Wizardry 8: From Crabs to Galactic Conquest

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Wizardry 8: From Crabs to Galactic Conquest

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

Selecting Defend in combat will recover some stamina if you don�t get hit.

Getting around beefy solos you can Sleep involves casting status effects while defending with the rest of the group. Sleep the hogar and you buy a few rounds to run past it, at which point your main danger is bumping into a second group of enemies and getting caught from behind by the one you are fleeing.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2020 19:27

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 05:28

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

PurpleXVI posted:

This is part of the mage vs physical divide. Ultimately physical combatants scale to being able to do more brutal damage by the end, especially as monster resistances pile on, but Wizardry has what feels like a shortage of midgame equipment for physical-focused characters(in some cases it feels like you go from a starter weapon to the weapon a character has for the literal rest of the game), while mages level up their arsenal just by going up levels. Physical characters also level up in more abrupt jags as they get more attacks, while mage characters have a smoother rise in power from level to level.

Any mage with an out-of-combat spell can also level that school of magic without risk, increasing their power considerably without actually increasing their level, while physical combatants can't really increase their skills without fighting and thus leveling, and thus also increasing the danger level of enemies.

Most games in the series suffer a bit from spellcaster grinding. 8's skill-based system can lead to power-leveling caster skill in a way where you don't even need to be fighting monsters, if you're willing to spend a mind-numbingly boring period of time doing that, which leaves physical-based characters even further behind the curve.

And balancing in certain areas is very "friendly mob" dependent: a fight that will kill you dead if three monster groups spawn can be easy if it's two monster groups and a group of patrolling friendly guards.

At least running away is a viable option in 8.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2020 17:56

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

I recall beating that fight once by triggering it outside the room and then backing out while doing preps. You can separate out the enemies that way and defeat them piecemeal. This is one of the rare spots where anti-undead magic works well, too.

I believe summons can also be useful in holding aggro. The trick to pulling a group at a time without exploiting the resting mechanic is not losing aggro too soon. If none of the monsters follow you out, it�s no good.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2020 05:41

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2020 18:48

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

Straight White Shark posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 20:15

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

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.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2020 15:09

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

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.

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.

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?

# ¿ Sep 24, 2020 15:50

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

Gort posted:

Thanks for LPing this - Wizardry seems like a cool series if you played it when it came out, but it sounds like an impenetrable slog to pick up today, so it was good to see it in LP format.

In keeping with the above sentiment, I curse you to LP Wizards and Warriors instead of playing a good game that I've played myself

In fairness, complaining about too much combat in an RPG is like saying there�s too much combat in an FPS: that�s kind of the main draw to the game.

The combat loop is pretty good in Wiz 8: enough PC variability to allow for a replay or two, enemy variety is pretty good, speed is a bit of an issue but this was an early 3d RPG and it is at least turn-based. You�ll get sick of a few enemy types, but the core gameplay of �these guys were awful but now we can just fireball them� is present. You can actually overlevel some areas and most foes, too, if you want.

It suffers in comparison to some modern RPGs because the core mechanics have since been done better, and I�d probably pick the 3d Might and Magics over Wiz 8 if you wanted to play an older 3d RPG. On the other hand, you can import a party from Wiz 6 and 7 into this game.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2020 15:36

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 05:28

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

Straight White Shark posted:

That speaks more to encounter density than anything else; Wiz8 still has a fairly small map footprint.

It's a dungeon crawler (despite mostly taking place outside), so combat is a big part of the formula. But exploration is the other half and it's a bit light in that department.

There�s more to explore than you�d think on the first playthrough: lots of nooks and crannies on a number of the maps. Once you get familiar with the game, it is certainly smaller, but even the wilderness maps have a lot packed into them until endgame.

Endgame is the other issue. From the Rapax onward, there�s a lot of unfilled space that seems like it shouldn�t be, and some obviously half-completed plotlines.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2020 04:51

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