Deal with it: Two out-of-reach sorceresses paralyzing your party while a bunch of mindless morons and troublesome thugs supplies you with a thorough beating!
Also: Locations of the starting items in Trynton (as we’re reaching it).
Playing that part was a bit of a nailbiter 😀
So have fun watching & happy gaming!
Immanuel-Can
…where the party experiences a massive slaughtering of lots of rats, bats and slimes in the lower parts of the Monastery (and avoids getting slaughtered – yet) and all of the girls (and the guy) gain massive experience (and thus level up).
Also: AÂ live introduction to basic Wizardry 8 tactics.
It might need some time still as YouTube Servers seem to not react quickly atm. Some re-production will also be done later because of that delay.
Have fun and hopefully see you around!
If you have any suggestions for me to try or to explain – write a comment anywhere on the Thoughtful Gaming pages.
Immanuel-Can
Party building live with explanations for an extremely offensive hardcore late game party. Have fun playing along, lurking, watching, commenting – I’m looking forward to You 🙂 – Immanuel-Can
You could guess I only want a divine character as a healer. Or for the precious buffs. Resurrections. No – DPS is also great for the Valkyrie, especially to bridge the midgame. But also because she is specialized in Polearms. And there are some pretty good polearm weapons late in the game.
As with the previous melee characters (Monk and Samurai) our ability priority will be Strength (melee damage and armor penetration final skill) > Speed (number of attacks and initiative) > Dexterity (to hit and AC) > Vitality (hit points in melee are never bad).
You can always argue that Senses or Intelligence are listed under combat skills but they only make you learn the skills a little faster – their endgame final skills (unlocked after you reach 100 Senses or Intelligence) are pretty much useless for a melee character, so we are ignoring these on purpose.
So let’s make our girl strong, quick and dextrous – who wouldn’t want such a bodyguard girlfriend? (especially as a stereotypical nerd 😀 )
And she’s a dwarf, too. The damage resistance is always cool for a melee character and the piety won’t hurt for some nice extra heals (piety raises spellpoints and stamina).
Combat skills are pretty straightforward, too: Polearm and Close Combat. We won’t need more. For some ranged damage, if we really happen to get two Tripleshot Crossbows, we’ll put the rest of the points into them (Level 5 upwards these points will go into spellcasting).
Her name is gonna be Brunhilda after her famous namesake from the Nibelungenlied whose combat skills were so legendary that she could even wrestle with the uber-strong Dragon Slayer Siegfried.
Yes, another aggressive character. But what are you going to do in combat? Bake bread and pick flowers?
Better pick up some kills. Yes Madam. She won’t have a problem with that.
See you soon for party member 5! Happy gaming,
Immanuel-Can
After having built the core style components of our team (SHREDDER THEM!), let’s go to a class you definitely do want in your party. The ranger. He can scout automatically which is a big bonus and has high quality of life. I’d recommend the ranger to every new player’s party of Wizardry 8 just because you will not have to turn “Scouting” on and off. And even if you know the location of every hidden item it’s still really tedious if you don’t have a ranger.
So, take one. There’s no doubt: He’s useful. He can heal a bit, and teleport too in high levels. Can mix potions with his alchemy skill.
And he does tons of damage in the late game, and is still pretty OK early. If you build him right.
In order to achieve a non-balanced offensive ranger with high ranged damage, we are going to buy points in the following priority: Senses (for the final skill Eagle Eye, recommended for late game ranged damage) > Strength (for additional ranged damage and the eventual melee encounter) > Speed (for additional attacks) > Dexterity (for better to-hit and a quality of life Armor Class final skill later).
One of the best, if not the best ranger is a Mook: He has most bonus points, and is even one size category larger than the other choices, so he will have access to a nice late game sword: The Giant’s Sword, with extended range – furthering his DPS role even if the enemies come close.
The skill category is pretty straightforward: We want him to kill with ranged weapons – bows. A crossbow, and hopefully a tripleshot crossbow later will be our favored weapon. Additional points are spent for scouting, so we won’t miss items.
For his Gorillalike looks, I have baptised our furry ranger Silverback, in short: Silver. Whatever comes his way, he will drop them like flies.
Bonus points for recognizing the Statue up above I used as a featured image 🙂
Happy gaming! See you,
Immanuel-Can
The first member of our party is going live, the most aggressive too, the Samurai!
To the honor of Miyamoto Musashi, we will call her Musashi, after one of the most famous Samurai – a double blade swordsman from the 17th century: Now going to the stars!
How are we going to build Musashi in Wizardry 8? As I already wrote earlier, there are so many possibilities to create viable characters in the game.
For the Samurai class, these choices would be:
For a high DPS endgame party, we will go for a melee Samurai and use magic to provide utility and buffs. For fun we will make her as offensive as possible. She is fearless (immune to fear effects) after all and won’t complain!
We will need:
As a race we will go for the most (melee) combat oriented race in Wizardry: Its weak magical abilities give it more points for melee. The Hobbit! A female hobbit for.. well, powergaming! We will need much stamina, and stamina regenerating items are easier to access for female characters at the start of the game.
For the start, we want her to have great Sword skills as well as Dual Weapons and Close Combat. At the beginning of the game it is more important to hit the opponents opposed to critting them – they will have so few hitpoints that they will quickly die through a much easier hit. A crit isn’t of that much benefit, so we will raise that skill later. The blue color of the Sword skill marks the class skill of the samurai: We will get a 25% bonus on the skill in game, it will apply 125% of its skill number – which is really helpful as fighting with dual weaponry gives a malus.
As for the Magic: The Samurai cannot do magic off the bat. It will have to wait until the 5th level where we are going to talk about magic and its specialization for the Samurai in Wizardry 8.
Now imagine a female version of Musashi – you have quite a few portraits, but I like a more calm one, staying concentrated in the heat of the battle. Her intentions are to go for the great enlightenment – to beat any opponent even before the battle!
When the party is starting (on YouTube), you’ll be able to hear the voices of the characters in game, commenting on the events happening in game. It is always fitting, funny, and actually making you like your characters much more.
Such a masterwork!
Let’s get it on – happy to see you at Party Member 2
Immanuel-Can
All the “games done quick” have also influenced me. So I want to try that with Wizardry 8 too. And as content rich as that game is, it should be possible!
One great thing about Wiz8 is all the freedom you have to build characters: You have 6 slots and you can build anything you want in any combination. It basically screams replayability! (As a result, there are random party generators for Wizardry 8 online, to give you even more of a challenge.)
There are many classes to choose from, with or without magic, with special abilities or just plain fighters / mages. For a quick playthrough you have to know that the endgame in Wizardry can be very hard. So we will focus on a good endgame – with the result that the early game will be somewhat hard.
The best scaling classes in Wizardry are Hybrid classes. They can do magic and they can fight too. Most of them can crit which results in an instant kill and can be very helpful late game when you have to kill opponents with many hitpoints as quickly as possible – in the first combat rounds. We will go for maximum slaughter!
So our party will be composed mainly of hybrids, focusing on melee combat (as it will deal the highest single target damage). Magic will be used to support the characters, for buffs and teleports and the like. Just to make life easy for us – #FeelsGoodMan 😉
Additionally, to feature most of the game, I will integrate two “sort of” magic classes, the Bard and the Engineer: Both can fight and can use unique items in the game. The Bard uses Instruments to play Songs on to help the party (and destroy enemies, too). The Engineer can even create special items – like combining three crossbows into a tripleshot crossbow – very helpful!
We will need a Ranger to find items quickly and to have those precious ranged combat crits (with the tripleshot crossbow!) and we will use a Valkyrie for tanking and access to the divine realm of magic and its range of buffs.
To round the party up we will use two extremely high dps characters: The Monk and the Samurai. Those valiant fighters can crit extremely often and are, of course, quite cool too if you’re into that Asian Martial Arts and Samurai aesthetics thing – who isn’t? They will rampage through the opponents like there is no tomorrow.
See you next time for some meaty character building. Fun names. Fun characters. And the unique audios for each character which you get to choose too! 🙂
This is the start to a series around the CRPG classic Wizardry 8. One of the greatest RPGs of its time – and still tons of fun.
Thanks to Steam revamps, Wizardry 8 is back to playable and available here in a version supporting Windows:Â http://store.steampowered.com/app/245450
Step by step, we will go on a journey through the rough & tough world of Wizardry 8, featuring
See you in game!
Immanuel-Can
