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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz1Mfyzoi1w Wizardry 8! The last of the Wizardries made by Sir-Tech, though I believe there have been a few made by Japanese companies since then. It picks up where Wizardry 7 left off, especially if you import a final save from that game, as it greatly impacts the start location of your party. You can, of course, like me, also start an original party which gives you a fourth start location right in the middle of everything. This LP is reasonably open world, so I will accept people's input on where and when to go. There's obviously an "optimal" path, but you're free to ignore it as long as you eventually hit all of the required places. Some of them are "gated" by being horribly tough, but Wiz 8 uses a mild sort of scaling which means every area has a max and minimum level it scales to. So some areas can NEVER be harder than a certain limit, others can NEVER be easier than a certain limit. Generally, though, even on Normal, this game will do its utmost to kick your rear end. I will also be accepting input for the party to make. I've obviously got my own opinions on what makes a good, strong party but... there are very few party compositions that are completely unplayable. Getting thrown a curveball might definitely be interesting. There are also a few options on how to complete some quests and who to align with. I will also leave that option to the audience. Why Wizardry 8? There are... a whole seven other wizardries first! Firstly, the older Wizardries suffer from oooooooooooooh so much jank and are very much hardcore groggy RPG's in comparison. Secondly, most of the series has already been competently LP'd by better and smarter people than me, so I don't feel like retreading their footsteps. Wizardry 8 truly reworks the formula in a lot of ways which I greatly enjoy. What's the plot? If you didn't watch the video above, it's relatively simple. The gods, known in this setting as the COSMIC LORDS, created four artifacts to help manage reality. The Astral Dominae: creates life. The Chaos Moliri: creates change. The Destinae Dominus: contains all knowledge. And the Cosmic Forge, a pen that turns anything written to reality, though often with a certain "monkey's paw"-esque twist to it, as discovered during Wizardry 6. Rumour has it that whoever collects the first three, with the fourth already having been returned to its intended place, can become the new Cosmic Lords, rulers of all reality. Obviously this is a thing we want. Also angling for this glory are the Dark Savant(imagine Darth Vader but with an army of very competent cybernetic troopers at his disposal), the T'rang(weird spider-slugs) and the Umpani(military-capitalist rhinomen). A variety of locals native to Planet Dominus(and a few who aren't) also have their own agendas and may get in our way. So you mentioned making characters. What are the options? Characters are made of six fundamental building blocks: A name, a character image, a gender, a race, a class and a voice. Names: Hopefully do not need explaining. They're split into a "full" name(almost never shown at any point) and a nickname/diminuitive(sometimes just the first name) that pops up whenever the game needs to tell you that they've gotten sick, killed something, levelled up, etc. Character image: Obviously the game has a lot of pre-made character images, but I may be able to import 180x144 .tga files if someone has a funny image to use instead. The game has a minimum of one male and one female option for each race. Gender: You've got male and female, which are mostly irrelevant to the game. They don't affect stats, but only females can be Valkyries, they limit the selection of voices(there are 18 for each gender) and there are a few female-only pieces of equipment. In addition, we will need a minimum of one(1) male character to finish the game, as one encounter requires it and I don't believe it's skippable. We may be able to get a male hireling instead, but I've honestly never tried and I'd rather not softlock myself at the 80% point through the game. Race: Races never limit your class options. Instead, each has a starting array of stats, and if your starting class requires more than those stats, you go into stat-debt, and your first few level ups' stat boosts have to be invested in repaying that debt. This means some class/race combos are certainly more optional than others. There are also a few pieces of race-restricted gear.  Humans have no special benefits or deficits and are roughly equally good at everything.  Elves gain some bonus Mental and Air resistance as a species default and are otherwise generically elfy, being slightly more fragile and smarter than Humans. They're good as both mages and clerics.  Dwarves have natural armor and Fire resistance, and boosted strength and vitality, at the cost of every other stat. They're good at punching things.  Gnomes get bonus Mental resistances and are highly dexterous. Their bonus resistance is Earth.  Faeries are our first race that isn't just Slightly Different Human. They're great mages, because they recover mana faster than any other race, and they have built-in bonus AC which works well with their inability to wear most armor(being very small and all) and mages' inability to wear most armor. They're very fast(often acting first) and have a high Intelligence. The usual move with a Faerie is to make them a Mage or an unarmed combatant or... a Ninja. There's a very powerful weapon only available to Faerie Ninjas, and only one of them in the game. Faeries get a grab-bag of boosted resistances.  Lizardmen are the inverse of Faeries. They're huge lumbering piles of muscle and health, slow and dumb as rocks. Great for Fighters and little else. They also get a mix of boosted resistances.  Dracons are noble dragonfolk whose main special trick is having a low-powered acid breath attack that can help out in the early game.  Felpurr are catfolk whose main thing is that they're the only other race to be as fast as Faeries.  Rawful start with the highest Piety stat, making them good options for Priests and Bishops. Otherwise, they're normal.  Mook are the second stand-out weird race along Faeries. Unlike Faeries, they can wear most standard gear, but there are also a few pieces of extra big gear only they can wear or wield. They are essentially intellectual Wookies, combining good physical strength with high intelligence, though they suck at Piety and Speed. Classes: Are even more involved than races. Most equipment has some form of class limitation on it, unless it's a quest-vital item.  Fighters are amazing users of melee and ranged weapons. In the early game they hold the line, in the mid-game they lag a bit behind mages, and then in the endgame as enemies get higher elemental resistances they come back as the main damage dealers for the party.  Lords are Fighter/Clerics capable of wielding Divine spells and being oddly specialized in dual-wielding, a mostly useless ability. Think of them as Paladins.  Valkyries are Fighter/Clerics like Lords, but polearm-specialized(and polearms can kick rear end) and occasionally when they die, they instantly revive at 1HP, which can allow for some sick speedrunning tricks or sometimes just save you when you gently caress up.  Rangers are specialized in ranged combat and can use Alchemy spells. Their special abilities include ranged Criticals(critical strikes are instant kills that a few classes and weapons have access to) and they also simplify the game by constantly Searching, something that usually slows you down in exchange for being able to find hidden objects. With a Ranger, you just constantly have a chance to find bonus stuff.  Samurai are Fighter/Mages that can critically hit in melee and are immune to the Fear status effect, something more useful than it sounds.  Ninjas are Fighter/Alchemists that can crit with melee and thrown weapons, and who have access to unarmed combat. Another skill that is occasionally insanely useful. Their thrown attacks also never bounce off armor, if they hit, they always do damage.  Monks are Fighter/Psionicists who cannot be blinded, can critically hit in melee and focus specifically on unarmed combat(with a sideline in thrown weapons and staves).  Rogues are wholly non-magical, but their ability to pick locks is vital if the party has no Alchemist or Mage(or hybrid of same) capable of casting Knock Knock to deal with obstinate locks. They have a limited weapon selection but can contribute effectively in combat nonetheless.  Gadgeteers are non-magical... kind of. If you find the right environmental junk, they can create items that simulate some spells at a cost of Stamina instead of Mana. They also start with an Omnigun, a ranged weapon that levels with them and eventually acquires the ability to cause most of the game's status effects and use most of the game's ammo types. At the start, though, it can just shoot rocks. They also have access to lockpicking and can create a few unique weapons for other classes, like the amazing Triple Crossbow.  Bards are like Gadgeteers except they find their instruments already made, rather than assembling them and end up with a different "spellbook" at the end. They're also more melee-focused.  Priests cast Divine spells and can banish undead. Very straightforward, also very likely to save your rear end. Having no divine or psionic spellcaster to put up Soul Shield sucks. They hit things with blunt objects in combat.  The Alchemy spellbook somewhat sucks compared to the rest, in my opinion, but Alchemists(and by extension Ninjas) can cast spells while Silenced, and so can ignore that status ailment. They also passively generate free potions, can mix certain potions and specialize in throwing weapons.  Bishops are Psionic/Mage/Priest/Alchemist crossclasses that have access to all four spellbooks. Having a Bishop ROCKS in the late game but SUCKS in the early game since their spread focus means they increase their abilities much more slowly.  Masters of mind bullets, immune to all mental status effects and great at inflicting them on the enemy.  Mages get a bonus to all elemental resistances and their main skill is in blowing things the hell up. Voices Each gender has nine voice "types" and two selections of each. Here are some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzlq9QTv0mA I can upload the remainder if anyone wants to hear all of them. 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.
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Jul 8, 2020 20:11
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Update Index Part 001: Crabs. It's Mostly Just Crabs. Part 002: Virtuous Thieves Part 003: The Umpani Part 003.5: Fire and Water Part 004: Arnika Part 004.5: Earth and Air Part 005: Trynton Part 006: The T'rang(and other new friends) Part 007: Programmed to Kick rear end Part 008: The Hell of Being Trapped In Cubes Part 009: Mt. Gigas In-Depth Part 010: The Wet Update Part 011: Real Ultimate Knowledge Part 012: The Hell of Being In Hell Part 013: The Horny Update Part 013.5: Mental and Divine Part 014: Apotheosis PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 8, 2020 20:12
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I had a feeling the Faerie Ninja would pop up.  Which I'm honestly fine with, I've been wanting to try that combo for years but just keep skipping it over every playthrough because of more generic, balanced parties attracting my attention. Also I'll obviously get more character suggestions than I have character slots... so I'll try to prioritize anything that gets multiple votes. Gotta give the audience what they want, after all.
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Jul 9, 2020 08:15
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Alright, so, a quick poll before I get to work. Would people prefer... #1: A pure screenshot LP, aside from the game's very rare cutscenes, with the occasional .gif? Pros: Easy reading, I can easily cut out repetitive/inconsequential encounters Cons: May be hard to keep track of what's happening, will miss out on satisfying splorches, sound effects and voice bites. #2: A hybrid LP, where I record the occasional battle or conversation in full but most of the game is screenshots. Pros: Mostly easy reading, I can show off the cooler battles in full. Cons: Some people prefer to avoid video, definitely slower output if I have to subtitle multiple smaller videos. #3: A pure video LP where I record everything but attempt to speed up less important things. Pros: The LP will be more "complete," no wacky sound effects or voice lines missed. Cons: There will almost certainly be a bunch of repetitive travelling/fighting that will be either hard to excise or speed up to the point you don't notice it, subtitling an entire multiple-hour play session will probably make for slow updates, I'll probably be less verbose in describing mechanics if that's your thing.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:41
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Part 001: Crabs. It's Mostly Just Crabs. Let's get this party started with... the party. [img]https://lpix.org/3793231/MonasteryLvl1.mkv_snapshot_00.07.25_[2020.07.11_23.02.07].jpg[/img] Apologies to everyone whose suggestion didn't get picked, there were no bad ones. Twinklesparkles was a no-brainer because multiple people wanted him on board, and also because I've been wanting to see The Weapon in action ever since I first played this game but never remembered it at chargen. Werdna got in because I couldn't pass up a good reference, Chewbecka because puns are my lifeblood, Lady because I was starting to realize I was going to need some beefy characters on the team to keep it alive, Stony because I wanted to show off Gadgeteers(and in part because that human male character image kind of worked as a reasonable facsimile) and Aurora because the extra items from a perma-searching ranger are good and also rangers are in general just a kickass class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZejwzqPNmUk There's a different intro video if you import from Wizardry 7, but mostly the difference is that you arrive on board the T'rang, Umpani or unaligned vessel with a lady called Vitalia Domina whom we shall later meet. As a short recap of W7: You arrive on Planet Guardia, either fresh imports or from Wizardry 6, where the T'rang, Umpani and Dark Savant are fighting to be the first to acquire the Astral Dominae. You can side with any of them in the fight, but siding with the Dark Savant, if I remember right, gets your party tossed into the Negative Zone at the end, permanently nulling them and making them unimportable. The T'rang and Umpani import starts also drop us near our chosen factions, rather than in the middle of nowhere.  It is, at least, a nice enough beach to be stranded on literal lightyears away from home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nTkeB1wssw This track plays throughout this entire area and the next one as well.  Chewbecka pipes up with the first of many voice lines and I just want to reiterate they did a shitload of voicework for this game. There are 36 different voices, each of them have different lines for everything from landing a hit to being hit with a condition to a party member going down and in addition every single voice has a unique reaction to story events like this, crashing on Dominus(though only one character will get to chime in on most of them), and none of them are just the same lines with a different voice, every single voice is written with a different personality and it's a really, really great part of the game. Now, if you notice the upper left of the screen, we have a choice of three different UI's. Our starting UI is the one where most of the character info is folded away, in favour of seeing more of the playfield, but vital stats still visible.  The very detailed option is definitely the one you want on for fights and, unfortunately, also the one I left on for most of this update, thus obscuring some of the environments. I apologize for that, I only realized it upon reviewing the screenshots and will likely go for the middle option in the next update and onwards.  The super-minimized UI is nice for screenshots but has some issues, for example the lack of your minimap in the lower left, which is just begging to get ambushed. Enemies move in real time outside of combat and having one of them sneak up on a poor angle of your formation can leave you with the choice of letting the enemy get in the first hit or leaving your wizards exposed to enemy frontliners on the first turn of combat.  With regards to formation, you'll usually find one you like and stick with it for most events. The way it works is that party members are always kind of stuck together in a blob, rather like a heavily armed hydra, separated into one of five quadrants: Front, Left, Right, Back and Middle. Enemies in direct contact with one quadrant can be hit by, and hit, that quadrant with short-ranged weapons, and be hit from, and hit, all adjacent quadrants with "extended" weapons. Ranged weapons and spells, of course, don't give a drat about this. If a quadrant is unoccupied, enemies adjacent to it are considered as adjacent to all of its adjacent quadrants.  For instance, now any enemies approaching the front quadrant is punchable by any of our guys and girls, while still mostly unable to reach the squishies in the back(Stony and Werdna). Another classic move would be to shove Chewbecka and Twinklesparkles up front, Stony and Werdna in the middle, and have Lady and Aurora on the flanks since Aurora ignores attack ranges with her bow and Lady can still poke melee enemies up front with her lances(all polearms and some staves have Extended ranges). If we had more than three short-ranged combatants, though, one of them would be perpetually in trouble at actually closing to punch the enemy.  Things on the minimap are either red: actively trying to find and kill you, yellow: will turn red if you get close enough but otherwise just patrolling, green: will at least talk to you before turning hostile and you can probably offload junk on them and white: items you can steal or creatures you spotted before moving out of sight range. As indicated by the text box, we got a bit too close to the crabs and they got extremely unhappy about it.   Getting into a fight also gives us a chance to talk about magic. All casters have six separate mana pools, the four classic elements, divine and mental. One of the great bits of this, as opposed to one huge mana pool, is that it helps force you to swap up your spells cast a bit since you'll quickly exhaust one pool if you over-rely on it. Spells that don't target friends either: target a single enemy, target all enemies, target all enemies in a group or target all enemies in view of the camera. Like Sleep here, it's a great spell that puts a group of enemies into Nap Mode, thus allowing you to stave their faces in unopposed until the beating wakes them up. Each spell also has multiple different levels of power you can cast it at, those would be the little coloured rings to the right of the spell list. The higher the level, the higher the power, and also the greater the risk. You'll notice that Werdna can cast Sleep at intensity 1 or 2, the level 2 version would cost more mana and, as indicated by a non-green ring, have a non-trivial chance of fizzling or backfiring. More levels and more magic skill will solve that, backfiring spells are the sort of thing that usually make you bite your nails because it also tends to mean you've cast them at a power level where they will gently caress you sideways.  Moving in combat postpones all character actions until you're done moving and usually lets the enemy get in their turn first. Against melee enemies the advantage is it lets them waste time walking up to you and then you can just choose to not move anywhere and let your fighters get on with the mauling. A pro strat is also to manually engage combat out of view of enemies(say, around a corner), so you can get in a free run/walk move up to them if they're ranged dudes and you don't want to give them free shots while you close on them. Otherwise combat automatically starts once you get in range of hostile enemies.  These being just crabs, Werdna puts one to sleep and the smashing ensues. And no, you're not missing something, enemies in Wizardry 8 do not leave corpses, they all explode, which is a great trick for saving frames and also a pro artistic choice on Sir Tech's part in my opinion.  Another advantage of putting enemies to sleep(or otherwise making them unable to fight back, with, say, paralysis or webbing), is that all melee attacks do double damage to them because they can't dodge. It's not a lot of extra damage now, but it will be later. The crabs are, as appropriate for a very first combat encounter, easily put down, and then it's time to look around the area a little bit.     It's a small, enclosed area really just serving to give us a place to beat up some wildlife before we feel ready to open the door and enter the starter dungeon proper.  This ramp near the back leads up to an optional encounter which, depending on your party composition and the luck of the encounter generator, may in fact kick your rear end early. Normally I bounce off it once or twice with my own artisanally crafted super cool parties.   These guys, though, are champs, and just bust right through it with nary a scratch.  Anyone paying attention to the combat messages will also notice that skills in use automatically level up. Every level up you're given 6 stat points and 15 skill points, with a max of 3 assignable per skill/stat. Stats never level up on their own, and unlock special skills when they hit 100, while skills being used will slowly increase towards 80 and then require manual upgrading for the last few points. Usually, though, you won't need characters to be so broadly skilled that you shouldn't put both your passive and active skill gain towards making them better and stronger at their core competencies.  Stepping into the Lower Monastery we're immediately faced with a dreadful challenge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLPzsW2E0Y This one I turned into video form because I really loved Chewbecka's reaction at having battled and defeated one whole crab.  Further up the corridor we encounter our second type of enemy. Crabs are kind of non-entities in terms of enemy design, they have HP, a melee attack and fighting crabs is inherently funny, but they don't really do anything much beyond that. Slimes, on the other hand, start requiring a bit of preparedness as the game advances. Right now, they're not too dissimilar from crabs except that many of them also have a ranged spit attack that can endanger your back rows. But it soon becomes common for them to be able to cause Nausea, Disease and Poison. Poison, obviously, causes damage over time, and unlike some games it will kill you. Disease starts dropping all sorts of random stat effects on the victim, fear, nausea, poison, paralysis, unconsciousness, etc. and eventually starts lowering stats permanently. Disease also does not go away with time. Nausea, lastly, is a minor stat malus that sometimes causes lost actions if characters are interrupted by having to stop and vomit.  Coming up the ramp we enter this large room where we're reminded that Wizardry isn't a pure fantasy setting, because this ancient, foreboding monastery is lit with electric lights rather than flickering torches.  Immediately on entry, some bats show up, and much like slimes, bats can be real bad news later on as they're often carriers of Disease or the rarer Draining ailment that permanently lowers hitpoints(though there's a specific curing item for Drained hitpoints, while there's none for stats lost to Disease).  At least they're just Level 1 bats. Until our Mythology skill gets better on one or more characters, we won't be able to really know much about enemy elemental weaknesses, strengths, total HP, potential status ailments they can inflict, etc. it's somewhat irrelevant in this first dungeon, but later in the game, especially for a mage-heavy party, it's very important to know what will actually stick and what will just be wasted.  Three exits to the room, one of them is...  Barred, not bolted, until we get to the other side to open a shortcut. The other is the source of the bats, and thus the last one we'll go to, the third one...   Is another enemy that can cause some mild trouble as, per the name, it can inflict the Nauseous stat effect if you get unlucky.  This cool crew chews right through it, though, getting us our first level-ups of this playthrough, for Werdna and Stony. This isn't (mainly) because characters get different XP rewards(because sometimes they inexplicably do), but because "pure" classes(Fighter, Mage, Priest, Psionicist, Alchemist, Gadgeteer, Bard, Rogue) level up faster than Hybrids(Valkyrie, Lord, Ninja, Monk, Samurai, Ranger) who level up faster than horrible messy classes(Bishop).  Now, truth be told I don't entirely know what the stats do. I mean, okay, some of it's obvious. Speed makes you act faster and be harder to hit, Strength makes you hit harder and able to carry more, Piety gives you more mana, etc. but the game also insists that, say, Intelligence "influences" lockpicking ability. However, at no point does it give a direct, listed percentage or skill point bonus indicated anywhere, so maybe it means that you learn the skills more quickly passively? Neither the manual or in-game tooltips deign to specify it in any detail. Probably there's a FAQ out there that has a very precise definition but I'm not a nerd who needs FAQs.  Speaking of things that don't do anything. The Communication skill, I'm quite sure, has no actual effect even though it levels up every time you talk to NPC's. It might faintly influence shop prices? Engineering, for Stony, determines his ability to slap two objects together and get a third object that has a spell-like effect or the couple of special weapons he can craft that way. Artifacts is for ID'ing items, Mythology for ID'ing monsters. Outside of those, character skills are pretty self-explanatory in what they do.  Werdna, meanwhile, gets a free spell on levelling up, like all casters do. It should be obvious at this point that pure casters have a huge advantage in terms of learning spells, here, especially since a good few spells don't exist as spellbooks and can only be learned by levelling. I teach him Terror because locking down enemies is great. The Fear effect on enemies can make them run away, make them lose their actions, make them pass out from terror and just generally gives them a variety of combat stat penalties. Of course it does the same to our goons if they get hit by it, except that they can't run away.    Beyond the slime is this poorly-lit office containing a few random items, including a Spellbook of Light for Werdna. I don't think I've ever actually needed to cast Light, but learning another Fire spell adds more Fire mana to his pool which is needed for casting Energy Blast so he can make crabs explode with the power of his brain. There's also a window overlooking a later area.     A bit of lore and some less fascinating reading in the office, then we turn around and head down the corridors the bats came from.   It can be easy to get lost in some areas of the game, but thankfully Wizardry 8 has an automap.  Unfortunately it's top down and some areas have rooms and corridors stacked on top of each other, which it deals poorly with. It's not so bad here, but there's at least one location in the game where it always drives me completely insane finding my way around.  No real interesting fights along the way except for another Noxious Slime in a pit of goop, a fight which levels up the remainder of our party and gets Lady a shirt.    The stats on most items are quite straightforward, but mysterious and sinister items should be kept at a safe distance until you know if they're cursed or not, because curses in Wiz 8 are rough. Some of them are stuff like a permanent HP drain which, if you don't have a permanent regen to counter them, is incredibly crippling. Interestingly enough, though, some of the cursed weapons are also incredibly heavy hitters and thus may be worth equipping anyway if you have the other equippables to counter their curse. Each item also has a list of classes and races that can equip them and... yeah, fairies are excluded from like 90% of all items which usually do not have any real racial limitations unless they're Mook-only, and there's an item or two that are elf-only and beast-race only.  A +lockpicking item not equippable by any class that can actually pick locks. I think the idea is that if you engage with the cryptic multiclassing of Wizardry 8, it can give a bonus if you swap a lockpicker out of a lockpicking class. The game, of course, does not tell you a drat thing about how multiclassing works except that you can do it, but my understanding is that you keep all abilities from the class you leave(aside from class-specific bonuses like ninja's thrown auto-pen), get the new class' gear limitations and can no longer advance in skills your new class doesn't also have. So say if you stated with a rogue and powerlevelled his Locks & Traps, you could swap him into a Fighter or something once you capped it out at 100. I've honestly never done anything with it, though in the older Wizardries you had to multi-class or you'd never have the power to finish the game.  Mulching some more vermin gets Stony a second level-up and his first Omnigun upgrade. Every two levels, he does something new and terrifying to it.  It now has less bad penalties and can fire darts in addiction to rocks, providing a decent damage upgrade and access to more ammo types. For now the ammo we've got is just "hit enemy, do damage," but later on just about every category of rocks, darts, quarrels, arrows and shurikens has upgraded versions that either do more damage, cause conditions or both. Some of these can be hoovered up in bulk amounts at shops and others are either sharply limited or primarily from random enemy drops.  The monastery basement also has some cells. The first one is unlocked and so we bust in and rob the corpse of his jewelry, his boots and his diary.  At this point we have no clue who Al-Sedexus or the Templars are, but if this monastery has cool dangerous weapons, we need to get our hands on those. Worth keeping in mind, but it'll be a few updates before we can acquire the necessary key since it isn't actually in the monastery and I don't believe anything in the monastery tells you where it is. You'll really only find it if you're a dickhead who busts into every closet you find and steal everything there.   The second cell door... is locked! The lockpicking minigame isn't actually a game. Any tumbler you click on will be raised, and the objective is to raise all tumblers. However, every time you raise one, your skill is the % chance of any given other raised tumbler not falling down. Thus even for a simple two-tumbler lock, it takes us in the vicinity of five tries to unlock the door. The Knock Knock spell can be used to force a number of Tumblers up and is more or less necessary for later locks, though sufficient patience will technically allow you to open all of them, good luck with 10% lockpicking skill and an 8-tumbler lock. I'm sure someone can do the maths on the average number of tries needed to to get through(Since you effectively would need to succeed 20+ 10% rolls in a row). Once open, though, the only contains some roaches(very low-level enemies) and some unidentified potions. So far we've found blue(generally healing, also holy water), yellow(usually cure conditions), purple(some buffing effect) and red(grenade-type weapons, occasionally they also have a spell-like effect), but the goon squad isn't smart enough to tell what any of them do yet.  Up ahead is another locked door. From this side, though, I can hear something making crab-y sounds inside, so as soon as I pop the door, I hit combat mode before I see any enemies, and rush inside the room, giving me a chance to close to melee range instantly.  The King Crab is another little intentional midboss sort of enemy, mostly there as a check on whether you've got enough damage output and know not to put your squishy idiots in the front row. The party blenders through him like nothing and I'm slightly concerned to notice that this party so far seems to be doing better than the parties I usually put together myself. The sharp-eyed may also notice that Twinklesparkles is now unarmed, which is entirely intentional. All fairy characters start with a Faerie Stick equipped, one of the few melee weapons they can wield, but fairy ninjas(and presumably fairy monks as well) are actually much better off just going bare-handed and punching their enemies to shreds, in Twinklesparkles' case it resulted in close to a doubling of damage output(and double the chances for critical strike instant kills as he now gets both a kick and a punch attack each turn rather than just a single poke attack).  I also unbar the path back. There's really only one reason to come back there, ever, but I'd like to make it slightly faster when I do.  Meanwhile, upwards and onwards! For a (potential) starter dungeon, the monastery is actually quite large.  On the way up, there's a side path to the cave we saw from the office with the Noxious Slime.  It's got some water(with no way out except looping back to the first area, so I won't go in there just yet) full of fish(which'll go hostile if we drop in) and a bridge with a red button that just begs to be pushed. Pushing the button raises and lowers the bridge, we'll need the bridge raised for later, so the pro move is to cross over the bridge, loot that area and then raise it. We can even ride the bridge up to where we need to go anyway.  A savage roach attacks on the way over the bridge, handing Werdna yet another level-up which I use to teach him Magic Missile. Unlike D&D's Magic Missile, Wizardry 8's Magic Missile is more like a blast of magic buckshot that nails everything in sight. Being a Divine spell, resistance to it is also less common and thus god's shotgun is very useful.  Over the bridge is the monastery's small wine cellar and...  Our first trapped chest! Trapped containers are a random roll, essentially, like lockpicking, but you have multiple chances to trigger the trap. First you try to find out what it is:  Stony is 100% sure of one of the components of the trap(green) and suspects two(yellow), then I can scroll down the list and try to find something with matching components, eventually landing on Dagger Scatter as the only one whose matching components are all in the possible ones. Then you attempt to disarm each component in part, again each of them being a random roll whether Tony gets everyone fileted by the trap or not. To my surprise, he actually pulls it off, I think it's the only time where I've ever not sprung the trap on this chest. The contents are nothing exciting, just more arrows and un-ID'd usable items, but I still consider it a good omen.  I jump in the river, kill the fish and carefully ride the falls down. While Wizardry 8 has no jumping it absolutely does have falling damage and rushing down the falls can kill you easy. The falling damage is very merciless. The reason I hop down the falls is that after the first "section" of the falls there's a ledge with a mysterious Powder on it. The most common useable revive item is a Powder of Resurrection and thus I want to grab every Powder-type item I come across, because sooner or later someone will die. This is really the sole reason to open that shortcut with the barred door, to make the way back up slightly faster. Riding the elevator up...   At one end is this door with a weird lock and a lot of ominous monster sounds coming from the other side. This is the vault that the corpse's note was referring to, we will be back here as soon as we can crack it.  In the other direction, the path splits... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXY9oOaC8Ik Burz is our first merchant, and first friendly NPC in general. NPC's have a pretty decent array of keywords we can ask them about, there's plenty more I could ask Burz about, but that would involve keywords I don't really know yet. He, of course, bilks us out of some money for a bit of lore(a lot of NPC's will do this, but later the cost isn't as notable as it is now). Mostly what he sells is ammo(rocks, quarrels, arrows, darts), a few healing items and resurrection dust. He's also guarding the toughest chest on this level of the Monastery, or, well, "guarding." He won't aggro if we crack it, possibly because he realizes it would be hypocritical(if it isn't obvious, he's a fence for stuff stolen from the local humans). Burz' species is "Trynnie," a race of giant squirrelfolk who are somewhat dorky but generally inoffensive. They're like if someone tried to write Kender and wasn't an rear end in a top hat, since they're a species of polite thieves, more or less. We can also attack Burz. No NPC's that I recall are immune to being attacked, except for a few that appear only to talk and then vanish immediately after. We can also ask all NPC's to join us...  ...though for a while yet, most of them will turn us down. Sometimes with mildly amusing dialogue, though. The Magic option is that we can hit all NPC's with Charm and Mindread, if we had a caster who knew them. The former would make them more well-disposed towards us, while the latter would give us some info from their internal monologue. Sometimes funny, sometimes pointless, occasionally vital(like a password or the location of something important). Without a Monk, Bishop or Psionicist, though, we sadly won't have that access. Perhaps an argument for later multiclassing.  Back inside, the next level of the lower Monastery has a nicer interior and a corridor running two ways. At this point I have yet to realize I've cornered myself.  At one end is a small room with a locked safe. At the other end...   Is Gregor! Now, Gregor is the boss of the Lower Monastery and will absolutely kick your rear end. He can spit to hit your back lines, he can cause paralysis, he can cause nausea and he can poison. He also hits like a truck, and like for monsters, if he paralyses one of the goonsquad, his next bite is double damage. Normally I might go down and grind out a quick extra level to speed up fighting him, but because I rode up on the bridge, the way down(as the bridge's button on the top level is busted...)... is past Gregor. There are a couple of places I can jump down, but sadly Wizardry 8 water doesn't buffer falls at all and when I tried it, most of the party just straight up died from the fall damage. So how does fighting Gregor go?   Not very well. I realize the only place I can find a bit more XP is if I hit fight mode, run past the entrance to Gregor's lair, and into a room down the hall with some roaches that will hopefully nudge someone into another level.  It goes pretty well, they're just bugs after all, even if there are a lot of them and even if Werdna screws up casting Magic Missile on a yellow tier(usually safe but... not entirely). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0l_DBz23cw  Then halfway into the fight Gregor psychically senses the rumble and comes to play. poo poo.  You know what the really crazy thing is, though?  Despite a Magic Missile backfire, despite Gregor showing up with the roaches already having mostly killed the party, this is the time I actually take him down. I credit Werdna managing to actually stick some Sleeps on him with this working out.  Gregor was guarding this hall with six entrances. One was the one where he first attacked us, another is an entrance to the roach room and a third is the way down to the lower levels of the lower monastery, leaving three passages behind.   One is the way upwards, from this side it requires a small amount of work to open since no one in the party happens to be the owner of something long, like, say, a polearm, that could be reached through the bars to push the button. Ahem. Lady.  The second leads to this hall of coffins that I was sure you could somehow desecrate to spawn a bunch of ghosts, but it turns out that you can semi-safely crack them open at your leisure. Four have minor random loot and gold(and the basin at the end would heal us if everyone wasn't fully topped off), the remaining two... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN3Y3Zm-vTM  One spawns an Apparition. Spectral undead are pretty scary customers in Wizardry 8 because almost all of them can inflict Fear, and at higher levels they start packing on stuff like Insanity, which causes your characters to lose turns or attack allies(or attack a random enemy, occasionally).  It manages to scare Lady, Werdna and Aurora so hard with a single cast of Terror that they all pass out in a dead faint. Thankfully the rest of the crew beat it back into the grave and nail the coffin shut.  And the last coffin is full of toxic fumes that nauseate half the party, knock out the other half and get within an inch (a literal single hit point) of making Werdna need the coffin the party just opened. With that, though, the crypt is cleared out and it's time to examine the last accessible hallway. It splits in two, and down one side is this very non-suspicious statue.   HMMMMM. Let's read the warning sign first.  So if you touch the skull the statue is holding, it opens a small compartment holding the key to the safe from before, which contains some Resurrection Powders. If you touch the statue itself, on the other hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id3nKdXE6TE This'll drop you all the way down to the green goop room where we fought a Noxious Slime back at the start of the update, oh and it'll probably kill half if not all of the party, too. Instead we'll go cash in our key for some resurrection powder and check out the last branch.  Approaching the button causes a bunch of spiders to literally drop from the ceiling.  Predictably, spiders often have access to web and paralyze effects. In effect they're the same, except paralyze has a cure item/spell for it and web does not, also high strength lessens the duration of being webbed if the manual is to be believed. The bugs get stomped without causing us too much trouble. This does get Stony his next level and thus also another Omnigun upgrade, however!  He slaps a laser sight on it and is now able to blind enemies with it. Blinding causes loss of actions when enemy stumbles around, makes it hard for them to hit things and gives you the classic 2x damage bonus in melee if you wail on them.  And with that, the bars are gone and we can progress to the Upper Monastery. Choice of the Update: Before we do so, however, we have an important decision... do we loop back and ice Burz for his stuff and crack open his chest? Burz is a real tough customer, but with a few tries, we should be able to beat him. It'll remove a very minor merchant from the map, get us some XP and gear, and in my experience the other Trynnie don't notice that Burz has gone absent. I also don't believe he pops up at any later point in the game, most NPC's stay where they are. We could also stick to just breaking open his chest and leaving him alive. You can also consider this to be setting the tone for our visit on Dominus. Are we going to be murderous assholes? Thieving assholes? Or virtuous assholes?
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Jul 13, 2020 00:08
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Straight White Shark posted: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. Another big difference is also that Wizardry 8 multiclassing doesn't reset your stats to the minimum required for the class you multiclass to, so swapping to a less-demanding class doesn't gently caress your base stats sideways. Also surprised there's only one vote for MURDER so far!
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Jul 13, 2020 07:11
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Chatrapati posted:Do a murder. I feel like there are no downsides? Downsides: You might feel slightly guilty for stabbing a squirrel wearing pants. Other downsides: I will probably spend a while swearing at the game until I manage to stick Burz with some crippling conditions because he hits like a truck at our current level.
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Jul 13, 2020 10:24
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Libluini posted:That said, the hall with the coffins also has a one-time full heal for your party if you drink the water. I don't know if you missed this or just forgot to mention it. I believe I mentioned that, I just arrived fully-healed already so I didn't get any mileage out of it.
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Jul 13, 2020 11:17
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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. As far as I'm aware there are no options to fight any Colossal Stone Genitalia in Wizardry 8, but seeing as how this is an early 00's RPG, you can expect that one part of the game will get mildly horny.
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Jul 14, 2020 00:13
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FairGame posted:Welp, gently caress that guy then. Enough weird derailing of what will probably be an awesome LP of an awesome, though flawed, game. Weird derails are honestly welcome as long as they're interesting and no one gets in a fight over them, especially if they're related to the game, the developer, the series, etc. in a way that adds facts we might otherwise not have. Also new update probably incoming within 24 hours.
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Jul 14, 2020 12:54
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Part 002: Virtuous Thieves So the vote seems to be pretty clearly in favour of stealing everything but not killing most people. When there's an interesting result from murder, or a we encounter some new factions of people, I will of course put up the vote again so you guys can decide what encounter you want me to get my face staved in by next time. Without further ado... welcome to me getting owned by Burz. Skip the video if you just want the highlight screenshots and explanations, though the video does contain Chewbecka's voice snippet for when an ally goes down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfFJQm3ETIU   Sneak up behind Burz, initiate combat, set everyone to target him. Seems simple enough, right?  It isn't, though. Firstly Burz is real tough, he can take more punishment than Gregor.  Secondly, his "Pray to the Spirits"-move, as indicated by the lack of space, it's a summon ability, and I thought maybe since it had bugged out in this one case, I'd be free to own Burz on my own time.   Because his personal damage output is low, and Stony saved the day by blinding him, doubling my melee damage output against him.  I beat him down to his first damage texture and he prays again...   Hmmm yes, this is bad news. There are three but you can't see the third because it spawned right behind Stony and Werdna.   And they, uh, hit like trucks. They're high-level Earth-focused mages that start off by buffing Burz and then just annihilate you. One round after this they do the following.  A blast of Whipping Rocks that just one-hit KO's the entire party. At least we get to see the death screen, though!  So. Let's leave Burz alone for now. I think the only hope of taking him down is multiple bugged summons or Chewbecka/Twinkles landing an instakill crit in the first couple of rounds. To top off the embarrassment, his chest doesn't even contain anything worth showing off, though Stony has at this point not failed a single trap disarming, making him literally the best rogue-type I've ever had along in any game of Wizardry 8. Getting back to the update proper, let's start with an overview of the team.    Lady and Chewbecka are much like how they started out, though they've been equipped with bows for when caught at long range. Probably one of the first things you want to do for all your melee characters.  Werdna's main improvements are in his spellbook, he's the only character with zero gear changes so far, since I've found nothing appropriate for mages and if he's ever fighting instead of casting spells, I've hosed up grievously.  I gave Stony a sword but honestly don't expect him to ever use it. Once his Omnigun starts firing arrows and quarrels it will be his permanently superior weapon.  Twinkles got a sling for ranged combat, but once I get a decent stash of darts and shurikens, I'll swap him over to that so his thrown auto-pens can benefit from it. For now, though, the darts are better in Stony's hands. Shurikens are the best, but also rarest, thrown weapons, except for the infinite-use Boomerang Shuriken of which there is only one in the game.  And Aurora's biggest change is that she now has an axe and shield for if something comes right up in her face. The axe isn't a superior weapon to her bow, but combined with the shield it gives her some more survivability since she's the weakest member of the front line in that regard.    These area intro screens are very cool, but sadly you'll probably miss most of them if playing Wizardry 8 on Steam since it just loads so goddamn fast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbZUzKw0NuA   We crawl out under these stairs, making the Lower Monastery feel very much like a forgotten part of the place that sees little use, emerging in this storeroom sort of area. Most of the boxes in the center can't be interacted with, but a few can be picked open, or just plain opened, to yield some low-level armor.    Crawling around the crates we get ambushed by a couple of rats. Rats are generally low-level enemies, but they're able to nauseate and sometimes disease you with their attacks, the latter of which can be extremely bad news, as mentioned. The storage hall has two doors and some stairs. Since I know where things lead, I hit up the stairs first as they're a short, dead end.    Seekers are odd little lizards that always have a spit attack but rarely constitute a threat, apparently nesting in this old... control room?    I love the juxtaposition of old-school architecture and modern items like electric lights and computers. None of the machines yield us any clues, however, simply beeping "ACCESS DENIED" when interacted with. We will be back here later, however. The sharp-eyed may already have an idea of why.  On the way out I look up at the ceiling because it being an open courtyard would explain a lot about why it looks like a loading dock, but no such luck.   Some more flattened rats on the way out give Werdna another level-up, and I choose to teach him Web. It's a cone spell which, well, webs enemies up for beatdowns. Unlike Sleep, victims don't get unwebbed when beaten with sticks. It also opens his second-to-last elemental selection of spells.   Both side areas are little barracks for the monks, with further areas branching off them. One leads to a small shrine and library, and I visit that one first because my gaming instincts always tell me to put off progress for as long as possible.  The shrine contains our first humanoid enemies, which is great. They're not fundamentally tougher than monstrous enemies, but they tend to drop more gold and have a chance of dropping equipment items. Again, these fellows are unlikely to drop anything useful but eventually a good number of our potential better equipment choices are likely to be looted from corpses.  A slightly better look at the shrine with the ruffians evicted, it has no equipment of interest, just a plain quarterstaff and a couple of potions.   Of course in a library you're required to remain silent. If you try to cast any spells inside...  The library itself only contains a few rats, and splatting them yields a level-up for Lady, Chewbecka and Aurora, leading to their first spell-casting options! For Lady and Aurora I get Heal Wounds since I desperately need some healing access(and I also want Lady started on Divine spells so she can eventually get Soul Shield), while Chewbecka gets Frost, an unexciting single-target Water offense spell. But she's learning the same spellbook as Werdna and so far Water is the one he hasn't touched, so I'll prioritize that one with her for now for the sake of spell variety. The one advantage of Frost is that it doesn't have a projectile, so it'll never get caught on intervening terrain.     The library has a spellbook we can't yet identify by way of loot, and a bit of flavour text besides. One side of it is occupied by a big, locked gateway and the other by a small doorway. Since we don't have the key for the gate, we have to check out the doorway first.     Looks like a kitchen. Hmmm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5mqGsAGCdM Whoops!  Eventually we can use this to make a reasonably powerful gadget for Stony. For the time being, though, it's just evidence that we're fuckups who'll poke anything till it breaks. On the way back out I also remember to look up at the ceiling of the library.  There are sometimes some surprisingly nice ceiling decorations despite it being super easy to completely miss them while playing the game. I don't think I ever actually looked up and saw this one.  I get why all the corridors are twisty-turny(to prevent you aggroing too many enemies at once), but it makes the building layout feel really wonky. I wonder if a simpler solution wouldn't just have been more doors to section things off.  Heading past the other monk dorm, we get a peek at the main hall.  And the somewhat unimpressive ambush there. So far all encountered bandits have gone down like chumps, these are no exception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKgaf_Ikh6o With the bandits bonked, I figured the front hall looks a bit nicer in video format. But I'll also post it as screenshots for the people who prefer it that way.        PHOONZANG Apparently a pretty important guy, I'm sure we'll learn more about him sooner or later. From the main hall there are four places to go: The front door leading out, we could actually leave right now, but we're not going to.  This little museum with a chest(containing nothing impressive, but once again Stony disarms a trap successfully), the glass case that we can't just bust open(yet) containing some armor and an instrument.  Without a bard it's useless to us, but let's keep it around just in case.  This stairway leading up to a small rest area for the monks.  It contained a couple of spiders that the team splattered in seconds, though they did manage to paralyze Aurora and Werdna, giving Twinkles the level up needed to access his Alchemist spells. He gets Itching Skin since status effects from him will likely contribute more than pure damage at this point. Predictably it causes the Irritation debuff.       The Amulet has a limited number of Energy Blast charges, it's a simple first-level, single-target attack. The Lightning Rod is our first gadget for Stony, it also casts Energy Blast, but runs off his stamina rather than mana. It's a decent enough backup ability, but considering that the Omnigun is already a decent ranged option, I never got that much use out of it. Using it does raise his Engineering skill, though, which is vital. The key unlocks that door back in the Library... so obviously I haul rear end right the hell back to crack it open, ignoring the fourth door in the main hall for now.   It's guarded by bats and... it's worth noting that flying enemies in Wizardry don't really fly. Instead they just hover over the ground and have the same movement limitations as walking enemies. So what happens when you paralyze one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQQDsxHTwLM (Worth opening this one on Youtube since it's hard to see the funny part in the smaller in-post view) So what happens is that anything that prevents an enemy from acting(paralysis, sleep, web, KO) stops their animations. However, being in the air isn't part of the bat's model animations, nor, apparently, is the up-and-down bobbing, so you get this silly display. This also counts for any other "flying" enemies we eventually meet, I'll note. With them out of the way, it's time to check out this room we've opened up.   A mysterious machine and a bunch of bells, also a chest in the corner and once again Stony proves to be far better at disabling traps than any goddamn trap-busting character in a party I've made myself. Seriously, what the hell? Let's see what happens if we fiddle with the machine... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na1gi5PWheM The sound of breaking glass makes it very obvious what happened when we slammed the monastery bells at full power. Let's go check out the glass we've seen in the past!   The loading dock glass being broken is at first glance unimportant except... the crates are arranged in a circle.   Get up top, hop down and one of the crates can be opened from its interior side. It contains a cloak that we can't ID just yet, but all of the game's cloaks are useful even if they only offer an AC bonus, and many of them offer much better than that.  Up top we got a book, a note and a stick.    The note will be useful when we reach Arnika, and the stick is just a melee weapon that I don't quite "get" as it's really barely more useful than a wizard's bare hands or a plain quarterstaff.   In the museum is a piece of samurai-only armor, though since we can't ID it yet, I'm a bit leery of putting it on Chewbecka since I can't remember where every cursed item in the game is and many of them share sprites with normal or beneficially magical versions. So into the inventory it goes as we check out the last parts of the Upper Monastery.   Behind the statue of PHOONZANG is a door leading into this nice little garden(the XP is from a pair of Seekers that were running around inside) and a door leading to the last room in the monastery. This one is gonna be a video since there's a good bit of voice acting in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg3dLlQZnhI Pretty cool that the Cosmic Lords have a robot for an emissary, in my opinion, and also we meet the first of the Dark Savant's androids. It also sets up our overarching goals for the game. Firstly: Life, Change and Knowledge? Clearly we need to acquire the Astral Dominae(Dark Savant has it after the events of Wizardry 7), the Chaos Moliri(in the hands of the Mook expedition on Dominus) and the Destinae Dominus(some dude named Marten ganked it and no one has any idea where he's ended up with it). We'll have to find all three and then their current owners are unlikely to relinquish literal artifacts of the gods without a struggle of some sort. Secondly: If we want to actually make use of those to Ascend... well, we're going to have to disarm the Dark Savant's literal planet-destroying bomb in Arnika. I'd also like to point out that I absolutely love how perfectly villainous it is. "If you're about to win I'll destroy everything, including myself and this planet. gently caress you." It goes well with his petty, spiteful tone from the intro. You can tell the Savant is used to getting everything his way and absolutely WILL cut off his nose to spite his face because he's that sort of rear end in a top hat.    Also this is obviously the place from the intro, where the Destinae Dominus used to hang out. Nice touch that it was obviously an object of public worship and veneration, the Brotherhood of the Ascension clearly never expected that anyone would try to steal it. In any case, that's the last thing we need from this place, so let's hit the road and get out of here.    The Arnika Road is the first place the game really takes off its gloves, aside from Gregor and if you try to gently caress with Burz. Most encounters out here can and will gently caress you up if you're careless. I had to reload twice just getting to the main road from the monastery.  Right out the door? Poison crabs.  Even having webbed them down they took away half of Chewbecka's hit points, and poisoned her and Lady.  With the crabs gone we can also turn around and look at the monastery we just left. It's weird that compared to how well-crafted the interiors were, the exterior looks like someone's Minecraft house. Presumably one of the bits that didn't get sufficient polish before launch.   A bit farther up the road we meet a bunch of plants. Plants are mostly noteable for the fact that almost every single variant of them can cause Irritation, and most can Poison, Paralyze, Blind or Nauseate you as well. Unlike a lot of games where the devs didn't quite seem to know what the most powerful strat was, in Wizardry 8 it's lockdown conditions and the devs made sure the NPC's were both capable and willing to use those, too. NPC casters are also usually very well-scripted in terms of what spells they use and can catch you off-guard.    This sandy pass also has a small bandit camp, which caused my first need to reload. Not from this particular pack, but the next one down the road. I'm mainly showing these guys off for their barely-visible-in-that-screenshot buddies.  Wasps! Enemy mobility varies some, and wasps are very mobile and tend to come in swarms, so you have a large risk of having your back row attacked by them on turn 1 or 2. On top of that, a very common variant can also potentially blind you with every sting, which sucks.  Worth noting is also that we're starting to run low on our yellow bars, too. That's our stamina. Zero stamina makes characters pass out, and they don't wake up from getting stabbed or poked until they recover sufficient amounts, thus, +stamregen items and the spells that recover stamina are very important. All attacks eat stamina and so does getting hit by enemies, as noted by Xerophyte low stam hurts your ability to hit enemies(and seems to hurt successful casting chances of spells, too, from personal experience). The reason Stony is so low is because he used the Lightning Rod a couple of times and that eats shitloads of stam every time at this point in the game, gadgeteers and bards really need tons of stamina to do their thing regularly.  This is the camp that got me killed once because I didn't think when casting my spells. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lc-ogBqYC4 This short video from the fight is purely because that hit with the Energy Blast making the one guy explode felt real good. The sound design in this game just makes every spell and impact feel meaty and satisfying and like you're kicking rear end, and minor stuff like enemies getting more bloody and ragged when injured contributes, too. The fight nudges Werdna up a level and his next spell is Missile Shield. Like Enchanted Blade it's a persistent, party-wide enchantment that persists outside of battles(letting you pre-buff, thank Phoonzang) and offers you a shot at no-selling any enemy missile attack(as long as it isn't a spell) that would otherwise hit. It's one of the less vital party buffs, but in some specific battles it contributes a lot to your survivability. The bandits' loot also yields two upgrades for Lady:  First a pair of pants.   And secondly an upgraded spear, the Awl Pike. Check out the huge difference to her damage at the top of her sheet, from 1-14 to 10-23. She is now absolutely the team's chief asskicker for a while since no one else can really match her damage output and a good roll from her can splat many enemies from full health for the next while. The bandits also had some magic bagpipes for Bards, capable of casting Shrill Sound, a cone-shaped damage spell that attempts to blow up enemy eardrums.  After another stretch of sandy canyons, we finally reach the edge of the badlands around the monastery and reach somewhere with a bit of green and life.  Off to the side is this Mysterious House that we'll eventually learn the purpose of, it's one of two Mystery Houses, though also the less important of the two. The other one will save us a great amount of headaches in the future.    For the moment, though, there's no way in, and wandering around outside we can hear a bunch of machine humming noises inside.  Then when I turn back to the road, I get attacked by giant ants. On the first try I gently caress up and cast a cone spell rather than a group spell to start the fight, and end up not locking down enough of them and the remainder strip Aurora to the bone while Chewbecka harangues her for being the weak link. The second time I properly lead with a Sleep spell which hits them all since they're only arranged in one Group and Lady shows off her stuff by dunking on them with her new pike. With that out of the way...  Where do we go next?  Here's the gameworld.  And here's where the party is currently, leaving us with two destinations. South to Arnika or North to Mt. Gigas. Heading South Pros: Obviously the intended progression, lots of merchants, some relevant plot stuff, we get to check out the Savant's bomb, recruitable NPC's, more gadgets for Stony, ghosts Cons: It's what The Man and the Savant want us to do, and we're not going to let them push us around, are we? Heading North Pros: We get to meet some different friends earlier than we normally would, I've never gone that way around before, I will probably get my rear end kicked in funny ways, there are some different merchants to patronize Cons: I will probably get my rear end kicked in funny ways
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Jul 14, 2020 23:27
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wafflemoose posted:You really should give Lady a different weapon instead of axes, as they really suck in this game. Since you already have a Samurai who will probably be hogging all the good swords I suggest you give her Maces instead. I would also suggest Spears instead but looks you want her to be a tank that utilizes shields. You could always swap the bow out and give her a spear as an extended range option. Seeing as how Aurora is a ranger she's never gonna not have a bow(unless I swap her to a Double or Triple Crossbow once Stony has the ingredients and skills to craft one). Earnestly the usual worthwhile weapons are swords and polearms, and also where most of the options are, but it's kind of cool and thematic for a ranger to have an axe and also it's a bit different from what I've done before, so I will see where it takes me.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:47
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wafflemoose posted:Was talking about your Valkyrie actually, give her a mace and shield and you should have a pretty decent tank that has the ability to knock monsters out, and then a spear for poking monsters just out of melee reach. As for the ranger, it's a waste to use a melee weapon on them, always be using ranged, even at point blank range since Rangers have the ability to instant kill with a ranged weapon. Yes, even at melee range they should still be using their bow to shoot them in the face for that crit chance. Double/Triple crossbows are awesome but they are ammo and stamina hungry so it might be useful to have a single shot weapon to swap to if running low on either resource. I was just confused since you were talking about axes and the only axe user I have is Aurora, and her melee option is mostly so A) she'll swap to something with a shield up close and B) Webbed/sleeping/paralyzed/KO'd enemies don't get double damage from ranged attacks, but they will take 2x damage if she beats them in the face with her axe. As for Lady, the KO chances from using a mace are extremely negligible, once again she's better off, in my experience, having a high-damage melee weapon that can do huge 2x damage against paralyzed enemies rather than taking the gamble on very minor condition chances, and a bow/crossbow for the longer-than-spear range stuff. Xerophyte posted:- 4 is famously one the of the meanest games of a mean genre. Try it only if you really want to repeatedly get kicked in the teeth by the kickstarter backers of 1987. I'd recommend reading the LP of 4, since it's a very clever game, but I couldn't recommend anyone ever actually play it for themselves without a walkthrough close to hand. Also, so far the votes seem to be for going North to Mt. Gigas. I'll be doing more recording on friday(or thursday if the votes are very obviously one-sided), so please get your votes in if you have a specific opinion.
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Jul 15, 2020 09:52
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Rockopolis posted:If you import a party from the previous game, would it be significantly beefier than the starting party for this game? My understanding is that imported parties are stripped down some, to fifth level, which I'll already be well past for everyone by the next update. So it's not a huge power boost in terms of stats... but what's a much bigger power boost is that some gear can be imported from the previous games, including some items that can't be found at all in Wizardry 8 normally. Some are sidegrades, while others are end-game power items.
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Jul 21, 2020 19:16
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Straight White Shark posted: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. Perhaps not common, but definitely threatening. Undead tend to have high mental resistance, which makes them immune to a lot of lockdown options(especially if you're rolling with a Monk or Psionicist), undead melee combatants often have fear/paralysis as a side effect on their melee attacks and most undead casters are loaded to the gills with terror/insanity-causing spells. While undead aren't common overall, they're over-represented in a couple of places, and they will gently caress you up. Especially since one of those two places(and let's not talk about it in detail because spoilers!!!!!!) limits your other offensive options.
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Jul 22, 2020 09:46
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Part 003: The Umpani So the votes have, as I had kind of hoped, fallen in favour of heading north to Mt. Gigas! Let's see how that turns out by taking a right at the first intersection rather than a left.   The Arnika/Trynton/Mt. Gigas road is mostly a linear, woody path with the occasional small side area, with the section leading towards Mt. Gigas being the most linear of it. The road has an assortment of low-level enemies you can run into, though it's primarily plants, ants and bats you'll be meeting, with the occasional group of Higardi bandits to spice things up. Of course, those are the random encounters, Wizardry 8 also has a good number of set encounters which are the main threat when going "off-road." The random encounters will to some extent be levelled to match us(though they may still well kick our asses), but the set encounters will almost certainly be well above us in level and danger. Enter the Hogar.   He has no special tricks whatsoever except that he will gently caress you up by being a huge lump of HP and damage output. Hogars are normal spawns elsewhere, but this one is specifically placed here, probably as a "go to Arnika first, you fool"-barrier for new players.   This is what two rounds of combat against him looks like. He shakes off pretty much anything you can throw at him and kills one of your characters. Webbing him only lasts one round because he's strong enough to bust out of it, Sleep the same because we'll inevitably hit him. I settle in for the idea that maybe I'm going to have to try and run past him, or simply give up and go to Arnika, and proceed to bounce off him multiple times(and every single time he targets Aurora first, what a dick).  Take two at the fight doesn't start off much better. Once again Aurora gets flattened by the big boy right out of the gate.  Lady and Chewbecka are the only party members that can survive a round of attacks from him, though that still messes them up real good. Then this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jSQTwhUtS8 The slow-motion replay is that Chewbecka sets off one of the rarer Samurai abilities, a LIGHTNING STRIKE where she hits four times in one action with her weapon, and one of them is a critical hit that instantly gibs the Hogar. It leaves behind a tusk, and a shitload of XP. The tusk is an item for the... pseudo-crafting system that we'll get introduced to once we find the right merchants(some of them will essentially take certain items in trade for giving you a unique item back, stating that they're going to hammer, say, some crab shells and a small mirror into a suit of unparallelled plate mail).  Did I mention characters also have voice samples for being resurrected? The amount of voice work is mental.  A quick overview of the area as explored so far. You may notice a small gap in the cliffs off to our right...   It hides a small side cave. I rather like how caves look in Wizardry in general, they all have a sort of curving, organic nature to them which makes them mildly unsettling and makes you worry that at any moment you could slide down them and get stuck somewhere.   The only really interesting thing about it is that it holds a new type of enemy, the Forest Mites, which look like walking nutsacks with fangs. Awful things, usually come in big swarms and their main thing is just overwhelming you with a bunch of small attacks and being in large enough numbers to surround your party and have a go at your back line. I flatten them in short order and get back on the road which ends just around the corner.    The Northern Wilderness is very unlike the Roads. While it's bounded on all sides by cliffs and rivers, it has effectively no obstructions anywhere in the entire central area preventing you from going where you want. There are roads that'll direct you(though it's smarter to stay off the roads, because the high ground to the sides makes it harder for enemies to surprise you), and a few caves at the south, and a small structure or two, but it's mostly just open area to explore as you please... Assuming, of course, you can handle the locals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Pt30u8sts This is also the theme that plays there. I promptly get owned by the first encounter I run into, while checking the southern bounds for caves.    Sorceresses are uncommon enemies that rarely show up on their own, usually leading packs of other creatures. In my experience they tend to mostly roll with mental, water and air magic and have a tendency to, much like the player would, lead with party-wide debilitating spells like Terror. The Piercer Modais, on the other hand, are Hogar-like big blobs of HP and punchy attacks. So this is a nasty combo the game's coughed up.  The sorceress leads by terrifying the party and pelting them with ranged attacks while the modais get stabby, and it just ends poorly with me getting worn down faster than I can wear the enemy down, even after I snipe out the sorceress. One reload later and I try out the northern side instead.    While doing so I come across one of the set encounters for the Northern Wilderness, a group of high-level Higardi Bandits camping at a small ruin.   Tons of HP, about as many of them as there are of the party. I make the wise decision to save and engage after circling around to a better angle of attack.   It does not go well.   After bouncing off them a couple of times, I decide to bypass them, which is easily done as they're not even a patrolling encounter, just a static one, and head onwards to where I really want to go.    This out-of-place looking steel bridge is the inviting entrance to the northern map exit of the Northern Wilderness(we entered from the South and there's also an exit to the East).   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROVsClAanrI Predictably, the Umpani Base Camp has a shitload of Umpani hanging around. They tend to patrol in large squads with an officer leading a group of privates and they are uniformly non-mages, though they tend to wield muskets or pistols that give them a ranged option and besides that just hit for assloads of damage with their swords.  The generic Umpani are curt but polite, though, and don't want to talk to us. So let's go hassle a named NPC.  Also of note you can steal the Umpani flag to resolve a T'rang quest later if you're an idiot, as I believe lowering the flag off the flagpole and stealing it aggros the entire base. Why this is idiotic will be revealed shortly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8h84tlnkWQ Private Panrack is a good fellow and waves us through after a brief chat.   The Base Camp is really just two large sheds in front of Mt. Gigas, most of the Umpani operations are inside the mountain itself. Still, let's go hassle the locals.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr6KalqQqAU Some Umpani won't give us the time of day if we don't sign up, though. Saxx is actually a recruitable NPC, or an "RPC" a decently skilled bard. Most RPC's, being made out of the same building blocks as PC's, are useful, so generally the main way of assessing their usefulness is how cowardly they are. See, most RPC's(with one notable exception) have areas they won't enter, usually on the grounds of their being scary. The only options you then have are either to let them leave(most will return to their recruitment area, though the one exception to the earlier rule will just stay where it is)... or to make sure they can't complain. If you get them killed or knocked out(sprint back and forth a lot until they pass out from exhaustion) you can haul them in and revive them, at which point they ceaselessly bitch(and get a 25-point malus to all skills) until they're back somewhere they feel safe again. Though once you've settled on a certain pair of RPC's, you may as well do that so they can at least get XP and help carry loot, rather than having to haul your rear end back to pick them up again. Saxx will complain about going to most late-game areas, but for now he would be useful muscle. Now let's see what's in the other half of the building.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ggRNYiJV34 Sgt. Kunar is kind of a dick. But he does at least sell replica Umpani flags so you can just get one for your T'rang quest that way. He's also a T'rang agent. If you try to play both sides, you need to silence him before he rats you out to his handlers, thus locking that option away permanently. For now, though, he's not a threat, just an annoyance, but your first action on signing up with the Umpani should be to buy everything you can and then murder him.  Maybe the folks on the other side of the road will be more friendly.     Large groups of patrolling Umpani will regular enter and leave the barracks. The only threat they pose to us, as we're currently unaligned, is that they can cause a very annoying traffic jam. It's not possible to shove peaceful creatures out of the way, best you can do is try to squeeze past them. That Trynnie in the middle, though, is Private Sparkle. An RPC we can actually recruit without joining the Umpani first. Unfortunately she'll cry about going to even more places than Saxx would, but there's no cost to recruiting her at all. She also has a decent bit of dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09lJtEP2LvY  Okay with that conversation done lemme just squeeze past the bulky lads and...  Into the barracks. Every single locker in those sections of 3 has loot in them, every single footlocker has loot in it. We're going on a picking spree.  The lockers tend to be locked, and the footlockers trapped, and Stony, for the first time ever, manages to actually get the party perforated with poison darts and flung knives a couple of times. He also levels up his lockpicking/trapfuckling skill multiple times, so that's good.  One of the lockers also has a spicy surprise in it. Guess the Umpani like their women thicc.  I don't think I've ever triggered an Alarm trap before. It doesn't piss off any of the currently-friendly locals, but if I remember right, if there are any hostiles around, they instantly zoom towards your location, rather than the trap spawning any.  Mostly the haul is gold, potions and greaves for everyone, upgrading their pants situation for higher AC. It's a small boost for most of them, but every little thing counts.      The other side of the building has a bunch of military intelligence and propaganda scattered around, as well as Balbrak, the local recruiter.   He's chill about a polite no, but won't really talk to us besides that unless we sign up.     And Sergeant Balbrak is the last Umpani NPC we can meet here without breaking in or allying with the Umpani. Obviously there will be a couple of votes coming up at the end of the post. After having the camp tapped out for now, I go back to the Northern Wilderness to explore a bit more and get some levelling in.   Monsters don't really have formations as such, but if you don't close the range with ranged enemies right away, they'll usually set up a firing line like this to try and maximize how many of them can hit you at once. This can be beneficial because if you rush right into the center of it, monsters can hit each other. Ranged attacks use "real" projectiles which means that a miss on the intended target could hit something else. I know some people have used this for bugged purposes to kill NPC's without aggroing their faction or to kill very powerful friendly NPC's before you're technically able to, but there's really no need to make use of it.   A bit farther east I encounter an enemy I have literally not, in like a dozen playthroughs, ever met before! Umpani Renegades! They're unexceptional, they're really just big strong lads with swords.   I manage to defeat a small group of Piercer Modais despite Werdna backfiring a Terror spell on to the party, thankfully most of them shake it off before it fucks anything up. Goddammit Werdna.  Not having anyone to cast Stamina, by the end of the fight, half the party is literally passed out on any given combat turn, getting in one or two swings and then taking a nap.    Being a genius I do it before saving and right next to a lake regularly patrolled by family-size Emerald Slimes.  On the bright side one round of attacks wakes up everyone still napping, on the less bright side he's soon got almost everyone nauseous and missing the occasional action as a result(and also paralyzes Chewbecka and Lady a couple of times). What prevents the battle from going poorly is that all those attacks raining down on the slime zeroes out its Stamina and makes it fall asleep before it can kill anyone. It wakes up every second round, but it still results in a lot of missed attacks. It also gets a lot better when I think to put up Missile Shield which negates an unspecified percentage of ranged, non-spell attacks, I think somewhere between 50% and 75%, since most of what the slime attacks with is spitting. I also then realize that I could probably have taken the rogues from about an hour's gameplay ago with that spell since every second attack of theirs tends to be throwing knives rather than stabs, even in melee.  This is really just to get out east, I don't yet have the power to properly "clear" the area and raid all the small caches of stuff(or enter the zone's special dungeon), and show off what I have to put up with if I want to keep going off-road.    Fighting that thing is going to suck, but if that's what everyone ends up voting for, I'll do it. I end the expedition by looping back to the rogues for some revenge. Besides my epiphany about Missile Shield, I've gotten some level-ups off fighting enemies(the Emerald Slime was the single biggest chunk of XP we've gotten so far, for instance).   They still hit like trucks, but this time I actually kill one of them before they kill one of my own goons.    And soon they're whittled down to just the leader.  Who, of course, kills Werdna literally the round before going down, the absolute fucker.  Thankfully I get Werdna rezzed on the same turn the rogue leader goes down, so he doesn't miss out on any XP.  The only relevant drop is a big-rear end diamond. It can be sold for a decent amount of loot, but is also one of the pseudo-crafting items we care about.  Looks like a good place to take a nap until the next adventure. VOTES Allegiance Probably the biggest choice for any party in Wizardry 8 is who to ally with. We have five choices. #1: Ally with the Umpani, destroy the T'rang #2: Ally with the T'rang, destroy the Umpani #3: Ally with both the T'rang and the Umpani, reconcile them with each other #4: Ally with neither the T'rang or the Umpani, destroy both #5: Ally with neither the T'rang or the Umpani, ignore both My favourite option is #3, since it shows off the most content and I can easily show off the "faction kills" in short side videos/updates. And the only one I'd argue against is #5 since that misses out on a lot of content. Recruiting Who, if anyone, should we bring? Private Sparkle: We already have a Ranger, but one more could be useful, at least until we get a better RPC or reach somewhere she won't go. Saxx: We don't have a Bard, and while Saxx won't enter some end-game areas he will in fact enter the last end-game area with us. Not an option unless we join the Umpani, however. None: We'll wait for someone cooler. Recruits also have set starting levels. If we recruit someone "late," would people be okay with me editing up their XP so they can still play along and things don't become a huge pain to bring? Normally it wouldn't be an issue, but going around in the reverse order, it may get a bit fucky. Travel If we align with the Umpani they'll decide our next destination(into Mt. Gigas, which will likely consume an entire update). If we don't, however, we have two options: Turn back south and head towards Arnika or travel East and enter the Mountain Wilderness(if I can somehow manage to defeat that Marble Golem guarding the bridge)?
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Jul 22, 2020 18:05
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Cythereal posted:3, neither I mean, yes, and those are who I usually bring. But I'm leaving these things open to votes because they'll make me do things I usually don't. Besides, we're not tied to our current companions, we can leave them in a dumpster somewhere and tell them to suck eggs when we find a better recruit.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:31
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EclecticTastes posted:Also, on the topic of Sgt. Kunar (since you mentioned it), wasn't it also possible to find evidence that he's a double agent and rat him out to avoid him turning you in to the T'rang as well? Seems like a more elegant solution than directly murdering him. The problem with Kunar... Is that no one quite knows what his triggers are as far as I've been able to search up. People know that leaving him alive at some point after joining the Umpani will alert the T'rang. Some people think it's a time trigger, others a quest trigger, some that it's buying anything from the Commissary on credit slips you get for doing Umpani missions. But no one's quite sure. And the way to rat him out non-violently involves getting a password from the T'rang so he'll hand you the evidence you can pass on to Balbrak and get him busted, so we can't do that right away. There's a way to avoid Z'ant ever going hostile, though, even if Kunar rats you out, though it's somewhat silly.
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Jul 22, 2020 19:47
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The votes seem pretty conclusive, but you never know, there could be a sudden surge of folks who want to see everything burn. Unrelated, a lot of RPG LP's tend to have spell overview posts, listing the various types of wizardry you can get up to and talking a bit about their various applications. Is this anything that would interest people? Or are you all just here for the great voice acting and to watch me cry when I try to beat a monster well above a level for half an hour in a row?
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Jul 22, 2020 23:22
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Part 003.5: Fire and Water It took me a bit to decide how to organize the spell list, since it's essentially organized in three ways: by spell school(wizardry, divinity, psionics, alchemy or a combination), element(fire, air, earth, water, mental or divine) and level. Ultimately I decided that element was the only way there'd be some logic to the organization and no crossover between the lists. Spells are learned in two ways. Either from spellbooks, if the caster has high enough skill levels, or from level-ups. All casters get to learn one spell per level, and they unlock new "levels" of spells every time the relevant elemental spell skills gets high enough. The "school" skills also contribute, but only at a 10:1 ratio, so they're less relevant. Especially for the Bishop. It should also be rapidly obvious that some caster types are very under-represented in certain elements, or have huge gaps from spell to spell. I believe the point of this is to encourage cross-classing so you start out as, say, a Mage to get an early start on Fire Magic and then swap over to a Psionicist so you actually have the Fire skills necessary to cast their big Fire spells. Fire and Water magic have few "weird" spells, mostly just Big Damage of various kinds. One thing of note is also that all condition spells' durations scale by Effect Level(the thing I mentioned in the first game post where you could cast spells at a higher level at a risk of backfiring) and all damage spells' damage done by effect level. However! While higher-level spells usually have a greater damage ceiling per level(for instance Dehydrate is like 2 to 38 per level), they often have almost the same damage floor as lower level spells(generally the lower bound of each effect level varies between 1 and 3, at most). So this means that a high-effect low-level spell is a "safer" cast than a low-effect high-level spell(which you usually lack the magic skills to jack up to their maximum power). In practice this tends to mean that you won't really cast the highest-level spells as much as you might expect. Fire Energy Blast (Level 1, Wizardry, Single Target) The workhorse combat spell for early game Wizards. It does respectable damage, but rapidly becomes outclassed by better spells that can hit more enemies at once or inflict status effects. Against single large enemies, it does remain a good option because it can be cast at bigger effect levels than higher-level spells without risking fizzling or backfire. Light (Level 1, Divinity, Wizardry, Alchemy, Party Buff) Light doesn't mechanically do anything other than light the area up. Most items you can interact with, i.e. pick up, are 3D objects which stick out like a sore thumb in any case, and most parts of the game are also generally well-lit anyway. However, it's extremely cheap to cast and Light casts still count towards levelling up your Fire magic and relevant magic school, so you should actually always be casting this worthless spell. It's also worth noting that Light is the only level 1 Fire spell for Alchemists and Clerics, so it's their only way to passively level Fire. Blinding Flash (Level 2, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Blinding is both a great and an awful status effect. Enemies affected by it take 2x damage from melee hits and can fail their combat actions, or will often miss with those they do take, and they can't bust out of it with high strength like being Webbed. Unfortunately it also tends to make enemies run away, which can sometimes be good(scattering enemy melee formations) and sometimes be bad(making that enemy you almost had whittled down run behind cover). The Radial AoE also means it can be great for hitting all enemies in combat if they've got you surrounded. Unfortunately, as you have no Energy Blast spell to train your Alchemists with Fire on, you're unlikely to have an Alchemist well-set to cast this unless you're rolling with a Bishop. Fireball (Level 3, Wizardry, Radial AoE) Doing slightly more damage per effect level than Energy Blast, it's almost ALWAYS a better option for casting unless you're dealing with fire resistant enemies. The game also has no friendly fire at all, so feel free to cast it right in front of you to hit every enemy currently stuck in melee. It's one of the reasons your Mage is likely to start off going Fire heavy before anything else. Hypnotic Lure (Level 3, Psionic, Radial AoE) This is an odd one. It places a beacon that will attract enemies towards it. I've never used it much myself because I've had mixed results from it, but it could be useful for bunching enemies together for cone-blast spells or simply for drawing them out of cover or out of melee with the party. Note, though, that level 3 is the first level Psionics get access to Fire spells at all, so you're unlikely to be using these spells much except via a Bishop or after considerable level-up investment. Or possibly a cross-classed mage of another type flipping into Monk or Psionicist Psionic Fire (Level 3, Psionic, Cone AoE) Slightly more damaging than Fireball in exchange for having a worse AoE type. Psionics don't really have another option, though, and in some cramped areas like tunnels and hallways, it may be able to hit everyone anyway. My Bishops never made great use of it. Fire Bomb (Level 4, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Straight up just an upgraded Fireball that does more damage. Haste (Level 4, Psionic, Party Buff) This one is GREAT. It provides a huge buff to speed even at low levels(+10 per effect level), which means attacking and casting faster(always great) and for physical combatants possibly getting more attacks per round. It's an all-round force multiplier. Unfortunately it can't be prepared outside of combat, so it should be the first think your Monk/Psionic casts on combat starting up. Ring of Fire (Level 4, Alchemy, Self AoE) This is a weird one. It does less damage than any previous fire-damage spells, at a higher cost, but to all enemies within Extended Range so on all sides of the party but pressed up against it. The problem is that a Fire Bomb or a Fireball centered on the party would hit those enemies, too, do more damage and do it cheaper. It does continue doing this damage for multiple rounds, so if it's an early cast, it may pay off over time, but I'd probably rather be casting Fire Bombs. Boiling Blood (Level 6, Alchemy, Single Target) This does absolutely massive damage to a single target. For comparison, Fire Bomb does 2 to 10 points of damage per effect level, while Boiling Blood does 2 to 38. This does make it a bit swingy in effect, unfortunately, but if it lands a kill, the target will explode damaging nearby enemies. Usually I'd say that an Alchemist would have better things to do, especially as there's a Gadgeteer item that replicates this spell. Firestorm (Level 6, Wizardry, Radial AoE) It's like a Fireball except it keeps doing the damage every round. One of those spells that pays off in a long battle but for shorter encounters you're better off just casting a couple of Fire Bombs or the like instead. Lightning (Level 6, Divine, Cone AoE) This one really kicks rear end, with twice the potential damage of a fireball. Unfortunately it's also the first Divine fire spell since level 1, so having the necessary skill to learn it, cast it effectively and really leverage it is doubtful for non-Bishop, non-crossclassed characters. Prismic Ray (Level 6, Psionic, Cone AoE) Ah, yes, gacha, except as a spell, complete with the high cost and high odds of disappointment. It can theoretically inflict any condition on the enemies hit, so you might get really lucky and, say, Turncoat half your enemies into fighting for you, or turn them Insane. But if you want to do that, you could just cast Insanity and be assured of not getting, say, Sleep, and since you could cast Insanity at a higher level, also be assured of a worthwhile duration on it. Nuclear Blast (Level 7, Wizardry, All Enemies) It doesn't do an awful lot of extra damage, but there are some insanely large fights later in the game where All Enemies vs Radial AoE can actually make the difference between hitting a shitload of enemies. So it has a niche, albeit a rare one, specially as the positioning necessary not to be right in the middle of a huge mob of enemies, but instead having them come at you down a hallway or other narrow area is a gameplay fundamental anyway. Prismic Chaos (Level 7, Psionic, All Enemies) The target-all version of Prismic Ray which makes it considerably more useful for, as mentioned, those few late-game battles where it's you against the world in a big open area and you can't ruse the AI into coming at you single file. Level 7 spells do in general suffer a bit from the issue, though, that without intentionally doing some levelling, you'll likely finish the game before you've really got the level and skill ratings necessary to wholly leverage them. Water Acid Splash (Level 1, Alchemy, Single Target) Just the Water version of Energy Blast. Frost (Level 1, Wizardry, Single Target) Just the Wizardry version of Acid Splash. Paralyze (Level 1, Divinity, Psionic, Single Target) Paralyze is probably the single best condition you can land on an enemy since it has no get-out-of-death-free like Web or Asleep do, and doesn't make enemies run away like Afraid or Blinded. A single target going down quicker and being able to ladle on more hurt can sometimes be what turns a fight around. Stamina (Level 1, Divinity, Alchemy, Single Ally) Restores a huge pool of Stamina. Great for keeping fighters on their feet in long fights, or for recharging Bards and Gadgeteers when they really go hog wild with the instruments and gadgets. Cure Lesser Condition (Level 2, Divinity, Alchemy, Psionic, Single Ally) Reduces/cures fear, sleep, blindness, nausea, or irritation. Being able to cure Blindness is really the big use case for CLC since you're usually better off just toughing out the other conditions and keeping your caster on the offense. Dracon Breath (Level 2, Alchemy, Cone AoE) It copies the Dracon's native breath attack, which remains disappointing past level 1. It does some undocumented level of DoT damage that doesn't scale with spell level. I've literally never cast this. Holy Water (Level 2, Divinity, Radial AoE) This spell is necessary, in my mind, for getting anywhere if you want to tackle certain areas of the game early, or for certain later areas where you can't cast Fire spells. It's a level lower than Fireball, but slightly cheaper to cast and does the same amount of damage, though only to demons and the undead. Slow (Level 2, Psionics, Group AoE) Like any Group AoE spell, the effectiveness is determined by how generous the game is with grouping enemies. It's the inverse of Haste, no real surprise there, and does its best work when the two are combined so enemies are slower and you're faster, giving you a massive initiative advantage and making enemies easier to hit. Cure Paralysis (Level 3, Divinity, Alchemy, Single Ally) The only way to cure Paralysis except for waiting it out. I'd say this spell is a necessity for beating certain fights without taking casualties. Freeze Flesh (Level 3, Wizardry, Group AoE) Oh man THIS SPELL. It's Paralysis except Group AoE and it's so good so good so good. It's the sort of spell that singlehandedly turns battles around if you manage to stick it, letting you chunk piles of enemies unopposed. Rest All (Level 3, Divinity, Party Buff) It's Stamina except it recovers everyone's Stamina. Again, one of those unexciting spells that's nonetheless a necessary workhorse for longer battles, unless you want to load everyone up with Stamina potions AKA meth in a bottle and have them waste turns chugging it that they could instead be using to hew enemy combatants in half. Acid Bomb (Level 4, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Another damage-over-time effect. For certain areas where enemies are water-vulnerable, it can be decent to use, but by that point in the game you're usually better off focusing on status effects than raw damage from your casters in any case. Cure Disease (Level 4, Divinity, Alchemy, Single Ally) Another one of those cure-a-condition effect. Frees you from reliance on Cure Disease potions, which is a godsend. There aren't a lot of disease-causing enemies in the game, but the potential permanent statloss from it is still a butt-clencher when it shows up. Iceball (Level 4, Wizardry, Radial AoE) Blue Fireball. Superman (Level 4, Divinity, Single Ally) This one buffs all stats by 5 points per level, thus capping out at +35 to all stats, which as mentioned go on a scale from 0 to 100. Not very big for mages, but for your physical combatants, it can be extremely worthwhile. I'm not sure if it also effects your chance of getting skill-ups, however, if it does it might certainly be useful to cast on everyone in a fight. Gadgeteers can replicate this one with one of their items, so I rarely ever cast it with an actual mage of any sort. Dehydrate (Level 5, Wizardry, Single Target) The Water version of Boiling Blood without the corpse explosion. Still has the insanely high damage, though, so if you've got a boss where it's the only option, it can be worth a cast. Freeze All (Level 5, Wizardry, All Enemies) Absolutely the best spell in the game. Target-all Paralysis. This should be your primary spell for all Wizardry-capable casters as soon as you've learned it. Blizzard (Level 6, Wizardry, Cone AoE) Pelts your enemies with disappointing games if cast after the year 2000. Okay I kid, it really just does decent cone damage and has a chance to blind enemies. Just cast Freeze All instead and beat the enemies to meaty chunks with your melee combatants. Tsunami (Level 7, Alchemy, Cone AoE) The potentially most powerful damage-dealing spell in the game that affects more than one target. Since it's one of the Gadget-replicable spells, I never bothered to learn it in any game of Wizardry I ever played.
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Jul 23, 2020 14:42
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For the upcoming update I had a fight that I had to restart something like 20 times to win, because it was entirely decided in the first two rounds and I kept rolling terribly. Probably my own fault for taking the fight and not just sneaking around it, but goddammit, those monsters were worth XP.
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Jul 24, 2020 22:50
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Straight White Shark posted:But your starting equipment just does not cut it against the enemies that you see at level 7 or 8.) 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.
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Jul 25, 2020 07:41
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It's actually remarkable how moddable Wizardry 8 is with the Cosmic Forge utility, though it's become slightly challenging to find. I think the only things it doesn't let you alter might be how many zones there are and what music plays where. It literally lets you gently caress with everything else, though, including level geometry and skins.
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Jul 28, 2020 21:36
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Nemo2342 posted:Sirius the dog throwing star is amazing. Oh gently caress me I completely missed that one on first read. You genius. Also new post should be incoming later today or tomorrow.
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Jul 29, 2020 09:10
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Part 004: Arnika The votes seemed more or less in agreement that for now both Saxx and Sparkle should be recruited and the party should join the Umpani as step one towards joining both warring races and attempting to reconcile them. This post will be relatively video heavy since there are a ton of new dialogue NPC's, both some who'll actually talk to us now and others that we'll be meeting for the first time.  So we're headed back to the Umpani base camp after my brief hunting expedition the Northern Wilderness to grab up Sparkle and tell Balbrak we want to join.    Getting Sparkle on the team is pretty effortless, she's a useful enough girl and not actually notably behind the party in XP.    Sparkle has gear that's comparable to our current loadout, and much like Aurora she's got an axe for her melee weapon. There are a couple of Ranger-only axes in the game, but they are, as has been mentioned, kind of a sub-par choice considering the limited selection of good axes compared to, say, good swords and polearms. The blunt weapons suffer much the same fate. Stats-wise it looks rather like she's been generated in much the same way as a player character, which is nice, because some games generate their NPC recruitables much differently which lead to a lot of them being unbalanced towards either uselessness or being OP. Sparkle's main issue is that she doubles up on a class we already have, when what we really want more than anything is greater class variety so we can use more spell types and equipment types. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRS8whDd2Y4 Once we tell Balbrak we want to join up he gives us a level 1 access card(which we don't really use) and we get to quiz him about a lot of stuff.  Having joined up, we can also recruit Saxx(and talk to Saxx), talk to Bildublu(the bartender) and actually shop at the commissary! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC7LHmDx7VM  Saxx is an excellent recruit, since he opens up some spells we can't cast yet. Specifically, his starting instrument, the Soulful Sax, which can be acquired no other way, casts Soul Shield, which ups resistances against a lot of awful "gently caress you and your entire party"-conditions like Insanity, Turncoat and instant death. He also has some bagpipes that do cone damage and a horn that casts Bless. He can actually cast it at a higher level than Lady, but I want Lady to get in the Divine training and he's better off starting most fights with Soul Shield.  The game defaults new recruits to the frontal quadrant, but to keep the wide front, I shove Saxx and Sparkle on the right flank while Aurora gets to hang out with Lady on the left flank.  Kunar should appreciate our business more.   Most shops will have a couple of equipment upgrades from this point on, in Kunar's case it's mostly a heavy crossbow for Aurora since it'll be a punchier option than her shortbow until I can glue a bunch of Light Crossbows together(as drops and shop lists are somewhat level-scaled, some kinds of low-level drops can actually be frustratingly hard to get if you don't find them early enough). However, if we had the money it would also be a good choice to buy some resurrection powder from him and some magic nectars. Magic nectars are about the only way to recover magic points for mages without resting or rare fountains, and so are very important consumables to find. Speaking of, not having a Bishop or Priest for the first time ever, I'm getting a lot more use out of consumables than I normally do, as potions become ever more vital for stamina/health regen. Offensive spell items remain a bit pointless, though as always I'll hoard Canned Elementals(more about elementals later this post...), while selling most other things(the stat reqs. needed not to backfire these items tend to be a bit fucky since some require Artifacts, which only levels very slowly and passively and others require sling/throwing which also levels slowly since it very much tends to be a backup skill for the characters that do use it.  Shops also tend to carry spellbooks which is where you should be getting your low-level spells and especially Bishops live or die more or less purely on what spellbooks you can pick up for them, since they will NEVER get a decent loadout from simply level-up learned spells.  Sadly I will never have the gold to buy everything I want from these stores, so we're off to basic training.   I forget to talk to Rubble, so we don't get his full selection of dialogue yet, as he's moved on by the time we get out of the training course.    I wish I knew why someof these screenshots are unusually grainy. Just trust me when I say that blue stuff is water. We jump a few ramps, leap into the water and...   Yeah so these go up and down and if you get hit by them(though they're not exactly hard to dodge) you get instakilled by physics damage. Physics damage is, as previously mentioned, extremely unforgiving in this game and sometimes using objects from the wrong angle will just annihilate you as the game clips the party into a five-cubic-inch space.   Oh and then some MAGMA. How many Umpani recruits met their end on this little training course?  You can't actually jump in Wizardry 8, so you need to run on to this platform at the right time, and because of the way the game's physics work, getting off while it's over the fence at the end is surprisingly difficult. You move with moving objects you stand on, so as you move forwards and the platform backwards, you remain at the same position in space until you reach the edge of the platform and fall off. So moving a bit too late gets you dragged back over the lava. Wizardry 8 also handles slopes real weird, plenty of stairs you need a run-up to be able to climb as you kind of bounce over the first step rather than simply stepping over it.   The Umpani approach to target dummies is interesting.   In that they're animated and will run over and attempt to ninja kick you in the face while you try to gun them down. Umpani training is hardcore. After chunking the "target dummies" you have to pick the lock on the door out. I'm not sure if its possible to softlock yourself here by having no one with any lockpicking skill at all in the party.   For our trouble we get a level 2 passkey, the only purpose of which is to open the door letting is out. It'll be more interesting when we get a level 3 passkey, but that won't be for a while yet, sadly. Since I always do this after Marten's Bluff in my own runs, I had forgotten that we couldn't get the level 3 key until visiting the T'rang base.   Balbrak demands we go collect some trophies before he'll promote us any further. Now, the vote seemed to mostly be that if I couldn't progress any further at Mt. Gigas, I should do Arnika next, but I decided to poke my head into the Mountain Wilderness anyway, just to see if I could make any headway there and continue advancing in an unorthodox way.  The trip over to the bridge is mostly uneventful except for encountering another Hogar.   Did I mention party members have different commentary lines depending on whether the person killed is a PC or an RPC? I win out over the Hogar in the end, it's just a big numberslam fight, really, and collect some things from the cave which include an un-ID'd set of bagpipes. Later investigation reveals that they cast the spell Hex on an entire group of enemies. It's a divine-type condition that's rarely seen but just functions as a big ol' penalty to everything. Now for this bastard blocking the way into the Mountain Wilderness.  He's several levels above the Hogar that almost prevented us from reaching the foothills of Mt. Gigas, though only half the health. Thankfully he has a secret weakness I'm going to be exploiting because I'm a big brain genius.   To emphasize what a big boy he is, the screen literally shakes and jiggles with every step he takes. Now, the secret to beating this guy? Missile Shield. Roughly every second attack, or possibly even two-thirds of his attacks, are thrown boulders rather than punches, and Missile Shield doesn't give a gently caress how big your thrown object is, it has pretty good odds of just bopping it out of the way and no-selling it. On top of that, Stony manages to blind him with his Omnigun which gives us a couple of rounds of bonus damage and the golem running away, giving the crew a rest. He goes down without killing anyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCkMnEWzQ_c A rare few enemy types also have non-chunky death animations. Golems, for instance, sort of crack and fall apart.    Welcome to the Mountain Wilderness. We're really not supposed to be here yet.   I really wish there was a fan patch or mod of some sort to fix the atrocious draw distance, it always feels like the part of the game that has, technically, aged the worst, and it somewhat spoils the more open areas if you can get up anywhere a bit tall.   The path splits into one leading down the slopes and one leading up. Upwards we can see some interesting architecture and also something with big wings.   Thankfully Bela, players of Wizardry 6 may recognize him, is a friendly NPC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPs3F2dO_Oo Somewhat vague, but he drops a decent bit of lore on us. It costs us nothing to, for now, promise to spare the Savant so Bela can get close to him, so we may as well. Bela is also a high-level merchant, selling tons of spellbooks and some unique gear items. Once we're rolling in the dough it wouldn't be a bad idea to come back and pay him a visit. Now, about that big arch behind him...  ...it's actually where the endgame area is. Sparkles is sadly one of the NPC's that will refuse to go up there, so I have to run back and forth for several real-time minutes to make her pass out so I can haul the entire party through.  Of course I can't really do anything much here yet, but there's a thing or two I was hoping to see if I could get far enough up the peak to trigger them.    All NPC's have some dialogue when they enter a new major area they're not afraid of. Some of it's interesting! Saxx is, I'll note, one of the four RPC's who will go with us to Ascension Peak without crying about it.    I make it around a couple of bends in the barren mountain pass before spotting all these large, angry things in the distance and deciding to haul rear end back to the Mountain Wilderness before I get pasted.    Peeking down the other path, I confirm that if I tried to head down into the valley I'd be dealing with a half dozen or more level 12 ants on fire. Fire ants can usually, well, spit fire, and predictably they're also immune to fire, which would mean that my biggest damage-dealing spell, Fireball, would be out of the running right away. I decide to back off and head to Arnika instead, rather than bouncing my head off this encounter twenty or more times.   So the first thing I see, coming back over the bridge to this wilderness, is three scrub thugs and the two sorceresses leading them. I think to myself, "oh, this should be easy. the sorcs will just like, cast Terror or maybe Frost a couple of times, while I mulch the thugs and then beat up the nerd wizards. This fight will be over in a couple of minutes!"  Sparkle's real gung-ho for this fight, just like me.  Wait, gently caress.  Oh God ow. The fighty types tank the fireball well enough, but two fireballs or one fireball and some misc. damage, would wipe out Werdna easy, and I need his spells to win this fight.  What's even worse is that they can apparently Summon Elementals and if they start flooding the battlefield with those I am VERY hosed.   Next turn, the summoning succeeds and... whoof. Elementals are big, fast and hit like trucks. We're talking like 40 damage per punch. Their one weakness is that if their summoner, who's usually a lot weaker than them, goes down, so does the elemental. But the highwaymen get in the way of my shooting and Werdna's cone spells can't hit them and it would take something in the region of five or six Fireballs to blow the Sorceresses up, which would take an unacceptably long time.    I think that's a reloadin'. Time to think TACTICAL. Time to think STRATEGY.  I back down the bridge a bit so the pack stops focusing on me and start heading down the road, first off.  Just after heading away from the bridge there's a U turn with a small ridge in between. The plan now is to wait for them to round that turn, lurk on the other side, hit COMBAT MODE, and RUN over the ridge so I can instantly get into combat with the sorceresses. The theory is solid.  The execution less so. Most of the party bar Werdna gets to go before the Sorceresses, so it's entirely down to what they cast and how effective it is, because the only way I can win the fight is if Werdna pegs them with a Web or a Freeze Flesh before they take him down. In about 20 or so tries they... Double up on fireballs turn one, blowing up Werdna. Beat me to casting paralyzes or sleep which puts enough of the party to bed that I lose on turn two. Once bust out Whipping Rocks which does a completely unreasonable amount of very painful damage(imagine a shotgun blast of gravel to the face). Several times they also summon an elemental on turn one and I get pasted before I can take down the summoner. The Highwaymen decide to use the rarely-seen Protect command to defend the Summoners(means they take the hit for the summoners, doesn't work for spells, though), delaying me enough in taking them out that they recover from conditions and kick my rear end. But eventually I get lucky rolls and pin down the casters and mulch them in the early stages of the fight.  As you can see by the party's HP totals, however, it was anything but an easy ride even so. There are a few more encounters on the way back to the road, mostly small groups of highwaymen and vines, but ultimately nothing that presents a real challenge.   We emerge right next to Arnika's gates, helpfully enough, and it's just a quick left turn and we're inside.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGUUqrtVinc The soundtrack helps make you feel like you've just arrived somewhere you can take a peaceful breather after getting attacked by everything that moves on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZElksoU7A4 Myles here is recruitable. The only time I've ever recruited him has been as a meatshield on the runs where Arnika was my first destination, and he got dropped like a bag of trash the instant I had a replacement. Being a pure-classed rogue, we have no real use for him as we already have both Stony and Twinkles with lockpicking skills, and like so many others he can't really enter the later stages of the game with us, so spending time levelling him up is kind of wasted.    For once the poor draw distance works in the game's favour as Arnika feels a lot larger than it is, and I actually find myself getting slightly lost in it on occasion when looking for a specific building. Sadly it's somewhat small and is clearly one of the areas that suffered from crunch time, with several areas feeling like they had more intended for them.    The local police station. We can get in here easily enough in short order, but it contains nothing of real interest except for a bit of flavour text which, I suppose, is fine enough on its own, but it's still a relatively large building for how little flavour text it contains.    Arnika's soundtrack is a bit deceitful, because while it's not AS hostile as the road, it's certainly not entirely peaceful. Periodically patrols of savant androids will spawn and march the streets, getting into fights with the cops(the Higardi Lunar Legion, which is probably why that mod added a moon bit.) and you. Thankfully these early types aren't so bad.   I duck into a bar rather than fight them for now, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEwFI-pHe5k He'li is probably one of the chattiest NPC's in Arnika, and we WILL need to talk to her again later. Because as the "rumour" NPC she is, once we join both the T'rang and the Umpani, she hears about it... and she'll happily sell us out if we don't pay her off. Of course, if we DO pay her off(and we will), she keeps her word and doesn't snitch on us.  Once I'm done talking to her, it's time to loot her back rooms, which consist of two small rooms and the upstairs.   The important part here is really to get this keycard out of what is, presumably, Anna's room. There isn't really anything else in the rooms of notable interest unless you came here first, then there might be a small gear upgrade or two.  We can also see the androids still waiting outside for us. Enemies can't open doors, ever, so as long as we've got a closed door behind us, they'll never path to us. Still, more and more androids keep showing up, so I suppose we should go outside and deal with them.   As the first round closes up we come to the true horror of fighting in Arnika... there are two types of allied patrollers, Lay Brothers and Higardi Patrols, and their needing to take their turns makes every fight take twice as long as it should. Thankfully they are, at least, usually competent backup that scores some kills for us and shortens the fight that way. Anyway. ANDROIDS.  Due to being robots they have a grab-bag of immunities, and they come in four variants. These are the basic punch troopers, then there's a version with a gun for a hand, the Savant Orbs which fly around and shoot KO/Insanity projectiles at you("Neurobolts") and the big burly androids we saw in the Monastery, the one that mocked us after Aletheides gave us some exposition, which are strong in melee but can also use their scythes to shoot at you. Later-game droid armies that mix all four types can be surprisingly threatening as they can engage you at all ranges and some lucky Neurobolt hits can severely limit your ability to fight back. And if you're heavily reliant on Psionic spells, they resist some of the best effects from that school of magic. For now, though, we're good.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abCUMc-nB4E  Cleaning them up gives Stony a level-up and his Omnigun now has twice the chance to blind enemies. This is very exciting since the random blind effects from that has turned around a couple of close fights before, and trivialized minorly threatening ones.   Investigating the name plate on this statue of Phoonzang causes it to drop off, revealing a hidden compartment behind containing a few potions and dusts that could be handy for a starting party.   I'm sure there are no shenanigans we could possibly come up with in a bank and that I will not have looted the main vault before this update is over.     Lorrac has clearly worked customer service for too long. She doesn't have anything to really say to anything we ask her, she mostly serves two purposes. Firstly, if we hit the buttons behind her to open the vaults or sound the alarm, she summons the guards to kick our rear end. Doing this would be stupid. Secondly, if we give her clear evidence that we're a customer here to access our safety deposit box...   Clearly we wouldn't be carrying around He'li's access card if we weren't He'li. This bank just defines security and trustworthiness.  I poke around a bit while heading down the hall to the elevator. The bank primarily just consists of the two vault elevators and these waiting rooms which are probably the nicest-looking(in terms of luxury) rooms in Arnika. Also the floors are very reflective. Considering the age of the game, that's a bit of a surprise, since I remember other games not too far removed from it in age that could hardly handle anything reflective. Then again, Wizardry 8 also cheats by not reflecting anything that actually moves or changes, like player characters or NPC's.     So the basement of the bank, on the deposit vault side, has two sections. The first one contains the personal vaults of He'li, Anna L'am and Antone Rapax, while the next section has three general storage vaults. The first three require keycards, while the latter three just requires that Stony break open the locks. This bank has no alarms down here, which is great for us, less great for the local economy when we finish looting the place. The loot down here would be great for a starting party, but as it is set and un-levelled, I have no use for it currently(though when I bust open Antone's vault, I'm hoping one of the items will remains useful). Still, it's the principle that if there's a bank, you drat well rob it, and also I can sell the items to buy things I actually do care about. The vault does yield a lot of un-ID'd blue potions that I hope will turn out to be Magic Nectars and Potions of Heavy Healing, though.   The only nasty surprise for a starting party is that the third general storage vault contains a guardian golem. Considering that he's more or less just a half-size and half-stat version of the Marble Golem I pasted on the bridge to the Mountain Wilderness, however, he doesn't represent much of a threat.   On leaving the bank I encounter a pair of the big henchmen with the scythe-staves. They go down in seconds from a combination of the party and a pack of lay brothers walking up behind them and punching them repeatedly in the back of the head.   As thanks for their helping out, I decide to go visit their bossman, Lord Braffit.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8xeZmlolj4  For most players, Braffit is probably their first chance to buy spellbooks. He tends to offer a good selection of Divine-related ones, and like all stores, every in-game three days or so, his stock replenishes with some randomly rolled new items.  We can also give him this note from the monastery.  Which makes him forget who we are and tell us to go graverobbing to find the key to that weird door back in the Monastery. You bet your rear end I'll be heading back that way as soon as I've got the key and am done with Arnika. Those things are pretty useful this early in the game.   So poke your head around the side of the temple and you find a way down into the basement.  The door immediately ahead leads to the crypt.  Going around the side breaks you into the Lay Brothers' quarters, however, where you can find a pair of real important amulets.   I have no idea why these are female-character only, but it's a good reason to make your melee combatants female, which ours luckily are! Chewbecka and Lady each get one of these, which will help a lot to make sure they don't get tuckered out during longer fights. There's also a Ring of Protection which applies a +1 AC across all body parts. I'm not sure exactly how the game handles body part targeting, but +1 is good, so take it and slap it on someone vulnerable. In my case it goes on Aurora.    These ghosts can be troublesome if you come here early. They've got the same immunities as androids, basically, making them imposible to turn insane or put to sleep, and in addition to punching you, most ghosts have "touch" attacks that can make your guys go insane, fall asleep, etc. a bunch of annoying paralyzing effects.  They also tend to have access to causing those conditions through party-wide spells. Coming here after you know Fireball or Holy Water, however, tends to trivialize this fight. The ghosts go down without doing much more than lightly bruising Sparkle.   Despite the size of the room, all it guards is this key. Now we just gotta take a walk back and make use of it.   Back outside I take a look at the map of Arnika which once again illustrates how the game's automap doesn't handle layered rooms well.   Antone is the local smith. Not shown: me breaking into his bedroom and stealing his bank keycard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhCLMFm_-_c Antone is part of the aforementioned "pseudo-crafting" mechanics where you can add special items to his shopping list by bringing him rare objects. The Featherweight Plate is the only one I'm particularly interested in since it's a very low-weight suit of plate and carrying too much makes your combatants slower. In addition to what they're equipped with and what's in their personal inventories, they also all carry an equal share of what's in the shared party inventory which they can't access during combat.  Outside Antone's Armory, we enter one of the residential parts of Arnika. Sadly, of all the abandoned houses, I think a grand total of two contain anything to steal. The rest are just there for flavour. It's hard to tell if this was intentional or again a result of lacking time to finish content. I feel like it's the latter.    So we head down to the docks! The ships are sunk, but there's another store here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsm155mOGg Anna is one of the chattiest NPC's in town, mostly being able to talk about the other town NPC's.  She also sells Electrodes, which Gadgeteers need for some of their cooler, better, more awesome gadgets. She also occasionally has spellbooks, so worth hitting up if you're travelling back through Arnika for whatever reason. Oh and we steal her bank keycard, too, while we're there. Because why would we not?  On the quay we get ambushed by some bandits(for like five seconds as Werdna hits them all with a Web) and find this item, which is also a Gadgeteer part. We have 50% of a LOT of cool gadgets now.   This structure, between Antone's Armory and the crashed spaceship(it's the last place I'll be going this update), is our next destination.      It's the old jail, locked up while the Savant is invading.   Considering that the HLL chases a man halfway across the planet for stealing a divine artifact but never think to check his locker for evidence, or even have thought to empty his drat locker like 100 years later, does not speak greatly to their professionalism.   Oh and they didn't empty the cells before locking up and abandoning the jail. These guys will fight us to the death if we let them out.   The last two cells are empty, but only the last one is really so. The central one has a secret!    A hidden tunnel under some floorboards that collapse if you interact with them.  It's guarded by a trivial slime that nauseates everyone before Stony blinds it and it runs away while I pepper it full of arrows until it dies.    It's the main vault of the bank! It's a bit unimpressive for a main vault, but it does at least contain some magic gear. The other way in is to fight your way through the teller and security guards, and then pick a 10-lock door. Thankfully there's a teleporter in the corner for getting out, because I tried picking the door from the inside, and even having used a Knock Pick(casts Level 3 Knock Knock) to paralyze 3 of the tumblers, I think I spent something like 10 minutes trying to get Stony to pick the remaining 7 and he failed at the finish line every time. On the bright side it was enough tries to level up his lockpicking a bit!   Now, with Marten's ID badge in our pocket, let's go approach the local police station again.   You'd also think maybe they would have updated their systems to void Marten's credentials or something.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNn9GA8Bb9Y And that's basically all that there is to this building. Again, I feel like more was originally planned, but at least Tramain is nice enough.  Back outside, it's time to check out the spaceport.   We can't really do much of relevance here yet except blowing up some android squatters, picking up the X-Ray chip for a future Gadgeteer item and talking to a spaceship.     The Callisto has exactly zero relevance to anything that happens in the game, sadly. It feels like it could have been used to travel to some other locations, the moon, maybe boarding the Savant's ship(or those of the T'rang and Umpani) or just as a Mook-aligned fast travel system.   The spaceport itself consists of three rooms.   A big main room that could be seen as a departure lounge. Needs some furniture or really ANYTHING.   A black box reader. We will eventually need to get a black box read here to complete the T'rang/Umpani alliance quest.   The tracking tower which monitors space traffic around Dominus, but someone's yanked part of the system and we need to bring that part back as soon as we find "Bobo" somewhere in the gameworld.  Back in town, I decide to check out this slightly more futuristic-looking building next to the crashed ship. Let's find out what's up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYI8uMCirOE If you have any Mook party members, they pop inside to visit the Mook embassy. I don't know what happens if you have multiple Mook party members. Or indeed an entire Mook party. They return to the party after you camp for a bit, so I pop into a nearby abandoned building and get everyone a nap.  Clearly some changes during dev. There is, in fact, not a spaceship inside the Mook embassy. She's thinking of the Chaos Moliri, which the Mook brought to Dominus and are keeping inside their embassy. This is progress, we've now tracked one part of the trio. Of course, we've yet to get our grubby little mitts on it. But where there's a greedy enough will, there's a way!   I raid the last couple of abandoned houses, getting yet another Gadgeteer part, before setting off to check out the Savant's tower here in Arnika.    There's a fixed encounter of low-level androids with an android orb loitering around the back. They need to get flattened so we can loot them.  Here's a close-up of one of the Orbs, by the way. It's shaped more like a nautilus shell and moves by "rolling" through the air rather than just floating.    I'm sure anyone with even the slightest bit of imagination can understand why we'd want to bring along something for repairing a Dark Savant android. yes, one of the potential RPC's is in fact an android, and he's one of the best ones.  Time to FINALLY investigate this crashed spaceship. I'm sure whoever's inside is doing just fine.   The interior has been completely cored out, though there's damaged black box that's "survived" the event. We sadly won't be able to get anything out of a black box in this state of disrepair.  Inside there's only one damaged door to kick down to investigate the smashed-up building further.   Five low-level savant troopers and a friendly NPC... Vi Domina. She's kind of plot-relevant, though she was more important in Wizardry 7 than 8. Anyway, let's bail her out.  Predictably this does not take long.  Before talking to Vi, I grab the box in the corner. Combined with the clown doll from the abandoned house, it lets me craft...  Now, let's see what Vi has to say... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJYDfm9k3LY  Quite a lot of chatter from her, but with that done, we've tapped out Arnika for content now(except for returning to the merchants every so often to buy their stuff). So it's time to get a couple of votes up! Companions Should we swap Vitalia or, ugh, Myles, out for either of our existing companions? And if so, which one(s)? Personally I'd swap Sparkle for Vi. She's a decently beefy Valkyrie. Destination Unfortunately with the Mountain Wilderness too tough for us at the moment, we really only have one destination we can go to at this point, and that's Trynton(though Trynton is also a quite large area with a lot of content), but after Trynton the game opens up somewhat again.
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Jul 30, 2020 14:01
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EclecticTastes posted:Also pick up a plain dagger, short staff, and longsword, for no particular reason. Only one I'm currently missing is the short staff, that loving thing always takes me forever to find.
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Jul 30, 2020 18:12
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Zurai posted:That said, Vi is just better and you can take her basically anywhere. I think there's only one place in the whole game she objects to entering, and that's because you need both RPC slots free for that area. If only, I actually prefer the third end-game RPC that we haven't met yet because he doesn't complain about several large locations that Vi will demand to be excused from. Bayjin, Sea Caves and the Rapax Rift
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Jul 30, 2020 18:59
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I remember from old experiences with the Cosmic Forge editor that editing areas/items you've already encountered would tend to lead to a hard crash. Is it the same for the view distance?
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Jul 30, 2020 19:32
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Part 004.5: Earth and Air Earth and Air are more interesting than Water and Fire, having more utility spells than just straight up damage, including the excellent Missile Shield among others. Though this brings me to a game issue with the out-of-combat buffs like Missile Shield, X-Ray, Enchanted Blade and Armorplate... they don't involve making any choices. An in-combat buff involves judging whether you need offense or defense more, do I need Saxx to bring up Soul Shield or do I need him to wail on the Piercing Pipes to do some conical damage to enemies? The out-of-combat buffs don't cost enough magic points to require considering a resource trade-off(and even at this early stage I can pump them up enough to cast them, rest up my MP, and still have them last for a decent while) and they don't require considering an action trade-off either. It's only just occurred to me this game that it's an issue. Earth Itching Skin (Level 1, Alchemy, Cone AoE) It, uh, exists. I never bother applying Irritation outside of the very early game when it may on occasion be the only Earth spell some party members can cast. It would help if I knew how big a malus it applies, but I think it's very low since I've never really been inconvenienced by it, and unlike others(like Nausea and Fear), it never causes lost turns. Razor Cloak (Level 2, Alchemy, Single Ally Buff) Anyone hitting the target in melee gets a mild amount of damage returned. It can be strong on enemies since you may often only have a single target to pick from, but enemies will almost always have multiple of your guys they can target, making it somewhat underwhelming in actual play. Web (Level 2, Wizardry, Divinity, Cone AoE) One of the KINGS of early-game spells. Your first multiple-enemy-lockdown spell that isn't Sleep in most cases. It seems to generally have some trouble sticking compared to, say, Paralyze, so later on you'll be less likely to use it except if faced with, say, enemies that resist Water but not Earth, but when you first get it, it'll be constantly getting spammed in combat. The only problem is that the cone AoE means that for many battles it's only useful in the first steps before all the enemy melee goons surge forward and get out of range. Armorplate (Level 3, Divinity, All Ally Buff) One of those party-wide buff spells mentioned earlier. At best it adds a +4(when cast at max level) to your armor class, but considering that even now, no one in the party has an AC above 10, even just a boost of 1 or 2 is percentage-wise really huge. Always cast it, plus with it being an out-of-combat cast, it also presents a way to grind up your spell skills. Chameleon (Level 3, Alchemy, Psionics, All Ally Buff) Makes you vaguely harder for enemies to detect. I confess I've never felt it to have a HUGE effect, but it's a cheap out-of-combat spell so you may as well cast it. Any little advantage in juking around nasty formations and sneaking up on vulnerable ones is to be taken. Knock-Knock (Level 3, Wizardry, Alchemy, Misc. Spell) It attempts to paralyze a number of tumblers on the targeted chest up to the spell level, which means a most of 7, so for the nastier locks your thief almost always still has some work to do. Still in my experience it's absolutely vital for not going completely insane trying to pick some of the game's tougher locks. You can also pick up one-use "Knock Picks" but they only cast the spell at an effect level of 3, so they eventually stop being useful unless you really spend time grinding up your rogues(their skill increase is on raising a tumbler, not picking a lock, so technically any one lock can, with sufficient patience, cap out their skill). Whipping Rocks (Level 3, Wizardry, Alchemy, Cone AoE) The first damaging Earth spell you get access to. I've had mediocre success with it, but I always dread seeing enemies cast it since the ones with access to it are modestly early-game enemies and can often full-party-wipe you with a couple of casts. Armormelt (Level 4, Wizardry, Psionics, Cone AoE) Lowers enemy armor class. For some enemies, this one is more or less vital if you want to have any hope of your melee fighters doing any damage to it. I also don't ever think I've seen it be resisted, so it's more or less always a "safe" cast to throw out. Crush (Level 4, Wizardry, Alchemy, Single Target) Insane single-target damage, though it feels more common you'll want to use group damage spells. Absolutely great spell animation, though, I'll show it off if we get access to this one. Element Shield (Level 4, Wizardry, Alchemy, All Ally Buff) In-combat buff only, but like Soul Shield after a certain point it'll be on your list of first actions in every fight, as it raises the four elemental resistances. Occasionally you might ignore it if you know the enemy is all physical attackers, but the farther you get into the game, the more mixed groups of physical/mage enemies(or sometimes pure mage squads) become the norm. Body of Stone (Level 5, Alchemist, Single Ally Buff) Very effective but suffers from the same issue as Razor Cloak which is that it's very rare the enemy only has a single target to pick from and you're casting it at one of your guys at a time. If you were using all the "exterior" quadrants, it might be more useful, since many melee enemies would only have between 2 and 3 targets at once, rather than 6, but even so I could almost always think of other spells I'd rather cast. Quicksand (Level 6, Alchemist, Radial AoE) Attempts to instakill all targets in range. I only ever bust out the instakill spells in absolutely HUGE battles since they feel like they have very low odds of sticking, so without sufficient targets they'll usually bounce with no real effect. Earthquake (Level 7, Alchemist, All Enemies) Just does damage to all enemies, as in literally ALL enemies. Considering that you can rarely jam high-level spells up to the same effect ratings as low-level spells, however, and that they cost more magic points per effect, you'd need a really big battlefield for this to be superior to just casting out a radial-AoE Fireball or Iceball instead. Falling Stars (Level 7, Divinity, All Enemies) Slightly less damage than Earthquake, but also slightly cheaper. Otherwise a literal spell reskin with the same commentary. Air Sleep (Level 1, Wizardry, Divinity, Psionic, Group AoE) Another early-game mainstay. Being able to lock down and disrupt entire groups and give yourself the occasional 2x damage hit can matter a lot in the early game, specially against big fellas like Gregor(if you can get it to stick on them). One of those low-level spells you might actually well be busting out in the mid-game and occasionally nearing the endgame as well. Missile Shield (Level 2, Wizardry, All Ally Buff) While the percentage of ignored missiles is vague, I'd estimate it to be around 66% or 75%. Definitely big enough to be noticed. Once you learn this, it should be up at all times and justifies having a Wizardry caster all by itself. Shrill Sound (Level 2, Wizardry, Psionics, Cone AoE) Does low damage to a cone of enemies. I almost never cast it outside of the early game, where cramped corridors funnelling enemies and low enemy HP makes it a viable spell. Sonic Boom (Level 2, Wizardry, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Does no damage but has a chance of causing Fear or KO effects. It may just be my own bias, but I never felt like this spell had very good chances of sticking its effects. I should honestly probably be using it more since radial AoE beats group AoE and KO beats Sleep(since KO'd enemies don't wake up when wailed on with swords and axes). Cure Poison (Level 3, Divinity, Alchemy, Single Ally) It... cures poison. It can be useful, I suppose, for high-level poison on fragile allies, but generally Wizardry 8 poison does relatively low amounts of damage, so if someone's in danger from poison, you're probably better off just healing up whatever HP they're missing and then dealing with the poison after the battle. Noxious Fumes (Level 3, Wizardry, Alchemy, Radial AoE) It does mild damage and inflicts Nausea, which is another one of those "maybe good sometimes rarely randomly"-status ailments like Afraid. It debuffs enemies in a vague way and very occasionally causes them to lose turns. I wouldn't waste a mage's turns casting this, but Gadgeteers get a gadget which can replicate it, which is a decent way to use their turns more effectively. Shadow Hound (Level 3, Wizardry, Alchemy, All Ally Buff) Pretty niche, it makes all party members wake up if you're attacked while asleep, but generally it's not difficult to find a door to sleep behind, or a nook or cranny to pry the party into before resting, since monsters don't just spawn ex nihilo but have to actually exist in the world for a while and then bump into the party while on a patrol route. No harm to casting it before resting, but I can count the number of interrupted rests in a full run on one hand. Silence (Level 3, Divinity, Psionic, Group AoE) Silenced targets can't cast spells, so if you stick this on a group of enemy spellcasters, you're golden. On the other hand, you could also just stick them with Web or Paralysis, which also prevents them from casting spells AND prevents them from moving AND prevents them from attacking AND makes them take double damage from melee attacks. What I'm saying is that I've literally never cast this spell. I suppose it might be your spell of choice if they're spellcasters resistant to both Water and Earth magic, but not Air. Whirlwind (Level 4, Divinity, Cone AoE) A basic damage-dealing spell, but I always feel like I catch more targets with the radial blast spells than the cone blast spells. Purify Air (Level 5, Divinity, Alchemy, All Allies) Removes "cloud" effects from the party. Clouds are thing-over-time effects, including nasty clouds that drain magic points, subject everyone to instant death saves, do damage, nauseate, etc. generally getting rid of these effects is a high priority, so knowing Purify Air can be a literal lifesaver. Clouds don't occur often, but the couple of battles I remember where you're guaranteed some cloud spells, you likely won't survive without Purify Air. Return to Portal/Set Portal (Level 5, Divinity, Alchemy, Psionics, Wizardry, All Allies) It's like Lloyd's Beacon from Might & Magic. Set a waypoint, warp to waypoint. It's glooooooooooooooooooooorious, especially once we get buddy-buddy with the T'rang for reasons we'll get around to in several updates. It also helps you get idiots into areas that should terrify them because they don't know where the beacon goes before you recall to it. Suckers. If you learn one when levelling up, you get the other for free, but when they spawn as books you can get them separately, so never learn the one until you have both books together. Toxic Cloud (Level 5, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Inflicts a "cloud" effect on an area. All enemies in it are dealt minor damage every turn, but ALSO risk getting nauseated, poisoned or getting straight up KO'd. Getting a check at all these conditions every turn, for all enemies affected, for multiple turns, is mucho bueno. Definitely a pro cast as spells go. Pandemonium (Level 6, Psionics, All Enemies) Attempts to inflict Fear and Insanity on all enemies. Pandemonium is one of my favourite later-game spells since turning a chunk of a big enemy crowd Insane and getting them to lay into their own buddies instead of me, or otherwise getting them to waste turns, is great, absolutely great. Asphyxiation (Level 7, Wizardry, All Enemies) Attempts to straight up kill all visible enemies. I can think of one or two late-game battles where I might try to cast this, but generally I'd pass it up in favour of duller, but more guaranteed effects. Death Cloud (Level 7, Alchemy, Radial AoE) Like Toxic Cloud, but with a save-or-die check every turn instead of just poison. The extra density of checks increases the odds of someone flubbing their save and getting chunked out of the battle, so this is the one instant-death spell I might actually use casually.
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Jul 31, 2020 07:14
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Part 005: Trynton(and side quests)  So I load up the game and get a brief shock as Vitalia is just gone. What happens is that every time you area transition, rest or reload a game, any RPC's not in your party(bar one specific one) are reset to their "starting" positions. There used to be a bug, in early versions of the game, where Vitalia's "starting position" was inside the game geometry, and also I believe Tantris' starting position had the same issue but I only ever recruited him once, so if you ever dismissed them, they would be un-recoverable.  Thankfully now she's just chilling at the bar.  Goodbye, Sparkle, you were briefly useful.  As soon as you recruit Vi, she encourages you to visit He'li and Braffit. Not a bad idea for a new player, especially one who hasn't played Wizardry 7, as it'll cause Vitalia and He'li/Braffit to barf up a lot of fresh exposition on the first time they meet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-OnTi1EjU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl7gEvIG0CU For anyone who doesn't care to watch the videos, she primarily just catches you up on why the Dark Savant kidnapped her and why she's not good friends with him. After that, we have one more very important job to do in Arnika for the time being... heading down to use Anna and Antone's keycards in the bank vault. Anna's isn't super-important but Antone's? Oh man. If you have any melee combatant that uses swords, you will want this.     Antone's vault contains just one thing, a non-randomized longsword item.  So important thing to note about the Bloodlust blade.  It's cursed! Now, this curse is different from every other curse in the game which tends to carry stat penalties and/or permanent HP/Stamina/Mana drain effects. All this one does is prevent you from unequipping it or swapping weapons, so Chewbecka will have to rely on magic for long-range damage rather than her bow, from now on. It also has only one "attack mode," which is BERSERK. Attack modes are a thing I never "got" about Wizardry 8. Most weapons have Stab, Thrust, Swing or some combination of the three, and you don't choose which one gets used. What they actually do... maybe they influence the area you hit and enemies have bodypart-specific AC values like PC's do? gently caress knows. The point is that Berserk is better than all of them. To explain why, I'm gonna fastforward to the return to the Monastery to break open that vault.  (the only thing of interest in Anna's vault was the MONSTRANCE, a holy-fella-only staff which is more interesting for it's name, try googling what a Monstrance is in the real world, than for anything it can do)  Oh and Antone is the only NPC in the game canny enough to realize when he's been robbed, but also smart enough not to piss off eight heavily armed maniacs to make an issue of it.  The way back mostly consists of mashing some generic wilderness monsters until I bump into these fellas. CRUSHER CRABS  Their main thing is being real beefy, and their pinchy claws have an Extended range which actually means they can reach past my front line to hit the mages in the back when the mood takes them. If I had a traditional fill-the-edges formation, I could have shifted Werdna and Stony into the back row to leave another rank of distance, but c'est la vie. Let's get to the main show.  So the big thing to notice about the BERSERK attack mode(which Fighters natively have access to with all melee weapons) is that it does inherent 2x damage, so the Bloodlust Blade actually does twice as much damage as the numbers claim. But Purple, you might ask, what if it hits someone who's paralyzed, blinded or webbed? Then it deals 3x damage. It should be obvious what a titanic asskicking potential this is. Oh and she's also fast enough with it to attack twice per round. So in a single equipment upgrade Chewbecka has escalated to doing, at base, four times the damage she was doing before. Completely mental. Using the Berserk attack mode also offers some vaguely-specified defensive penalty, but Chewbecka's a big girl, I'm sure she can survive a few daggers through the head. It also seems to up the incidence of her 5x LIGHTNING SPEED attacks a lot, since I saw maybe one per recording session otherwise and now I was getting three or four of them. According to internet people, initiative bonuses/low carry weight impacts how regularly they happen, so I figure that the +6 init might be what makes the difference. It would also track with how they became less common over the course of the recording session, as I also became more encumbered with dead enemies' gear and living civilians' stuff that they didn't bother to lock away somewhere sufficiently impregnable.  In any case, the return to the vault is without incident, let's crack this baby open.  And have a fight that could have gone extremely poorly if these two fuckers had any sort of backup. See, we fought a Screaming Head before, and all it did was scare some party members a bit, because it was alone and low-level. Let's see how this fight looks about a round in.  Everyone's a combination of Blinded and Silenced.  And paralyzed.  And insane. The last one is the worst part, because the Screaming Heads do relatively low damage themselves, but if, say, Chewbecka went Insane and the RNG said she was going to chop the rest of the party into little chunks she'd be able to annihilate a party member per round, more or less.  At no point did I have more than two or three party members reliably doing what they were told. Just the presence of a small group of spiders or bugs to actually do damage for the Screaming Heads could have wiped the party out, especially since Saxx bungled casting Soul Shield on the first round of combat just because he was blind. Do you even need to be able to see to play the goddamn saxophone? Thankfully he redeems himself well and truly before this update is over.   Once the fight is over, though, we can start desecrating the dead. We've got two chests of randomized loot that yield nothing of any real interest and a big sarcophagus in the middle that's more worthwhile to bust open.  The bow is essentially a longbow that deals +10% damage to demons. Spoiler, we will be meeting demons before the game is over. The sword is more of the same. We don't really have a good candidate for the sword at the moment, since our two Valkyries are using polearms and Chewbecka has fused with the Bloodlust Sword to become Stabbotron 4000. In hindsight I should maybe have considered giving it to Saxx, but for now I stuff both of them on Aurora for safekeeping. The bow and sword are named Demonsting and Demonsbane respectively. Anyone familiar with Wizardry games or Wizards & Warriors may recognize Ankhs as sweet misc. magic items.  They more or less consistently offer a low protection boost and a big stat boost. It goes on Chewbecka so she can kill things even more efficiently, she is the party's major source of damage output and I am extremely proud of her for kicking so much rear end. On the way back to Arnika from the Monastery to head south to Trynton I also gently caress up by resting along the road in an unsafe location, I wake up to this:  In one free round of combat this Hogar dumpsters Aurora(she's definitely going to be the most-resurrected by the time this game is over unless something changes a lot) before Chewbecka can fillet it. Still, it's fine, resurrections are mostly a drain on your limited rez consumables, there aren't any stat losses or XP losses, though if possible you want the dead character back to life before the fight is over so they don't miss out on post-fight XP. Once he's sorted, i.e. dead, I briefly stop by Arnika to stock up on resurrection dust before continuing on to the next treasureful sidequest.    Along the way is another Mystery House with an eerie hum emanating from within. Similarly to the first it will become relevant later. It's also somewhere along this part of the recording where I realize I've had a Short Staff all along, because the only way to be guaranteed one is to have a pure Mage who's not a Fairy in your party(Fairy gear overrides class gear since they can't equip 99% of it), so Werdna's been lugging one around since the very first post.   I squish some plants, rogues and Piercer Modais on the way onwards when I run into a friendly, or at least not immediately hostile, NPC on the road. Who's this fella?  Looks beefy. I bet he has something important to chat about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK0C8xe1eVg Let's, uh, let's have a look at what he gave us.  A simple rifle. I give this one to Vi so I won't have another character hogging all the specialist bow ammo, it's bad enough that Saxx and Aurora have to share.  HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. I WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF WE ACTUALLY GAVE THIS TO THE TELLER. It will, of course, be up to a vote whether we should do that the next time we're in Arnika.  A few steps onwards and the road splits, I, of course, pick the one that doesn't lead to progress as there's a small, spooky side area down here. A graveyard! Normally it's one of the places that can challenge you considerably if you make a straight run to Arnika from the Monastery and then head to Trynton, as the game seems to heavily imply that you should.    The gate guards are a bunch of Trynnie ghosts with condition-inflicting spears, backed up by a ghost sorceress that can throw nasty conditions on you. Of course, having arrived somewhat late, I simply apply Fireballs until the problem is resolved and wade inside.   Inside there's a graveyard and a mausoleum, patrolled by a mummy.  Another potential roadblock for low-level parties considering that he's very beefy and can inflict paralysis with his melee attacks. If you got unlucky he could lock down a large part of your party without giving you a chance to wear him down. Of course, in this case I just need Chewbecka to win initiative and she splatters him across the gravestones in short order. I splatter him into mummy dust(which I collect) and turn around to see...  a mystical rune There are six gravestones with runes on them that you can interact with to activate, in no particular order, you just need to turn on all six. In an extremely cruel trick, five of them are on the east sides of gravestones, and the last is on the west side, which drove me insane for a bit. Of course, activating all six outwardsly does nothing. I poke the couple I can easily spot and head for the mausoleum.    We can't do anything here quite yet. Mind you, I don't know if busting this particular ghost actually does anything besides give you some bonus XP, like disabling enemy spawns for the graveyard or something.  More importantly, though, there's a new instrument in the corner.  Which is the aforementioned redemption for Saxx. Being able to drop Insanity on an entire group of enemies is wonderful, since it's roughly an even chance of them doing nothing, attacking one of their allies or actually doing what they meant to do. So once you've prodded all the gravestones, what do you do next?  You interact with this one pillar in the corner of the graveyard, which you only know is interactible because it changes the cursor when you wave it over it at close range. If you attempt to interact with it without having activated all gravestones? Nothing happens. If you attempt to interact with it without a plain Dagger in your inventory? Nothing happens. But what if you fulfill both those requirements?  You jam a dagger dramatically into it and... apparently nothing happens. What you need to do next is you need to leave the graveyard entirely and follow the wall all the way around...   To find this mushroom ring that's an entrance to a bonus dungeon. Supposedly none of these secret dungeons were discovered until a developer hinted at them on a fan forum way back, and I can believe that. The remaining two secret dungeons are in the Mountain and Northern wildernesses, where we've been already, we'll be sure to visit them as well since high-level visits provide a chance of items and monsters encountered nowhere else.   The bonus dungeons are sadly somewhat unexciting. They're intentionally grid-based retro. Dark, curving corridors full of doors, chests and random encounters, as well as the occasional spike trap that has zero warning and will gently caress you up for entering the wrong dead end.   The map is also useless because A) there are teleporters that warp you around. B) at unclear points to north, east, west and south the map loops in on itself. And C) there are three bonus dungeons and they all in the same "space" just layered on top of each other.  Some enemies are stuff we can meet on the outside, too. These Scorchers, notably, kicked my rear end. They've got a "built-in" conic fire attack that hits everyone. It's currently the nastiest thing anything can do to us, AoE attacks, since it fucks up Werdna and Stony real hard.  Nibblers are inoffensive miniature versions of Swallowers and, I believe, only occur in these dungeons. Unlike Swallowers who can, as the name implies, swallow a PC to remove them from the battle until the Swallower is killed, Nibblers just, well, nibble at you and do plain damage.  Moraxes are the upgraded version of Screaming Heads, adding a bunch of actual damaging spells to go with their condition-inflicters and also looking a heck of a lot cooler.  There's also no clear way out. You can't just leave whenever you want, whenever you've had your fun, you need to find the boss monster, kick his rear end and use the (indistinguishable from all the rest) mushroom ring in his boss room to escape. The unique boss monster of the Dagger Dungeon is...  Baron Englund's Ghost. I'm earnestly not sure if I should be recognizing the name, I feel like I should. Bloodthirst loses me the first engagement, as I rush in and get surrounded and poked by Trynnie Ghosts. On the second try I smartly use the open door and the wall to protect my right flank and rear and just bombard Englund and his ghosts from range.  Worth noting during this fight is that some enemies can also Berserk, which ups their damage ability considerably compared to what they'd normally do. When I'm not being a moron, the fight is pretty trivial and Englund goes down like a chump. Doesn't even drop anything unique or interesting. Time to go back to the real world.   I only barely step outside of the graveyard when...  Thank you, Aurora. Holy Water can be thrown at enemies to cast the spell of the same name, but it can also be used to banish the ghost in the graveyard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FXfaoHW60c The reward is trivial, but sometimes it's about doing good things, not about being rewarded for them.  Once the graveyard is done with, Trynton is literally just around the corner.  Whoever they got to do these little art pieces for the loading screens deserves a medal, I'll note. Even the less cool ones are all really good.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwzDtF0vhQ Trynton is slightly darker than all areas so far, with the skybox tending to be obscured by mist and fog. Straight ahead and right are forest, to the left is...  The sea. Wizardry 8 has an odd approach to being able to fall. We can't drop into the ocean if we slam our faces into the cliff's edge, but if we drop down...  Into this little creek...  We can drop into the ankle-deep sea for decent amounts of falling damage. It occasionally feels like the game is "faking" being 3D, especially as there are relatively few room-over-room areas. But more likely it's just a result of the game's odd "physics" engine when it comes to slopes(you often need a run-up to climb them, so if you start sliding down, you'll keep sliding down) and wanting to make it not too easy for people to kill themselves slipping off ledges.  This part of the ocean is boring, just a few fish to gib and nothing else. I feel like I remember there being a cave or something to explore down along the cliff's edge, but I couldn't find a drat thing.   So we're just going to climb this fishing line up. Perfectly safe. Climbing ladders and ropes in Wizardry 8 functions by interacting with them, at which point the game more or less moves the party along a rail until they come to the end point to simulate climbing. This climbing is inexorable, which means that if you approach it from an unexpected angle sometimes you an phys-gib yourself against a railing or the game will drop you early because of unexpected resistance and you'll die from falling damage. Up top, we meet some new friends.    Rapax will become increasingly common towards the endgame. They're tough sons of bitches whose warriors often Berserk with their weapons for extra damage, and later encounters will also include Rapax warlocks and priests that can gently caress us up with wizzardry.  Not too scary when reduced to target practice, though.  And they've got random low-level spellbooks in their drop tables, which is also an awesome reason to chunk as many of them as possible. They help fill out holes in the party's low-level spell selection.  They also drop the occasional low-grade elemental resistance item.  It's a smaller area than it seems, when you get right down to it. It's really just a path leading west to east and, in the big black blob in the center, one of the central boughs of Trynton hosting the way up.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BigiOkqHtNI Chief Gary gives us an excuse to walk into his town, steal everything not nailed down and kill everything that looks at us funny. Seems like a good deal to me.    Trynton proper is a mixture of inside-trees and inside-buildings cramped areas, and open outdoors areas along walkways. Said outdoors areas are less open than they seem, of course, because you can't really walk off the walkways(or rather, you can, but it's a pretty bad idea, though possible to survive if you have one or more Valkyries in the party). It's also absolutely INFESTED with vermin of various types, so it took me like a solid 30 minutes of mulching man-eating plants and giant roaches just to get off the Trynnies' front porch and climb up the inside of one of their big trees.    This is Trynton, and also what most of the rest of the update is going to look like.  Little platform on the left hosts a fountain that restores MP.  Oh and sometimes it curses you.  Being cursed is pretty bad. Does no damage but does mean you can't really do anything. Good thing curses can be slept/walked off just like being insane, tied up, knocked out, blinded or poisoned. Not being sick, though. Being sick is different.   The other way winds around the tree.    I guess they did say Marten hid out among the Trynnies and was their friend. Nice to see some actual signs(literally) of it rather than it just being mentioned by NPC's, though.    A simple elevator takes us a level up into the second part of Trynton.   And brings us face to face with the greatest danger in Trynton... the goddamn guards. Not because they'll attack you but because on the narrow walkways a patrol of them will often block your way, even worse so if two of them are moving along in opposite directions. I'll also note that multiple encounters with giant wasps, spiders, plants and bats have been cut out during these screenshots, because the fights mostly involves Werdna shredding them with fireballs while Chewbecka bathes in their blood/sap/ichor.  But there ARE encounters here that make me nervous. See that glitter on the left side of the screen?  Sprites are glass cannons. All of them are spellcasters and very fragile, so if you get the drop on them, they're mincemeat, but the other way around they can screw you up, too, as they usually come in swarms of 5 to 14 or some such and all of them are spellcasters, capable of both blasting you and buffing each other, something we've not seen much of yet. In particular I've been wrecked multiple times in the past by their casting Eye For An Eye(hits attackers for as much damage as they do) a step faster than my own squishy casters manage to cast their offensive spells. None of that this time around.   I think this fountain next to the entrance accepts multiple answers, but I know it accepts Mind, and the reward is a permanent +5 Intelligence across the entire party. Not bad at all. This also breaks Werdna into the Power Cast skill which has unspecified spell-boosting effects and a vague ability to blow through enemies' elemental resistances. I tried to find out whether anyone had anything interesting to say about how effective it was and started drowning in a morass of pretentious maths and inscrutable shorthand on various forums. Mostly what I learned was that apparently certain status ailments are tied to certain elements, so if you have something that paralyzes(eg. a weapon with that effect) without being the Water-realm Paralyze spell or similar, it still checks Water resistance for whether it sticks. Also apparently the game runs on some kind of pseudo D20-system as there's always a 1-in-20 chance(5%) for resistances to fail. Anyway, I initiate combat out of sight of the fairies multiple times to move from cover to cover until I'm in striking range.   The fairies are, of course, buck naked and while it's very pixelly I think it may count as NSFW.  I luck out on initiative and blast most of them with a fireball from Werdna, while the archers snipe sufficient amounts of the rest that the worst they manage to do is put a few party members to sleep.  If you don't know Trynton ahead of time, it's entirely possible you'll spend a lot of time trekking back and forth pointlessly. I have excised the bit where I hosed up something extremely simple and had to spend an hour shoving my way past idiot Trynnie patrols and angry wildlife to get back and fix it. But I'll point it out when it happens, so you can laugh at me.  You don't want these big obvious flower petals. No, what you want is to yank down the vines hanging in between them(and also to loot the stuffed dragon head on the far side, someone's shoved a bunch of potions in it). Why? Because you can then braid those vines into a rope so you can access the last part of Trynton, you fool. Thus we acquire one of the many incidental items that will let us "complete" Trynton.   We're about to buy another couple of them from an NPC.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4W93AurxYo Fuzzfas here doesn't sell a lot of important things, but he does sell the goddamn Mystery Potion which he even mentions in the dialogue above and which I completely miss when I'm scrounging through his inventory for anything useful like dangerous ammo for my archers(there are very few upgrades to actual bows and crossbows, so most of your ranged attack bonuses will come in the form of even more war crime-y ammunition) and incense. It's funny that I remember the incense, because every time I play my brain is like "NO, GET THE INCENSE, IT'S IMPORTANT" when it is in fact pretty irrelevant to grab.  It's even right next to the incense in his shop inventory!  Most of the homes in Trynton are relatively empty and not worth raiding, but I do so anyway because adventurers use every part of the loot. It's part of their culture.  The paths crossing over each other is also a nice touch, it helps make Trynton feel bigger than it actually is. In terms of actual traversible area, I'm sure it's smaller than Arnika.    Usually if there's a pre-placed Bad poo poo encounter, the game is kind enough to hint at it with, say, giant blood splotches or something similar.  It looks like fat giant spiders ate the family inside this home. The broken ceiling is a nice touch, implying that's how the spiders got in. Oddly enough the room with the spiders in it has no loot, though the spiders themselves drop spider silk which either Antone or his brother will want, I forget which.   Trynton also has a zoo! With a whole three exhibits!  There's a loving Hogar, how did theses little assholes get it up here?! Also a cage full of crocodiles. SAME QUESTION. And they also locked a bunch of sprites, which are POTENTIALLY sapient beings in a cage to watch them flutter around for fun. Man, the Trynnie are kind of dark. Anyway, we want to kill the sprites.  Because their cage has fairy dust.  Which we mix with the rotten meat from the rotten meat vending machine(???????), to produce drugged meat, which we drop in the Hogar's feeding trough.  It's hard to see but this puts the Hogar to sleep. UNFORTUNATELY a bunch of wandering assholes attacked at this very moment, burning off a lot of duration on the Hogar naptime.   So as soon as I open the cage, the sleep wears off and Bobo attacks me. Hmmm. Bobo? I'm sure we've heard that name before.   Turns out it was the goddamn Trynnnie who stole the component from the Arnika spaceport necessary for their astrogation systems to work.   If they weren't pre-placed, these willows would be real dangerous. As we experienced from trying to ice Burz, they can blow up the entire party with Whipping Rocks or single members with Crush once they have sufficient levels. Thankfully their comparatively low level means they get fireballed like so many others. Considering how many problems I solve with fireball, I'm starting to think Werdna should've been named Black Mage instead.  'course it helps that Saxx hits them all with Insanity and they spend half their turns babbling and foaming or whacking each other with sticks rather than blasting me with spells.   Once they're done, we get to poke our heads into the temple. Again, a building for just one quest item, though this time instead of vines we've got us some flower petals that are gonna get us high as kites.   Back outside to raid an otherwise normal-looking house for another quest item.   A magic marble for us to put our faith in.  Also it opens this door.     Supposedly this square is now a safe place to rest, which I imagine means that resting there cranks monster spawns down to 0 for the rest period. The party takes a nap and I explore the three rooms branching off from the central square.   First branch, these three assholes. With some parties I've bounced off them multiple times like a chump, but these raw badasses just freeze them in place while Chewbecka practices her lumberjackery. Then we loot what looks like a Trynnie forge/armory. It's got a total of four chests.  Two of them locked inside this neat safe. But all we get aside from sellable junk is a spear upgrade for Lady. Which is still nice! I'm not complaining.    Second branch leads to a small structure where a pair of Trynnie scouts are holding off some Rapax who got up here somehow. There's a hole in the floor, so did they CLIMB up? Feisty fuckers.  They're only half the level of the Rapax I already iced on the ground and so they go down easy peasy. I decide to check how the Trynnie scouts are dealing with it.   Looks like they're good! Then I lean over them and yoink their holy book.  Hmmmm, yes, could mean anything.     Third branching contains The Seventh Bough. I prepare for a vision quest and then realize I forgot to buy the Mystery Potion from Fuzzfas. I haul my way back to his store cursing all the way and then back here again.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWbaBvMspQ Showing that he really is wise, the Shaman tells us to do what we were going to do anyway: go new places, see new things, pack them up and bring them with us(possibly after killing the owners if they object). With that done, there are only two paths left in main Trynton to explore.      Up one path we find... a lab? Huh. It gets looted, of course, everything in here will be part of some exciting new doomsday device for Stony in an area or two. We're just about done collecting HALF of gadgets and getting to where we can start turning them into complete gadgets.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt93cXKX_gg So Madras... exists. He refuses to enter the two last areas of the game, but is otherwise surprisingly fearless for a Trynnie, and he's a Gadgeteer. One of his downsides, though, is that after you've dismissed him, if you want him back, you have to haul your rear end all the way up to the top of Trynton to do so, unless you waste a Portal location on it. Still, if you advance in the normal way and bring Vi but not Myles, he wouldn't necessarily be a bad recruit. Plus I enjoy his ideas for a Rapavac.    The last path is, of course, progress. Up the path, up the ladder, out the-   I end up needing to rest twice for this traffic clusterfuck to disperse enough for me to get through.   We can't do anything here yet, but it's where we'll need to go once we've gotten Marten's Idol, something which is a legitimate, unskippable main questy thing.   The other way...  Using the Gooda Vine Rope on it fixes it so you can cross it. It doesn't require a lot of intellect, but there also aren't a lot of quest item uses for the "combine item" command, it's mostly only used for gadgeteer item construction, so I could see how it would be possible to miss that it's an option at all.    And here's the last third of Trynton. We've got a couple of important things to do here. First, check out the local decor.    It's minor, but just adding some red and green splashes to the generic Trynnie home textures helps make the whole area feel a lot more run-down, abandoned and decayed than the rest of Trynton.  We'll also want to activate this shortcut to ground-level Trynton.    You can actually see this platform from ground level, but not activate the rope. This'll save us a hell of a lot of walking later.  Heading back up and time to be blind as a bat.   Hmmmmm, how do I get down from here without damage? Oh well guess I gotta just eat that falling damage! Pay no attention to the rope at the edge of my vision!   Of course the moment I'm down and nursing several snapped ankles, I instantly notice the rope.   As soon as you get down there's a small locked building on your right. Don't forget this place exists!   The party is, sadly, too attached to each other to just make Twinkles pop through the bars and grab that chest on the far side. As we will eventually learn: this is actually a good thing.   I leave off a bit of exploring because what I do with that exploring is dependent on choices made shortly, and we'll need to see the inside of this house to make those choices.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYt8rsrUw04 Milo is not an effective door guard.     He also doesn't care if you don't follow him and instead go rifle through the Rattkin treasury instead.  It contains a key and a few minor gear upgrades, mostly a new cloak and some new rings for boosting the characters that still have empty misc. slots. Then we turn around and actually follow Milo.    Probably we should listen to what this guy has to say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOQwPLb71sQ So it turns out the Dark Savant screwed over the mafia. I wonder who'll win in a fight of Darth Vader vs a bunch of literal criminal vermin.   While I ponder this, I try to break open the chest in the corner behind Milo and roll some of the worst traps possible, including...   It actually deletes poo poo out of your inventory! Now that's a scary trap. And then to make matters worse the contents are garbage.  CHOICES Rattus Rattus Do we do the job he so politely requested next time we're in Arnika? The Rattkin Do we destroy them like Madras and Chief Gari requested? Do we hold off and destroy them later when they've gotten the Astral Dominae for us? Or do we choose to spare them and instead let them take over Trynton as their new home? Keep in mind, Don Barleone is the only, and 100% guaranteed, drop of the special weapon only usable by Faerie Ninjas, the CANE OF CORPUS. Next Update Either way, the next update will take us into the swamps and T'rang territory.  From the Swamp we can go north to Bayjin, which we know nothing about. Northeast to the Mine Tunnels, which we also know nothing about. Or east to Marten's Bluff, where we know the T'rang have set up shop.
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Aug 12, 2020 23:57
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Zurai posted:Demonsting deals double damage to demons, not +10%. Whoops, my bad, got it mixed up with the generic +10% damage that longbows get. Zurai posted:Baron Englund is a reference to Lord British aka Richard Garriott, the guy who made Ultima. loving gets everywhere, doesn't he? Zurai posted:The Rattkin Mob (ie the Don) isn't the same faction as the Common Rattkin (ie the Rattkin Breeders), so you can't gently caress yourself out of them stealing the Astral Dominae for you. Also if you can believe it, I always missed this because I never let any of the Rattkin live since my usual playthrough strat is: "even if it sequence breaks, complete any given area so much when I first arrive, that I will have no reason to return."
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Aug 13, 2020 08:37
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I normally never have an issue with killing the Rattkin but Milo's response to being asked about himself made me lol so now I feel slightly bad, even if he is a knee-breaking mafia hitman. Still, the vote seems to be going in favour of vermicide.
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Aug 13, 2020 11:53
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Xander77 posted:Do the patrols get involved in the fights? Can you use enemies to get rid of guard patrols? 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.
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Aug 13, 2020 20:16
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Zurai posted:EDIT: Oh, a really cool flavor touch in Trynton. If you pay attention to the area outside the bounds of where you can walk, you will sometimes see GIGANTIC bats flying around (like, King Kong-sized bats). They will never aggro on you because there are invisible walls preventing them from reaching you, and either of you from attacking the other, so they exist purely so you can see one and go "Oh poo poo I hope I never have to fight that!" Ah, see, funny thing about that. You can ABSOLUTELY fight them. Usually it doesn't happen on your first visit, but on your second visit one of them will almost always approach close enough to get into a fight with you, and you actually want that, since they drop a crafting bit that Antone's brother will later want.
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Aug 13, 2020 20:29
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There's apparently a single spot where you can aggro it along the rope bridges near where you're meant to bring Marten's Idol, according to the internet, which would track with me always fighting them on the second visit as I head over there with the idol.
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Aug 13, 2020 20:43
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Part 006: The T'rang(and other new friends) We resume outside the Don's office. The general vote seems to be to at least let the Rattkin live for now, so we can get the final chunk of their dialogue, and then beat them up on the return visit when they (hopefully) furnish us with the Astral Dominae just to spite the Dark Savant. However, some nice folks did remind me that we can go chunk their Rattkin Breeders without pissing off the Don, so let's get that sorted.      Not picture: Me having to fend off like 500 giant bats and wasps because something is up with the spawn rates in the Rattkin Tree, and even resting inside a building they tend to come for your rear end. It feels like they've got the same spawn numbers as all of Trynton compressed into an area that's a quarter of the size so you can't take a leak without tripping over a plant that wants to eat your brain. On the bright side, the narrow environs meant that most of them were resolved with mass applications of Fireball and Saxx's Siren Wail making them all go insane and start stinging each other.  Around this point I also get the smart idea of upgrading Chewbecka's Wakizashi to the Poison Dagger I stole from the Rattkin.  It is an upgrade(check the stat change in the upper right between the screenshots), but now she's got a cursed weapon in each hand. Better hope I learn Remove Curse before I find an upgrade for her, though I suspect it likely that I will never upgrade her away from the Bloodlust Sword, at least not for several more updates.  [about five random battles later] Let's open this door and see what these Rattkin Breeders are all about.    Hm. Well that could be trouble. Oddly enough, there are less archers present than usual. I could swear every other time I've done this encounter, there have been two squads of them in there.  Bad news: they shrug off all my save-or-suck spells and almost-kill a PC and a half in one round. I can heal them back to functionality, but the breeders get at least one attack before Aurora or Lady can get in a heal, so it's very much down to whether they choose to focus on the same character or not. Thankfully, while enemies will often focus on the same character in a given round, they'll usually forget who they were focusing on between rounds. Usually.  I manage to heal Lady up... just in time for her to eat the almost exact same amount of damage again.  They spread the damage around, but I'm slowly wearing down the first breeder and it's thankfully large enough to block the doorway so the second breeder and the archers can't join in.  Just as the first Breeder goes down, Saxx also gets lucky and manages to turn both the Breeder AND all the archers insane.  And the RNG is merciful. The remaining rounds, the Breeder "babbles and foams" rather than attacking anyone, and all the archers just infight.  Once the fight is over, the main reward, aside from the XP and skill-ups, is that the Breeders drop spear upgrades for both Vi and Lady. The Burning Spears are a modest upgrade in terms of power/hitting ability, but come with a respectable +15 Polearm skill which helps them punch above their weight and would also make them good weapons for helping someone transition into the polearm skill, perhaps after a Valkyrie class change or something similar. Anyway, time to get the hell out of this bug-covered hellhole. Once again I'm cutting out like three or four fights on the 20-meter walk to the elevator down.  At least I don't have to go all the way back through Trynton for this. Wizardry 8 is generally good about leaving long, linear areas with "shortcuts" at the end to help you transition back out.   A pre-placed Swallower guards the transition between Trynton and the Swamp. It's a trivial challenge at this point, I had kind of hoped it would manage to Swallow someone so I could show it off, but it doesn't even manage that before getting reduced to chunky salsa.    Welcome to the Swamp. It's brown, perpetually rainy, sightlines are blocked by trees and it's full of swarms of wandering beasties. There are also cracks in the ground, even on the paths, you need to dodge, because if you step on them they release Swamp Gas which nauseates/KO's in addition to doing minor damage. The paths are intentionally winding and any time I follow them I always end up going in circles, so generally what you want to do is pop up the map and travel purely via your compass or simply hug the edges of the map. This may make the Swamp sound miserable, but honestly it's not really. It just means it's an area that demands your attention when traversing it.   As usual, the supporting cast has some commentary on the state of things.   Just heading down the road when I spot a sign in the bushes. Lemme just walk over and have a look at that.  What it says is gently caress you. See, right there in front of it? That's one of the aforementioned swamp gas cracks, so you WILL be focused on the sign and walk right over it to read it. What does the sign say? "Beware of swamp gas." It's not like an instakill trap or something, but if you're entering the swamp from the most likely direction this WILL get you. It definitely got me. But as we approach... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtmVYjGDVbs THE DARK SAVANT Who teleports in just to yell at us and throw a fake copy of the Astral Dominae at our feet in petulant anger before vanishing again. We yoink that thing off the ground because I have plans for it. Or rather, a plan for it. Chewbecka is not impressed by him. She seems to be stealing a lot of the randomized voice lines. Mind you, I've been looking for a text dump so I can share some of the alternate lines for these things... but with no luck so far. If anyone wants to help out with that, it would be appreciated. Alternately, if someone's familiar enough with the Cosmic Forge to use it to pry the lines out, I would appreciate help with that, too. Because there's a lot in here, even the RPC's tend to have their own comments for all these things if they're areas they're supposed to be able to enter(if not, and the game randomly rolls them as the one to comment, they just bring out their general "I wish I was at home"-bark. I had this happen once on beating the game, where instead of a triumphant comment from one of my PC's, a complaining RPC literally mumbled about wishing he'd stayed home as the party ascended to godlike power).  As soon as the Dark Savant's gone and we've grabbed his dropped marble, a bunch of ants march up on me from the right.  They look weak so I laugh, pull up my sleeves and get ready for a fight.  And after one fireball the battlefield is pretty much cleared except for the big dark Ant Queen at the back. Expecting that she'll be a pushover like the rest I wade into melee so Chewbecka et al can really lay down the hurting.  The first hint that I may be underestimating the queen is when her spit attack has an insanity-causing effect that nails Vi.  Of course that's still preferable to her melee bullshit because it drains. Now let me tell you about the "gently caress you" called Draining. It's probably the rarest status effect, generally only some variants of giant mosquito and vampire bat will bring it, oh and this arthropod rear end in a top hat, too, apparently. What it does is that it drains HP, but not in the sense that it does damage and then heals the drainer. No, it drains HP by literally permanently lowering your max HP. And there's no cure spell for it. Resting doesn't remove it. The only thing that'll deal with it are rare, costly potions called Renewal potions. In this fight, Lady and Aurora lose about 10% and 20% of their max HP, respectively. Thankfully I have two Renewal potions lying around, but holy poo poo I suddenly have a lot more respect for Ant Queens and will not be attempting to melee one in the future.  After that fight the party needs a rest thanks to the ant queen, so I head north. Generally resting on the paths or anywhere near the middle of the map is ill-advised and difficult to do since you'll be napping in the middle of patrol routes and, without anything to put your back against, will almost certainly wake up surrounded and with your casters already half dead. The northern third or quarter or so of the map is separated from the rest by an east/west river with a single crossing point. I want to cross that river, but not right away since there are some real nasty things over there closer to the Bayjin transition point.   For now, though, I just follow the river east since it more-or-less leads where I want to go.  Along the way I underestimate some crocs who eat Vi and Saxx. Normally I'd reload, but in the interest of not presenting a super-perfect playthrough I've decided to actively suck up more tough wins and just rez whoever goes down. The only reloads are if the party actually gets completely mulched.    Along the way are more giant bugs and a glimpse of the bridge leading north, as well as a level-up for Stony that upgrades his Omnigun to its Mk. 6 variant which adds KO chances to the already-respectable blinding chance.     Eventually, though, I find the one friendly, or, well "friendly" resident of the swamp. Living in a worn-down house surrounded by blue flowers.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUIbuPbROps What a nice old man, by which I mean holy poo poo he's like what, over a hundred-something years old by his own admission and living in a swamp full of giant monster bugs. Lots of exposition from him, and he's a worthwhile merchant to visit, too. He shops a nice couple of gear upgrades for bards, and besides that some gadgeteer-related stuff and we definitely want to pick up his Perfume. If a merchant has a unique item, you want to grab that poo poo right away.  He's also got a sling upgrade for Twinkles and a bow upgrade for Aurora(though Demonsting will certainly be brought back out again when we meet some demons).  Actual armor (ninja gear) for Twinkles, too, which helps his armor class considerably.  I also buy the perfume, of course, and a voltage amplifier and a large prism for Stony to play with. The voltage amplifier sees immediate use, being combined with the giant magnet from Madras' lab in Trynton.  Aside from Armorplate being a decent enough buff that it's certainly worth Stony erecting at all times, it also means he's got an out-of-combat buff to help train his Engineering up.  Also a shot of the map for context. The draining, fatalities and general terror have happened in just making a straight run across about 2/3rds of the map's width. There's plenty of terror yet to come as I set off to deal with the northern half of the Swamp, and by "deal with" I mean "poke around a bit and get killed by the locals and then reload and pretend it didn't happen."   Crossing the bridge presents you with the option of going east, which will gently caress you by leading to stuff you're not prepared for, and going west which can, if you're careful, be lucrative.   Going west eventually leads you to this depressing shoreline.   It looks like something crashed and washed ashore, which means there's a decent bit of loot washed up in the sand. Among them a spellbook, yet another magic ankh and...  Ammo for RAYGUNS. Sadly I think the only accessible powerpak weapons in the game have to be imported from Wizardry 7. So having reached the eastern end of the beach, I turn around and travel back south.    I hug the cliffs and eventually run into some ants. Shouldn't be too bad, I think, just gotta not melee their queen like a moron this time. Then about 30 seconds into round one...   There's a Rynjin outpost up there and they spotted me. Now let me show you what Rynjin do.    Every single Rynjin is comparable to a Monk. I.e. they're competent unarmed melee fighters who also have a byline in psionic magic which they will use to tear your brain a new rear end in a top hat. This was just round one.      Yeah, uh, that's about when I reload and decide to move back a bit farther west before heading south again, just so I don't attract those fuckers a second time. Goddamn.  The second attempt at getting back on track goes better, albeit with some big bugs that need a squishing.   The "crack in the ground you won't see until you step on it"-swamp gas sources mostly occur on the actual paths, oddly enough. Off the paths, the swamp gas is marked by big blackened spots that are much easier to see and avoid.    Most everything interesting in the area, though, is out at the edges, unless you really like large, rotting trees.      Down south is this hogar graveyard next to a big, bubbling tar pit. If you've got any spare empty bottles, which are occasionally left lying around the place, you can dip them in the tar pit to turn them into Cherry Bombs, a consumable item that stopped being useful roughly about when you left the Monastery. Still, it's a nice idea.    This little hidden-ish path leads up to a hollow log above the path leading to Marten's Bluff, it contains a fixed(and thus ez pz) encounter with a slime, a blue feather and a drum that casts Haste. It's not as insane as D&D Haste where it doubles all your actions, but considering that it's a simple-to-cast, all-party-buff, it's a solid piece of gear for a bard to have to consistently use on round one of a fight. I trek back and forth a bit, murdering wildlife and unloading some gear on Crock, before heading south to Marten's Bluff. Predictably, Saxx protests.   I'm extremely sad to be divested of Saxx for this next part, but I honestly wasn't sure if his presence would piss off the T'rang, so I let him go. Later on I'll have to slog back to Mt. Gigas and pick him up again.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQR-nfUUnk Welcome to scenic Marten's Bluff.    I rather liked the framing on this, one of the tower's of the Bluff being visible above the cliffs briefly before turning the corner and seeing the full thing, also the blue light sticks left around the place indicative of T'rang occupation.     I'm just crossing the small bridge over the moat to reach the front gate when suddenly I'm attacked by invisible alligators or, rather, MAULIGATORS, which is a rad as hell name. I hold for a walk to give them a chance to show up rather than exposing my back, queueing up all the buffs I can think of as I do so.   Taking out just one of them almost chewed up Vi after their shrugging off all the stuns I could think to throw at them. If they had come at me front on rather than needing to clamber out of the moat first, this encounter would have been a lot rougher.   As it is, things get spicy when the gators pincer-formation me, and I need to queue up some movement to get out of there. This, of course, also means they get first strike for the round which could VERY easily have reduced some party members to dogfood, or gatorfood, rather.   Once again, Stony's Omnigun comes to the rescue by whacking one of the gators first with a blind and then a KO, keeping it out of the fight during the pinchiest parts.  Now, you can attempt to go in through the front door, but there's no point. Just around the corner there's a barrier that can't be bypassed from this side. So let's take a walk around the fort and see what we can find. What's cut here is me running into a pack of Deathsting Apuses and needing to reload because, as their name implies, they have a chance to instakill party members on hit. loving bugs.    I take the "long" way around the bluff, because I could swear I remembered something being this way that could be missed, but it turns out I'm mistaken. There's just yet another entrance that cannot be accessed from the outside.     So I loop aaaaaaaaaaall the way around to almost the entrance where I find what I assume to be the remnants of the HLL's attempts to break in.  You can interact with the gear to "load" the catapult.   Then undo the latch holding the arm in place, so it slams forward, through its rotted-through crossbar and slams unto the battlements. Why would you want to do this, though?    Because that's the only way in (for now), the gate is locked so you need to use the catapult's arm as a sort of ladder/bridge up on to the walls and boom, you're in. Time to nose around.    The battlements don't really hold anything except two empty towers. The only purpose they serve is that they are, I suppose, safe places to rest. Resting outside the Bluff tends to get you ambushed by various enemies, not that I'd have learned this by getting ambushed five times in a row or anything. Oh no certainly not me a certified PRO GAMER.    Just inside the gate we used the catapult to bypass is a dead T'rang, poked to death by an arrow trap immediately opposite. I walked through it like three times and took no hits since, interestingly enough, the Missile Shield spell apparently also deflects out-of-combat projectiles.  At the corpse we can loot: 1 T'rang Arm, this is both the evidence that the Umpani want of T'rang presence as well as a very important tool for Marten's Bluff. A piece of paper with --O on it and a pair of wires that will be EXTREMELY important in an update or two depending on how things go, and obviously we can unbar that gate from the inside making entry through the side entrance slightly easier.     There's this big door we can't interact with (yet) and a courtyard on the opposite side of where we arrived that has basically nothing in it except the occasional monster spawn. However, in the middle, just behind the main gate...     So we got us five buttons in total. One to enable/disable an elevator in the central room. One to lock the doors in and out. One to forcibly open one of the doors even if locked. One to operate the giant pistons and one to...  ...drop a training dummy into the middle of the room? Hm.   Whatever, let's head down and see what sort of sinister villainous hive the T'rang have built beneath our very feet.     'sup, uh, my good spider slug fellas?   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4FTABt3WuQ So, maybe it's just me, but I like the T'rang more than the Umpani. The Umpani generally feel a bit aloof and patronizing, while the T'rang immediately invite you into the family and are overjoyed that you're joining them. Now let's celebrate this by rooting around their fortress and stealing anything they weren't smart enough to nail down.   The level-up from Z'ant's reward also gets Werdna two boosts. Firstly he levels up enough to make use of the Portal and Return spellbooks I found, which gives us a Lloyd's Beacon-esque functionality, and secondly he gets Freeze All as a level-up spell, allowing him to attempt to paralyze every enemy on the battlefield at once.    So any of these doors requiring a T'rang handprint can only be opened with our looted, severed T'rang arm. Anything else just electrocutes the party!      The tunnels are occasionally patrolled by T'rang Watchers and their higher-ranking cousins, but generally the place is calm and safe, though the T'rang haven't done anything about removing Marten's old traps and puzzles when they aren't immediately in their way.    Okay so the answer is obviously Marten, but I wanted to go check out another NPC and a storage room first.   The T'rang slime trails are safe to touch, but do have slight ice physics to them, so there may be a location or two where you want to watch out.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86VWzBZ30VQ Sadok is a bit icier than Z'ant, but he's still a friend, and also a merchant. He sells nothing unique, but he does sell spellbooks and in a corner of his lab is another Gadgeteer item.    Guardian Angel is a great spell, since it basically gives a character an ablative pool of HP that needs wearing away before they can get hurt. So for enemies that can hit sufficiently hard that even being fully healed won't do the job, it can give a character an extra lease on life, and it's also a good way to protect fragile caster characters if the enemy has ranged weapons, long pokey spears or hits-everyone attacks/spells.    Opposite Sadok's lab is a storage room containing some forgettable loot and this, which really is brilliant. It's a helm that ANYONE can equip, including mages and fairies, and which gives +20 Intelligence, and is thus excellent for equipping on mages and/or fairies. It goes on Werdna's head and it's unlikely he'll be unequipping it at any point for the rest of the game.   So, 14 ghosts that would be severely challenging to anyone beelining for the Trynton/Marten's Bluff questline connection. What happens if you mix those with a pair of maxed-out Fireballs from Werdna?  You get a nice clean corridor, is what.     There's a bit of, again, non-notable loot, some bookcases with a bit of fluff, and at the end of it, Marten's spartan bedroom. On the floor nearby is a single Ebon Gem for Antone, and then there's a diary.  ETERNAL TRUST SURVIVES THE SOUL is obviously a password we'll need to remember. If we don't, it can leave us with a decent bit of backtracking to do to learn it again at some point.   Opposite the branch of the T'rang base that has Sadok is this flow of harmless sludge.   It leads to a part of the base the T'rang do not want you poking around. I forget if they later give you better access, but I think they don't. Eventually all of Mt. Gigas becomes accessible to you as an Umpani soldier, but the T'rang keep a few places permanently off-limits, though I've read that there's dummied-out stuff giving you access to part of it so you can acquire a powerful, unique weapon in there for the end-game T'rang quests.  Anyway, time to head back up and deal with the dastardly Raven Rapax. I'm sure some of you may already see what's coming.   Splashing the perfume on the "Rapax doll" makes Raven spawn in somewhere around the same place we entered the map. Now we could just hike over there and beat him until candy comes out, but I have a funnier idea. First, we take a smoke break until he gets over here.   Then we slam the doors shut and make fun of him while he can't do anything about it.   But how to kill him. HMMMMM. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVK9t4JdWI    Somehow his head survives that experience un-smushed. Let's go back down and impress Z'ant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLccPObvq-0  Z'ant's reward gives us several level-ups and then he gives us our simplest quest yet: delivering a letter and robbing an embassy. Easy peasy work. Our next step will be to go back to the swamp and head into the Mine Tunnels. There are a couple of important things there I'd like to pick up. Once that's done, however, we have another choice: Destination Do we head back to Arnika via Trynton, chatting up the Rattkin about the Astral Dominae(shortly before staving in the Don's head, of course) and resolving anything else there that we get access to? OR Do we head back to Arnika the long way around, through the South East Wilderness(accessible from the Swamp) and the Mountain Wilderness, effectively finishing our loop around the world map?
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Aug 19, 2020 23:20
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Zurai posted:Croc's "Crawled outta the swamp, didja?" greeting is stuck in my brain. I know what fight you mean and I take that as a challenge. 
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Aug 20, 2020 01:18
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Straight White Shark posted: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 I mean I could also take that way via the Mine Tunnels, but I want to explore a few more areas if given the option, or get my drat cane of corpus.
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Aug 20, 2020 01:50
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Zurai posted:If you can beat that fight at this point, I'd love to see it. I usually have to come back closer to level 20, and even then it takes a couple reloads. It's generally considered the hardest fight in the game. Nailed it on the second try. Once I get the video chopped into screenshots, and get post up, prepare to be dazzled by my pro strats.
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Aug 21, 2020 20:21
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Update 007: Programmed To Kick rear end So the party wakes up in one of the towers of Marten's Bluff, having, among other things in their pockets, a fake Astral Dominae(indicating that the Rattkin have clearly ganked the real thing from the Dark Savant, hence his flipout) and a quest item from the T'rang that needs bringing to Arnika. But what's the fun in that? Let's have a detour.    So the Swamp has five exits, starting at north and going around clockwise they are: Bayjin, The Mine Tunnels, The Southeast Wilderness, Marten's Bluff and Trynton. As far as I'm aware no things in the game will ever directly point you to entering Bayjin from the Swamp or to entering the Mine Tunnels at all. In fact, you could beat the game entirely without entering Bayjin(assuming you're up for one of the less "perfect" endings to a major quest), but beating the game without entering the Mine Tunnels would be... rough. Technically I suppose it could be done if you're allied with the Umpani and are all in for spiderslug genocide and thus do not give a gently caress about pissing off the T'rang, but if you're friends with the T'rang you'll need to take this path or, as mentioned, abuse the combat-pauses-time mechanic to run past where NPC's would otherwise warn you to stay out.    Along the way Chewbecka eats a Drain from yet another giant ant queen. I can't wait to be done with this area.     One thing I generally appreciate about the area design of Wizardry 8 is that for the most part, each area flows into the next. Like you don't just warp from the Swamp into the middle of the Mine Tunnels. There's a short transitory period where things get less boggy and marshy and more greeny and cliffy.    On first arrival the Mine Tunnels are always deceptively peaceful.      And here we go. What I'll be fighting the rest of the time here. loving Tanto Wasps. They're not fundamentally tough to beat, the worst their stings can really bring is a bit of damage and the Sleep condition which is probably the least bad thing an enemy could inflict at this point, they just keep loving coming.  I clear out the first group but get turned around in the fighting to avoid getting pincered and having wasps reach my squishy backline, at which point even more wasps show up from my right flank and this time they brought friends.   Just look at all those drat red dots. I scatter the nearest Tanto wasps, partially by Stony managing to make them Afraid, and charge the Blooddrinkers and androids who are plinking at me from a distance.   While I chase the Blooddrinkers over to these huts and try to finish them off, Werdna spots someone potentially friendly in the distance, note the yellow dot on the radar.  Hmmm... looks like a Savant android. But those are always hostile, aren't they? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyhGCvIdtZw So we're off to a good start with RFS-81 here. He's programmed to be fanatically loyal to the Dark Savant, and he thinks we're the Dark Savant. He's also apparently programmed to attack and dethrone god, which is a further bonus and will feature well on his yearly performance report. Note that I somehow managed to initiate a dialogue with him just as combat started, never had that happen before and it made things a bit buggy. For instance, after the fight RFS-81 wasn't showing as part of the party formation at all, and I had to boot him and reinvite him before he did. I didn't want to enter a battle with that bug as I have no idea how it would interact with anything. Pros of RFS-81: Will go anywhere with us, has the laundry list of resistances that all Savant Androids do, punches like a truck. Tends to yell out "TERMINATOR MODE" before punching a boss to gibs. Cons of RFS-81: Even though Monks normally learn Psionics, RFS-81 will not as he literally lacks a brain.  He gets welcomed to the party with a punch party against a bunch of wasps, and once that's sorted and the slime cleaned off I bring him along. The main reason for this is that A) I have an empty slot anyway and B) RFS will, unlike any other RPC, stay where you leave him rather than returning to his "spawn," which means that if I bring him along, I don't have to haul my rear end back to the goddamn Mine Tunnels and collect him if the thread vote should remain in favour of keeping him once we get back to Mt. Gigas and Saxx.     The "base camp" for the Mine Tunnels contain a bit of mediocre loot, but as I'm collecting up the last of it, a couple of giant spiders spawn in and notice me. I wouldn't even have commented on it except that they try a novel strategy for engaging me.   One of them crawls into the level geometry to hide from me, which would probably be effective against archers, but RFS just reaches in and yanks its heart out like a Mortal Kombat fatality.   The way onwards is going up along that steep incline, but there's a reason to come into the little cleft below it first. Though you should be careful as that cleft sometimes spawns unicorns, and unicorns in Wizardry 8 are not noble and lovely creatures, instead they are huge assholes that you want to avoid at all costs.    There's a fixed-spawn Amulet of Healing down in the cleft, which is a nice find. Firstly it's an improvement over all the generic +1 AC misc. gear and secondly it has a mild HP regeneration effect which can also matter over longer fights, as well as saving you needing to waste MP on healing spells after fights.       The Mine Tunnels are, verticality excepted, probably the smallest area in the game, content-wise and size-wise. The odd part is also that no part of the game ever references it, as far as I'm aware. No one tells you that the Mine Tunnels have a back entrance to Lower Marten's Bluff, or that there are are a whole two recruitable PC's here.      I think getting this hint, like some others in the game, is down to a check against whether any of your characters have a sufficiently high Senses stat, or possibly it's a Scouting check for your ranger.    This sign isn't kidding, btw, if you step on the pressure plate the party gets insta-crushed. So let's not. Instead let's go back and poke the secret switch rock.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNSSBhkLX8I Meet Tantris, he's a T'rang Samurai. Like most recruitables in the game, he's not fundamentally bad, especially as Samurai is a decent class that you could usually always use another of, since they can use most swords(but are slightly restricted in armor compared to normal Fighters, Valkyries and Lords). Unfortunately, he starts at a very low level considering how in-the-boonies he is(level 6) and will not go with you to the final area of the game. We've already met the three RPC's that will: Saxx, Vi and RFS. It feels like an oversight, frankly, that you have an Umpani RPC to bring into the endgame but not a T'rang RPC to bring into the endgame.   The outpost doesn't contain anything other than Tantris(and a slight clue to another puzzle about a minute down the road which you can brute force in like a second once you figure out the logic, anyway), so it's time to head for the exit. Thankfully the outpost has a second one that takes us out through the laser grid and on the other side of the Crush You Flat-plate.   By the way, much like in Trynton, assume I'm cutting out a fight with another dozen Tanto Wasps between every lump of screenshots. In hindsight, the Mine Tunnels may actually be a decent place for grinding as the Tanto Wasps give out a lot more XP than they're worth in terms of the danger they present. I guess if you got hit by like 20 of them or something they'd be scarier since they could envelop you and sting your squishy back line if you were in the open, but they never really manage to threaten me, just to function as a roadbump.    There are a couple of mysterious, unopenable doors around the place, which will cease to be mysterious AND unopenable shortly.  I also assume this giant boulder, balanced cartoon-like by a single stick, is what falls on you if you step on that DO NOT ENTER T'rang floor plate. The lyre in the other screenshot, by the way, causes Silencing, a status ailment I've never made use of for two simple reasons. Firstly, if you're fighting enemy mages they're usually pretty squishy and just damage rushing them down tends to be more effective. Secondly, being paralyzed, webbed, blinded, turned insane, KO'd, put to sleep, afraid, nauseated, etc. works just as well on casters as it does on enemy physical attackers, keeps them from casting spells just as well as Silence and gives those sweet, sweet 2x damage bonuses if you stick the right status effects. So there are just almost always better options unless you have no Wizardry casters along but do have a Bard along.     This little shack is the last bit of the road, past that there's just a cliff where you can look down into the picturesque Swamp and smell the festering cholera and tropical diseases.     So the mine carts. You have this little setup where you can twist the dials to choose what path your cart will take. As long as you understand that you start in the upper left, it's easy to get to each of the four locations. Only one of them matter and actually has anything of interest in it, though, the bottom-most exit. So let's go for a ride! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56Sw-fuVGGo For whatever reason the camera is stuck at an angle while riding the carts, which is a bit of a shame. Still, being able to ride a mine cart is a bonus to any game. Three of the four destinations lead to behind closed doors along the track and no real loot, just a couple of potions and stix, nothing I care about. The fourth one, however...    Doesn't loop back on to the main area of the Mine Tunnels.    This monstrosity is part of a future crafting recipe and is also INSANELY HEAVY. Even in the party inventory it nudges everyone's encumbrance up a notable bit and worsens everyone's AC and initiative. I haul it along anyway. It's a giant silver nugget, how am I meant to NOT haul it along.   As mentioned this tunnel takes us into the back of Marten's Bluff, behind the guard who yells at us not to proceed. Oddly enough, no one back here minds our presence, further confirming in my mind that said guard keeping us out even when we're part of the T'rang Empire is a bug and unintended.    The T'rang are actively patrolling, so there's little danger down here except for the occasional spawn of milipedes which are literal speedbumps of no danger. I'm not sure if anything much nastier can spawn here at high levels, since there's little-to-no reason to come down here again unless you want to genocide the T'rang.    The first room is this little cul de sac of small rooms around a pond of slime. All of the rooms are locked but effortlessly picked open by Stony. There are a few interesting things in the rooms:   Like a literal flamethrower.   And an electronic lockpick that helps you break into parts of the T'rang tunnels where you aren't meant to go. The only use I have for it is opening a shortcut back to the main hall a bit later.    This place. It's what's behind the little hatch Z'ant hides behind, so we can also come back here if we just want to say hi to him. If I remember right this console is used as part of the genocide-the-T'rang quest chain.   Aside from that, there's only one more area we're allowed to go. The T'rang yell at us if we go anywhere near their labs or the power station for the facility. Which is a shame, because the labs hold what's probably the best Monk weapon in the game, the Mindblast Rod, which dummied-out stuff says was also meant to be a reward for assisting the T'rang to the end of the kill-the-Umpani quest chain or the alliance quest chain. Aside from doing a solid amount of damage it's nearly guaranteed to KO, paralyze or tap out anyone who gets whanged by it. I've never had it legitimately because even on the runs where I don't go for the alliance ending I've always allied with the T'rang.     Anyone observant may well have noticed that there are plenty of parts of the above-ground Marten's Bluff we don't visit. It could be assumed this is simply because they're "solid" and don't actually contain interiors. The real reason is because the only way to reach them is to go into Lower Marten's Bluff and then come "up" into them. Aside from the quest-relevant reasons to come here, there's some extremely good loot, and good lute, too.   And the opposition is low.  Unless you get unlucky there's a total of one combat encounter against a few weak ghosts, and the traps are mostly of the "being annoying"-kind than the "actually hurting you"-kind. Though one of them is somewhat mean.   See this discoloured piece of ground you might well rush through to get to that sword? It drops you down into the moat outside Marten's Bluff. This means that if you didn't open the shortcut back to the main hall next to the Mothership Console, using the Pulse Pick which it may not have occurred to you to do since you might just assume it needed a key or was opened by a button elsewhere, and didn't set a Portal before approaching it, you would have to trek all the way back through the Swamp, and then the Mine Tunnels, and Lower Marten's Bluff. Oh and there's often a pack of Mauligators lurking below the trap door, too, so if you drop down facing the wrong way your mages become gator-chow. I would rate it an eight out of ten on the scale of "evil traps." Especially because the sword isn't even very good! It's just barely better than a Fighter's starting Longsword.   What's better is this Gadgeteer ingredient lurking in the corner, which we combine with our Porthole from the Arnika harbor to make...  Silly as it is, giving your Gadgeteer an AoE attack spell helps up his usefulness against groups considerably, and the chance of Nauseating or straight up KO'ing enemies also ends up evening the playing field in some fights.   I just could not manage to grab any screenshots of this thing actually firing any arrows. But trust me when I say the mouths fire arrows that do extremely limited damage and are deflected by Missile Shield 80% of the time anyway. Not very threatening. Aside from the gadgets, instruments and other loot, however, we are here for two primary reasons. Firstly:  Pulling this lever. There's a big rumble in the background when it's pulled but it does nothing obvious. We shall see what it does shortly.   Then we're back into the Lower Bluff again for the second part.    This, by the way, is what's behind the first door the T'rang wouldn't let us through. If we had snuck past that guy we could have bypassed a hell of a lot of travelling.  On the other side of the hallway...   Is a goddamn teleporter. It's broken when you arrive, randomly flickering between four locations, but the two wires we snagged off the dead T'rang up top will let us fix it. Let's see where it leads:  Umpani base camp...  Mystery House outside Arnika...  A place we haven't been yet but it sure looks spooky...  Just outside Marten's Bluff...  So obviously I plop down a Set Portal spell here right away and it's unlikely I'll be moving it any time for the remainder of the game. There's really no better place to place one as it can save you a silly amount of travel in the long run. And then we hop the portal to the Mystery House real briefly. It's also worth noting that without Set/Return Portal this place is a lot less fun since only the Mystery House has a teleporter to take you back, the other trips are one-way.    We can now open the door from the inside so this location also serves as a fast travel beacon to Arnika. Aside from that there's a gadgeteer ingredient and another instrument in here. The ingredient is a Strobe Light, combined with an Oscillator we found in Lower Marten's Bluff...  He can't use it yet, but heck yeah. As for the instrument...  Holy poo poo! This is part of why Bards are so loving rad. It's an attempt to paralyze literally every enemy in sight. Even if most of them will likely resist it, it's the sort of thing that can really turn battles around. Anyway, back to the Bluff for the last bit of fun...    At the far end of the corridor is the lever to open that hatch we saw behind the Bluff a while back. Time to pop that and loop back inside the fort for a surprise.   It turns out that the lever we pulled in the first part of Lower Marten's Bluff actually opened the big door here and finally let us into the last area of it that we hadn't been in yet.   There are two ramps up. One leads to nothing interesting(a single giant bug, some potions and a mandolin that casts Magic Screen), while the other one...  Why, that looks like an idol! And it's somewhere related to Marten! Could it be... Marten's Idol?! Let's snag that bad boy and head back to Trynton for the Astral Dominae and our reward from the squirrels.   Son of a bitch! Someone knocked us out and stole our Gadgeteer! The fucker! Let's look around for clues and by clues I mean only and obvious clue.  We got outwitted and owned by a 100+ year old swamp hillbilly. If you'll remember, Crock has a bunch of blue flowers growing around his house in the Swamp. Time to go shake him until answers come out.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXXWz0P6m8o So this old rear end in a top hat has apparently had this trap primed for a hundred years or something just to catch him a city slicker. At least he's bright enough not to try and pick a fight with a half-dozen heavily armed kleptomaniacs.  At least it's a short-ish trip. Crock's house is just west of the magnifying glass and Brekek's lair is the big pool just north of it north of the river. Still, this being the swamp, it's perfectly possible to run into a couple of nasty encounters just in that short trip.   loving Nightmares. Their name is appropriate as they are probably the worst enemy to encounter. I make the genius decision to charge them rather than waste time buffing up, casting Soul Shield would probably have been smart, though.  See, in addition to being competent mages that as far as I can tell are mostly loaded with Psionic spells, Nightmares also have the ability to "Rear" a full-party attack spell that seems to just have a chance of slapping every "mental" condition on someone. In particular it's one of the rare few places you'll likely see Turncoat, the one that's been applied to RFS. Now, Insane party members may occasionally infight rather than just losing a turn. And Blind party members who don't stumble may occasionally mistarget. But Turncoated party members intentionally target allies and never "just" lose turns. I take a guess that it probably has a low duration and decide to Walk for the next turn. When you Walk, party members who are too slow lose their turn, and if you Walk your entire allotment, none of them get a turn. So in this case I'm using it to wait out the Turncoat rather than having RFS pull Werdna or Stony's skulls out through their assholes. Of course, it's a gamble because if the Nightmares use their Rear again, they might just Turncoat someone else, like there's a good chance Chewbecka could kill two party members a round if it was her.  By the time I get up close, it's Vi and Aurora that have been turncoated instead, but the rest of the party turn the Nightmares to glue before it gets any worse and get back on the road to Brekek's lair.   Brekek is thankfully a non-threat with no real dangerous attacks beyond being able to potentially Swallow(he can also give the party some nasty poisoning doing upwards of 20-something damage her turn. But as it's only single target it's not hard to heal/cure through). I feel like this may have been intentional as the devs knew the party would be down some power prior to facing him. Coincidentally, if you try to do a one-character run, grabbing the idol is an instant loss since you suddenly have no active characters at all, and the only solution is to bulk up the party with RPC's beforehand. Or at least so various guides claimed. Turns out, because I just tested it, that if you go stab Crock in the brain before you grab the idol, the party still blacks out but no one ends up KO'd and there are no blue flowers on the ground. I hadn't actually expected the game to account for that degree of sociopathy, but guess it does!   Son of a bitch, we did all that just to get that old rear end in a top hat lunch, didn't we? Well, let's get back to Crock... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9jhxZj2Z80 Well, at least we've got Stony back, now to get out of this swam-   The funny thing is that on a normal run I end up with someone getting hit by Drain maybe once, maybe two of my characters at worst. This one? I've just been getting hosed by it endlessly compared to normal. I didn't even know that ant queens and flesheater slimes COULD hit you with it, but I guess they can!    Tour Guide RFS points out the many local animals that might try to disembowel us, and now the ones in the treetops are being joined by Rattkin angry that we killed their breeders. They're mostly not a threat in the numbers they arrive in, especially not with the geometry of Trynton to keep them hemmed in and prevented from really bringing their numbers to bear. If they had some mages in their number, they might get scary, though, since while bodies block arrows, they do not block fireballs.    Let's go see the Don. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImX06dgQBWA  So, we can just buy it through his trade interface but he wants almost a hundred grand for it, which is absurd. So instead I'm going to pay him in stab dollars.   Tons of HP, slippery as a snake, practically magic immune... usually it takes me ten or more tries before I luck out and paralyze him or something similar so I actually have a chance at taking him down. This time...  This is what the first round looks like, the party whiffing literally everything that they can. Then round two rolls around.   Normally the Don guts half my party but in this case he manages to wing Twinkles and then RFS tears out his spine and poses with it dramatically before resuming the fight. Good robot, best friend. Then there's just Milo to deal with, he's nowhere near as scary, though... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5RF734weJs The fight does contain a bit of comic relief before we eventually make him explode like a blood sausage.  Now to loot the corpses.    In addition to the CANE OF CORPUS, the Don of course also has the Astral Dominae, some random loot, and he and Milo always drop Thief Daggers, which are pretty nice weapons only usable by, predictably, thieves. Now the Cane, though... in aside to being a one-handed weapon with great base damage(I give Twinkles a pair of nunchucks for his off hand a bit later), it also has a considerable chance to instakill(15% chance to make the attempt), will always attempt to poison and will attempt to paralyze on every second hit. It's lovely and makes Twinkles a real terror of the skies. Now let's get this idol back in place.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3xczcKEhNs It's worth noting that it also accepts partial input for things like this, stuff like "eternal" or "eternal trust" will do. Also how the hell does the Shaman get out to go to the bathroom or go grocery shopping. Is he stuck in there with those two guards until someone comes along with an ancient idol? Anyway, his key opens a door back in the Rattkin bough...   The place has obviously been looted by the Rattkin and we also had to mulch a couple after opening the door, making you wonder if we couldn't just have paid them to pick the lock rather than going on that quest.   See, the Shaman's key doesn't actually open the door down below where the actual item is. Instead it opens the door up above, allowing you to drop down through a hole in the floor to get to the Helm of Serenity. Was it always planned like this? loving Trynnies.    The helm has the advantage of being equippable by anyone, so it's usually a good move to slap it on a class otherwise starved for good headwear, or a faerie, or both. It goes on Twinkles, in this case. Between it and the Cane(which provides 50% Divine resistance) he is now able to shrug off most of the really bullshit things the game can throw at him, like insanities and instant death.  Yeah, let's get out of here.    I think this is just a coincidental spawn, since I've never had an ambush like that on leaving the house of the helm before, but GODDAMN. As mentioned before the Rattkin can't really bring their numbers to bear, so it's a foregone conclusion that I'll win, but it still took me upwards of 20 real-time minutes to smash through them all. I stop by Madras and Chief Gari for comments, and Fussfaz for more Renewal potions, and then it's time to head for the Southeast Wilderness.    Oh and I kill the giant bat on the way. First try, though, Stony blinds it and it runs away and I need to wait for it to get close again. Goddammit Stony.     Welcome to scenic Southeast Wilderness. Home of such sights as "you will be reloading multiple times" and "hope your rear end in a top hat is ready for this loving it's gonna get."    If you piss off a "faction" sometimes they'll send out revenge squads to poo poo-talk you and attack you. They're usually not very scary. I know the Rattkin and Savant androids will do this, and I suspect the Umpani and T'rang also will if you ally with only one of them. But I'm not sure if other factions you're unlikely to be hostile to, like the Trynnie and Higardi, will do the same.      So the Southeastern Wilderness is a not-very-open area, basically a circle of paths connecting to the Swamp, the Mountain Wilderness and the Wilderness Clearing. The latter is a small hollow in the mountains where I got repeatedly owned by high-level fairies until I managed to sneak close enough to them to ambush them(thanks to X-Ray letting me see them on the radar so I could plot the perfect moment to make my move). It's completely irrelevant(so far) except for having more unicorns for me to fight and a small cave with some CAVE LOOT. The SW Wilderness usually has nasty wander Mage spawns and one big set piece in the center that is, as mentioned, regarded as one of the biggest challenges in the game, if not THE biggest.  There are also some nice magic items scattered around the pagodas. Now, those mages.  Three-man squads, elementally themed, with a pet elemental of the appropriate type. As it's a pre-spawn you can't destroy it by killing its "owner," sadly. The mages are fragile, but, at least in the case of these assholes, keep spamming spells like Tsunami until the cumulative damage took out Werdna before I got them locked down.  Also some less dreary beaches than the Swamp. Before I went for the big set piece at the center, I went to the Wilderness Clearing to get my rear end kicked a bit to prepare.  This is what one turn of engaging the Wind Sprites from the wrong distance looks like. Ow.   On coming back, I get accosted by some androids and then promptly turn them into spare parts for RFS. They are persistently un-scary for the time being.  The poor render distance really negatively impacts views like this since half the time half the building is missing from view.   You climb a twisty path to give you a sense of foreboding on the way up.  Sometimes there aren't any randomly spawned guards out front and I keep expecting those statues to animate and attack me like they would in 90% of all games.      Thanks to having Chameleon up, the locals don't immediately go into combat mode but instead get suspicious and start advancing towards the front of the cathedral. There are six Cultists in groups of 3, mid-level casters that love Fireball and summoning elementals. Two Death Lords, a pair of real rear end-rippers with giant swords that love to cast Death Wish and Death Cloud. Don't you love having the entire party checking for instant death every round? And lastly there's the Sorceress Queen who tends to round out the team with a bunch of direct damage spells for the most part. I wait for them to get a bit closer to the entrance before striking. The first time I prioritize closing the distance over getting buffs up and don't queue them for the first round. This turns out to be a mistake.    This is ONE ROUND without Element Shield and Soul Shield up. Jesus. Let's try that again.    This is round three WITH those up. Hell of a difference even if one of the Death Lords tagged me with a Death Cloud that makes every party member save-or-die every round. Twinkles' Ring of Breezes also failed to clear it, whomp whomp. Werdna summoned an elemental for muscle, and I charge in to try and get some damage done in melee.   Not ideal, but I manage to kill the sorceress queen and then... I loving leg it. Woob woob woob!  Turning and running means I eat a couple of salvos with no response.  One Death Lord and group of Cultists give up the chase pretty early, but the other and his buddies keep coming. I do my best to break sight lines so they don't peg me in the back of the head with a Death Wish or a fireball.   Finally, halfway down the path they give up. I can now rest up, rez up, heal up and take out the survivors piecemeal. Pro strats, folks. Vi distrusts my strategic acumen. Then, I take a nap on the ground and...   I get awakened by unseen savant androids poo poo-talking me! I think they're in the valley below, it's the only thing that makes sense, but it's still pretty weird.  Also, smug as I am, the first corner I round, RFS and Stony both eat it from a Death Wish. Goddamn those big assholes can be nasty. Still, the rest of it goes smoothly. So let's check the place out.    There's also a basement crypt(it's guarded by mummies that go down without a fight. One of them has a special "Possess" attack that I've never seen him land on anyone, so I've no idea what it even does. I assume it's just a fancy Turncoat effect.).     Nice. So what's this earned me, aside from the awe and respect of my internet peers? Well, I'm able to construct a couple more gadgets...   Stony will definitely have the former in his active inventory for the rest of the game. The crypt had a full suit of magic plate for Lady and...  There's only one of these in the game and it will be on RFS 81 for the remainder. Unless you guys make me boot him, of course.   I also finally uncurse Chewbecka so she can wield the black blade Fang instead of the Bloodlust sword. Testing it out, it seems to do about as much damage at base as the Bloodlust did 2x, and not berserking should buff her defense and chances of hitting.    And with that, I've impressed everyone who knows what hell that encounter is and we've also almost circumnavigated the world of Dominus. Vote Time Once we get back to Mt. Gigas, should the future RPC's be... Vi and Saxx, Vi and RFS, Or Saxx and RFS? Technically we could also make a different setup but I would really hate not to have Saxx along and having multiple NPC's constantly moaning about getting their hair wet or visiting a volcano would be a real drag. My personal vote is with the latter since I need a bard more than I need Vi's limited divine casting abilities and RFS is less cowarly than Vi. Plus, c'mon, we get our very own Terminator!
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Aug 24, 2020 00:10
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