Wizardry The Wizardry Series Thread

[DraQ]

It must be my stamina, I can't figure out exactly what it affects

Staying conscious.

Also, everything else.

 

[ArcturusXIV]

You, Sirs, are Brilliant!

I beat them, 4 party members remaining. Fatigue it was, and blinding flash was the win condition. Does the Codex suffer to share in my ph@t l3wt..?

 

[Renegen]

The holy water in Arnika's temple will cure your character of all conditions, it can come in useful. I also think that it may resurrect too. Wizardry 8 is one of the few games where rats don't drop +5 long swords. I like fighting rogues, or encountering metal slimes for example knowing you'll probably get a metal item out of them.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I'm not talking about the Western games, since most of them didn't have a sountrack, but the Japanese ports of the Wizardry games actually all seem to have extremely well-crafted soundtracks, some of them even played by live orchestras, which surprises me a lot considering that these were ports of hardcore western games with a limited audience.

The first five ones were scored by the guy who also scored the original Macross series (very good), and the first Suikoden (decent). Those ones just used the NES and SNES chiptunes, but some of the songs were later recorded by live orchestras.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=535cts87fj8&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ioxZDWMHMo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_msQrs1THoQ

There are other ports for other systems which again all have their own original soundtracks. My favorite one is the FM Towns port of Wizardry V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAPNsiqT9k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6d2PC6u ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FWJ-0HwE3g

It's like, woah, nice! You wouldn't expect these to get such a treatment.

 

[Lightknight]

Wizardry games actually all seem to have extremely well-crafted soundtracks, some of them even played by live orchestras

As if that is somehow a treatment exclusive to Wiz games. Many, many, MANY Japanese RPGs (and just games in general) have orchestra soundtracks, and there are videogame music concerts going on all the damn time, from the 80's to the present day.
Right now i'm listening to a Taito game music live concert from the 90 i recently found. 80's glorious synths.

 

[aweigh]

Wizardry 8 is like having sex while getting kicked in the groin, I love it

first round: bishop 1 casts freeze flesh, bard uses siren's wail for Insanity, my bishop 2 casts bless
second round: bishop 1 casts noxious cloud, bard uses rousing drums for haste, bishop 2 casts armormelt

third round: my fighter/sam, rougue/nin, myles, vi and my valkyrie obliterate all enemies.

lather rinse repeat. it's great fun levelling up and stuff, but i sure hope the game throws a monkey wrench into my well-oiled monster slaying machine... i did run into some Dreadmares that group-Turncoated me, in the swamp; now THAT was a fun fight. even had to use some ressurection powder afterwards. turncoated fighter/sam is an absolute terror

 

[DraQ]

Try switching to hard or starting ironman.

 

[aweigh]

t superficial changes. doesn't affect the game's mechanics...

 

[aweigh]

t superficial changes. doesn't affect the game's mechanics...

 

[Wyrmlord]

Wizardry games, or at least Wizardry 6 which I played more of than the rest, start out difficult but get very easy much later.

If you push up the difficulty, then it starts out even harder and eventually gets even easier, due to the increased XP.

 

[mondblut]

That's the whole point of levelling up, is it not?

 

[Eyeball]

You could grab one o' them mods discussed in the humonguous Wiz8 thread. Ramps up the difficulty something nasty - you can now walk straight into Ascension Peak without having to circumvent the blockade, but now you have a level 50 giant blocking your way.

Cloudkill your way past THAT.

 

[Azrael the cat]

There are MUCH harder parts of the game coming up:

1. Firstly, you've got a decent party build - ASSUMING that those bishops are two-school rather than four-school. If they're 4-school bishops you're screwed, but if they're 2-school, (covering the various schools between them) then you'll gain access to spells just in time to need them. (2-school bishops are the best casters in the game - they learn almost as fast as pure wizards/alchemists/etc, with much more flexibility, and a really handy auto-identify class skill). Your bard is a great choice - I'd say to give him the cursed beserking sword from the bank (you won't need to upgrade his weapon that way for a LONG time) and work on his melee so that he can handle a flank if necessary, while using his instruments for anything ranged (with a stamina-boosting item or two he can spam instruments every fight and recover by the next one - just keep spamming the sleep/snare stuff mostly, or silence for casters, or the AoE damage instrument for the low-hp mass-numbers monsters.

2. Use your back-up casters (any rangers, Vi, samurai, bards etc) to be your buff-casters and maintain your buffs at ALL TIMES - firstly because you never know when you'll need them, but secondly because there's no penalty for having them cast the buff and it's the best way for keeping their spell progression going given that you'll need to also focus on other skills during level-ups (the 2-school bishops will have good enough progression anyway, from class bonuses, level-ups and being the main casters during combat).

3. IMPORTANT - boost your bard's traps and open locks abilities (his thieving stuff) over time so that you can make Myles obsolete. From memory he won't go everywhere in the game, and you'll need another option - and your bard can easily cover that. Usually I don't even bother with a thief - I just use a bard for traps and locks, and later I'll use the robot ninja for stealth. You WILL want to sub Myles out recruit a certain robot ninja in to the party, while using the bard for opening locks and detecting traps (and despite Myles' backstabs, a bard with a good sword - like the cursed beserking sword in the bank - is a far better backup fighter, easily holding down a flank while firing off songs.

Now why am I giving instructions on how to make the game even easier when you are complaining about how easy it is?

Because the game gets MUCH harder as you go on.

MUCH MUCH harder.

Firstly, there's the good old level-scaling. The road to Arnika can be utter death at high levels.

Secondly, there's some of the 'hidden' stuff in Arnika (robbing the bank et al) - if you do things right you shouldn't end up in combat, but do it wrong and you're in for a fighjt.

But seriously, don't even THINK about talking about the game benig too easy until you've done the Bayjin area. Have fun with your uber lizardmen fighters getting mind-controlled and slaughtering your own party. Laugh it up as your possessed samurai scores an insta-kill against one of your other party members. Fall off your chair in hilarity as your mind-controlled bard uses his instrument of mass insanity against your party, turning all of them insane, leading to your ninja getting an insta-kill on your fighter, one caster following it up with a mass debuff to your party's armour and the other caster casting mass paralysis on you all.

Fun times.

The Bayjin are really tough unless you have specifically planned a build around them (party with high mind/spell resistance) - incidentally, it makes iron will a really good 'special' to go for. All the 'specials' are really good, but iron will seems weaker than it is until you get to that area.

The Rapax can be tough, but only until you know what you're dealing with - they are basically just hp-spunges with decent melee damage...so use formations intelligently, spam your disabling songs non-stop, use snares intelligently and ping them with ranged weapons, and hopefully they'll be at a more manageable level of HP nby the time you go toe-to-toe. Still, the castle isn't exactly a breeze, taking on the Rapax royalty and all that.

There are also quite a few really really hard optional 'easter egg' fights in the game, that are quite impossible for a party who would ordinarily be entering that region for the first time. Fight the undead in the temple (not in Arnika - in the fields past Trynton on the way to the swamps( and then tell me things are too easy).

 

[riptide]

The undead Temple and the fight before Marten are two of my favourites. I was actually nervous before going into each one. That reminds me, I gotta do a dual monk walkthrough sometime. One with fists, the other with the cursed staff. Should be fun...

 

[commie]

Does the level scaling eventually taper off? Will you eventually grind up enough to overcome the filth easily enough? Always wanted to start on W8 but when I heard of the level scaling I put it on the backburner.

 

[DraQ]

Does the level scaling eventually taper off? Will you eventually grind up enough to overcome the filth easily enough? Always wanted to start on W8 but when I heard of the level scaling I put it on the backburner.

It's not as much scaling as fixed levelled lists and, as such, they are necessarily finite so they do taper off.

Specific locations spawn only specific range of enemies and each type of enemy has its own level range, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, with min, max and intermediate levels set.

The levelling is most visible at low levels, since even mere several levels of difference between high and low end of the range may equal to range between "slightly weaker than the party" and "several times more powerful, FUCKING RUN!!!1" (and then you're on Arnika Road, trying to run the gauntlet of rape - best n00b filter ever).

In any case you should probably check a game 90% of the codex furiously faps to in spite of it having both level scaling and furries in it.


Of course, in my case the latter is actually part of the reason.

 

[Hobo Elf]

There does seem to be a work around to the level scaling that is similar to Oblibian. You can stave off leveling and just rack up skills. Of course you'll occasionally want to level up as enemies cap out. The idea is to be generally the same level as the enemies in the current zone, but have vastly superior skills that don't need level ups to be raised. If you are a faggot who cares about grinding then you can grind skills and ignore leveling.
..I'm not actually sure if this works since I haven't tested it out, but it was an idea that did pop up in my head.

 

[hoverdog]

I don't think you can really grind combat skills, but magic spheres, for example - fairly easily (and it's almost a must with bishops who can't afford to put points into them)

 

[DraQ]

I don't think you can really grind combat skills, but magic spheres, for example - fairly easily (and it's almost a must with bishops who can't afford to put points into them)

Still, with a bishop or hybrid simply putting up the necessary travel spells and just using magic whenever opportunity arises should take care of necessary grinding, any thing past that is optional and powerfag territory.

 

[Grunker]

Does the level scaling eventually taper off? Will you eventually grind up enough to overcome the filth easily enough? Always wanted to start on W8 but when I heard of the level scaling I put it on the backburner.

Yeah, the "trash mobs" of Wizardry 8 is the only thing that really bugs me out after playing this game for more than 6 months, on and off. It's quite brilliant in almost all other aspects, but you will wade through battle after battle after battle executing the exact same tactic every time, and it gets quite tiring. And since Wizardry 8 doesn't fuck around on the difficulty side of things, every single one of these battles carry the potential of you losing - making them take that much longer to finish. At least if you're not a faggot and lower the difficulty (something I refuse to do, since I can beat the battles just fine, it just takes a million years).

In that sense, because of the difficulty, they aren't really trash mobs (hence the quotation-marks), but they fill out the same role as trash mobs would do in other RPGs - except they are tough to beat, and thus require more time.

Regardless of this fact you should definetely play the game. It's fucking awesome, the character customization is DA BOMB (no, really, DA BOMB). I say this even though I fucking detest skilling-by-doing experience systems, because this problem is negligeble because of the huge variety and number of possiblities in the rest of the character system. The world is also really nice to explore and has some incredibly cool stuff in it.

I could do with using less time fighting the same lizards/highway men/spiders for the umpteenth time, but every game has its flaws. This one has level-scaled trash mobs, and you should endure it for the rest of the game's awesomeness.

I kindda hope OP is right in lieu of this - that the games "normal" mobs become easier and other fights get harder.

 

[commie]

Thanks for the replies guys. Good to know that if I face some uber mobs that I can run and run and eventually grind past them so they don't get in the way as much leaving the fun for the proper fights and that there are workarounds of sorts. I know from Might and Magic 1 the run and grind method all too well so it's not the terror for me that it can be for some, but it's good to know that Wiz 8 doesn't lock you into a permanent arms race of 'scaled mob +1' no matter the level you reach.

 

[Foxtrix]

I'm starting to play Wizardy 6 and was wondering if there are any patches I should apply first. For example, running the Cosmic Forge Editor I've seen that there is an option to fix 'Learning Spells from Spellbooks' algorithm so that characters get mana when learning a spell. I don't know if this is a necessary fix or a cheat, and when I try applying this fix it fails. Also, I've seen mention of a carrying capacity bug which prevents the max carrying capacity of PCs to increase when their strength increases. Is there a patch to fix this issue?

 

[kmonster]

You don't need any patches or "fixes" for wizardry 6.
Just get high strength and vitality at creation and you'll have sufficient carrying capacity from the start until the end.

 

[Foxtrix]

@kmonster

Thanks, but I already created my characters and started the game. The first 4 chars have 14, 16, 12 and 12 STR, and most of my characters have around 12-13 vitality. Don't know if this is high enough, but if I have problems with carrying capacity later on I think I'll just edit the savegame to correct it.

 

[Ammar]

Go get this : http://www.softwarespecialties.com/dcfo ... /224.html# to solve the infamous spell bug.

I would also install the Carry Capacity patch, since it makes more sense like that.

Besides, your spell point regeneration rate is ALSO determined at Char Creation (need high vitality and piety IIRC). So you have enough stats which have to be high at creation without Str. Faries get a bonus and Lizardmen a penalty to spell point regeneration.