Wizardry Wizardry 8 - first time playing

[xuerebx]

The best party was my party - a bunch of inexperienced travelers who didn't know where the fuck they landed on, and what the fuck they should do, and yet managed to ascend to godhood and rule over the universe. :D

 

[jackofshadows]

Nuking casters are in dire need of power cast to be useful - another reason why faeries are great at that.

 

[DraQ]

Stupid build question:
Assuming there will be another gadgie in the party, is fae gadgie at all viable?
I was thinking of making one for the lulz, and offloading all the heavier gadgets to the other one.

 

[Shadenuat]

u realise every time u ask questions like this someone reinstals wiz8?

i mean I guess you could try going dex/spd but in terms of gadgets, won't low stamina kinda cap your abilities to use even low weight gadgets?

 

[Grauken]

Avoid any Mod that puts removed Wiz 7 spells in Wiz 8 - The Alchemist's poison type spells especially scale absurdly high in Wiz 8.

I never looked at Wiz 8 mods, anything worthwhile?

 

[Piotrovitz]

I never looked at Wiz 8 mods, anything worthwhile?

Sadly, beside Wiz enhanced there's nothing.

Christian Coder's mod is also decent, but it messes up spell schools, so there's no need for bishops, as pure casters have access to most of the necessary spells there.
It also revamps weapons/armors requirements and gimps some stuff a bit, which is nice - i.e bloodlust is now fgt/lor/val only AFAIK.

 

[Piotrovitz]

The problem with nuking casters is that enemies have absurd resistances on high difficulty (they're already rather absurd on normal tbf). When you combine that with big dmg ranges for many spells and the fact that they are unreliable to be cast on a high dice for a looong time then it becomes very meh. Pure casters still have high kill counts, because they are good at clearing chaff and glass cannons, which is of course useful in itself.

I think that DD spells are being a bit downplayed/underrated in Wiz 8

Sure as hell that CC is the king (as in majority of cRPGs) and it's always easier to incapacitate the shit out of the mobs and whack them with melees, but with AoE CC thrown at right mobs (iceball/blizzard at Rapax, fire stuff at Rynjin, whipping stones at wasps etc) you still can do a shitload of dmg in total.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Pure casters still have high kill counts, because they are good at clearing chaff and glass cannons, which is of course useful in itself.

You are right, but this cannot be underrated. Obviously your melee and ranged guys will make the major man-o-man damage, but ranged nuking is great help to thinning out huge swarms of low HP, but high damaging/disabling foes like wasps, faeries, bats, rats and other tiny, but dangerous creatures. Even a medium power whipping rocks can take out the whole squad of faeries on the first turn, which is huge relief. It also helps mopping up runaway foes and scattered ranged fucks without spending gazzilion turns and energy for running. Even better, when you find a good choke points, that allows casters slowly killing off huge swarms of enemies, while your tank is nibbling at one or two in front.

Assuming there will be another gadgie in the party, is fae gadgie at all viable?
I was thinking of making one for the lulz, and offloading all the heavier gadgets to the other one.

Only if you complement it with lizardman bishop.
But in serious, gadgets are ridiculously heavy so i don't see it as good idea. I usually buy my gadgeteer two rings of +20 St from Bella and get their total st all the way to max and they still are choking under heavy load, especially stamina wise. Faerie will die from exhaustion after two uses and will be huge ass pain in terms of constant encumbrance.

 

[coldcrow]

A party that's good for a part of the game if you meta is nowhere near being the best party in the game. Also, such setups have plenty of problems and inconvenience of their own. Best party would be something that has stealth, high (and consistent!) damage from start to finish (being good early game is more important for most people, anyway), is easy and quick to develop, does not largely rely on lucky rolls and is not marred by mundane shite like encumbrance or lack of spell points. From the top of my head, something like 3-4 rogues with bard+gadgie for buffs, cc, nuking, healing and all added ease of use (lockpicking, quick camping, identifying). You can probably add a staff monk to the mix, as I think it's the best mix of pure damage, disables and instakills in the game, has stealth and is easy to "complete" as a build (just beeline for SoD and voila).

What? While I can see your point in terms of the critical strike party, the pure caster party (with bard and gadg) rules the early game with their spells and later on the melee/throwing option becomes viable.

On the topic of lackluster spell damage: The high numbers a fighter shits out are impressive, but AoE spells deal the same numbers if you add them up. Not to mention being able to spam 4 elementals effortlessly.

 

[DraQ]

I think that DD spells are being a bit downplayed/underrated in Wiz 8

Sure as hell that CC is the king (as in majority of cRPGs) and it's always easier to incapacitate the shit out of the mobs and whack them with melees, but with AoE CC thrown at right mobs (iceball/blizzard at Rapax, fire stuff at Rynjin, whipping stones at wasps etc) you still can do a shitload of dmg in total.

Earth magic is sweet against androids. Both damage like whipping stones, disablers like web and multikill like quicksand.

Assuming there will be another gadgie in the party, is fae gadgie at all viable?
I was thinking of making one for the lulz, and offloading all the heavier gadgets to the other one.

Only if you complement it with lizardman bishop.
But in serious, gadgets are ridiculously heavy so i don't see it as good idea. I usually buy my gadgeteer two rings of +20 St from Bella and get their total st all the way to max and they still are choking under heavy load, especially stamina wise. Faerie will die from exhaustion after two uses and will be huge ass pain in terms of constant encumbrance.

That's my main worry so the question is how it will interact with having second gadgie to:

• Offload the heavier half of the gadgets onto - let the bulkier dude use stuff like negatair, watercannon or jackhammer, while faerie can still plsay with lava lamp or microwave blaster.
• Split the casting load.
• Divide ammo with according to ammo weight.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

What? While I can see your point in terms of the critical strike party, the pure caster party (with bard and gadg) rules the early game with their spells and later on the melee/throwing option becomes viable.

On the topic of lackluster spell damage: The high numbers a fighter shits out are impressive, but AoE spells deal the same numbers if you add them up. Not to mention being able to spam 4 elementals effortlessly.

I thought you meant pure casters, adding gadgie/bard to the mix changes quite a lot, but it's still a fairly minor point. A backstabbing bloodlust/stiletto rogue just outright deletes everything and that's talking damage only, then you have stuff like hp, ac, reliance on sp, leveling speed, etc. I've never actually run a party of exclusively pure casters so I concede that just spamming 6 aoe spells might be quite effective (if you're ok with powertraining and sleeping every minute), but running something like that still seems like a complete nightmare when you meet, for example, a group of high initiative aoe spamming faeries.

 

[Piotrovitz]

u realise every time u ask questions like this someone reinstals wiz8?

Confirmed - just got triggered myself, but need to resist the urge and finish my current IWD run first : |

 

[Darth Canoli]

Stupid build question:
Assuming there will be another gadgie in the party, is fae gadgie at all viable?
I was thinking of making one for the lulz, and offloading all the heavier gadgets to the other one.

With Dodd the Slayer mod, you get new craftable and upgradable armors, leggings and helms, plus new gloves and rings adding a lot (and i mean a LOT) of regen (mana, stamina and even health).
But you'll have to deal with uncapped level scaling. Meaning each time you pass a threshold (level 5X: 5, 10, 15, ...) you get the updated new versions of roaming monsters at threshold +5 until you reach the next one ...

Another way could be to use the cosmic forge to reduce gadget's weight, i did it for projectiles on my last run (0.1 for almost every fucking projectile, i missed some but it helped).

 

[DraQ]

With Dodd the Slayer mod

Nope. Codex mod is the best mod.

 

[Gnidrologist]

^ Yeah, i installed that and it's all i need. Think i played with it in my last playthroughs few years ago. A convenience mod that doesn't insert stupid shit.

Now to the meat. Remember i already had disagreement with some of you guys about hybrid casters. Like someone suggested i made a critical strike party. 5 - sam, ninja, monk + ranger for scouting, archery and maybe great sword around later stages + fairy bishop to cover all magic needs. Will probably add RFS bot for full martial arts action, a ninja is polearm and monk is a staff wielder, while sam is obviously katana fag (how awful are these base katanas fffs).
What i'm still confused about after all these years is how/why do use the first trio for casting if at all. I mean i can't afford to put spell school or magic realm points into my still barely developing and shitty azn kung fu fighters. They need all the points in their combat skills to even reach the level of average early game fighter/rogue. Do you guise just give them couple of spells and grind to make them useful in magic or just start to pump in early magic points + intelligence/piety right of the bat, while gimping their combat ability. Not like i'll need much of their casting in the long run, with bishop grinding everything possible from all schools, but as a support casters that can at least heal or refill stamina, yeah, would be nice. Don't see how to do it without majorly gimping their primary use.

 

[Darth Canoli]

^ Yeah, i installed that and it's all i need. Think i played with it in my last playthroughs few years ago. A convenience mod that doesn't insert stupid shit.

Now to the meat. Remember i already had disagreement with some of you guys about hybrid casters. Like someone suggested i made a critical strike party. 5 - sam, ninja, monk + ranger for scouting, archery and maybe great sword around later stages + fairy bishop to cover all magic needs. Will probably add RFS bot for full martial arts action, a ninja is polearm and monk is a staff wielder, while sam is obviously katana fag (how awful are these base katanas fffs).
What i'm still confused about after all these years is how/why do use the first trio for casting if at all. I mean i can't afford to put spell school or magic realm points into my still barely developing and shitty azn kung fu fighters. They need all the points in their combat skills to even reach the level of average early game fighter/rogue. Do you guise just give them couple of spells and grind to make them useful in magic or just start to pump in early magic points + intelligence/piety right of the bat, while gimping their combat ability. Not like i'll need much of their casting in the long run, with bishop grinding everything possible from all schools, but as a support casters that can at least heal or refill stamina, yeah, would be nice. Don't see how to do it without majorly gimping their primary use.

You can spare 3 points per level on your valkyrie, for the ninja/samourai/monk, i usually go full combat/crit and i try to develop their weak magic skills every chance i get by grinding.
Early on, their ranged impact is so negligible you can use them to cast spells when they have nothing close enough to destroy, this and utility spells will allow you to make them decent secondary casters with no archery skills whatsoever.
Of course, you'd have to focus on one element for some time, until combat skills hit 60/70 and then you can spare level up skill points.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Dunno, my monk and ninja (especially ninja) are decent at throwing/sling right of the bat. Get them suriken/doom darts and it's much better than pissing away your time making failing magic attacks. Gavei samurai a bow and he starts to level that up rapidly. Now halted though because of Bloodlust. I'm okay with grinding magic through a little bit of utility skill cheese, but casting attacking spells in red is just bad idea. Only way i see this is mid/late game, where all combat skills are developed and you can start putting spare points in magic and realms, but at that point you don't need no weak ass magic anyway.

 

[Darth Canoli]

You can play the game the way you want but the way to make decent hybrid casters by late mid game is the one i described (aside from gimping their close combat skills).

Besides, doom darts and shurikens are scarce (and low range), while having extra fireballs or other utility spells by mid game is extremely useful for tough fights.
My last argument is this one, even with 50 ranged + bow you'll miss quite a lot when your targets aren't really close. (but i'm always playing on max difficulty so maybe it's easier on normal)
You can always improve their ranged skills when they're out of MP, which will happen a lot if you don't spam rest.

I think this way is way superior, the valk can do both spells + ranged skills for a decent result though.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Fair enough, it just seems to much work for too little gain to me.

Now for something completely different. The whole Umpani camp has suddenly become hostile to me. WTF? I just got there and have done fuck all. I did took the flag off the pole, but private Whatever, was already dead to some spore plants and no one became hostile at that point. Weird bug. Is it possible to edit saves to remove hostility of a fraction?

 

[Darth Canoli]

The right way to complete the flag quest is to buy one after you enrolled and passed the first test (you don't need to go any further through the umpani quest-line, which is tedious due to their mines labyrinth).

 

[xuerebx]

I think that's the only map I disliked - the Umpani mines. At least there weren't many combat encounters - generally only when you get to the end of the map and the cavern opens up.

 

[Gnidrologist]

The right way to complete the flag quest is to buy one after you enrolled and passed the first test (you don't need to go any further through the umpani quest-line, which is tedious due to their mines labyrinth).

I know, but i have taken the flag from the pole previously without consequences. Also, there wasn't any hostility right after. Guess my yearly playthrough has abruptly ended, because i have no save before entering the camp and i can't find any info on changing the faction status, only save editors that change character stats.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Yeah, wiz8 is kinda weird in the way that whenever you get actual dungeons, they tend to be rather meh and boring. One more thing it got ahead of its time.

Regarding t'rang and umapni. If you're working both sides then t'rang at least can randomly learn about it and turn hostile (I'm not sure if there are any precise triggers for that), but I don't think it happens with umapni so I guess you fucked up somehow and didn't notice. I think loading an old save is the only way. Otherwise, just roll with it

 

[xuerebx]

When you're randomly stopped and blackmailed that you will be ratted out for working for both sides (T'rang and Umpani), will one of the factions turn hostile if you don't pay the blackmailers? I always paid them for fear that I wouldn't be able to make peace with both sides.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

This might be it, but I think I paid them every time too and still remember at least a couple occasions when I had to reload, because t'rang said fuck you. Although it's also possible that if you just miss the blackmail convo then they turn hostile too if you progress the story enough or something. Itisamystery, I guess. But I specifically remember that umpani never, ever went hostile on me, just the spider blobs.