Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
As I was saying in my VII LP, I was going to do a LP of eighth part - I'm doing it.
Once again, I'm gonna start with a relatively short foreword. Without any doubt, M&M VIII is a flawed game. It's not really awful because it was built on the strong foundation, laid in the two previous parts, and yet the Day of Destroyer was definitely rushed and thus shoddily done. To be truthful, same can be said about VII (because once you really look into it and compare, for example, dungeon sizes with VI, you'll see how much less effort went there), however, For Blood and Honor was lucky to introduce some some serious renovations to its role-playing system. And while not all of them were really that good (new resistance system made dark magic seriously overpowered; they went too harsh on distributing access to "grandmaster" level of skills, making ranger & druid useless and severely limiting usefulness of archer and paladin), at least they made pure melee and pure archery paths viable, thus greatly increasing replayability of the game (in theory, at least - according to my observations, people somehow prefer to go for the balanced party builds, even if they don't have much sense in the context of later M&Ms ruleset). And the problem of dungeons being small and generally unchallenging also remained, making replayability not as desirable.
But that's seven, we're already done with that. What's wrong with the eight is that it has failed to improve the formulae even further. It stagnated, making the same mistakes again and, in some places, even adding to their repertoire. I mean, dark magic is so retardedly powerful that it makes all other types of combat magic obsolete - how do we fix that? Oh, let's give it from the get-go! Oh, and light magic is also pretty strong - what do you propose we do with that? Sure, let's allow to have it together with the dark one! Brilliant game design, simply majestic. And it's not like the dungeons became much harder to compensate for it - on the contrary, they rather mellowed down. Just a quick example - through all stages of the game VI was full of monsters attacking you with different debilitating conditions, up to death and eradication. And there was no 100% way to protect your party members from those attacks - high resistances helped, but they weren't sureproof. VII also had similar monsters, but it introduced Protection from Magic spell, able to negate the threat fully (in my book that's pure decline). VIII still has the spell, but insta-gibbing monsters are much rarer and late-game areas are pretty much devoid of them. Talk about increasing the challenge accordingly, yeah.
To make the case even worse, designers upped the party size to five people but changed character creation rules - now you make just one character in the beginning and the rest you recruit over the course of the game, choosing from pregenerated characters. Obviously, the system was broken, allowing you to recruit characters way above your party level if you did things right. Which defangs the challenge even further. And let me recount the most infuriating (to me, personally) thing from M&M X designers' interview to the Codex:
Bullshit. Oh, sure, it's fun. For, like, five minutes, as you slaughter first couple of cyclops basking in realization of how powerful you've become. Then you understand that there's still boatload of cyclops, that killing them requires no effort, poses no challenge and basically becomes a chore, meaning that the whole dungeon is kinda wasted for you. That's a huge flaw of all new (well, old new, and I’m not talking about old old ones since I haven’t played them in a while, my last playthrough of WoX was, like, when I was 14, I simply don’t remember them well) M&M games, to be honest - you just can't play them so all the game stages remain challenging. Well, you can if you fuck up your party composition, but then it becomes extremely tedious - it's just impossible to find balance here.
Another (and, this time, rather unobvious) problem with hireable high-level party members is that many of them actually make your late game harder. Well, longer - you can mow down the foes with any kind of party, it's just the matter of time you spend while doing so. Let's look at the infamous Cauri Blackthorne:
Sure, if you get her on level 15, she's total beast. But does that change the fact that she's horribly built (which is pretty much a tradition with pregenned chars)? Not really.
GM merchant is waste of points - money is overflowing in this game and you don't have any valid ways of spending it.
GM disarm is useless - just cast day of protecton and those traps barely scratch you. Even if they do, regeneration patches you up almost instantly. Even if, by some unknown reason, you want to disarm, just use plain expert + ability boost ring - that's enough.
Alchemy expert is unnecessary - you need just one char with alchemy, and he's gonna be able to at least master it.
Elemental magics are wasteful - you should have a necromancer to cast all the utility spells, and in terms of damage magic just can't catch up with either her bow (at the distance) or her double swords (in close combat).
Oh, wait, she has Master Dagger instead of Master Sword - really, why would you learn a stronger skill when there's a weaker one available?
DE abilities are redundant by the same reasons as with magic - darkfire bolt seems powerful, only it's not. Also, it costs too much – she starts with 180 mana, meaning a whopping number of six darkfire bolts. That’s big.
Finally, GM chain is optional - you can do almost as fine with master chain or even with expert leather. The way tanking in this game works, your party is as vulnerable as your weakest party member is, and since dark elves are tankier that clerics/wizards, she'll do well with just expert leather.
Basically, her skill points are spent on shit and it doesn't even matter that she has more SPs than the average character of her levels - just having Bow Skill at 20 would've been much more useful than all of her diverse shenanigans.
And see, because she's level 50 already she won't level as much over the course of the game, meaning that she won't develop as much, meaning that while she'll slice through the initial monsters, she'll struggle with the late game ones. Well, struggle is an unappropriate word because you can go through this game with almost any kind of party, but you'll go much slower and why would you waste your time?
So, if you want to smoothen up your game, avoid those high level characters, use just the basic lvl 5-15 ones. Or even say “fuck this shit” and, using edited save, create yourself a normal party – that’s a decent solution. And, since the game wasn’t really balanced for 5 man party, don’t use one (unless you go pure melee build) – you can easily complete it with either 4 or 3 party members. Heck, with certain classes, you can even singleton it. And that’s what we’re gonna do.
Hmm, my short foreword grew rather large, but if you actually got here, don’t worry – we’re almost there. Let me tell you a bit about power tiers of singleton playthroughs. Basically, there’s two of them, comfy and grindy.
At the bottom of the grindy tier lays the impotent minotaur. He’s a total gimp – he has the lowest melee damage output of all the melee classes, he uses the second worst weapon possible, he lacks alchemy & learning skills (and they’re truly important in singleton), he can’t wear boots & helmets (meaning lower AC and less buffs for you), and for all of that he can do what? Slowly heal himself back up with his pathetic expert body?
Next come the troll & the knight. They’re really close to each other so I’m not sure who is better. Troll deals significantly less damage than knight (in fact, he’s not that ahead from the minotaur), however, he has a chance of paralyzing his victim, meaning that once you’ll get your mace skill to at least 30, 1 on 1 duels will go real easy for you. Now, if only they were common in this game... You can always kite, though. Troll also has the highest HPs in the game and, thanks to his huge starting strength and endurance, first levels go relatively easy for him.
Knight has a much rougher start, but, in the mid to late game, he deals significantly more damage. His spear+sword combo can easily dish out 200 damage per hit. He’s also much more skill points efficient – with troll, you have to get his mace as high as it gets and, past skill level 20, that starts to become really expensive. With the knight, you can spread the love between armsmaster, spear and sword skills, meaning that you will gain more benefits for less efforts. Master plate (don’t GM it – GM armsmaster covers any recovery penalties that you’ll ever get) also helps.
Still, there’s a reason I called this tier grindy – 200 damage per hit is great, but when you encounter a 10k hp pack of enemies, it doesn’t mean much (especially since you’ll still miss and monsters will resist your hits). No area of effect spells means you can forget about wiping out high level areas – it’ll take eternity to do so and that’s if it will be possible at all. Also, you have no travelling spells, not even the most basic ones – no torchlight means you’ll be wading through the uncomfortably dark dungeons. No wizard eye will make you prone to ambushes on overworld maps, also it’ll make reagent collecting much harder. Finally, no fly & town portal & lloyd’s beacon will make you waste lots of time walking – that’s hours of real time we’re talking about.
I really don’t advise singletoning the game this way. Even if you do, please, savescum the shit out of the shops to make your life easier – save before entering them & then reload until you get those “fly” and “town portal” scrolls that you need so immensely.
However, I do want you to commend a certain poster here. Watch and sit in awe:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/best-might-and-magic.42757/page-57#post-2424285
See what this bro did? He singletoned the fucking game with a fucking troll. Dude has balls of steel, basically. And did he got a single fucking brofist for it? Of course he fucking did not, because codex is in decline - it's more about yapping cheerfully to empty ubisoft promises & criticizing biowarian&bethesdian games (while playing then ten times over, obviously) nowadays than it's about recognizing quality oldschool games. Fuck yeah.
But I digress. Next comes the vampire - thanks to his daggers & spirit magic combo, his damage output can rival the knight's one once you get to really high levels, and vampire actually has sustainability. Master body & alchemy do wonders for his health & mana issues. Vampiric levitation also helps in a number of places and mistform has some interesting uses - you can use wands while in mistform and, if you get your alchemy to, like, 25-30 + get alchemy buffing rings, you can recharge those wands ad infinitum with via appropriate potions. I.e., you can spam shrapmetal (albeit low level) while being perfectly immune to physical damage - something to think about. Or maybe it's more about spirit lashing the enemies - judging by the bestiary table, few monsters are actually immune to spirit and it's an aoe spell which are extremely rare in this category.
Finally there's the cleric. Thanks to his hour of power, he's decent enough at close range (he won't outshine pure meleers, but he can stand for himself) and, unlike the rest of grindy tier, he actually has some ranged damage options. Especially in the outdoors - Sunray is obviously crappy, but it's as good as it gets for the grindy tier. Prismatic Light has the potential to be a decent AoE spell. Flying fist can also work fine - if my sources don't lie to me, immunities to body magic are not as common as they were in VII, so you can actually brofist the living shit out of your enemies if you want to. GM mind also has it uses, potentially, but it whiffs on most of elemental enemies and that's an actual problem. And you can summon decoy wisps to tank out for you (besides, there's five of them and they deal 20-80 light damage per shot - that's solid).
Cleric & Vampire would be good classes if only they had travel option... (no one prohibits you to use editor, though - just for those).
Next comes the comfy tier. Dragons are the lowest class here (accessible via editor only, obviously). Contrary to the public opinion, they're not that broken. Sure, thanks to their tanky hps and huge starting damage, they breeze through the early game, however, mid to late their damage starts to lag behind. Still, with dragon skills 60, master bodybuilding (for them it's 30 hp per point - groovy) and GM learning (meaning that you can actually max out those skills), you have little to worry about. Here's my recent dragon:
(build is screwed though - should've went for alchemy 30 instead of pumping body building that high; alchemy 30 is the only way to increase his damage output via boost speed options).
Dragons are fine, but stale and they lack options. Dark Elves are better in this department - they start frail and don't pack the punch in starting combats, however, their mid-to-late game damage is devastating and their overall gameplay is actually versatile, you don't just go & burn stuff as you do it with dragons. You have some tricks and you can switch between different bows to achieve different effects. And you have almost all of the travel spells, not the bare fly.
Finally, there are liches and they're awesome. I won't say more about them because, as you already can guess, that's my choice for this LP, however, they're the most fun class to singleton this game, in my opinion. It's not as challenging as with the other classes (but not effortless since even high-lvl liches can die easily), but it contains no boring parts and that's what matters the most to me.
Also, if you don't like any of the options presented, you can try a number of things:
- Play your lich without dark magic - elemental only. Makes him less broken, makes you use more tricks to actually complete the game.
- Play as an "archmage" - swap your necromancer's dark magic for the light one via editor (maybe even swap his appearance so he doesn't look oxymoronic). That's close to the previous variant, but gives you more options.
- Play as a druid - swap your dark magic for GM tiers of body, mind and spirit ones (if you need them).
KK, now we're done with Let's Read long texts about Might and Magic and can finally start our lp.
(as usual, let's start with a song to set up the mood - dagger wound isles were supposed to be somewhat native american so let's go with mayan industrial ambient)
Here's our hero - strong of mind and tenacious, but fugly, clumsy, weak and luckless. Temporary, of course.
As our bonus skills, we're taking elemental ones - they're the most expensive skills to buy so we'd rather have them for free.
Man, Pope had to spend his youth on heavy drugs to look like that in his twenties...
As you can see, we're absolutely unfit for physical combat (not that we're going anywhere near it) but begin with semi-decent hit points & mana pool. Well, considering we're taking 5x damage, those HPs are pretty much nothing, still, without high endurance it would've been even worse. At least we can stand against some random ranged attack.
And so it's just us, some lizardman dude & a caravan that's we're supposed to be protecting. Protecting a caravan full of goodies, huh?
Nah, I feel moar like looting. They're not paying us high enough for this crap.
Random lizardman dude gives us our first quest pointer.
Before that, we fix our luck through the local well (up to the mark of 17) - and not a single coin involved.
Then it's about taking some stupid crystal to some pesky sun-worshipper. Whatever.
I'd rather donate to their local temple - not out of sharing their pagan beliefs, but for the sake of convenience.
As in the VII, good reputation gives you discounts in the shops. Unlike the VII, authors didn't bother to attach reputation changes to quests so donations are the only way to gain citizen's favour.
Then we blitz through the first arcomage challenge - we had a hand with lots of damaging cards, thus dispatching our opponent quite easily.
Yeah, I always knew that stealing from your workplace pays off. I mean, what's the point of actually working if not for that?
We collect local quests - we're sorta indifferent to the plights of local population, still, those XPs have to come outta somewhere.
And we have a quick chat with the aforementioned cleric.
Too bad he doesn't have a motorcycle.
Now it's asta la vista time, baby.
Time to spend our illicit moneys. First comes merchant - makes all the other skills cheaper. I'm not going to train it further, though - no point. Five man party has no ways of spending its gold, more so the one-man team.
Next is bow - with our mighy 40 mana we're won't be spellslinging for long.
Learning - we need those fast levels. It's not working on quest XPs so we won't gain lots from it at the moment, but something is still better than nothing.
Finally, leather to give our frail body at least a modicum of protection. Not that we got weak - it's not from all the shopping, it's from our temple "hour of power" blessing (they reward for donations that way) running out.
OK, we can recover while we're training to level 2.
Let's start with the air magic so we don't have to recast wizard's eye as often.
Ahead of us, brave lizardmen warriors throw their young lives away to protect their settlement from human invaders, but why would we care for that? We're in for the personal gains so let's skip it.
We still can't avoid pirate encounters though.
But we're not struggling in vain - it's all for the chests they're guarding.
We have to kite them real long - our accuracy sucks, and one bow doesn't deal nearly enough damage. But as they lack ranged attacks, we have all the time in the world for the hit&run tactics.
Ah, the sweet, blood-soaked loot!
Amongst the trash, we find ourselves a decent club - as in VII, clubs have ridiculously low recovery time (due to designer mistake) so, if you have high strength, they make for an excellent early game weapon. Not that we're heading into the close range - it's more for the intimidation purposes.
Then it's sniping more hapless victims...
And getting more loot.
We also find some barrels on these isles, but we don't peruse them - let us first visit all of those "pump your stat up to 17" wells before that. We're doing it less for the actual combat benefits (after a short starting period, we'll barely notice the stat influence) and more for the stat challenges - winning those "get your stat to 200" can be tricky in singleton.
Visiting all of the huts, we stop the local disease epidemic. An unfortunate occurrence, but I promise you, we'll correct our mistake later.
And then it's the deserted temple time!
Or not. Going to some dark place choke full of snakes and traps and who knows what - am I what, daft?
I'd rather swipe more loot from under the pirate noses.
Shooting those noses away is also a nice plan, btw.
More futile gratitudes from random people, if you can call those things so. They're not even bloody furries - how do you call them, scalies?
At least it brings us closer to ultimate power.
Expert air magic is nice - now our minimap shows loot on the ground so scavenging for alchemical reagents becomes much easier.
We also invest in personal protection.
As we ran out of easy quests to accomplish, we go out to slaughter some more pirates (to the immense joy of locals - little they know...) There's no shortcoming of them and, in singleton runs, XPs for them is actually decent enough if you have time to spare.
And they shall bow, oh they will.
This grinding was kinda pointless, however, as we had another xp earning option. Easily scrounging enough reagents to make +50 speed potion, we're given more than enough experience - those quests provide excellent payoff in singleton runs.
Unfortunately, local trainers are absolutely clueless. Level cap 5, what the hell?
We improve our armour wearing skills, actually removing that pesky recovery time penalty. Being 10% slower is no fun.
Now it's time to get out of this rathole, but how? I surely don't want to go through the temple - I'm not surviving that shit.
Hm, those docks are not that far, however. And Pope was quite a swimmer in his youth, so...
Easy.
Actually, it was not - I almost screwed up here. The basis is simple - you run across the water, drinking as much red potions as you can. The problem is, drowning damage is percentage based, meaning the more HPs you have, the less effective those potions become. And we've almost came to the limit - only buying some gog blood from the local shop gave us red potion strong enough to carry us through. You should do this run at level 1.
Once there, we activate the teleporter so we don't have to suffer again.
Returning to village, we loot our caravan even further.
And of we go, away from this lousy backwater!
That's it for part 1 - kinda short, but I'm sorta tired from typing the foreword. Part 2 will come soon.
Once again, I'm gonna start with a relatively short foreword. Without any doubt, M&M VIII is a flawed game. It's not really awful because it was built on the strong foundation, laid in the two previous parts, and yet the Day of Destroyer was definitely rushed and thus shoddily done. To be truthful, same can be said about VII (because once you really look into it and compare, for example, dungeon sizes with VI, you'll see how much less effort went there), however, For Blood and Honor was lucky to introduce some some serious renovations to its role-playing system. And while not all of them were really that good (new resistance system made dark magic seriously overpowered; they went too harsh on distributing access to "grandmaster" level of skills, making ranger & druid useless and severely limiting usefulness of archer and paladin), at least they made pure melee and pure archery paths viable, thus greatly increasing replayability of the game (in theory, at least - according to my observations, people somehow prefer to go for the balanced party builds, even if they don't have much sense in the context of later M&Ms ruleset). And the problem of dungeons being small and generally unchallenging also remained, making replayability not as desirable.
But that's seven, we're already done with that. What's wrong with the eight is that it has failed to improve the formulae even further. It stagnated, making the same mistakes again and, in some places, even adding to their repertoire. I mean, dark magic is so retardedly powerful that it makes all other types of combat magic obsolete - how do we fix that? Oh, let's give it from the get-go! Oh, and light magic is also pretty strong - what do you propose we do with that? Sure, let's allow to have it together with the dark one! Brilliant game design, simply majestic. And it's not like the dungeons became much harder to compensate for it - on the contrary, they rather mellowed down. Just a quick example - through all stages of the game VI was full of monsters attacking you with different debilitating conditions, up to death and eradication. And there was no 100% way to protect your party members from those attacks - high resistances helped, but they weren't sureproof. VII also had similar monsters, but it introduced Protection from Magic spell, able to negate the threat fully (in my book that's pure decline). VIII still has the spell, but insta-gibbing monsters are much rarer and late-game areas are pretty much devoid of them. Talk about increasing the challenge accordingly, yeah.
To make the case even worse, designers upped the party size to five people but changed character creation rules - now you make just one character in the beginning and the rest you recruit over the course of the game, choosing from pregenerated characters. Obviously, the system was broken, allowing you to recruit characters way above your party level if you did things right. Which defangs the challenge even further. And let me recount the most infuriating (to me, personally) thing from M&M X designers' interview to the Codex:
If you want to go to that mountain over there despite the fact it’s notoriously full of angry Cyclopes, nothing will stop you.
...
We feel it’s one of the great pleasures in RPGs to become a demi-god and then return to those Cyclopes and teach them a lesson.
Bullshit. Oh, sure, it's fun. For, like, five minutes, as you slaughter first couple of cyclops basking in realization of how powerful you've become. Then you understand that there's still boatload of cyclops, that killing them requires no effort, poses no challenge and basically becomes a chore, meaning that the whole dungeon is kinda wasted for you. That's a huge flaw of all new (well, old new, and I’m not talking about old old ones since I haven’t played them in a while, my last playthrough of WoX was, like, when I was 14, I simply don’t remember them well) M&M games, to be honest - you just can't play them so all the game stages remain challenging. Well, you can if you fuck up your party composition, but then it becomes extremely tedious - it's just impossible to find balance here.
Another (and, this time, rather unobvious) problem with hireable high-level party members is that many of them actually make your late game harder. Well, longer - you can mow down the foes with any kind of party, it's just the matter of time you spend while doing so. Let's look at the infamous Cauri Blackthorne:
Sure, if you get her on level 15, she's total beast. But does that change the fact that she's horribly built (which is pretty much a tradition with pregenned chars)? Not really.
GM merchant is waste of points - money is overflowing in this game and you don't have any valid ways of spending it.
GM disarm is useless - just cast day of protecton and those traps barely scratch you. Even if they do, regeneration patches you up almost instantly. Even if, by some unknown reason, you want to disarm, just use plain expert + ability boost ring - that's enough.
Alchemy expert is unnecessary - you need just one char with alchemy, and he's gonna be able to at least master it.
Elemental magics are wasteful - you should have a necromancer to cast all the utility spells, and in terms of damage magic just can't catch up with either her bow (at the distance) or her double swords (in close combat).
Oh, wait, she has Master Dagger instead of Master Sword - really, why would you learn a stronger skill when there's a weaker one available?
DE abilities are redundant by the same reasons as with magic - darkfire bolt seems powerful, only it's not. Also, it costs too much – she starts with 180 mana, meaning a whopping number of six darkfire bolts. That’s big.
Finally, GM chain is optional - you can do almost as fine with master chain or even with expert leather. The way tanking in this game works, your party is as vulnerable as your weakest party member is, and since dark elves are tankier that clerics/wizards, she'll do well with just expert leather.
Basically, her skill points are spent on shit and it doesn't even matter that she has more SPs than the average character of her levels - just having Bow Skill at 20 would've been much more useful than all of her diverse shenanigans.
And see, because she's level 50 already she won't level as much over the course of the game, meaning that she won't develop as much, meaning that while she'll slice through the initial monsters, she'll struggle with the late game ones. Well, struggle is an unappropriate word because you can go through this game with almost any kind of party, but you'll go much slower and why would you waste your time?
So, if you want to smoothen up your game, avoid those high level characters, use just the basic lvl 5-15 ones. Or even say “fuck this shit” and, using edited save, create yourself a normal party – that’s a decent solution. And, since the game wasn’t really balanced for 5 man party, don’t use one (unless you go pure melee build) – you can easily complete it with either 4 or 3 party members. Heck, with certain classes, you can even singleton it. And that’s what we’re gonna do.
Hmm, my short foreword grew rather large, but if you actually got here, don’t worry – we’re almost there. Let me tell you a bit about power tiers of singleton playthroughs. Basically, there’s two of them, comfy and grindy.
At the bottom of the grindy tier lays the impotent minotaur. He’s a total gimp – he has the lowest melee damage output of all the melee classes, he uses the second worst weapon possible, he lacks alchemy & learning skills (and they’re truly important in singleton), he can’t wear boots & helmets (meaning lower AC and less buffs for you), and for all of that he can do what? Slowly heal himself back up with his pathetic expert body?
Next come the troll & the knight. They’re really close to each other so I’m not sure who is better. Troll deals significantly less damage than knight (in fact, he’s not that ahead from the minotaur), however, he has a chance of paralyzing his victim, meaning that once you’ll get your mace skill to at least 30, 1 on 1 duels will go real easy for you. Now, if only they were common in this game... You can always kite, though. Troll also has the highest HPs in the game and, thanks to his huge starting strength and endurance, first levels go relatively easy for him.
Knight has a much rougher start, but, in the mid to late game, he deals significantly more damage. His spear+sword combo can easily dish out 200 damage per hit. He’s also much more skill points efficient – with troll, you have to get his mace as high as it gets and, past skill level 20, that starts to become really expensive. With the knight, you can spread the love between armsmaster, spear and sword skills, meaning that you will gain more benefits for less efforts. Master plate (don’t GM it – GM armsmaster covers any recovery penalties that you’ll ever get) also helps.
Still, there’s a reason I called this tier grindy – 200 damage per hit is great, but when you encounter a 10k hp pack of enemies, it doesn’t mean much (especially since you’ll still miss and monsters will resist your hits). No area of effect spells means you can forget about wiping out high level areas – it’ll take eternity to do so and that’s if it will be possible at all. Also, you have no travelling spells, not even the most basic ones – no torchlight means you’ll be wading through the uncomfortably dark dungeons. No wizard eye will make you prone to ambushes on overworld maps, also it’ll make reagent collecting much harder. Finally, no fly & town portal & lloyd’s beacon will make you waste lots of time walking – that’s hours of real time we’re talking about.
I really don’t advise singletoning the game this way. Even if you do, please, savescum the shit out of the shops to make your life easier – save before entering them & then reload until you get those “fly” and “town portal” scrolls that you need so immensely.
However, I do want you to commend a certain poster here. Watch and sit in awe:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/best-might-and-magic.42757/page-57#post-2424285
See what this bro did? He singletoned the fucking game with a fucking troll. Dude has balls of steel, basically. And did he got a single fucking brofist for it? Of course he fucking did not, because codex is in decline - it's more about yapping cheerfully to empty ubisoft promises & criticizing biowarian&bethesdian games (while playing then ten times over, obviously) nowadays than it's about recognizing quality oldschool games. Fuck yeah.
But I digress. Next comes the vampire - thanks to his daggers & spirit magic combo, his damage output can rival the knight's one once you get to really high levels, and vampire actually has sustainability. Master body & alchemy do wonders for his health & mana issues. Vampiric levitation also helps in a number of places and mistform has some interesting uses - you can use wands while in mistform and, if you get your alchemy to, like, 25-30 + get alchemy buffing rings, you can recharge those wands ad infinitum with via appropriate potions. I.e., you can spam shrapmetal (albeit low level) while being perfectly immune to physical damage - something to think about. Or maybe it's more about spirit lashing the enemies - judging by the bestiary table, few monsters are actually immune to spirit and it's an aoe spell which are extremely rare in this category.
Finally there's the cleric. Thanks to his hour of power, he's decent enough at close range (he won't outshine pure meleers, but he can stand for himself) and, unlike the rest of grindy tier, he actually has some ranged damage options. Especially in the outdoors - Sunray is obviously crappy, but it's as good as it gets for the grindy tier. Prismatic Light has the potential to be a decent AoE spell. Flying fist can also work fine - if my sources don't lie to me, immunities to body magic are not as common as they were in VII, so you can actually brofist the living shit out of your enemies if you want to. GM mind also has it uses, potentially, but it whiffs on most of elemental enemies and that's an actual problem. And you can summon decoy wisps to tank out for you (besides, there's five of them and they deal 20-80 light damage per shot - that's solid).
Cleric & Vampire would be good classes if only they had travel option... (no one prohibits you to use editor, though - just for those).
Next comes the comfy tier. Dragons are the lowest class here (accessible via editor only, obviously). Contrary to the public opinion, they're not that broken. Sure, thanks to their tanky hps and huge starting damage, they breeze through the early game, however, mid to late their damage starts to lag behind. Still, with dragon skills 60, master bodybuilding (for them it's 30 hp per point - groovy) and GM learning (meaning that you can actually max out those skills), you have little to worry about. Here's my recent dragon:
(build is screwed though - should've went for alchemy 30 instead of pumping body building that high; alchemy 30 is the only way to increase his damage output via boost speed options).
Dragons are fine, but stale and they lack options. Dark Elves are better in this department - they start frail and don't pack the punch in starting combats, however, their mid-to-late game damage is devastating and their overall gameplay is actually versatile, you don't just go & burn stuff as you do it with dragons. You have some tricks and you can switch between different bows to achieve different effects. And you have almost all of the travel spells, not the bare fly.
Finally, there are liches and they're awesome. I won't say more about them because, as you already can guess, that's my choice for this LP, however, they're the most fun class to singleton this game, in my opinion. It's not as challenging as with the other classes (but not effortless since even high-lvl liches can die easily), but it contains no boring parts and that's what matters the most to me.
Also, if you don't like any of the options presented, you can try a number of things:
- Play your lich without dark magic - elemental only. Makes him less broken, makes you use more tricks to actually complete the game.
- Play as an "archmage" - swap your necromancer's dark magic for the light one via editor (maybe even swap his appearance so he doesn't look oxymoronic). That's close to the previous variant, but gives you more options.
- Play as a druid - swap your dark magic for GM tiers of body, mind and spirit ones (if you need them).
KK, now we're done with Let's Read long texts about Might and Magic and can finally start our lp.
(as usual, let's start with a song to set up the mood - dagger wound isles were supposed to be somewhat native american so let's go with mayan industrial ambient)
Here's our hero - strong of mind and tenacious, but fugly, clumsy, weak and luckless. Temporary, of course.
As our bonus skills, we're taking elemental ones - they're the most expensive skills to buy so we'd rather have them for free.
Man, Pope had to spend his youth on heavy drugs to look like that in his twenties...
As you can see, we're absolutely unfit for physical combat (not that we're going anywhere near it) but begin with semi-decent hit points & mana pool. Well, considering we're taking 5x damage, those HPs are pretty much nothing, still, without high endurance it would've been even worse. At least we can stand against some random ranged attack.
And so it's just us, some lizardman dude & a caravan that's we're supposed to be protecting. Protecting a caravan full of goodies, huh?
Nah, I feel moar like looting. They're not paying us high enough for this crap.
Random lizardman dude gives us our first quest pointer.
Before that, we fix our luck through the local well (up to the mark of 17) - and not a single coin involved.
Then it's about taking some stupid crystal to some pesky sun-worshipper. Whatever.
I'd rather donate to their local temple - not out of sharing their pagan beliefs, but for the sake of convenience.
As in the VII, good reputation gives you discounts in the shops. Unlike the VII, authors didn't bother to attach reputation changes to quests so donations are the only way to gain citizen's favour.
Then we blitz through the first arcomage challenge - we had a hand with lots of damaging cards, thus dispatching our opponent quite easily.
Yeah, I always knew that stealing from your workplace pays off. I mean, what's the point of actually working if not for that?
We collect local quests - we're sorta indifferent to the plights of local population, still, those XPs have to come outta somewhere.
And we have a quick chat with the aforementioned cleric.
Too bad he doesn't have a motorcycle.
Now it's asta la vista time, baby.
Time to spend our illicit moneys. First comes merchant - makes all the other skills cheaper. I'm not going to train it further, though - no point. Five man party has no ways of spending its gold, more so the one-man team.
Next is bow - with our mighy 40 mana we're won't be spellslinging for long.
Learning - we need those fast levels. It's not working on quest XPs so we won't gain lots from it at the moment, but something is still better than nothing.
Finally, leather to give our frail body at least a modicum of protection. Not that we got weak - it's not from all the shopping, it's from our temple "hour of power" blessing (they reward for donations that way) running out.
OK, we can recover while we're training to level 2.
Let's start with the air magic so we don't have to recast wizard's eye as often.
Ahead of us, brave lizardmen warriors throw their young lives away to protect their settlement from human invaders, but why would we care for that? We're in for the personal gains so let's skip it.
We still can't avoid pirate encounters though.
But we're not struggling in vain - it's all for the chests they're guarding.
We have to kite them real long - our accuracy sucks, and one bow doesn't deal nearly enough damage. But as they lack ranged attacks, we have all the time in the world for the hit&run tactics.
Ah, the sweet, blood-soaked loot!
Amongst the trash, we find ourselves a decent club - as in VII, clubs have ridiculously low recovery time (due to designer mistake) so, if you have high strength, they make for an excellent early game weapon. Not that we're heading into the close range - it's more for the intimidation purposes.
Then it's sniping more hapless victims...
And getting more loot.
We also find some barrels on these isles, but we don't peruse them - let us first visit all of those "pump your stat up to 17" wells before that. We're doing it less for the actual combat benefits (after a short starting period, we'll barely notice the stat influence) and more for the stat challenges - winning those "get your stat to 200" can be tricky in singleton.
Visiting all of the huts, we stop the local disease epidemic. An unfortunate occurrence, but I promise you, we'll correct our mistake later.
And then it's the deserted temple time!
Or not. Going to some dark place choke full of snakes and traps and who knows what - am I what, daft?
I'd rather swipe more loot from under the pirate noses.
Shooting those noses away is also a nice plan, btw.
More futile gratitudes from random people, if you can call those things so. They're not even bloody furries - how do you call them, scalies?
At least it brings us closer to ultimate power.
Expert air magic is nice - now our minimap shows loot on the ground so scavenging for alchemical reagents becomes much easier.
We also invest in personal protection.
As we ran out of easy quests to accomplish, we go out to slaughter some more pirates (to the immense joy of locals - little they know...) There's no shortcoming of them and, in singleton runs, XPs for them is actually decent enough if you have time to spare.
And they shall bow, oh they will.
This grinding was kinda pointless, however, as we had another xp earning option. Easily scrounging enough reagents to make +50 speed potion, we're given more than enough experience - those quests provide excellent payoff in singleton runs.
Unfortunately, local trainers are absolutely clueless. Level cap 5, what the hell?
We improve our armour wearing skills, actually removing that pesky recovery time penalty. Being 10% slower is no fun.
Now it's time to get out of this rathole, but how? I surely don't want to go through the temple - I'm not surviving that shit.
Hm, those docks are not that far, however. And Pope was quite a swimmer in his youth, so...
Easy.
Actually, it was not - I almost screwed up here. The basis is simple - you run across the water, drinking as much red potions as you can. The problem is, drowning damage is percentage based, meaning the more HPs you have, the less effective those potions become. And we've almost came to the limit - only buying some gog blood from the local shop gave us red potion strong enough to carry us through. You should do this run at level 1.
Once there, we activate the teleporter so we don't have to suffer again.
Returning to village, we loot our caravan even further.
And of we go, away from this lousy backwater!
That's it for part 1 - kinda short, but I'm sorta tired from typing the foreword. Part 2 will come soon.