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PurpleXVI posted:No, I did not. I just talked about it and how you could do it, but that it would be skipping content, which we aren't doing for this LP. If someone else ascends, the Dark Savant's route to ascension is gone anyhow so from his point of view he might as well blow the whole thing up. The artifacts will presumably survive and given enough time I'm sure the Savant could figure some other way to use them.
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Sep 8, 2020 14:22
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 16:49 |
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 edit: crap, sorry, should be from the party POV. 
Araganzar fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 11:42
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That's a quality post, Araganzar. Also, finally got around to editing the screenshots for the next post. I had so much demon cleavage to remove, as well as about an hour of me getting hopelessly lost because of a bug in the game.
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Sep 16, 2020 19:14
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Part 013: The Horny Update And not just because the Rapax have horns.  So the Rapax Castle is probably the second-most-annoying part of the game for me every time. Normally I have an impeccable sense of direction, but this place fucks me up utterly every time. It consists of three layers, the cellars, the main castle which we're in now and the upper castle. The cellars are irrelevant and feel strongly like more was planned for them. But let's look at the other two.   Oddly enough, the main castle is actually the easiest to navigate since most of the silly-looking corridors are because of 3D corridors being layered on top of each other and are actually part of one-way sub-areas. Fundamentally, the main castle floor is just a square with up/down stairs at three of the corners and the Temple of Al-Sedexus at the fourth. The other place of interest is Ferro's forge on the south side. The upper floor, on the other hand, is a total shithole.   The main floor is oddly void of decorations, with only a few actual rooms and mostly just corridors. First thing I do is set a direct course for Ferro, because he sells some incredible stuff. On the way I, of course, get ambushed by the locals.    Levels are a bit of a mixed bag since we're starting to hit the top tier of the level cap for some of the locals. Most creature types span a range of 6 or 7 levels, with three variants in there, a low, a mid and a high-level one. Once you start out-levelling an area, the game doesn't really have any tricks for dealing with it. It does not, for instance, keep cranking up amounts or spawn rates as far as I'm aware. You'll just start being free to laugh as you scythe through them.    The fighting carries me past this tease of a look into a treasure room which is also one of the biggest dick moves in the game, because there's actually no way to get in there. There is a way to get some stuff out of there, but you probably won't realize that's where it's coming from when you do so, and thus it can lead you on a wild goose chase for a long time.    In a decent bit of signposting, these purple lights are explicitly posted at up/down passages in the corners of the castle, making them easier to find.  We enter Ferro's forge by the side entrance so we can yoink his bellows for Stony. It gets combined with the hose from the Mine Tunnels to form...  Something that's perfectly ideal for washing away Rapax.  While I'm poking around in the back, a random patrol comes to check up on Ferro who, as an example of great customer service, takes his forge hammer to their heads in our defense.  They would have gone down easily enough without him, but he does help speed things up. My biggest worry was that they'd dogpile him and manage to kill him, as Wizardry 8 doesn't really do much in terms of invincible NPC's and we are, currently, in one of the few parts of the game where I believe we can actually softlock ourselves out of progress.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxZHmBBc2-k So Ferro is probably the last merchant you'll meet in the game, and what he sells is, appropriately enough, very rad.  He's got top-tier ammo for your ranged guys and gals.   And amazing pieces of armor for just about everyone. The best thing is that "unique" items sold by merchants also get reliably restocked when their inventory refills, which means we'll be able to slap Infinity Helms, Robes of Rejuvenation and the like on every single party member who's actually capable of equipping them.  He also sells high-level spellbooks and a single quest item, and has a small selection of custom items, though the only one I'm interested in is the Ivory Blade. We've already got all of the ingredients for all of his custom stuff, one of which is the huge silver nugget we've been lugging around since the mine tunnels and can now finally unload.  His quest item is the non-descript "Dark Nectar." Anyway, let's go join a weird sex cult so we don't have to butcher twenty rapax just go walk down the hallway.  What we're headed for is the two distant yellow(i.e. provisionally non-hostile) NPC's on the far side of the area.   Another new enemy type here are Rapax Courtesans(or Concubines, depending on how they're levelled), who are generally non-entities except they have a non-zero chance to land instant kill hits. Thankfully they're also about as fragile as you'd expect a Rapax armed only with a knife and wearing a wet T-shirt to be.  Delightful, by which I mean goddammit you horny artists.  Sucks for the pack of Rapax Janitors who have to go through this place later and clean up the pool.    The main roadblock towards reading the semi-friendly cult NPC's is this shoddy throne room where a big pack of enemies seems to consistently spawn. Thankfully, once I fight my way into the throne room proper there's enoguh headroom to start summoning elementals and speed up the cleanup.   The throne room is always funny to me because clearly there's no way any goddamn Rapax could actually sit on that throne. I also misremember that there's something hidden behind the throne and get myself stuck on the geometry coming back, forcing a reload. Goddammit game. There are two exits to the rest of the castle on the ground floor, the cultists and an exit to the upper castle on the top floor, and a couple of exits to small dead-end areas. One of them is actually interesting.    This little lounge area exists for us to pulp a bunch of the locals and collect some nice items.    It's a shame this horn is more or less useless in the Rift, but we might still get some use out of it during the last couple of sections of the game.    There's also a kitchen at the back of the lounge in case anyone was wondering what happened to those Trynnie the Rapax managed to get their hands on. Gross. Still, there's a reason to palm this poor unfortunate squirrel. If you give it to Ferro, he'll unlock a closet at the back of his workshop for you which contains a number of items we've mostly outgrown, but also a second Brilliant Helm.  Anyway, what we actually care about is these two dorks up top who've watched us casually skewer a couple dozen of their countrymen down below without giving a gently caress.    We of course tell him we're here to join his weirdo cult and he lets us in right away. Score. Now, the reason we're joining this cult, aside from it turning every Rapax in the castle friendly so we can explore without getting hassled, is that it's the only way, as far as I'm aware, to access a portal to Ascension Peak, which is necessary once the landslide hits if you haven't set up a portal up there beforehand. I'm honestly unsure what security the game has if you murder Surdan and Saydin, or Al-Adryian, or even Al-Sedexus the first time you meet her in the Rift, before joining the Templars. I personally suspect it just gets you a nice, fat softlock.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPr4Gy4MimM Adrian doesn't have a whole lot to say, he's just here to recruit us for the cult. If we tell him we're all aboard, he sends us back outside to talk to the other goon at the entrance.    I always gently caress up spelling Al-Adryian's name with this guy. Oh and he also charges us a percentage of our total gold to join, which is why it's deeply important that we spent as much as possible of it at Ferro's before going over here.   He opens the door to this nice carpeted area which doesn't look suspicious at all by which I mean it looks incredibly suspicious.   Which it is, because the floor drops out from under you and deposits you in the testing chamber. Or one of the three testing chambers. They share some similarities.  All of them have a pair of big elementals behind a gate.  A lever to let them out.  A riddle-dispensing Rapax tart behind the elementals.  And a piece of locked-away gear, a part of the "Canezou," as a reward for answering the riddle. The fights are all pretty trivial(well, mostly, one of the earth elementals gets off a lucky punch that one-shots Saxx), but the riddles are, I suppose, somewhat interesting. As is the gear we get as a reward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf4G8mXhwes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgWUKk669x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF7vMfElpPg They're kind of basic riddles, but the classics are strong and I like the voice acting. But what does this actually get us besides their approval and some XP?    Three items equippable by all classes and all races. So they're ideal for rounding out your Fairy or Monk's gear. The stamina regen on the robe also makes it ideal for a backline Gadgeteer or Bard, likewise the helm as the Vitality ups their Stamina, and the dagger is actually a quite solid off-hand. It's a shame there's no way to join the cult multiple times for more of these. Once we're done, it's time to head back to Adrian to ask him about the next step.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QavZIMtIkHI Sounds entirely safe. I choose to dress Stony in the Canezou because it's funny to me to expose him to whatever weird-rear end initiation we're gonna get.   ...I feel like that altar has a slightly suggestive shape. I'm sure it's just my imagination.   Welp, time to dunk this sinister goop on the platform and see what happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rElFAxRhqhY Description of the content spoilered below in case someone feels(rightfully) edgy about watching this video. Al Sedexus shows up and quizzes us on the riddles we just had, when we answer correctly she asks for a sacrifice(who must be wearing the full Canezou and be male) and drags them off for some(mercifully fade to black) boning. Surely this will not come back to haunt is in any way.  Banging Al Sedexus opens doors for us, literally, as it raises the portcullis on the far side of the altar.     Now every single Rapax is friendly towards us, hooray! Also that portal on the far side of the big book will take us to Ascension Peak any time we're ready.     Lurking in the alcove on the right is the game's last recruitable NPC... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRHHJXDD9iM The problem with Sexus is that he requires you stay aligned with the Rapax to remain your buddy. Maybe there was a more in-depth Rapax-aligned endgame at some point or something. But as it stands, killing Al Sedexus pisses off all the Rapax, and as we'll soon learn, killing Al Sedexus is gonna be something we will very much want to do.  Look at all those lovely green dots. Anyway, now we can really explore the castle without someone trying to kill us all the time.   The Cellar has three sub-areas.   One is literally just a storage closet with a weird goopy chest(it's from the Dark Savant) that always drops garbage for me.    Then there's the jail, which holds a prisoner and a jailer who won't talk to you. Boo.  The third one holds a bar brawl where half the participants are allies and the other half are hostiles. It does not go well for Team Intoxicated once Team Drunk has us on their side.  Nice-looking place, though, except for all the blood. There's a single "talkative" NPC off down a side corridor.     We'll be back to cut this guy into ribbons later because he has something we want, though I will feel slightly bad about it. Only slightly, though.   The Upper castle is more expansive and also sucks poo poo because I ALWAYS get lost here.   It has a bunch of rooms that are just full of guards and nothing of interest, and a few servants' quarters you can raid, and then a couple of "set piece" encounters.   This is why we want to kill the Constable, btw, he has an office and the only way to open the safe is with his key.    One of the set piece encounters is bumping into the Rapax Prince and his entourage.   I swear I remember the whole pack of them going aggro as soon as he fades/teleports out, but they don't. I'm not sure if their going aggro in the past was a bug or if this is the bug, either way, they talk like they're not letting me past but in fact I can easily squeeze past them and loot the chests in the room.   One of the things of moderate interest is this zoo on the roof. It's full of nothing but horrible carnivorous creatures. There's the final piece for the Jackhammer(casts Earthquake, dealing moderate Earth damage to all enemies in view) in one of the sheds, and also you can open the cages and kill all the animals. A side passage leads to the Prince's old room on the roof.   Considering how bleak the Prince's playground looks, it's no real surprise he grew up to be an rear end in a top hat.   Also if you for some unholy reason made a Fairy Fighter/Lord/Valkyrie and never got the Zynaryx Plate from Ferro, this is the first and last chance you'll get all game to dress them up in something other than robes, as there's a collection of platemail for dolls lying in the corner that you can equip them with.   There's also a really unsubtle secret passage under the bed. Now, you might wonder, how do you access it? You can't just do the logical thing and push the bed aside.  Instead the statue next to the bed(of course holding a pike at head-height, great idea for a kid's room) is a wind-up statue. So you wind it up...   And it swings the pike and knocks the bed aside. I stand by saying that this is a demented puzzle and that if it hadn't all been contained inside the room, it would have been outright cruel because who the hell would have figured that out. Anyway, obviously the response is to jump down the tunnel and land in...  A Rapax war room.      The drawings on the table are amusing to me, though I'd be worried if we had to meet that Rapax tank.  And now we reach the bane of my existence, because despite this next section consisting of only three corridors and like four doors, I somehow always manage to get lost here. Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how.  It should theoretically be simple enough. You've got the Queen's chambers, the King's chambers, the war room and this little torture/leisure(?) room, and that's it.   Part of what fucks me up is always that little keyhole you may be able to see next to the rack there.  Oh and remember the treasury downstairs? This is the "access" to it. You drop vouchers for treasure into the pneumatic tube on the right, and they pop out of the doors at the end there. There are only a couple, one up here and the remaining three in the constable's safe, hence why you'll want to gib him. And I maintain again that anyone who can figure out that this is actually coming from the treasury downstairs is a big-brain hyper genius.  I think part of what gets me lost is that there's no central room at any point, literally ONLY corridors, running parallel to each other with little connecting bits.  One of the chambers also has this ominous portal, which you might think is very important but is it ever not.   Chains on the beds and a cat o' nine tails next to a corpse. The Rapax aren't subtle about what they like. Also the dead body has the first of our vouchers.  Also really the least interesting of them.  Getting the key makes the "King's Assassins" pissed at us but, as far as I can tell, and as far as the internet at large can tell, there are literally no Rapax in the entire game that belong to this particular faction. They were probably part of some cut content related to the queen.  The key doesn't open this keyhole. In fact, what opens it is the key that was on the war room table earlier. I've tried that key, though, with no luck. What's up is that a couple of items in the later game have incredibly fiddly interaction points, like padlocks we'll see shortly that can only be interacted with from the side, not from the front. So after trying five times, I give up, assuming I remember wrong, leading to my confusion and running in circles being convinced I've missed something.   What the Queen's key unlocks is this little closet with the metal rod for the ominous portal earlier.   Now, you see where it takes us? The temple in Arnika. Imagine if you didn't recognize that and hopped through without a portal set up here. You'd feel like a real goofus, as there's no portal leading back from there. You also have to wonder why the queen would have a portal to Arnika, capital of her people's supposed enemies.  After a quick visit at the constable in the basement, I return with his key to grab his vouchers.    Which get us...  A kind of lame amulet.  An absolutely rad staff that RFS will be bonking enemies with for the rest of the game.  And a hat that will up someone's chance of instakilling quite a bit. Sadly instakill chances are apparently capped, no matter how many attacks you have per round there's only one check for it and it caps at about 4% or 5% per character, and the monster still has a chance to resist it like any instadeath effect, which is strongly affected by compared levels, which makes it much stronger in less-than-full parties as XP gets split less ways. Still, for now we've done what we can at the Rapax Castle(I think) and it's time to go investigate the Rapax Away Camp which I happen to know where is.   Also since Purple Has Played The Game Before, I take a detour to the Umpani camp to park RFS and Saxx first(I wouldn't have to, but since RFS stays where he's put, leaving him where Saxx will return to simplifies matters). But as I do so...   Apparently Al-Sedexus has left Stony with a demonic STD. Now, this one sucks. Firstly it has a very minor HP loss effect(you likely won't even notice it, as even a single point of +HP regen counters it, and at this point you should be drowning in that kind of gear), but a second later it Hexes him, a condition that will persist until Al-Sedexus is dead. As a refresher, Hex applies something like a flat -30 Malus to all skills and stats. This means that he can actually no longer use his top-tier gadgets and is all-round a much bigger loser now. Normally I'd be tempted to go flatten Al-Sedexus right away, but this time I need her to stay alive for a while, because I want the Rapax to stay non-hostile for a while.  Parking the boys.   Then return to the Southeast Wilderness by way of the portal to the Rift(since it drops you right at the Rift/Mountain entrance, and said entrance drops you right at the Mountain/SE Wilderness entrance).   Since the formerly pristine Wilderness Clearing is where the Rapax King and his team have set up shop for the conquest of Dominus.   Everyone here is friendly... for now. That's gonna change.  Most of the tents have mid-level chests in them which I constantly gently caress up busting the traps on because Stony is, of course, also my lockpicking "expert" who manages to, over the course of all these chests: melt the party's gold, get everyone drained and get us attacked by elemental lords. Twice. Goddammit Stony.  Now, it's not gonna be a surprise for anyone that we'll butcher everything in this camp(bar three people) before we're done here. So take notice of those towers. See what they're missing? Stairs. There are ladders you can interact with to climb up them, but only when not in combat, which means every tower has two archers you can't reach to instantly pulp, leaving you relying on low spell or ranged damage to take them down. In any case, there are three locations of interest here at the ground level of the camp.    First, we can piss off the Rapax Prince again.    Secondly, this cave behind the king's tent holds the Rapax Queen. Sadly we can't bust her out just yet, but she'll be one of the camp's three survivors.  Lastly, there's the king's tent.  Cool guy, he just watches and laughs while I bust open his chests and murder huge elementals too big to fit in there each time. Let's go see what he has to say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl8iWHF3GGQ Real funny guy. Also a real huge rear end in a top hat. You're on our list, buddy.   A broad switchback path leads up the side of the hill to where the Rapax are keeping their prisoners. It's worth noting that at the end of the first "switch" there's actually a semi-hidden path leading right up to the cells. With the archer towers being on the main path, taking that path once things get hostile can save you some amount of grief and having to deal with two of the three emplacements.   Once they're denied access to magma, the Rapax become a lot less clever at designing prisons.   Also as mentioned before, gently caress these padlocks. You cannot interact with the front face of them at all, only the dark "side" on the right side of them, and depending what angle you're standing at, it may be impossible to find an interactible facet at all. Consider this to be another thing that had me completely stumped for like ten minutes before I finally found a place where I could nudge it open. Anyway, the reason I left Saxx and RFS back at Mt. Gigas is because the only way to actually get these two imprisoned idiots out is to recruit them as RPC's.     They also have quite a lot to say when you bust open their cells. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fqXLtVIZrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB2ZXuzMfts   At least they're decently levelled and the Rapax have been dumb enough to leave them with all their gear. Unfortunately their gear isn't actually... very good and they don't have a great spell selection. So mostly they're dead weight, except you want to make sure neither of them actually dies. Because if one of them dies(or even just gets KO'd), the other is apt to lose their poo poo and run away from the party screaming and howling and tanking the alliance quest.  As soon as you're out of the stockade, you're in a fight. The guards at the bottom aren't too great a threat, and will go down pretty quickly, but the archers up top will prevent you from getting away too quickly.  As soon as the immediate danger is cleared, I bolt for the back door as the aggro has "spread" and pissed off pretty much every high-level Rapax in the camp. How high-level? I find out when one of them catches up to me.   Pretty much as tough as Rapax can be. They have a 90% chance of casting spells, and a 20% chance of that spell being Nuclear Blast. If they catch you without your magic defenses up, they could very well cause a full party wipe.  When more than one of them is on scene they can do some considerable damage even through the various magic buffs, especially if the beat the party on initiative and get off a shot before Elemental Shield goes up.  Slowly but surely, though, the fight carries downhill. Technically I could have warped out of there the instant I freed them and before I fought the stockade guards, their chatter about needing to kill the King is, as far as I can tell, just chatter. But I'm not letting him live, and also I'd like to liberate the queen since she doesn't deserve to be stuck in a dank hole in the ground.  Reaching the bottom I have the problem that there's an archer platform overlooking the entire area and thus impossible to fight anyone else without aggroing.  So first I run right into the middle and aggro everything that's not inside a tent and some things that are(like the Prince's concubines). Then I summon up elementals and get murdering.   Then I hide at the bottom of the ladder where the archers can't see me until they forget about me, because Rapax have issues with object permanence.  Then I haul rear end up the ladder and brutally evict them from their treehouse. Now I can deal with the king at a calm, sedate pace without these idiots wasting my time or putting arrows into the back of Stony's head, guy's got enough to deal with after his new demon girlfriend gave him demonic crabs.    In all honesty probably the biggest thing to learn when playing Wizardry 8 is how/when to trigger combat without aggroing anything so you can use it to reposition. I can just barely manage to slip through the front of the King's tent and ready myself right next to the entrance to his crappy little throne room in the field, meaning I get to go in with all my buffs up without wasting a turn being at range.  The king is frankly kind of chumpy. He's only got a single guard inside with him and isn't much tougher than the Master Templars we've been wading through for the last twenty minutes. Though something funny does happen. Normally monsters are very respectful of each others' personal space, no clipping and such, but here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esV2OYl_4xI  The King either has a very devoted bodyguard or a bodyguard who watched too much DBZ and wanted to do a FUSION. Doesn't help them, though, they get splatted. If the King was outside so he could summon elementals and maybe had the backup of the camp, he could actually be scary, but in this case he really was not. Now let's rifle through his pockets.   Again, the King can drop nice stuff. He just doesn't for me, but he does drop the key for opening his ex-wife's cell out back. So let's go let her out.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYCJHOBUy8A So she's saner than her husband, and considering the portal to Arnika in her bedroom, probably friendlier to the planet in general than he is. Sadly, there's no payoff to opening her cell or anything. It feels an awful lot like a cut quest. Likewise, if we had actually talked to Drazic and Rodan without recruiting them and returned to the King, there would have been nothing more for us there. Still, we can probably assume she has some kind of happy ending, especially considering what's coming up in a bit. For now... let's take advantage of placed portals and scoot back to Mt. Gigas with our new friends.       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6j1y_IVqsI The next part is mostly just portalling back between Mt. Gigas and Marten's Bluff. If we hadn't gotten the Dark Savant's coordinates before now, we'd have had to go clean that up with Rodan and Drazic in tow, not that it would have taken awfully long.      Imagine how long this would take without Set/Return to Portal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk4VtD398Ls And with that, we've got the basics of the alliance down. Now we just need to make it accomplish something. What Z'ant just gave us was a tracking device to allow Umpani weapons to locate the Savant's cloaked vessel and blast it out of the sky. This is going to be very satisfying. I also drop by Sadok to see what praise he has for us.    I love these friendly weirdos. I'm generally charmed by the weirdest, most villainous-looking faction in the game being super reasonable and appreciative of you. Anyway, back to Yamir with the good news.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRkSVB0icmI Though I'll be honest, the portalling also makes it kind of anticlimactic. It could strongly have used some intermediate questing and maybe some attempts by the Rapax and Savant to gently caress up the alliance by ambushing you or whatever. Anyway, Yamir has now given us access to the top of Mt. Gigas, where the BIG GUNS are.      Honestly I would kill for a Wizardry 8 remake just to patch up these holes and to add stuff the original engine couldn't handle like giving you an amazing view of the lands of Dominus from the top of Mt. Gigas.  BIG BOOM. So what the Umpani have up here is a couple of huge missiles(not sure why everyone calls them guns)-   -a short runway for their mothership. The way you destroy it if you side with the T'rang is that you sabotage the runway and then call it in for a landing and it crashes and booms-   -and this little observatory/traffic control structure.  It has an elevator around the back to take you to the roof.    Press the button and the roof opens up...   Huh, you have to wonder what that is they're scoping out in the sky. We'll find out eventually, but, mind you, it makes hilariously little sense that they can actually spot it through a telescope.   The inside is pretty spartan and serves little purpose unless you want to gently caress over the Umpani. Nothing really interesting to look at.    Out back is the missile aimed at the T'rang mothership. We will, of course, not be firing it. In fact, it isn't even how you take them down. Instead you call them up and tell them to maximize breeding output and then shut down the teleporter so they literally overcrowd their own mothership and die in orbit. Brutal. Let's go back to the other missile, that's the one we get to play with.    Zero percent hit chance until... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0xw5ivAiP8 Chewbecka with her usual finely tuned sense of humour. Let's go tell Yamir the good news.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxjbFZrgzp0 And that also finally expends Rodan and Drazic's usefulness. Sadly it also doesn't change a lot of things, like, Saxx and Tantris will still refuse to go to each others' home bases, and Yamir and Z'ant will not in fact show up at Ascension Peak. On the one hand, it sucks, on the other hand, I cannot imagine dealing with some of the later-game fights if I also had 20 Umpani and T'rang taking their turns. Now, time to go get the crew back together and fix up Stony.     And the team's back together again, though one thing worth noting is that because this quest requires leaving your RPC's behind, it'll create a pretty decently-sized XP-difference between your PC's and RPC's, which is a crying shame. I wish catch-up XP was part of the game's mechanics.   Time to go deal with Al-Sedexus. At least this time we have all the keys and other gubbins and it's a straight line.  Of course we still get this happening every five minutes so it still sucks.   At least it gives Stony a chance to get a bit of exercise with his water pump gadget. Suck it, Rapax nerds.      So, Al-Sedexus as a boss.   She's got some beefy-rear end resistances, with only Water and Divine being slightly below 100%. She's got a 70% chance to spawn Rapax aid every turn. And a 30% chance to whip out a selection of very nasty spells including a Heal All or a Nuclear Blast.    Theoretically she is thus a quite nasty boss encounter if your Fairy Ninja doesn't paralyze her with the Cane of Corpus on round 1 of the fight.  She literally doesn't get a single action in before the party splatter her all over her own temple.    Good thing that isn't what it takes to cure all STD's. So the big upshot of this is that now the Rapax are quite unhappy with us, but that's a them problem, not an us problem, since we can own them easily.  Good boy, best robot.  I portal back to the Rapax Castle and prepare for the last stage of the game. At this point it's one, at most two, updates and it'll be sorted, assuming I can get the "hitbox" on the goddamn hidden keyhole on the wall of the King's apartment to work as intended. Which might be asking a lot.
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Sep 17, 2020 22:50
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Oh, well, that'll learn me for not watching the linked videos, I'd forgotten exactly when Al-Sedexus grabs her sacrifice and assumed it was last update, so, when I mentioned that she's perfectly willing to take a woman if (and only if) the party is all-female, this update is actually what I was referring to. Additionally, you can use RPCs for this purpose if their level is close enough to that of the rest of the party (Myles, in particular, has some pretty great dialog for the whole sequence, though getting him there at a high enough level is easier said than done). If they're too weak, they'll be rejected. Additionally, RFS will mention lacking the necessary "components" in most cases and is not usable regardless (rumor has it that if he's the only male character in the party, he'll do it, but I've found no evidence to support this).
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Sep 17, 2020 23:25
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RFS is actually the only character in the game noted as genderless. So I strongly suspect that's just a rumour.
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Sep 17, 2020 23:29
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There is actually a way you can go through all that without the Rapax being hostile in the end. 1. Go do the Rapax Away Camp before you do any of the templar stuff, fight your way in and kill everyone. 2. Go do the gross templar stuff. Now all the Rapax are friendly. 3. From this point, every Rapax-aligned mob you kill will drop your reputation by 1 level. So go to Al-Sedexus and kill her but if she spawns any Rapax do not kill them, just book it away after you're done until they forget about you. As long as Al-Sedexus is your only kill after templar initiation, the Rapax will remain neutral and you can hang out in the castle without getting aggroed on sight.
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Sep 18, 2020 04:34
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So! Some notes. Killing Al-Sedexus before ever hitting the castle will not soft lock you, from what I recall hearing. I remember being told that the initiation would play out as normal, but the whole Hex thing would never actually happen. The door guard who takes the password is completely untouchable. Won't engage in combat, can't be targeted, etc. I believe the other door guard is the same, but it's been ages. The door guard will also not accept the password unless that other guy gives it to you first. If you happen to, say, start combat, run over to the password giver so his proximity conversation trigger doesn't activate, and make his insides his outsides so you can't ever get the password from him, then you'll have softlocked yourself if you don't already have a portal to the Peak set up. I want to say that the deposit slip items aren't fixed, and that one of the possible items is the best Samurai-exclusive sword in the game, but I generally always got the Bo. Speaking of which, it's the best Monk weapon by a mile outside of a solo run. In a solo run, you get to make waaaaaay more skill progress than you ever could in a party, and very high level Unarmed is kind of bonkers. Not quite *LIGHT* *SWORD* Warrior-level bonkers, but still very very respectable. Speaking of solo runs, Stealth is another skill that doesn't really shine in a normal playthrough. It's not really noticeable unless you're really paying attention, but one of the effects of Stealth aside from the rather nice AC bonus is that the character gets targeted less. It doesn't lower the chance to target the character on some RNG table, it just straight up prevents the character from getting targeted at all. In a solo run, this means that you eventually hit a point where you're basically immune to melee, ranged, and single-target spells, and everything is forced to just sit there and defend while you bash them senseless.
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Sep 18, 2020 05:34
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Unoriginal One posted:Speaking of solo runs, Stealth is another skill that doesn't really shine in a normal playthrough. It's not really noticeable unless you're really paying attention, but one of the effects of Stealth aside from the rather nice AC bonus is that the character gets targeted less. It doesn't lower the chance to target the character on some RNG table, it just straight up prevents the character from getting targeted at all. In a solo run, this means that you eventually hit a point where you're basically immune to melee, ranged, and single-target spells, and everything is forced to just sit there and defend while you bash them senseless. See, I did not in fact know this and it's hilarious to me. "Well SOMEONE is making us all explode. But I can't SEE anyone. Let's stand here and keep staring at the wall, guys."
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Sep 18, 2020 05:47
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Wait, couldn't you in theory do a full party of stealthy characters for the same effect then?
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Sep 18, 2020 06:41
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Arzaac posted:Wait, couldn't you in theory do a full party of stealthy characters for the same effect then? Depends on how the mechanic works. If it's just "if Stealth Check passed, no attacky," then yes. If it's, "if Stealth Check passed, attack someone else, if no someone else, stare vacantly," then it only works with a single character.
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Sep 18, 2020 06:46
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Well, they know where the "party" is, so they can try to shuffle closer if not already in melee, they can still lob AoEs, they'll still adjust their facing, etc. I figure it works something like stealth does for monsters, particularly since you can closer to mobs before combat triggers once the skill gets high enough(it even stacks with Chameleon). As for making a party of Stealth capable characters, you're still splitting up all of the checks and slowing down skill growth. Nothing stopping it from working, but you'd probably have to make a heavy skill point investment to really get anywhere. You'd also have to split up all of your good resist gear; a lone Monk or Ninja with all of your good resist accessories can deal with getting tagged with a half dozen Whipping Rocks, a lower level party with the good stuff spread out won't fare so well(Heaven help you if one of those Whipping Rocks is a Crush instead).
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Sep 18, 2020 16:18
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So I know I played this and Wiz 7. I remember abusing the hell out of portals. I remember all the fuckery required to start a fight without your guys having variously bad things happen to their body and brains before anyone can do anything. But I do NOT remember areas of the game being this much of a slog. Maybe it's the kind eye of memory, maybe I save-scummed a little too much?
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Sep 20, 2020 07:21
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Araganzar posted:So I know I played this and Wiz 7. I remember abusing the hell out of portals. I remember all the fuckery required to start a fight without your guys having variously bad things happen to their body and brains before anyone can do anything. But I do NOT remember areas of the game being this much of a slog. Maybe it's the kind eye of memory, maybe I save-scummed a little too much? Honestly, the only part of the game that's an annoying level of slog is the Rapax Rift because of the battles you have to wait your way out of since you can't actually fight them or it takes enemies ages to path to you so you can actually throw down. Then in the Rapax Castle, you face reasonably-sized battles... but because of the corridors your big wipe spells can't target all of them at once because half the enemies are around a corner or pathing through a quarter of the castle to get to you from the other side, so they can sometimes drag out. Lastly, you have the Wilderness Clearing where the archer towers are somewhat badly thought out and cause the same issue as the Rift. Most other areas aren't annoying or slog-y, but clearly the devs needed some extra work/testing time to find out the sweet spot where fights didn't drag out too long but were still a reasonable challenge, and obviously the later parts of the game got less testing and love before SirTech melted.
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Sep 20, 2020 08:48
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I dunno, I felt like the entire game was a slog, because even the most basic battles with trash mobs can take upwards to 20min at a time. I still find Wiz8 a great game but the tedious battles do drag it down some. Still, the quality of the game is good despite it's rushed and troubled production. There's a good reason SsethTzeentach refers to this game as a PSTD simulator.
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Sep 20, 2020 17:05
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Yeah, the cool 3D combat means that you often can't efficiently mow things down with melee because you have to stop and run between individual clusters of enemies if they have ranged/magic attacks, and you often can't efficiently mow things down with spells because they either spread out in a wide arc or get blocked by level geometry. Couple that with mandatory animations and frequent monster spawns even in "town" areas, limited MP pools that require mages to recharge pretty often and let more spawns build up, etc. It is a huge slog for sure.
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Sep 20, 2020 17:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Honestly, the only part of the game that's an annoying level of slog is the Rapax Rift because of the battles you have to wait your way out of since you can't actually fight them or it takes enemies ages to path to you so you can actually throw down. My memory is having parties with stronger ranged capacities and often preferring to fight Rapax at range where their attacks are often less effective while your spellcasters can wreck their days. But yes, a more close-range group has more issues. The Wilderness Clearing fights are a slog, though, mainly because the camp is so big and has so many enemies.
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Sep 20, 2020 18:48
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This LP is compelling me to replay this game with a party all Rawulf Monks that only used unarmed combat. Literally Just Six Regular Wolves solve the world's problems. Gotta get that portrait editor downloaded I guess.
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Sep 20, 2020 19:29
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:This LP is compelling me to replay this game with a party all Rawulf Monks that only used unarmed combat. Literally Just Six Regular Wolves solve the world's problems. Gotta get that portrait editor downloaded I guess. So a Six Wolf Monk playthrough? Narsham posted:My memory is having parties with stronger ranged capacities and often preferring to fight Rapax at range where their attacks are often less effective while your spellcasters can wreck their days. But yes, a more close-range group has more issues. The problem is that ranged combat scales worse than melee combat, and is generally very reliant on high-level ammo which you'll run out of fast if you're using your Mystic Arrows and Lightning Bolts for every battle, especially with multiple users. Magic, on the other hand, has the problem that rising enemy resistances takes a good bit of the bite out of it towards the end, while it's very strong in the midgame where it's your melee combatants that are largely irrelevant. Additionally the end-game melee weapons also tend to come with things like instakill chances, paralyze, hexing, etc. to take enemies out of the game faster. And while you have to do a lot of running between clusters of enemies at times, having Soul Shield, Magic Screen, Element Shield and Missile Shield up will make a lot of ranged attacks irrelevant unless they're in a truly overwhelming volume. wafflemoose posted:I dunno, I felt like the entire game was a slog, because even the most basic battles with trash mobs can take upwards to 20min at a time. I still find Wiz8 a great game but the tedious battles do drag it down some. I'm not sure what could have "unslogged" Wizardry 8. Probably smaller fights with tougher enemies, something similar to fighting other parties like yourself, or perhaps enemies moving more simultaneously once their moves are plotted(to prevent them banging into each other).
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Sep 20, 2020 19:47
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm not sure what could have "unslogged" Wizardry 8. Probably smaller fights with tougher enemies, something similar to fighting other parties like yourself, or perhaps enemies moving more simultaneously once their moves are plotted(to prevent them banging into each other). Don't have the battles out in the world with free movement. Sure, it feels neat to have everything be organic like that but we've seen how maddeningly slow it is. Instead, keep the old style where it was purely turn-based with no free movement. Anachronox showed that PC RPGs can handle that sort of battle engine, and it would be a lot faster.
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Sep 20, 2020 20:23
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EclecticTastes posted:Don't have the battles out in the world with free movement. Sure, it feels neat to have everything be organic like that but we've seen how maddeningly slow it is. Instead, keep the old style where it was purely turn-based with no free movement. Anachronox showed that PC RPGs can handle that sort of battle engine, and it would be a lot faster. The problem with that is that "line up and bop each other"-fighting like an ancient jRPG is... really hard to have any real tactical depth in. Like, any game I've had where fighting required thinking and not just a big ol' numberslam, it had positioning of some kind. In Wizardry 8 as it is, for instance, picking the right place to fight is huge. Like there are fights where the difference between a wipeout and an easy win is whether you put your back to a wall or engage in a corridor where the enemy can't swarm around you and hit you from behind.
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Sep 20, 2020 20:55
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PurpleXVI posted:The problem with that is that "line up and bop each other"-fighting like an ancient jRPG is... really hard to have any real tactical depth in. Like, any game I've had where fighting required thinking and not just a big ol' numberslam, it had positioning of some kind. In Wizardry 8 as it is, for instance, picking the right place to fight is huge. Like there are fights where the difference between a wipeout and an easy win is whether you put your back to a wall or engage in a corridor where the enemy can't swarm around you and hit you from behind. See, that's the thing about game design, is you can't always have everything. In this design space, barring some heretofore completely unknown solution, you can have two of the following three: -First-person, on-the-ground perspective. -Turn-based combat. -Action that isn't slow as gently caress. The turn-based stuff with tactical movement is all isometric in large part because it's much, much faster to get everyone moved around (and even then, they take a lot longer than oldschool Wizardry/JRPG-style combat). The only other solution I could see maybe working (but probably requiring too much processor power for a game as old as Wiz8) is just input the party's actions, and then have everyone move simultaneously. You still end up losing a lot of tactical depth since you can't set actions to go off in order, but battles don't take forever to finish.
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Sep 20, 2020 21:35
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EclecticTastes posted:The only other solution I could see maybe working (but probably requiring too much processor power for a game as old as Wiz8) is just input the party's actions, and then have everyone move simultaneously. You still end up losing a lot of tactical depth since you can't set actions to go off in order, but battles don't take forever to finish. I mean, a lot of the movement of enemies could easily happen at the same time, really the only time where timing matters is attacks and spellcasting.
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Sep 20, 2020 22:09
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There are mods that speed up the animations and movements of the enemies and makes the game less of a slog. Wiz8fast - allows you to crank up the monsters' movement speed to levels way past the default maximum of 5x http://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/ find it under patches and utilities Faster Animations Mod - makes the animations of monsters and projectiles much faster. Combat becomes way snappier with this https://www.dropbox.com/s/jup0feu4g2qr32o/wiz_8_speedmod.zip?dl=0 wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 12:14
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The Trynton patrols are also an incredible slog when you're doing ironman. I carried Vi with me in every playthrough just because I wanted some level of insurance against getting pushed off a bridge by those bastards.
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Sep 21, 2020 15:49
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Part 013.5: Mental and Divine The last update is going to take me a bit of work, so in the meantime, have the last spellbook update to ride you over. Predictably, these will cover a lot of the ground where Psionics and Priests distinguish themselves. Something interesting is that there are only two Mental spells that aren't Psionic spells. Mental Charm (Level 1, Psionic, Divinity, Single Target) Welcome to a spell that I've never, ever cast. You'll likely only pick it up by mistake or because you got a spellbook for it and learning an additional spell of a given "element" adds spell points to said element. Ostensibly it attempts to make a target like you more, which can be relevant if you've accidentally annoyed a friendly NPC into being ambivalent and not wanting to talk to you until you bribe them. But this pretty much never happens and usually you can just pay them weregild(literally, bribe them) to make up for it anyway. Between this and Communication I feel like the originally envisioned social and faction system was going to have played a larger role. Mind Stab (Level 1, Psionic, Single Target) Probably the best of the level 1 single-target attack spells. Firstly, mental resistance is rarer than the others. Secondly, unlike the others that just do damage, Mind Stab has a chance to inflict Insanity and is thus a potential gamechanger if you land it, being surprisingly relevant even into the mid-game. Terror (Level 1, Psionic, Wizardry, Group AoE) Probably your first group battlefield control spells... but you'll likely try to cast it as little as possible. See this is because, obviously, it inflicts the Afraid condition. And Afraid is 50-50 whether enemies do nothing or run away. In a lot of areas, an enemy running away gives you a hell of a lot of extra work catching up with them, and disrupts their formation so radial AoE's and cone AoE's don't hit all of them any longer. It can still turn around early battles, but you'll come to hate it. Detect Secrets (Level 2, Psionic, Wizardry, Party Buff) As far as I can tell, all this does is emulate the Ranger's Scouting skill, by auto-searching for items. It has a painfully short duration, though, and you'll probably never think to cast it where there's anything to find. Just bring a Ranger. Divine Trap (Level 2, Psionic, Divinity, Special) So when your Ninja, Rogue or Gadgeteer is trying to disarm a trap, Divine Trap gives them a potentially very large buff. Probably you'll want this, since by the endgame, once Stony was hexed, even with a max Divine Trap cast, he was capable of loving up traps. It seems like high-level chests have some kind of malus to actually picking them, since apparently a 99% chance of disarming each stage of the trap still means you can fail them four or five times in a row. But yeah, you want this unless you want to look at all those locked chests for the rest of your playthrough. Identify Item (Level 2, Psionic, Divinity, Special) Again, another spell you want unless you have a FAQ open all the time, because it's impossible to have sufficient level of Artifacts to passively ID all items. Also a great way to level your Psionic's Mental spell skill passively. Especially since a lot of potentially great items have the exact same sprite as some utterly garbage items. Insanity (Level 2, Psionic, Group AoE) Your wonderful replacement for Terror. Well into the endgame this spell is great and useful. Even chance of enemies doing nothing or attacking their allies. It's great poo poo, Insanity is literally the best condition you can land on an enemy(because you'll never land Turncoat on them, don't even bother). Mindread (Level 3, Psionic, Single Target) Any NPC you can talk to, you can hit with Mindread, which gives you some of their internal monologue. A lot of it's just fluff, occasionally entertaining. But in a few places it lets you skip ahead or gain an advantage. Not on the level of Dragon Knight Saga, where reading people's minds could get you XP and skill points. But, for instance, you can learn that Kunar is a traitor and things like that. But again, in a game with as relatively little NPC interaction as there is in Wizardry 8, it's not a game-changer. But it IS the only level 3 Mental spell in the game. Ego Whip (Level 4, Psionic, Cone AoE) A workhorse cone damage spell. It does decent damage and, as per all mental spells, few things will resist it utterly unless they're mindless golems or something. X-Ray (Level 4, Wizardry, Party Buff) Another one of those buffs you'll have up at all times. Letting you see enemies around corners is great for planning ambushes, which as mentioned is probably THE biggest tactical thing you have to master to have an easy time with Wizardry 8. If it's your first playthrough it also lets you spot not-in-a-chest loot on the ground, and where friendly and neutral NPC's are, which will be points of interest in most areas. If nothing else, keeping this up will help your Gadgeteer level his Engineering once you've got the Mook Alliance Letter. Hex (Level 5, Psionic, Wizardry, Radial AoE) I really can't gauge how well Hex works on enemies, since you can't see their stats, but I know it's totally crippling for PC's. It might be great to make spellcaster enemies constantly backfire and fizzle their spells if you could land it on them, though. By the time you have it, however, landing status effects on enemies is difficult, and good as it is... paralyzing an enemy or making them go insane is still better. If it dropped elemental resistances, too, it might be worth applying as a first step but... it doesn't. Only cast when my Wizard ran out of everything but Mental mana. Psionic Blast (Level 5, Psionic, Group AoE) This spell is like casting Mind Stab on an entire group, with the same chance of causing insanity on everyone. In practice it replaces Insanity since you now have a version of Insanity that also does a good whack of damage even if it doesn't land the condition. It's an absolutely kickass spell. Sane Mind (Level 5, Psionic, Divinity, Single Target) It cures Insanity and Turncoat, but you get it so late that you'll almost never suffer from them since a combination of Soul Shield and Magic Screen will almost guarantee you never get hit by them. Turncoat (Level 6, Psionic, Wizardry, Single Target) Turncoat is like the Insane status effect, except it guarantees they attack an ally every turn. Again, it has the issue that a single-target condition effect in the endgame is a bit... anyone who it'll matter to convert will be resistant to conversion, so instead you'll just hit an entire group with Psionic Blast instead. Plus Single Target spells are just... generally not worth it. More on this after we're done summing up the spells. Cerebral Haemorrage (Level 7, Psionic, Single Target) Attempts to blow up a single target's brain, does insane damage, can cause Insanity. Concussion (Level 7, Wizardry, Single Target) Attempts to blow up a single target's brain, does insane damage, can cause Unconsciousness. Mind Flay (Level 7, Psionic, All Enemies) Does a big chunk of damage to all enemies, but doesn't cause any conditions. You will be casting Pandemonium instead. Generally from level 6 up, you won't be using the Mental spell school. Divine Bless (Level 1, Divinity, Party Buff) Bless is a general no-duh spell to put up on the first round of all fights as it increases your odds of hitting enemies. In the early and mid-game, enemies can still dodge your swings, so it makes for a big overall change in how much damage you can do. Heal Wounds (Level 1, Psionics, Divinity, Alchemy, Single Target) Fixes up a character's hit points. Early on what you want to do is to never rest until you've poured all your Divine spell points into casting Heal Wounds, since it's easy training, and for some classes(like Alchemists), one of the few ways they have of training it up. Make Wounds (Level 1, Divinity, Single Target) If you keep your priests on the back lines, this is how they'll be doing damage early on, since ha ha at the idea of using slings for any kind of real damage. Enchanted Blade (Level 2, Divinity, Wizardry, Party Buff) It's like Bless except you can keep it up constantly. Once again, something you should have up at all times since it guarantees a bonus to hitting enemies, and also a bonus to the nebulous step of "penetration." See, attacks have to both hit AND penetrate. So you might think that characters and enemies have both an armor and a dodge stat? No. They just have an Armor Class stat. And pretty much everything that makes you better at hitting things(like being strong) also makes you better at penetrating, but sometimes attacks just don't "penetrate." Enchanted Blade should make that happen less, I guess. Anyway, cast Enchanted Blade, keep it up. Guardian Angel (Level 2, Divinity, Single Target) Adds a layer of ablative HP on top of a character. If you've already got someone else casting a heal, casting Guardian Angel instead of another heal can make sure you don't waste spell points. Additionally if you know there's some dickhead enemy who can hit your fragile casters(especially if they're fairies), you can use this to protect them ahead of time. Once you've got all the defensive spells up, it becomes less of an issue, but pre-Magic Screen, it can be what saves you from having your mages constantly wiped out by dickhead pixies and treants with their Whipping Rocks poo poo. Magic Missiles (Level 2, Wizardry, Cone AoE) I never really cast Magic Missiles much. It does okay damage and few things resist Divine damage as well as other types, but it's kind of in this weird gap where you almost always have something better to cast and there are only a couple of levels where it's relevant before you get Fireball. Magic Screen (Level 3, Divinity, Party Buff) KEEP. UP. AT. ALL. TIMES. Unlike Soul and Element Shield, this buffs all six resistances, and it's one of those out-of-combat casts that remain up at all times. When you get it, it'll probably account for 50+% of your total elemental resistances. Generally items, stats and racial bonuses don't give you all that much, and your buff spells account for the majority of your elemental resistances. Eye For An Eye (Level 4, Divinity, Single Target) Also known as the game that gets you killed because you missed one enemy casting it. See, if you hit an enemy with this spell with an AoE spell, it loops back and hits your entire party with it, not just the caster. At the very least it repeatedly kills your casters. Your first experience will probably be when a pixie in Trynton casts it and gently caress you up. Theoretically it's a good cast, but you're better off buffing your elemental resistances and just retaliating with offensive/status spells. Remove Curse (Level 4, Divinity, Wizardry, Single Target) If you accidentally or purposefully equip a cursed item, this will let you unequip it. It's good for once you eventually get Fang or a Bushido Blade to replace your Bloodlust sword, but generally you shouldn't be equipping a lot of cursed items because by the time they really start popping up you can cast Identify Item before putting them in someone's hand. And then once you have it, curses are totally irrelevant so it kind of feels like they shouldn't even have been in the game. Soul Shield (Level 4, Psionics, Divinity, Party Buff) AKA "how you prevent the entire party from being killed by Death Wish when fighting the Sorceress Queen." Resists Divine and Mental damage and their associated conditions. If anyone can beat the game without this one, I will give them a prize. Elemental casters are mostly just shitloads of damage, and sufficient grinding will deal with that. But the Mental/Divine casters in the later game will usually either turn everyone Insane or just straight up kill them if you gently caress up your save rolls. Heal All (Level 5, Divinity, All Allies) If you don't play with either a Gadgeteer or a Bard, this is a great spell, but if you play without both a Gadgeteer and Bard, you're probably some sort of deviant who should be in an asylum somewhere. Both of them get access to items that cast this spell. I guess a pure Priest could be casting this, but Lords and Valkyries should be laying down a smackdown instead and casting as few spells as possible. Instant Death (Level 5, Divinity, Psionics, Single Target) See every other complaint about high-level single-target spells so far. Enemies can barely ever manage to stick this, so you shouldn't even bother. Summon Elemental (Level 5, Wizardry, Alchemy, Special) The main obstacle to learning this spell is that Alchemists and Wizards have little Divine access to level up with and Bishops have a hard time reaching the relevant level to learn it. But it's absolutely worth your time. High-level elementals can deal out over 100 damage with a punch and get two of them per round, which can help accelerate later battles, especially if you've got someone paralyzed or otherwise helpless and the elemental gets to double up on the damage. Non-boss enemies rarely get over 400 health even in the latest parts of the game. They also draw some hostile fire. Sadly, they require a certain amount of space to spawn, and a lot of areas in the game have too low ceilings for them to be summonable. Their AI also seems buggy, sometimes they just defend even when they're perfectly able to attack enemies. Banish (Level 6, Wizardry, Divinity, All Enemies) Attempts to blow up all Undead and Demonic enemies in the area, a purpose for which it's great. It deals out fat assloads of damage and sends them right back to hell. Unfortunately... by the time you have it, you're past most areas that actually contain undead in any real amounts, and the list of demon-type enemies in the game is incredibly short, and they generally show up as single large targets(like al-Sedexus) rather than anything that would benefit from an area wipe effect. Draining Cloud (Level 6, Alchemy, Radial AoE) So, Draining Cloud. It hits enemies' health, stamina and spell points, the latter of which can be really annoying when it hits you rather than them. However... it deals less damage than Acid Bomb or Toxic Cloud, the latter of which can also poison, nauseate and knock out. And... enemies don't actually use spell points as far as I can tell. Instead their spellcasting is entirely based on random rolls their AI script goes through. If enemies actually used SP, it would be great for dealing with hostile mages, but as it is... just cast Toxic Cloud instead. Lifesteal (Level 6, Divinity, Single Target) Hits a target for big damage and heals the most wounded party member. Which... you know the drill by now. Just cast Heal Wounds or Heal All or have the bard play his dulcimer. By the time you can cast this you almost certainly won't do enough damage to make the healing OR the damage-dealing worth it. Might to Magic (Level 6, Psionic, Single Target) Like Lifesteal, except it deals more damage and restores spell points rather than hit points. Actually sometimes worth casting, though... your casters will probably be swimming in magic nectars and mana stones by the time you get this far. So real mana outages are unlikely to happen. Still, could be situtationally useful. Resurrection (Level 6, Alchemy, Divinity, Single Target) Cures being dead. It's a useful thing to have in your toolbox, but again, by the time you have it, you'll probably have tons of Scrolls of Resurrection and Powders of Resurrection, enough that you could feed pigs with them. Especially since spells get disadvantaged in terms of init, and you probably want to pick up your dead guy early so he'll benefit from a Heal All in the same round and doesn't instantly go down again, using an item for it would probably be beneficial. Death Wish (Level 7, Divinity, All Enemies) Attempts to instakill all enemies. The same story as Asphyxiation and to a lesser extent Quicksand. I mean, yeah, there are a couple of late-game fights where you might as well roll the dice. I think there's a limit to how likely enemies can be to resist things, like an 0.1% chance of something slipping through even a 200% resistance, so if there's like 30 enemies, roll them bones and see how many of them explode. If it's even one, you got a return on your investment. Restoration (Level 7, Divinity, Single Target) Cures all conditions(bar being dead or drained) and fixes up a huge amount of hit points. Yeah, it's alright if someone's both hurt and insane and you need to fix both at once. But once again, the Bard gets a Rennaissance Lute that casts the same spell, so let him handle it instead. There are worse things to get with your level 7 spell picks, I suppose. Wizardry 8 Magic Post-Mortem So magic in Wizardry 8 kind of sucks, which is funny because it's called Wizardry. How do you make magic suck in a game literally named after it? Mostly it's down to how the game handles resistances. In most games, the flat default for an enemy is to have 0 resistance to a thing, eating the full effect, and then being resistant, immune or sometimes vulnerable to certain things. In Wizardry 8, the flat default resistance rises as the game goes on, and there's no such thing as an actual weakness, until by the endgame the flat default is 80 or 90 resistance to most things. Which, for all intents and purposes, means that they eat very little magic damage and ignore most conditions inflicted by magic(I don't trust claims that, say, paralyze from weapons still runs off water resistance since I see the weapon effects sticking far more often than the spell effects). It means that in the early game, magic is okay. In the mid-game it rules because it's your big battlefield clear artillery. And then in the endgame your wizards are better off summoning elementals and casting buffs, then bringing out their beatsticks. Secondly... potentially high-level magic is worth more than I give it credit for. But I don't know. Why? Because the system is obfuscated as gently caress. Consider that two decades after release, people still aren't sure how resistances and the spellcasting system actually work. Now, I don't believe a system needs to be super-simple, but if it isn't, then the game should tell you the end result. I point a Fireball at someone? Tell me the damage or damage interval for the targets. I ready up a Freeze Flesh? Tell me the rough odds of affecting each target. Either make the calcs simple enough that they can go in the manual, or tell me the factors and the end result. But Wizardry 8 does neither, so usually you stumble on what's actually effective by accident rather than on purpose. Like... a balanced party sucks poo poo. You want a Bard, a Gadgeteer, at most one full caster and the rest should be hybrids and pure beatdown guys. You don't want half casters and half choppers, because the casters will be useless by the endgame. Lastly, there's the issue of splitting things up between four schools and six realms. I love the idea, honestly, but there are just some huge gaps. Like, it's fair that the Mental school is most important to psionics... but at the same time wizards have a couple of spells in the top there that they'll almost never be able to cast because they have no real low-level spells to get in the training with unless you grind by spamming Detect Secrets and resting over and over again. There are also some spells you just can't beat the game without: Magic Screen, Soul Shield and Elemental Shield, because of the way the magic is "balanced," i.e. that you more or less have to be completely immune to it by the end game or get mercilessly annihilated. There's no easy fix towards unfuckling all this, but goddamn, it's probably the game's biggest weakness. Imagine if magic didn't suck poo poo, suddenly all of those huge mobby end-game fights and hard-to-reach enemies could actually get blasted down to a respectable size in the first few rounds. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 15:26
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Magic in Wiz8 is a lot better than it's usually given credit, but it still has issues. The first problem is that fighter types are very focused on single target damage and mages are very focused on group damage, so they don't mix terribly well. If there are 10 enemies typically your fighters can murder about 1 enemy per round and your mages do about 10% damage to everything per round, so a party full of mages will finish the fight about as quickly as a party full of fighters, but in a mixed group mages are only really going to pull their weight if there are a lot of squishy enemies clustered together; in most fights by the time you can wear the enemies down with AoE damage your fighters have already murdered most of them. The second problem is that even though mages' damage output has been balanced to be roughly equal with fighters, mages are still squishy and have limited juice. These things are conventions from old school RPGs where a wizard could finish a fight in 1-2 spells, but when wizards struggle to end most fights any faster than fighters do they're unnecessarily harsh. The third problem is actually probably the smallest one: due to levels and resistances mages suffer badly in boss fights, which there are quite a few of in the endgame. But buffs and elementals (and buffed elementals) are really, really good even when direct damage fails. There are still a couple very tough fights for an all-spellcaster party but most of them are quite manageable. The biggest problem in my book, though is the interface. Casting spells just isn't terribly convenient; I think there's a hotkey to recast your last used spell, which isn't terribly useful since having separate SP pools for each realm encourages you to rotate spell use. Otherwise, it's a ton of clicks to cast anything compared to just letting your fighters do their thing automatically. So not only do mages generally fail to end fights any faster than fighters do in terms of combat rounds, it's much slower in terms of real time. The power level dial seems like a really cool idea for about 5 minutes before you realize that you almost always want to just cast at the highest safe level possible and it's just an extra step in an already slow process. (There are times when you want to risk a higher level cast, but they're fairly rare. Needing to conserve SP is also fairly rare since you're usually better off ending fights faster, and as noted above the SP system is kind of a relic anyhow.) You can build a party full of spellcasters and they'll get through the game just fine, but there's no reason to bother as it's a lot of hassle for no real benefit.
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Sep 23, 2020 17:20
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I've never really had a problem with the group instant death spells failing to kill things in larger fights. I usually kill 1-2 enemies per group per cast, which is pretty efficient when you're fighting two groups of Scorchers, a group of flying snakes, and a group of fire ants or something.
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Sep 23, 2020 17:47
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So are spellcasters just suboptimal to use overall, or are they still good for doing CC / buffs / healing while the wall of meat punches everything to death?
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Sep 23, 2020 19:53
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Buffs, healing, and debuffs/crowd control are critical. You're not going to get very far in the game without access to Armorplate, Missile Shield, Magic Screen, Soul Shield, Enchanted Blade, and the like, and Web is an absolute staple of early-to-mid-game combat.
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Sep 23, 2020 19:59
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Straight White Shark posted:Magic in Wiz8 is a lot better than it's usually given credit, but it still has issues. The design intent was clearly to have certain areas where enemies resisted certain schools of magic, forcing you to use others (like the Rapax areas involving lots of fire resistance), but the vulnerability angle seems to have gotten dropped, and at the high end everything has resists across the board, which is a problem. The other issue is how grinding works in the game. Level grinding is pretty standard and helps everyone. But you can grind magic skills with non-combat spells, despite not being able to grind weapon skills in that way. The game, I think, is balanced assuming players will do a lot more of that than most players are likely to do. Worse, you have to grind in multiple schools while Bards and Gadgeteers only need to improve a single skill to be about as good. I think high-level casters are also better in extended combats against large numbers of enemies. But the game strongly incentivizes you to end combats as rapidly as possible. The up-shot is that your casters only matter in fights that aren't going well, and even then they spend a fair amount of time buffing, healing, or otherwise keeping the fighters going while they deliver the hurt. Zurai posted:I've never really had a problem with the group instant death spells failing to kill things in larger fights. I usually kill 1-2 enemies per group per cast, which is pretty efficient when you're fighting two groups of Scorchers, a group of flying snakes, and a group of fire ants or something. This is the other key: the early game teaches you repeatedly and brutally not to trigger too large a fight, but by the late game, you want as many enemies involved in a combat as you can manage to maximize the effects of the mass spells. And of course, the classic problem that if buffs land 100% of the time and attacks do not, you're always better off with the buffs unless the attacks allow you to kill enemies faster. In the sweet spot, you want the Fireballs to kill off those swarms of lower hp foes, but by late game, you're back to the buffs.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:15
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RabidWeasel posted:So are spellcasters just suboptimal to use overall, or are they still good for doing CC / buffs / healing while the wall of meat punches everything to death? You need them for buffs, like, by the end of the game you have a list of like 8 buffs you want up at all times: Missile Shield, Magic Screen, Enchanted Blade, Light, X-Ray, Chameleon and probably Shadow Hound. On top of that, end-game fights that don't start with you casting Soul Shield and Element Shield usually ends in instant death. Mid-game, you need them for area clears because there their fireballs, noxious fumes, etc. will speed up combat a LOT. And there are tons of good mid-battle buffs: Haste, Bless, Superman, Body of Stone, etc. and then the elemental-summoning. They DO still have a role, but their damage spells rapidly stop being it, and are what 90% of their top-tier setup consists of.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:31
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The solution to Wizardry 8's janky magic system is to use a Bishop as your party's pure spellcaster. It's true that they get spell levels more slowly, but Wizardry 8 is the only game in the series that actually goes to a high enough level that Bishops can really play around with top-tier spells, and once you get to that point, they'll absolutely be able to clean house. There's one endgame battle that I completely trivialized just by using the Gadgeteer's NegatAir and the Bishop's Quicksand or Death Wish (I forget which I used, pretty sure it was Quicksand because their Divine resistance was higher). Wiped out not only all but maybe one or two of the dozens of weak chaff enemies, but also one of the "boss" enemies of the encounter. In fact, I would contend that the ideal party is two tanks (Samurai and Valkyrie tend to be my picks, in order to use as much class-exclusive gear as possible), a Fairy Ninja (obligatory in the Dark Savant Trilogy), a Bard, a Gadgeteer, and a Bishop. The only thing you kind of miss (the Ranger's Scouting) can be easily replaced by Detect Secrets and/or just reading a guide on the internet.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:32
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Narsham posted:The design intent was clearly to have certain areas where enemies resisted certain schools of magic, forcing you to use others (like the Rapax areas involving lots of fire resistance), but the vulnerability angle seems to have gotten dropped, and at the high end everything has resists across the board, which is a problem. There's apparently some weirdness in the resist formulas where more expensive spells are more effective at penetrating resistances than cheaper ones, so the resistance creep isn't as bad as it sounds. Lategame enemies with triple digit resistances except a "weakness" of 80% resistance still take a decent beating from lategame spells, especially with Power Cast. The problem is, this means that functionally your spellcasters' longevity never actually increases because as you level up and get more spellpoints you need to blow it on ever-more-expensive spells to handle higher level enemies. You can cast more Fireballs than before but if you want to do any reasonable amount of damage you need to cast Nuclear Blast instead. Also, if you're facing something that's not weak to fire you're kinda SOL because all you have is much cheaper/lower level spells.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:48
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Straight White Shark posted:There's apparently some weirdness in the resist formulas where more expensive spells are more effective at penetrating resistances than cheaper ones, so the resistance creep isn't as bad as it sounds. Lategame enemies with triple digit resistances except a "weakness" of 80% resistance still take a decent beating from lategame spells, especially with Power Cast. And then sometimes it still bounces off. No one knows how this works and no one ever will. If the stuff posted on Steam was real, then Werdna should have been owning through all resistances, no probalo, but in practice he was largely incapable of doing any magic damage to anyone at the end. Somewhere between 80% and 90% resistance, the ability for the party to punch through reliably with conditions and damage just vanished.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:53
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PurpleXVI posted:And then sometimes it still bounces off. No one knows how this works and no one ever will. If the stuff posted on Steam was real, then Werdna should have been owning through all resistances, no probalo, but in practice he was largely incapable of doing any magic damage to anyone at the end. Somewhere between 80% and 90% resistance, the ability for the party to punch through reliably with conditions and damage just vanished. Either you’re exaggerating or something strange is going on, because the high level single target spells will reliably do over 100 damage in the endgame. That’s less damage than a melee attacker will do, or a lot less if the target is paralyzed, and as a percentage of total hp it’s often not great, but most enemies in the game care about damage at that level. Fireball becomes useless, yes, but “magic doesn’t work for damage any more” is a bit of an exaggeration, especially if you insist on focusing on damage spells and then insist that single-target damage is pointless. Either you hit everyone in an area for enough that you can kill them before they get in melee range over 5-6 rounds or you hit one target for meaningful hp. Your original point, that spells fall behind good melee weapons or the bard/gadgeteer items, is absolutely right, but there’s a big gap between that and being useless. An all-spellcaster party can still win late-game fights, it just makes the game a slog.
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Sep 24, 2020 15:09
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Narsham posted:Either you’re exaggerating or something strange is going on, because the high level single target spells will reliably do over 100 damage in the endgame. Yeah, that is confirmably not the case. Unless I encounter an underlevelled enemy, they did like maybe 20 or 30 damage tops from a cast of Concussion, assuming it stuck at all. For curiosity's sake, though, how high level were you generally in the endgame? Because it's like, I feel like I was at the intended level for the endgame, i.e. roughly on par with most enemies I encountered or slightly below, but you could certainly hammer your way up higher if you wanted, like if say you didn't use the portals to skip out on tons of on-the-road encounters.
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Sep 24, 2020 15:31
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PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, that is confirmably not the case. Unless I encounter an underlevelled enemy, they did like maybe 20 or 30 damage tops from a cast of Concussion, assuming it stuck at all. I’m unsure if I have an endgame save archived somewhere. My furthest seems to be at Ascension Peak. Everyone is level 23 except for the bard at 24 and the bishop at 22. The bishop has 90 in Power Cast and is in the 80s on magic skills. I suspect that party was my one Wiz 6-8 attempt. I’m thinking back when the game was first released that I was more willing to grind magic than I am now, although my willingness to try a solo faerie run in 2017 gives the lie to that. A question: how do you manage stamina in combat? Because that’s another modifying stat that I’m not sure is well understood, and the manual says “Tired characters do not fight as well as fully rested characters.” Low stamina on melee sorts seems to degrade hit and maybe penetration chances, but in endgame I don’t recall a damage drop-off. I’m wondering if spellcasters with lower stamina have worse chances to beat monster resistances? I always tried to keep my parties above 50% in combat. Given that casters usually do buffs for the first few rounds, I’m wondering if your casters tend to be lower stamina when casting?
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Sep 24, 2020 15:50
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Yeah, stamina absolutely 100% lowers penetration chances. It's really obvious early on when a samurai gets two Lightning Strikes against Gregor and the second one hits 5 times for 0 damage when the first did reasonable amounts. I don't know if it affects spells or not, but I do know that I use the Rest All instrument frequently in combat. I don't like my party going below 50% if I can help it.
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Sep 24, 2020 16:11
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Narsham posted:I’m unsure if I have an endgame save archived somewhere. My furthest seems to be at Ascension Peak. Everyone is level 23 except for the bard at 24 and the bishop at 22. The bishop has 90 in Power Cast and is in the 80s on magic skills. I suspect that party was my one Wiz 6-8 attempt. I’m thinking back when the game was first released that I was more willing to grind magic than I am now, although my willingness to try a solo faerie run in 2017 gives the lie to that. So it looks like you had lower magic skills than me for the most part and similar levels. As for managing stamina, once I had Infinity Helms and Robes of Rejuvenation on everyone who could wear them and wasn't reliant on big heavy armor(Lady and Chewbecka, mostly), the only characters I had who ever ran low on stamina were Saxx and Stony, at least once hitting the endgame. There were a couple of midgame fights that dragged out and really wore the party's stamina down, but that was about it. Stamina mostly handles itself because your female fighters get Amulets of Rejuvenation, and then a variety of other options crop up for everyone else as the game advances. Bards and Gadgeteers who eat up 30% to 50% of their stamina pool per "cast" are the only ones who need some babysitting in that regard.
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Sep 24, 2020 17:50
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