Does such an old game deserve its own thread? Probably not. But threads are free, so here we go anyways. So thanks to the LP by AaronSofaer, I've reinstalled this game yet again, and this time I'm going to get past the first city, so help me God. But I did have a couple questions. First, Aaron mentioned Alchemists as hybrids, and difficult to level. But as I understand the classes, they're a pure caster. Was that a mistype? Also, Bishops in theory seem to blow the other casters out of the water, given their ability to do, well, *everything*. How much does their slower advancement hurt in practice? For example, would I be better off having a dedicated mage rather than a bishop type character? Also, should I resist my (very strong) urge to have like 3 bishops? Finally, a bunch of guides that I'm looking at seem to recommend switching classes in very clever ways in order to... I can't quite figure it out. Maximize something something something. Should all my characters just pick a class & go with it, or is this idea of switching mid-stream worth considering?
From what i remember. Alchemist is a pure caster but not a very good one. Not more then 2 Bishops needed. Each with 3 magic schools. Never switch classes in Wiz 8 is a good rule and only wrong in very rare situations. Hybrids are weak if you do not grind their magic skills up. I stay away from Samurai,Lord, Ninja as they are more difficult to develope right.
I believe it was possible to use class switching to optimize something. However, this wasn't like Wizadry 7 where repeated class switching could turn someone super uber. Class switching is far less optimal; can you point to a guide where it's talking about this. I don't remember the slower bishop advancement ever being a big issue. A faint memory says this was partly because of the stupid way the game gated learning spells (it hard coded level thresholds in, in addition to the individual skill thresholds).
Levelling a bishop can be a pain because of the quirky way it determines when to raise skills. I forget the exact details, but raising a particular school too much might cut off ways of raising another school except via a few rarely-used spells, making it much harder to raise that other school. This page explains it a bit better and gives you an 'optimal' bishop levelling guide, though it involves a lot of grinding. I once tried a party with two bishops, following this guide, and it was so tedious... Another thing I just remembered to watch out for: the spell books available at merchants are random, so you might have to keep checking later to find different ones, but you might have to buy up some of the cheap stuff from the merchant's inventory to free up space on the merchant for new books to appear in.
Bishops are incredibly overpowered if you min/max them* and rather underpowered if you don't. Alchemists are not a hybrid but they're a little weak. Not terrible though, they get some interesting spells. * Find Burz, cast charm, rest, cast charm, rest, cast charm, rest, until the skills are maxed out. Go to Arnika, cast Knock Knock on the vault, rest, Knock Knock, rest, until the skills are maxed out. While you're doing that, keep spamming Light/Enchanted Blade/Magic Screen/Shadow Hound/etc to keep leveling your other skills.
It's mentioned in pretty much all the guides I've looked at, but here's the one I'm currently trying to digest: http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/374906-wizardry-8/faqs/55174
So... umm... wow. Thanks for that link... it's super helpful, and at the same time it's a *great* argument for not futzing with bishops. Hmm... I think it's time to recreate my party.
What I did when I played Wiz 8 was start with a party of all ninjas. Then I got in an easy fight in the opening dungeon, and walked away from the computer for a few hours. I got the whole party up to 99 stealth, then leveled and classed switched everyone to what I really wanted to play. Then like 20 hours later I fell through the ground or something, and it was Ironman, so I uninstalled.
I actually remember that, Mike. It was a little bit more involved. :) You had to actually take it easy at first. Wound the enemies in a group, rotate your people around until they were almost dead, then kill off the enemies, rinse repeat. You needed to get your stealth up to ~30 for the +3 AC bonus before you could outright walk away from the computer, and then after a little while monster groups would fall unconscious because of the stamina they spend to swing (and miss) at your party.
It isn't, and it isn't a pain. The "problem" comes up when a spell is a member of two different schools; the game always counts the higher-ranked school when determining which skill might benefit from an increase in casing. A couple of things worth mentioning. The example on that link is a guy powergaming an uber-bishop with 4 spell schools. Yes, that would actually matter in that situation. A normal bishop can hit on the high points of about 2.5 schools without much trouble, and 2 schools easily. There's enough skill points from level up to offset any problems losing "good leveling spells", that is spells you can cast over and over in certain situations to rank up a skill (if you weren't aware; skills can increase via use *and* when yoiu allocate points at level up). You don't need to spend time doing that with only 2 schools of magic. With 3 you might get stretched (depending on a number of factors). You'll easily max 2 spell schools on 2 bishops over the course of a "normal" game.
Wouldn't this work better using stealth classes that have lower stat requirements? Ninjas require strength, for instance, which is fairly useless to a bunch of classes.
Meh, that's largely tiny optimizations from class switching. 5 points here and there just won't matter much even over the medium run. By all means do it if you like. Also, I'll declare shenanigans on the notion that Lord, Samurai, and Ninja are too hard to make powerful (granted, if you want to go Fairy Ninja to get the REDACTED you'll have some trouble actually getting it. Also, it will prevent the ninja from being able to do thrown weapons as it's cursed. But it is, inarguably, the best weapon in the game). They do take a little longer to come into their own than some other classes, but they're all quite powerful. Samurai perhaps the least so; there's reasons for that you can ask about if you like. Also, Monks own. Anyway it's not too hard to develop these classes well. It's true that generally you don't want to develop them as hybrids; Focus on their martial powers. You will eventually get decent backup casting out of them (The Valkrie in particular is nice to have backup healing on; she'll frequently live when nobody else does). Really, all melee types will struggle at first. You won't notice it as much in the monastary but you may have noticed it once you got outside. An unfortunate side effect of the design. Debuffs can really help, at least.
Has anyone ever gone back and played Wizardry 7 or 6 and imported a party all the way through? I have the urge to do that on occasion, but I usually get bored and quit after a few hours.
Maybe? I think I might also have liked getting the critical hit percentage you wound up with by taking ninas? And maybe they started with more stealth or something to make it worthwhile? There's a bonus, right? So maybe you need it to bootstrap? I barely remember, this all happened back when the game first came out. There's a good chance that "Because Ninjas" is the right answer, actually. I remember that as one of my first great min/max "victories". I think I only leveled up if I wanted to switch classes, which made the random encounters nice and easy. Makes me want to try it again, actually, but I have discipline. And DotA.
The game also doesn't work while alt-tabbed. :( I wonder if it could be made to work nicely in windowed mode?
Yes, I am on 64bit Windows 7. I do have the latest patch as well as a fan patch (the fan patch fixes three very specific bugs and does no balance changes), which might be why it's working fine for me.
Ugh. Now I remember why I never played past the first city: this game sometimes throws 5 or 6 groups of monsters at you in a row with no chance to rest, and there's no way to disengage. You have to suck it up & fight 30-40 enemies in a row, which is unwinnable. (by definition, thanks to the monster scaling) That's... kinda lame. It seems like the only way to win is to almost never level up, and just grind your skills up... which kinda negates the main draw of the game: the rich & interesting character builds. (Well... I suppose another possibility is to save/reload repeatedly until the game spawns groups small enough to win against.) Oh well. Back to Dark Souls!
And another gamer is devoured by the Arnika Road! OH THE HUMANITY. More seriously there are a few things going on here: (1) The first time you encounter the Arnika Road is the hardest. That said, it never really gets "easy" because the game design is, as you have discovered, hideously fucking stupid. (2) This is a game where leveling buffs and debuffs matters 1000% more than leveling direct damage. (3) Even if you do everything 'right' in terms of optimizing your characters, because of the timing and when you hit it the Arnika Road is still a slime-pit of "for fuck's sake Wizardry 8 why are you such a stupid pigfucker." There really is no excuse for it. I refuse to believe they actually playtested the game to that point. It's the ruination of what would have otherwise been a great game. The other thing I hated about Wizardry 8 was the lack of a concept of 'dungeon', or perhaps I mean "Peril Everywhere™", which is more of an issue of mental fatigue. There are very, very, very few "safe areas"; at any time you might be approached by enemies. So the overall feeling is all wrong. "Let's step out and go to the store for a quart of milk -- OH LOOK WE ARE BEING ASSAULTED FOR THE THIRTY-FIFTH TIME TODAY. BY NAZI ALIEN SPIDERS." It just felt like a slog. This is because it was a slog. TLDR: This is a game that is better remembered fondly than actually played.
Ooooh yeah. I'd almost forgotten about that. When you finally get to the first town and decide to do some shopping, you have to fight occasional enemy patrols, don't you? It's beginning to come back to me. And holy shit, that was *annoying*. On the other hand.... 15 radically different classes. 4 different magic schools. 11 different races. Building characters is *so* cool. It's a shame so many other parts of the game don't quite hold up.
Funny story about that mod, actually. I installed it, and discovered that everytime you use it it resets all your keybinds to the default settings... which suck. So I alternate between suffering through incredibly slow combats and a really crappy keyboard layout, depending on which one is currently irking me more. OK... so maybe that wasn't a funny story after all. Goddamnit.
BTW... I stumbled on a post by a Wiz 8 dev where he talked about how the Arnika Road was designed to teach players alternate ways of dealing with enemies. Apparently the devs expect players to avoid monsters there "using spells like Camoflage". Actually, camoflage is the only spell that I know of that helps you avoid monsters, so I'm not sure what other sneaky techniques they had in mind. But fortunately, I had a bishop that was *just* about to level, so I was able to choose the one spell that makes that section do-able, and I'm now in the enemy infested town. And sure enough, every time I try to run an errand, I have to wade through 10-15 higardi thieves. *Sigh* Fine. I'll fight all 15 of you highwaymen, and *then* go get my milk.
You can also go rest in the little nooks and crannies of the geography, which if nothing else means when you get ambushed, you have a frontage of one or two enemies. This makes most fights really easy.
You might think so, but the main enemy I was encountering on the road were wasps... and they can apparently completely ignore terrain and stand all around you regardless of where you're standing.
