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Goddess Rainbowvixen, female Felpurr MagePurpleXVI posted:I'll need six characters(technically I can play with a smaller party, but hell to the no on doing that), to fill out six of our eight slots(the last two are reserved for recruitable NPC's we can encounter along the way). As mentioned, I'm not sure the game is actually beatable(without a lot of reloading) without a Priest, Psionic or hybrid class involving one of the two, since the spell Soul Shield is the only thing standing between you and a lot of late-game save-or-die shenanigans(well that and your saving throws, I guess), so requiring access to that spell is the only limitation I'll put on the final party. Just coast through the game with ~smooth jazz~ you coward
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Jul 8, 2020 23:26
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Cardiovorax posted:Agreed. This is a very long game and you spend of time walking through empty corridors or wilderness. There isn't a lot going on that would benefit from video format all that much, but it might be a good idea for the more important voiced conversations. Seconding this. This game's combat is excruciatingly slow. There are a few big fights that might be worth showing off but random encounters are frequent and looooong.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:54
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Voting for MURDER. Communications skill does influence shop prices, but most vendors have a pretty small spread and you can't push buy/sell prices past each other, so it doesn't take much to cap out most vendors (and IIRC there are at least 1 or 2 that start out buying and selling at 100% regardless of skill.) I think there may be a few bits of dialogue that are gated by Communication but they're very minor and incidental. The main difference between multiclassing in Wiz 8 and multiclassing in previous Wizardry games is that multiclassing does not reset your experience requirements, so you can't power level through a new class to pick up more stuff. If you take a level 10 mage and decide you want to cross-class into a level 1 priest instead of taking level 11 as a mage, it will take you just as much xp to get to level 2 priest as it would to get to level 12 mage. Consequently there just aren't a lot of cases where it makes any sense to gently caress with multiclassing since you tend to get more goodies at high level than at low level and it costs the same either way. Occasionally you might switch a support-only caster into a beefier class if you've got all the support spells you care about, maybe, but if you actually care about attack spells you'll need to keep leveling your current class to keep up.
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Jul 13, 2020 02:08
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FairGame posted:There are also some real weird stories about the development of this game, where for whatever reason there were a bunch of animated genitalia monsters. I don’t know if I believe it, but there’s an area MUCH later in this game that kinda makes me inclined to.  I've never heard of this but Brenda Brathwaite is batshit enough that I'd believe it.
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Jul 13, 2020 22:55
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FairGame posted:I don't have an RPG Codex account, but this kind of alludes to what I heard: I think that thread is just gone to the ether. I found some of the guy's other ramblings and he's just a fuckin loon, but there's probably a grain of truth behind it all. EDIT: Ok, so from what I can gather the short version is that penis monsters never had anything to do with the game that was released as Wizardry 8. In between Wiz7 and Wiz8 Sir-Tech contracted with a 3rd party shop in Australia to produce a sequel to Wiz 7. The principal coder claims that he used his superior northern European genes to singlehandedly produce the greatest sequel to the greatest cRPG series ever made despite the sex crazed antics of the (insert various LGBT slurs here) that comprised the rest of the team, only to have Sir-Tech pull the plug because they were afraid of his northern European game design prowess. Someone posted some concept art they had found from an auction of Sir-Tech's assets depicting some monsters that were somewhat suggestive in a vague, Gigeresque sort of way, giving a veneer of truth to some of the guy's claims. Other claims, such as the harem of underage sex slaves the project leader supposedly had (for he was gay, you see) remain uncorroborated. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 04:37
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EclecticTastes posted:But, it gets better, in that signing away the IP was likely done specifically to spite Electronic Arts, who allegedly pulled a lot of strings to gently caress over Sir-Tech as much as possible in order to prevent the successful release of Wizardry 8 and force them into a buyout so EA could acquire the Wizardry license (essentially doing to Sir-Tech what they'd previously done to Origin Systems). Huh, suddenly Wiz8's mysterious difficulty finding a publisher makes a lot more sense. Guess it's not really much of a surprise though.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:37
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EclecticTastes posted:The real bummer is that only very few of the Japanese games inspired by Wizardry adopted any of the rad sci-fi elements added during the Dark Savant trilogy. Also, many of the cultural references and in-jokes were lost on the Japanese audience, so they took the whole thing completely seriously and so the Japanese installments are honestly kind of dreary. Yeah, they tend to stick very closely to the original Wiz trilogy. There are Japanese Wizardry games released in the past decade that stick to the original 8 classes and 5 races.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:27
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Go North, it makes for some fun times getting there early. It also helps speed along some of the early-midgame quests and cuts down on backtracking.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:44
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Other than bishops you don't need to worry too much about saving spell picks, there are <10 non-spellbook spells per school. Diversifying elemental access early on is a great use of spell picks, as is getting immediate use of key spells (spell books generally won't show up at vendors until you get to an even higher level than you need to cast the spell.)
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Jul 15, 2020 00:52
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Arzaac posted:Hey so uh...is Wizardry good? Honestly at this point this one is the only game in the series I can really recommend for a newcomer. Maybe Wiz1 for sheer historical curiosity (it's 40 loving years old!); it's not Good, but it is Short, so the suffering is brief. Wiz6 is good but it's incomprehensibly ugly, Wiz7 is very good but it is incomprehensibly huge, and neither of them is very forgiving or user friendly. Wiz8 is not super well polished by any stretch but it's vastly easier to get into than either of them.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:15
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Most spears have a built in skill bonus for some reason which makes the Valkyrie bonus kind of redundant in the long run. On the other hand they're just really fuckin good weapons.
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Jul 15, 2020 16:32
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Wizardry 1 was almost certainly the first game on PCs where you controlled a full party and navigated a dungeon in first person. It may or may not have been the first publicly distributed game on any platform to combine the two features--several 70s mainframe RPGs (some of which were ripped off quite shamelessly by Wizardry) had one feature or the other, and there were first person multiplayer dungeon crawlers where you controlled a single character in a party of multiple concurrent users, but there are no clear precedents for first person multi-character gameplay. And yeah, there were several recognizable features of Dragon Quest that derived directly from Wizardry (and perhaps indirectly from mainframe games that Wizardry lifted from.) Wizardry 1 had a slime monster as the very weakest enemies in the game that were not even threatening to unequipped level 1 characters, and a slightly more advanced slime on level 2 with slightly better stats than level 1 monsters and the ability to poison on hit, that would map directly onto Slimes and Babbles/Liquid Slimes. The effects of poison (decrease HP every step) and paralysis/numb (a permanent disable that lasts until being healed and can cause game overs) also match Wizardry. These things aren't really super closely associated with 70s era D&D, the main source of inspiration plundered by early CRPG nerds, so they're pretty much part of that early proto-CRPG DNA passed down through Wizardry into DQ.
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Jul 20, 2020 15:41
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There are plenty of good polearms that you can find early on in this game, so it's not that big of a deal. There are a few unique bard instruments you can bring over, although nothing mind-boggling. One casts Banish, a high level attack spell, but it only hits undead which are not that common or threatening in the big scheme of things. The other thing to keep in mind is that depending on your endgame choices in 7 you won't necessarily start on the monastery beach, so the level 1 crab experience is mostly reserved for fresh parties.
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Jul 22, 2020 03:56
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3, Saxx Saxx is a rhino that plays jazz, your arguments are invalid
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Jul 22, 2020 18:36
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other reasons Saxx is good 1. he has a ~completely unique~ bard instrument attached to him and it's one of the best ones in the game (you can finagle it away from him for your own bard to use, but it takes some doing) 2. he is OK going to 2 late game areas that most RPCs aren't 3. there are sneaky teleporters into most of his no-go areas so by the time you reach the midgame you can easily get him anywhere you need to go if you know what you're doing 4. bards have a bunch of stat bonus gear that takes the edge off the penalty for hanging out in places he doesn't want to be
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Jul 22, 2020 19:13
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Hypnotic Lure is weird, it's theoretically very good but it seems to work very inconsistently. I think there might be some kind of mechanic where you can't really reapply it once enemies have overcome/ignored it? I don't know, I don't like psionics very much and bishops have better uses for fire MP so I don't have a lot of chances to use it.
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Jul 23, 2020 16:50
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Trynton kinda sucks and my preferred route is usually to save most of it for later while I run around racking up other early game quests.
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Jul 23, 2020 22:08
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Libluini posted:You know, I've forgotten how absolutely brutal this game can be. After bumbling around in the monastery for far too long, I exited and on my road to even reach the crossroads before Arnika, I encountered 15 crabs, 16 army ants and 4 bandits that were giant sacks of hitpoints but astonishingly harmless after a rain of constant status effects. Back in the day I remember a lot of online strategy guides recommended deliberately avoiding going past level 4 or 5 until you got within a stone's throw of Arnika, because encounters scale by level and at this stage of the game they scale up faster than you do. (Once you loot Arnika you get a huge leg up, so at that point you can just resume leveling normally and not worry about it anymore. But your starting equipment just does not cut it against the enemies that you see at level 7 or 8.)
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Jul 25, 2020 02:09
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Zurai posted:So thanks to this thread, I found out that there's a small but surprisingly in-depth selection of mods for Wizardry 8, including options everywhere from "minor tweaks and balance changes" (Christian Coder's mod or Flamestryke's mod) all the way up to "gently caress everything you thought you knew about Wiz8, this is an entirely different game" (Lunastralis or Wizardry Reforged). Huh. Against all expectations I found a copy of the lovely mod I made 15+ years ago floating around, I would have figured it would have disappeared into the ether by now. It's definitely on the former end of that spectrum, it's got a few new spells but mostly it's just a million terrible pun items.
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Jul 28, 2020 22:57
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The only two that I remember are Sirius (an endgame shuriken only usable by rawulfs) and the Killeidoscope (an upgraded version of one of the gadgets.) There were plenty more for sure, though.
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Jul 29, 2020 02:17
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Swap out Sparkles, having to listen to her for more than a few minutes is a fate I wouldn't wish on anybody.Libluini posted:Goddamnit, I just walked right by that hidden tunnel. Next time I'll walk through the area, I need to rectify this. I think he gives you like 500xp or something for it. There are a couple of very piddly quest bonuses you can get when you reach Arnika, although I forget what all triggers them. Also, show off Antone's loot dammit! It's one of the best weapons in the game.
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Jul 30, 2020 15:39
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There are 2 areas that are almost universal no-go zones. There's one that needs both RPC slots open for story purposes that no one will go to without complaining, and another that needs one RPC slot open that has exactly one willing RPC. They really don't want you to have to dismiss an RPC to make room for a quest character.
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Jul 30, 2020 19:23
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I say go ahead and try to kill Don Barlone now if you can. Note that it is impossible to gently caress up the Astral Dominae quest, so no worries there.
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Aug 13, 2020 01:29
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh God I'm afraid they do any time the fights are outside. The patrols are actually pretty useful and powerful, they just tend to get in the goddamn way all the time. So the beasties usually can't even take out the patrols most of the time. Also, there are a couple spots where they are absolutely capable of shoving you over the side of the walkways to your death on the forest floor below.
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Aug 13, 2020 20:52
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Trynton's got some obtuse puzzles including a bit of pixel hunting, murderous spellcasters, obnoxious friendlies in your way, hostile geometry, and it's a looooong trip that you can't easily back out of to go do something else (unless you have a valkyrie and a lot of resurrection powders.) It didn't make me give up on the game the first time I got there, but it did get me to restart with a better party to go do something else.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:16
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I vote you take the other short way via the T'rang high security room--the guards will not aggro if you enter combat mode and use combat run to cut through to the opposite hallway
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Aug 20, 2020 01:47
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But you can speedrun back to Mt Gygas for that sweet sweet quest XP (and that sweet sweet smooth jazz)!
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Aug 20, 2020 01:53
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Saxx and RFS all the way. If you really want to cheese the wilderness temple fight, camping while you are still being pursued by enemies will trigger an ambush by a maximum of one enemy group. So you can initiate combat outside the door, run past to catch their attention, then camp in the courtyard and you'll get a fight against a single enemy group (from an encounter that is mostly single enemy groups), at melee range where they're nnot inclined to cast spells, and if you have the Shadow Hound buff up you start the fight on equal footing instead of getting sucker punched while half the party is asleep. Meanwhile everyone except that 1 enemy groups forgets about you when you hit the camp button, so you can take them out 1 by 1 at your leisure.
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Aug 24, 2020 01:17
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Giant Sword is probably not a genius brain option for samurai since it eats up so much stamina that you pass out as soon as you Lightning Strike. I like it a lot for rangers, since you're spending most of your time shooting and are probably not front and center anyhow.
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Aug 25, 2020 20:11
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Mount Gigas. The main faction quests are a lot simpler if you keep them up to pace with each other. Also, if you're going to dual class Werdna (which I'm all for) I would recommend doing it sooner rather than later. The XP differential on mage vs. bishop suuuuuuucks at endgame levels. If you take a few bishop levels now and then switch to mage when you get level 7 spells you will be able to level fast enough to get some use out of them, but if you switch to bishop at level 18-19 it's going to take a very, very long time to get enough levels to cast level 7 spells at a worthwhile power.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:40
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Zurai posted:The only part of casting spells that is level-dependent is that they all have a minimum level to learn them. Aside from that it's entirely stat/skill/number-of-spells-you-know-in-that-element dependent. Caster level is a huge part of backfire calculations, particularly higher level spells. A level 18 bishop with 125 in every stat and skill and a completely full spellbook will still be stuck at maybe 2 circles of power if they want to safely cast their new level 7 spells, but every level up will basically give them another green circle. Moreover, having a higher caster level helps overcome enemy resistances.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:55
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Zurai posted:That's definitely not my experience. Raising the spell school skills raises both the total amount of spell points you have in that school as well as the amount of spell points you can safely spend on any given spell. I've definitely gotten a level 7 spell, only had 1 yellowish-green circle, then gone off and grinded my Earth (or whatever) casting skill and gotten to 3-4 green circles without ever earning a single point of experience. I think you might be mistaken. My own experience is that level 18 casters just don't get past 1 dark green circle period, and need to break triple digits on both realm + school skills to get power level 2 down to light green, which also matches the numbers that are being pulled out by data miners (which say that regardless of skill there is a flat 7% chance to fail for each power level past the first, which goes down by 7% for each subsequent caster level; if your skills aren't up to snuff then you'll face a bigger penalty on top of that too.) Jumping up multiple power levels from grinding skills can happen if you are playing a bishop and wind up having to wait past level 18 to pick up some of your level 7 spells, though.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:21
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IIRC the state of Ascension Peak actually depends on the current state of the quest items in your inventory. The game prevents you from dropping key quest items so it operates on the assumption that once you have 2+ of 3 artifacts you will always have 2+, but you can put them into chests to duck back under the trigger which I believe will actually clear the route for you.
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Sep 5, 2020 00:39
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Oh yeah, interesting note about resistances. So, caster level vs. target level plays a role in magic resistance calculations. But the thing is, the level that's listed on a monster's stat screen is a lie. The game uses a separate, internal number for monster levels which varies depending on difficulty setting, so on Expert you're facing enemies that are technically ~2-3 levels higher than on Novice even though the game will display the same level regardless. For most monsters, even on Expert the real level is going to be at least a couple levels lower than what's reported. You might see "level 17" rapax wandering around that are actually somewhere between 12-15 depending on difficulty. But named boss enemies virtually always have their internal level numbers fixed at whatever the display number is. So while randomly spawned Rapax might display levels on par with the set bosses here, the bosses secretly have an edge of several "real" levels. Since levels matter for spell resistance, this effectively gives them a little edge in resists across the board above and beyond their usually already-good resistances (and lets them chip away at your own resistance, too.) If El Dorado's levels were in the mid-teens like comparable "level 18" enemies you might be able to chip away at him with magic a little more (at least with Power Cast), but at level 18 you can forget it unless you came here at a much higher level. No, I have no idea why they went to all the trouble to obfuscate this instead of just reporting levels consistently and letting bosses actually appear as several level higher than the random spawns for their area.
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Sep 7, 2020 14:20
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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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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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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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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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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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Unoriginal One posted:Monster resists are the way they are because back in early testing the devs found that speed stacking mages could just zoom around and blow everything up before it could move. This makes sense and again, the final result is balanced in the sense that mages and fighters wind up with vaguely similar average TTK for groups of enemies. The problem is that they balanced mages and then left in all the limiting factors that are supposed to compensate for mages being able to alpha strike everything into oblivion.
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Sep 27, 2020 17:32
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