armsmaster you can still have the lowest recovery time possible, but why bother? Just dual-wield some vampiric swords or the glomenthail/elsenrail combo.
Volcano is junk because it's an axe, that's all that can be said about it.
Ring of fusion is actually useful - "of water magic" makes our lloyd's beacons last longer so we don't have to return and reset them as often (that's a chore) and it's alchemy bonus stacks with other bonuses, so even if it's small it still improves your potion quality a lot. And endurance penalty is not as important - worst case scenario, you can wear the ring only when you actually brew the potions & cast beacons, that way it's pure profit.
Jumping to ironsands, we find it absolutely lively - how disgusting, let's correct that.
Surprisingly for ourselves, we barely survive our own armageddons. Should've thought about that - each armageddon cast is 110 points of irresistible damage atm, so 4x is 440 and we're only alive because of our regeneration items & skills. Yikes.
In The Rock we find a Havoc sword - it's only good for the dark elf, to boost your speed so you can shoot arrows even faster. Knight, as I've said, have no shortage of recovery time bonuses.
Another wipeout of ironsands brings us to level 120.
End of Part VII.
I find your lack of glee upon meeting Sandro disturbing 
thermo-optical camouflage 
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
I find your lack of glee upon meeting Sandro disturbing
Well, I'm larping a grim sociopathic mass-murderer so I'm not sure that any other living (or not very living) being can put him to glee. I mean, even a dozen of hot, naked and willing decently curved babes won't put him to glee, as he's no longer equipped for that sort of encounters.
thermo-optical camouflage
Yeah, rewatching GiTS:SAC atm.
In VIII, you should as there's no penalty for it and both of them make your party infinitely stronger. Reputation restriction was present in VI, sorta - you needed the highest reputation possible to master the light magic and the lowest reputation to master the dark.
TOME
Cuckmaster General
- Joined
- May 25, 2012
- Messages
- 1,820
So it should be doable. I need to start looking my CDs and googling walkthroughs.
Look to my LP. In there I mastered both. Cheesy as it was.
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Part VIII:
(considering how much bounty jobs we do, it's almost a theme song for us)
More dirty work for us. We're offered a considerable sum for scaly head of a triton and so we jump to minotaur city so we can reach water plane from there, yet our prey finds us before that.
See, minotaur lair respawns as well as your average dungeons do, meaning that every 2 years they get another triton raid.
For caring party, this thing is quite annoying as it's too easy to cause some heavy collateral damage here. We don't mind, however.
Pope loves the smell of blood money (maybe that's because he lacks nose)
Revenge time - we've waited long enough, and now at last we're bringing an ultimate misery to our murderers.
Undead dragons have a dark magic immunity, so we're forced to use Ice Blast on them - not the greatest choice of offensive spell, but we have GM water magic coupled with enhancing ring so it's our best damaging option.
Master necromancers are also dark immune (this place is totally lich unfriendly, that's why I had to use shenanigans to get those jars), so we inflict an agonizing death from heavy poisoning on them. They asked for it.
Descending into lower maze, we continue to do just the same.
Now I realize that in blind fury I've missed a great opportunity - I should've reanimated those buggers and killed them once more. What a shame.
The only benefit of ice blast is that it hits more than one target, although unreliably. It also may ricochet back on initial target, although that is also extremely hard to calculate. If only spells in this game had more precise controls...
This place was also protected by some skeletal archers, but we swat them like flies now.
This cube looks real curios...
We don't have time to play games, however - we have a world to destroy.
Regna, pirate fortress, soon to be another hecatomb.
You should've spent more on your mercenaries if you truly wished to stop us.
Tunnels under fortress, also filled with easily dispatchable pirates...
And somewhat annoying pirate mages. We're rending dragons limb from limb solo - think mere humans have a chance at stopping us?
Considering that's a tunnel filled with their corpses behind us, we can conclude that they don't. They can only burn some of our mana.
Next part of this tunnels features some ogre fighters - mere insects before us.
They land a hit or two, but it's either kill us in one round or we drain our life back.
Next segment features much stronger tier pirate mages who hurt us a little - we answer with wildly uneven retribution, obviously.
There's also a semi-artifact mace hidden here, needed for the allied clerical quest (all in all, we're missing 2 quests by joining necromancers without getting anything in return - talk about harsh morality lessons). It cannot be sold so we leave it here.
Drop down, bastards.
There's also some ogre mages for what's that worth. Not much, honestly.
Carnage leads us to fortress' treasury.
We find a nuclear warhead there - will serve our needs just right.
Time to carve our way outta here.
Near the end of this dungeon, we're almost stopped by nigh-empty mana pool, but it would be cowardly to jump out for mere regen - we'll take these weaklings with our bare hands if we'll need to (probably).
Of course, that was just a metaphor - we've had enough mana to handle that white trash.
Though bare hands was all that we had available since those stupid ogres & pirates broke both of our daggers. Should've hardened them, dammit.
On a surface, we find a launching shaft for our freshly acquired warhead.
Bright explosion and regnan fleet is no more. Too bad I've killed all the civilians already and no one can suffer from residual radiation.
Yeah, don't do anything if you're not being paid a bonus for it.
Then some bald erathian dude tells us to collect some stones for him. Du-u-ude, since the world is getting destroyed and you're getting snuffed along with it, why won't you, as an uber-archmage or whatever, go and geto those stones, huh?
Unable to answer hard existential questions, we went our frustration the only way we know.
This time, even guardian necromancers join the ranks of the dead.
Pesky dragons still float, however. Ugh.
Another skill distribution update - more mana for us.
As we wiped out the dragon lair, I think it's about time we've brought some balance to the Force by subjecting dragon hunters to the same fate (besides, not that there's no dragons, what are they gonna do? dwell on a wellfare? not in my world)
Their castle is kinda tight and shoddy without much interesting points, so I won't linger here.
On lower levels, we'd have to enter invisible to gain an advantageous tactical position, as it is, we just run blindly while spamming our spells.
Murdering knights, we steal their greatest treasure.
Not sure what to think of this sword. First, I've found no info about level of the slow it casts (so effect & duration is unknown). Sure, even 1/2 slow prevents lots of damage to you, but that's if it lasts more than 5 minutes, at least, and you've all seen debuffs' chances of landing - not very high, so by the time you've actually cast it, your target may be nigh-dead already. On the other hand, those ~15 elemental damage other swords offer also don't give increase in damage high enough, so occasional early slow may be well worth it. Needs testing. I'm talking about singleton, obviously - in melee party you may not have enough of artifact weapons for everyone so it passes (although slow is even more redundant here as individual monsters die relatively fast)
KK, let's kick those elemental asses. Wow, that thermo-optical camo works even underwater - they make stuff good these days.
Reaching a safe position, we unleash full strength of our wrath upon watery plane.
We're almost corpse ourselves (more than usual), but everyone else is even deader.
Reactivating the camo, we sneak close to some still moving foes.
Flash - and their lives are ours.
Then it's a boring matter of chasing out the stragglers and picking up our first gem.
Doesn't feel like we've done anything significant, but surely we gained lots of XP.
Can't be enough, though (not yet).
In midst of our training, we discover a peculiar date on our calendar.
Jumping to murmurwoods, we find a lone pony wading between his brethren rotting corpses.
Does this magic feels like friendship to you, bitch? Does it?
On it's corpse, we've found a key. With that key, we're opening a certain vault.
And it's full of money, artifacts and ore.
Taking a short genocidal break...
We discover what they are. Scepter of kings is meh - it's ok for a party cleric, but even a party troll needs something more damaging and both singleton troll and cleric have enough sturdiness to go by, they need damage.
Foulfang is awesome - it's the highest damage dealing dagger in the game and it's also vampiric. Best weapon for a vampire, obviously. Nice flavor too. Probably the biggest reward of obelisk treasure.
Oh, out of curiosity, we peek into dragon's lair and what do we see - it respawned along with the gorge! Or maybe not along but it has a mere 6 months cooldown - doesn't matter.
One more time, with passion.
But then, it's not like we weren't passionate before. Still, there's no limit to perfection.
Mass slaughter with one glance, that's awesome.
We've filled our quota of artifacts already (you can't find all of them - after 20 or so you stop finding them), so no more item reviews for us.
Another armageddon scroll will have to do.
And it wasn't without a reason - why would we do anything without a reason?
Level 144 already.
Hurr-durr, I've cast so many armageddons already that I'm running out of snappy comments, and there's still some more to go...
Let's do something new for a change - we haven't won a single arena combat yet.
Nothing less will do.
Perfect positioning is achieved through our camo, so that entrance walls protects us from more than half of the monsters here.
Then it's sorta popamole ordeal - just hide behind the cover and shoot.
The gore becomes so dense that we can barely see our enemies. Sorta.
Our greatest fear was to run out of mana (we have a couple of mana potions, but no more than that), but we've run out of enemies faster.
Two more and we're good to go.
Nifty reward, but, as you can see, wholly insignificant.
Getting meditation up to 40, we shift our focus to alchemy.
That's 62 shrapmetal casts there. Or 47 dragon breath casts. Not bad for a one man project, huh?
So alvarian ogres reclaimed their fortress.
Too bad another price tag was put on their head.
Those merchants seem relentless when it comes to ogre extermination.
Fire plane. Camo entrance as usual - as you can see, a huge force of fire elementals sits in the ambush here (honestly, it's probably the toughest place in the game for non-caster singleton class - it's a huge ambush and there's no cover for you to reduce the incoming fire).
Relocating to tactically sound position, we invoke our massive destruction capabilities.
Fire Elementals are tough, so a lot of cleaning up remains - luckily, they're hanging there perfectly for a massive souldrinker.
One of the most annoying things about this plane is the tendency of these tritons to fall down the cliffs - you have to fly down to finish them (that is if you can fly).
In midst of the plane, a small camp is standing.
Inside, a monster unique to that camp greets us - phoenix. Not that it's special or strong or anything.
You can also find a range of weaker critters here, all ready to jump at your throat.
And on the upper level there's a cash of strong items (since we're past our artifact limit, it's just piles of gold).
All that fuss with a war camp was just a warm-up - a greater challenge arises.
We're immediately assaulted by a bunch of fiery dudes. Shrapmetal ftw.
One of the most annoying fire elemental features is their flight capabilities, meaning that they position themselves all over the screen. So here a fiery flying legs are the enemy - scary.
There's also some narrow & twisted bridges in this dungeon, and there's a lava down there to "cushion' your fall.
Exploring the dungeon further, I find myself low on mana after battling elemental wave after wave, yet I'm sorta reluctant to jump away and heal - no, we'll finish this in one go.
We have our potions, we have our rings of regen - that'll have to do.
Mostly potions, of course - you'll have to wait for a long, long time for those 1860 mp to get regenned. I mean, one regen effect restores 288 mp per day, so even with dozen of those it's still twelve hours.
It was exhausting, but we reach the gem chamber and it's staunch defenders.
That's still not enough for us - our wizard eye spell told us that we've missed someone, so we located a hidden treasure chamber here and brought last survivors down. No mercy.
Returning back to civilization, we make another arena trip. Boy, what a shitload of dragons!
Mere fodder for us.
Be it at range or at close distance, it takes a couple of turns to deal with each one.
Those crystal ones pose a bigger threat - they have an energy attack and those can't be resisted, iirc.
Doesn't help them much, though.
The last one hits the bricks.
Take a note of xps, please.
Yeah, it wasn't just a casual trip to arena - everything was coldly calculated to gain that huge crystal dragon bounty.
Which, finally, proves us as a headhunter of higher level. What's the point of that, you'll ask?
Take another glimpse on our XPs. 1.2kk experience awarded - more than a freaking million! Yeah, it was hard to gather those 60k reward money without savescumming, but it's totally worth it.
Let's cash on on those xps - we boost our alchemy skill to 30 (and an effective level of 52). More is unneeded as if we'll find an alchemy boost of +25, we'll max it out anyways.
And here are our physical stats once again.
End of part VIII.
(considering how much bounty jobs we do, it's almost a theme song for us)
More dirty work for us. We're offered a considerable sum for scaly head of a triton and so we jump to minotaur city so we can reach water plane from there, yet our prey finds us before that.
See, minotaur lair respawns as well as your average dungeons do, meaning that every 2 years they get another triton raid.
For caring party, this thing is quite annoying as it's too easy to cause some heavy collateral damage here. We don't mind, however.
Pope loves the smell of blood money (maybe that's because he lacks nose)
Revenge time - we've waited long enough, and now at last we're bringing an ultimate misery to our murderers.
Undead dragons have a dark magic immunity, so we're forced to use Ice Blast on them - not the greatest choice of offensive spell, but we have GM water magic coupled with enhancing ring so it's our best damaging option.
Master necromancers are also dark immune (this place is totally lich unfriendly, that's why I had to use shenanigans to get those jars), so we inflict an agonizing death from heavy poisoning on them. They asked for it.
Descending into lower maze, we continue to do just the same.
Now I realize that in blind fury I've missed a great opportunity - I should've reanimated those buggers and killed them once more. What a shame.
The only benefit of ice blast is that it hits more than one target, although unreliably. It also may ricochet back on initial target, although that is also extremely hard to calculate. If only spells in this game had more precise controls...
This place was also protected by some skeletal archers, but we swat them like flies now.
This cube looks real curios...
We don't have time to play games, however - we have a world to destroy.
Regna, pirate fortress, soon to be another hecatomb.
You should've spent more on your mercenaries if you truly wished to stop us.
Tunnels under fortress, also filled with easily dispatchable pirates...
And somewhat annoying pirate mages. We're rending dragons limb from limb solo - think mere humans have a chance at stopping us?
Considering that's a tunnel filled with their corpses behind us, we can conclude that they don't. They can only burn some of our mana.
Next part of this tunnels features some ogre fighters - mere insects before us.
They land a hit or two, but it's either kill us in one round or we drain our life back.
Next segment features much stronger tier pirate mages who hurt us a little - we answer with wildly uneven retribution, obviously.
There's also a semi-artifact mace hidden here, needed for the allied clerical quest (all in all, we're missing 2 quests by joining necromancers without getting anything in return - talk about harsh morality lessons). It cannot be sold so we leave it here.
Drop down, bastards.
There's also some ogre mages for what's that worth. Not much, honestly.
Carnage leads us to fortress' treasury.
We find a nuclear warhead there - will serve our needs just right.
Time to carve our way outta here.
Near the end of this dungeon, we're almost stopped by nigh-empty mana pool, but it would be cowardly to jump out for mere regen - we'll take these weaklings with our bare hands if we'll need to (probably).
Of course, that was just a metaphor - we've had enough mana to handle that white trash.
Though bare hands was all that we had available since those stupid ogres & pirates broke both of our daggers. Should've hardened them, dammit.
On a surface, we find a launching shaft for our freshly acquired warhead.
Bright explosion and regnan fleet is no more. Too bad I've killed all the civilians already and no one can suffer from residual radiation.
Yeah, don't do anything if you're not being paid a bonus for it.
Then some bald erathian dude tells us to collect some stones for him. Du-u-ude, since the world is getting destroyed and you're getting snuffed along with it, why won't you, as an uber-archmage or whatever, go and geto those stones, huh?
Unable to answer hard existential questions, we went our frustration the only way we know.
This time, even guardian necromancers join the ranks of the dead.
Pesky dragons still float, however. Ugh.
Another skill distribution update - more mana for us.
As we wiped out the dragon lair, I think it's about time we've brought some balance to the Force by subjecting dragon hunters to the same fate (besides, not that there's no dragons, what are they gonna do? dwell on a wellfare? not in my world)
Their castle is kinda tight and shoddy without much interesting points, so I won't linger here.
On lower levels, we'd have to enter invisible to gain an advantageous tactical position, as it is, we just run blindly while spamming our spells.
Murdering knights, we steal their greatest treasure.
Not sure what to think of this sword. First, I've found no info about level of the slow it casts (so effect & duration is unknown). Sure, even 1/2 slow prevents lots of damage to you, but that's if it lasts more than 5 minutes, at least, and you've all seen debuffs' chances of landing - not very high, so by the time you've actually cast it, your target may be nigh-dead already. On the other hand, those ~15 elemental damage other swords offer also don't give increase in damage high enough, so occasional early slow may be well worth it. Needs testing. I'm talking about singleton, obviously - in melee party you may not have enough of artifact weapons for everyone so it passes (although slow is even more redundant here as individual monsters die relatively fast)
KK, let's kick those elemental asses. Wow, that thermo-optical camo works even underwater - they make stuff good these days.
Reaching a safe position, we unleash full strength of our wrath upon watery plane.
We're almost corpse ourselves (more than usual), but everyone else is even deader.
Reactivating the camo, we sneak close to some still moving foes.
Flash - and their lives are ours.
Then it's a boring matter of chasing out the stragglers and picking up our first gem.
Doesn't feel like we've done anything significant, but surely we gained lots of XP.
Can't be enough, though (not yet).
In midst of our training, we discover a peculiar date on our calendar.
Jumping to murmurwoods, we find a lone pony wading between his brethren rotting corpses.
Does this magic feels like friendship to you, bitch? Does it?
On it's corpse, we've found a key. With that key, we're opening a certain vault.
And it's full of money, artifacts and ore.
Taking a short genocidal break...
We discover what they are. Scepter of kings is meh - it's ok for a party cleric, but even a party troll needs something more damaging and both singleton troll and cleric have enough sturdiness to go by, they need damage.
Foulfang is awesome - it's the highest damage dealing dagger in the game and it's also vampiric. Best weapon for a vampire, obviously. Nice flavor too. Probably the biggest reward of obelisk treasure.
Oh, out of curiosity, we peek into dragon's lair and what do we see - it respawned along with the gorge! Or maybe not along but it has a mere 6 months cooldown - doesn't matter.
One more time, with passion.
But then, it's not like we weren't passionate before. Still, there's no limit to perfection.
Mass slaughter with one glance, that's awesome.
We've filled our quota of artifacts already (you can't find all of them - after 20 or so you stop finding them), so no more item reviews for us.
Another armageddon scroll will have to do.
And it wasn't without a reason - why would we do anything without a reason?
Level 144 already.
Hurr-durr, I've cast so many armageddons already that I'm running out of snappy comments, and there's still some more to go...
Let's do something new for a change - we haven't won a single arena combat yet.
Nothing less will do.
Perfect positioning is achieved through our camo, so that entrance walls protects us from more than half of the monsters here.
Then it's sorta popamole ordeal - just hide behind the cover and shoot.
The gore becomes so dense that we can barely see our enemies. Sorta.
Our greatest fear was to run out of mana (we have a couple of mana potions, but no more than that), but we've run out of enemies faster.
Two more and we're good to go.
Nifty reward, but, as you can see, wholly insignificant.
Getting meditation up to 40, we shift our focus to alchemy.
That's 62 shrapmetal casts there. Or 47 dragon breath casts. Not bad for a one man project, huh?
So alvarian ogres reclaimed their fortress.
Too bad another price tag was put on their head.
Those merchants seem relentless when it comes to ogre extermination.
Fire plane. Camo entrance as usual - as you can see, a huge force of fire elementals sits in the ambush here (honestly, it's probably the toughest place in the game for non-caster singleton class - it's a huge ambush and there's no cover for you to reduce the incoming fire).
Relocating to tactically sound position, we invoke our massive destruction capabilities.
Fire Elementals are tough, so a lot of cleaning up remains - luckily, they're hanging there perfectly for a massive souldrinker.
One of the most annoying things about this plane is the tendency of these tritons to fall down the cliffs - you have to fly down to finish them (that is if you can fly).
In midst of the plane, a small camp is standing.
Inside, a monster unique to that camp greets us - phoenix. Not that it's special or strong or anything.
You can also find a range of weaker critters here, all ready to jump at your throat.
And on the upper level there's a cash of strong items (since we're past our artifact limit, it's just piles of gold).
All that fuss with a war camp was just a warm-up - a greater challenge arises.
We're immediately assaulted by a bunch of fiery dudes. Shrapmetal ftw.
One of the most annoying fire elemental features is their flight capabilities, meaning that they position themselves all over the screen. So here a fiery flying legs are the enemy - scary.
There's also some narrow & twisted bridges in this dungeon, and there's a lava down there to "cushion' your fall.
Exploring the dungeon further, I find myself low on mana after battling elemental wave after wave, yet I'm sorta reluctant to jump away and heal - no, we'll finish this in one go.
We have our potions, we have our rings of regen - that'll have to do.
Mostly potions, of course - you'll have to wait for a long, long time for those 1860 mp to get regenned. I mean, one regen effect restores 288 mp per day, so even with dozen of those it's still twelve hours.
It was exhausting, but we reach the gem chamber and it's staunch defenders.
That's still not enough for us - our wizard eye spell told us that we've missed someone, so we located a hidden treasure chamber here and brought last survivors down. No mercy.
Returning back to civilization, we make another arena trip. Boy, what a shitload of dragons!
Mere fodder for us.
Be it at range or at close distance, it takes a couple of turns to deal with each one.
Those crystal ones pose a bigger threat - they have an energy attack and those can't be resisted, iirc.
Doesn't help them much, though.
The last one hits the bricks.
Take a note of xps, please.
Yeah, it wasn't just a casual trip to arena - everything was coldly calculated to gain that huge crystal dragon bounty.
Which, finally, proves us as a headhunter of higher level. What's the point of that, you'll ask?
Take another glimpse on our XPs. 1.2kk experience awarded - more than a freaking million! Yeah, it was hard to gather those 60k reward money without savescumming, but it's totally worth it.
Let's cash on on those xps - we boost our alchemy skill to 30 (and an effective level of 52). More is unneeded as if we'll find an alchemy boost of +25, we'll max it out anyways.
And here are our physical stats once again.
End of part VIII.
Why won't you GM Alchemy?
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
There's no point to - I've already drank all of the +50 potions so they're not needed, there are no stoning enemies during the endgame (and not like those "stone to flesh" potions can prevent us from insta-dying), we're not going to fight dragons in melee so "dragon slaying" is useless, and there's nothing to age us so rejuvenation is also pointless. White is all we need, and it's not like GMing the skills make them any stronger, unfortunately.
eklektyk
Erudite
:bowbumpbadabunsss:
It doesn't? I'll have to play this game one more time. I could have sworn each skill mastery in Alchemy level enhanced potion strength.
Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Nah, they just unlock higher tiers of potions - skill is added to potion strength without consideration to mastery level.
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