Wizardry The Wizardry Series Thread

[octavius]

5. All classes are equally good at map making, I think. Rangers have good Search skill, though.
6. Yes, Bard are quite good with bows, IIRC.
7. Formation is pretty much fixed. Who goes where depends on which weapons, your characters' armour class and their hiding skill.
8. Yes. Spears, Staffs and maybe more.

 

[cvv]

7. Formation is pretty much fixed. Who goes where depends on which weapons, your characters' armour class and their hiding skill.

What.

 

[Wizfall]

1. Hard to say, one of the longest cRPG i have played though.
2. you have voice acting in the CD/Gold version (VA can be very good but also quite bad) and automap is better. The interface is a bit better too IMO. On the other hand the diplomacy skill does not work (which mean you can't trade/talk to wandering NPC before helping them, really no big deal FYI). I like better the Gold/CD version unlike some other people here.

3. first you should download cosmic forge editor and apply the patchs (not the cheat patchs though unless you want to cheat, the missile swings patch may be good though and not a cheat).
Switching class is fine (you will be much stronger,once is enough though unless you want to become OP, class switching is totally OP in WIzardry 7) but not mandatory.
IMPORTANT : character mana regeneration is fixed at character creation and will never change even if you switch class (not sure if it's a bug though). It's mean a fighter switching to mage for example will still have a crappy mana regen of a fighter. To simplify 3 speed of character regen : slow (F,T) average (all the hybrid bard included) and fast (specialized spellcaster/bishop).
It's why it's better to start the game with specialized spellcaster and switch latter (around level 5-8). Example alchemist to ranger/ninja (same magic school) or mage to samurai, priest to lord/valkyrie/bishop, etc... (good luck for the Psionist to munk, almost impossible without save/reload the level up). However create your character in order that he has very little bonus level up stats needed in each stat to gain in order to be able to switch easily (no more that 2 points to gain in any single stats unless you save/reload level up).

4. objectively not good.The most important is you to enjoy the game. You will just have harder time (maybe a bit too hard for a first time) to finish the game but it's doable nonetheless.
5. every class has the map skill (at least in Gold, be aware only 3 threshold in the map skill : 10 30 and 70 for max details, do nothing above 70)
6. fighter/lord/valkyrie/samurai , NOT bard.
7. not configurable always 3 front 3 back, you can switch whenever you want which is where though.
8. yes a good amount of extended weapon like spears etc... don't worry.

Enjoy

 

[octavius]

7. Formation is pretty much fixed. Who goes where depends on which weapons, your characters' armour class and their hiding skill.

What.

I meant who he puts where should be based on the characters, weapons and armour available.
Sometimes you need to switch your guys around to make them all perform at their best as a team.

 

[cvv]

7. Formation is pretty much fixed. Who goes where depends on which weapons, your characters' armour class and their hiding skill.

What.

I meant who he puts where should be based on the characters, weapons and armour available.
Sometimes you need to switch your guys around to make them all perform at their best as a team.

Ok.

 

[cvv]

Ok playing W8 now and Jesus Christ on a bike this game needs some fucking patience.

I've tried to modify the respawn rate with Mad God editor, with some success it seems, but still...the combat is incredibly slow. WizFast helps with the monster movement but everything else is still slow.

God help me finish this game which is otherwise excellent.

 

[theSavant]

Yeah, the slowness also prevents me from multiple walkthroughs. Even if you use the speed tool, it feels slow. The idle-times for the player are just too long. Not only the movement and actions from the monsters make it a turtle, but also the execution of your own party's actions. There are at least 2 long idle times, where the player cannot interact at all. This kills it.

I wonder what could be done to make combat in a turn based game more convenient / faster - generally I mean - if anyone would like to create a game similar to Wizardry 8?

 

[Wizfall]

Ok playing W8 now and Jesus Christ on a bike this game needs some fucking patience.

I've tried to modify the respawn rate with Mad God editor, with some success it seems, but still...the combat is incredibly slow. WizFast helps with the monster movement but everything else is still slow.

God help me finish this game which is otherwise excellent.

My god.
I must have told this a hundred time...
Use the faster combat component you can find here :
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/wizardry-8-enhancements.79581/
Unlike Wizfast it ALSO speed up ANIMATION and missile weapon !
Combat much MUCH faster.

 

[cvv]

Ok playing W8 now and Jesus Christ on a bike this game needs some fucking patience.

I've tried to modify the respawn rate with Mad God editor, with some success it seems, but still...the combat is incredibly slow. WizFast helps with the monster movement but everything else is still slow.

God help me finish this game which is otherwise excellent.

My god.
I must have told this a hundred time...
Use the faster combat component you can find here :
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/wizardry-8-enhancements.79581/
Unlike Wizfast it ALSO speed up ANIMATION and missile weapon !
Combat much MUCH faster.

Thanks, but too late. The saves would be incompatible and besides - the projectile travel speed is the least of the problems for me. The biggest drag is the delay between monster action, it must be at least a second. And that's unfortunately hardcoded it seems.

I wonder what could be done to make combat in a turn based game more convenient / faster - generally I mean - if anyone would like to create a game similar to Wizardry 8?

I'd be a completely happy turtle if:

a) every combat was as tough, dragging and exhausting as it is now - IF the game would be balanced for no or very infrequent (M&M style) respawn. Then it would give you a tremendous feeling of achievement to clear an area

or

b) the respawn rate stayed the same BUT most combat against trash mobs could be resolved within seconds (like in W7 - just cast Asphyxiation, Death Wish or Nuclear Blast and holt ESC )

To be clear, I'd greatly prefer the first option, because most combats in the second half of W7 felt like a nuisance tbh, but alas - it's not to be.

 

[theSavant]

The biggest drag is the delay between monster action, it must be at least a second. And that's unfortunately hardcoded it seems.

Thanks, this exactly confirms what I have observed as well (I have described this in the Wizardry Workshop Thread some months ago). There seems to be an unbearable 1 second delay between each action. Unfortunately something that can't be changed

It all adds up... all these delays and idles to a point where it isn't enjoyable anymore (at least not on the second+ walkthrough. I didn't care about it that much on my very first playthrough).

 

[cvv]

The biggest drag is the delay between monster action, it must be at least a second. And that's unfortunately hardcoded it seems.

Thanks. This confirms what I have observed as well (I have described this in the Wizardry Workshop Thread some months ago). There seems to be an unbearingly 1 second delay between each action, and unfortunately nothing that could be changed

Exactly. There is a similar effect in W7, where even if you set the text speed to the max, there is still a delay between a "Hit" message and the damage number (or "No penetration"). But that can be skipped by pressing ESC. So effectively if you hold ESC, the whole combat can go on lightning fast if need be.

After playing W7 for two weeks I have the constant urge to hold ESC when fighting in W8 but of course there the ESC only asks you to quit the game.

 

[treborSux]

Bows are pretty garbage in Wiz 6 and 7. I wouldn't worry about bows. Bow attacks are really only more of a fallback option when you don't feel like doing something useful with one of your back row characters. It's not like Wiz 8 where having a good archer was pretty cool.

 

[Jocund]

So I've been playing Wizardry 1 (the DOS version) for the past few hours for the first time ever, and I'm confused about leveling and class changing. Other than my HP always increasing (seemingly from a range of 1 to 19, majority being low end rolls), my stats in general seem to not be improving really due to stat decreases. My characters feel stronger in general, I think mostly due to my Fighters hitting twice per round now and my higher HP, but I'm wondering whether leveling up is a guaranteed power increase or not? For instance, I feel like one of my level ups on my mage was 1 HP increase and two stat decreases, but I can't recall for sure, so I'm wondering if anyone knows if this is a possibility.

I also decided to make my Thief a Human rather than a Hobbit after seeing the stat requirements for Ninja in the manual, in the hopes of switching his class, but every stat increase seems to be coupled with a stat decrease, so the goal seems to be no closer with each level up. My thief seems really unreliable, often triggering traps while trying to inspect chests, and I'm wondering if this has correlation to my race choice, and if the race choice was worth it. Is it a real possibility that my character won't reach the stats required to switch classes?

 

[Coriolanus]

I think early Wizardries have a set "normal" HP number that depends on class and level, the more current HP you have the greater the chance of only a 1 HP/level increase - so if you roll 1's early you might get big boosts later.

So no worries, it should even out ... eventually.

 

[treborSux]

So I've been playing Wizardry 1 (the DOS version) for the past few hours for the first time ever, and I'm confused about leveling and class changing. Other than my HP always increasing (seemingly from a range of 1 to 19, majority being low end rolls), my stats in general seem to not be improving really due to stat decreases. My characters feel stronger in general, I think mostly due to my Fighters hitting twice per round now and my higher HP, but I'm wondering whether leveling up is a guaranteed power increase or not? For instance, I feel like one of my level ups on my mage was 1 HP increase and two stat decreases, but I can't recall for sure, so I'm wondering if anyone knows if this is a possibility.

I also decided to make my Thief a Human rather than a Hobbit after seeing the stat requirements for Ninja in the manual, in the hopes of switching his class, but every stat increase seems to be coupled with a stat decrease, so the goal seems to be no closer with each level up. My thief seems really unreliable, often triggering traps while trying to inspect chests, and I'm wondering if this has correlation to my race choice, and if the race choice was worth it. Is it a real possibility that my character won't reach the stats required to switch classes?

I could be wrong but I think the randomness of stat increases/decreases on level ups in Proving Grounds on DOS is harsher toward decreases than the Apple II version. I'll leave you a small spoiler but you can turn your thief into a ninja at a certain point in the game without regard to stat requirements.

Spoiler

Invoke the Thief's Dagger on your thief.

 

[kryminator]

My party in Wiz7 is preparing to leave New City now. Regarding that fact and the fact that my party made some improvement, I have new thoughts and a couple of questions:
1. In museum there is a riddle (laughing devil, angry demon etc.) or at least I think so. Is this really a riddle, should I be able to solve it now (but didn't find/notice/hear sth in New City) or am I missing some clues which I will find later?
2. Is there any way to make money quickly in New City or its surroundings? I want to buy spellbooks worth 10k and currently, I have exactly 0 (bought armors, weapons, spellbooks recently).
3. My female hobbit bard is so useless when she does not play some tunes and run out of mana. Is it good idea to change her profession to valkyrie?
4. Also she gains mana so slowly that she hasn't a lot of it and she ran out of mana very fast. Does mana gain per level depend on something or is is just the way it is with bard?
5. I have mage and alchemist and want to change their professions to samurai and ranger and I am wondering when to do it. Does prefession level influence new spells availability? I know that magic skill (alch/thauma/theos/theol) value matters and professions gain spells since some fixed level, but after they start gaining spells, does the profession level limit that? In other words, can level 5 ninja with 100 alchemy learn any alchemy spell?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dorateen]

I hesitate to give out advice, because a large part of the fun of Crusaders, or any Wizardry title, is figuring out stuff on your own. But I'll address the first two points.

1. Yes, it is a riddle. You should get clues on how to solve it later on. I believe it can also be solvable through trial and error.
2. Explore pickpocketing (legerdemain skill) and selling goods back to merchants.

As far as class changes, it is always something to aspire to, but I cannot really suggest the best time. The one-trick pony aspect of the bard seems to be a class feature. Nonetheless, I made it through the adventure without ever class changing our party's bard. He had the least amount of monster kills, but the higher level songs and putting enemy groups to sleep were invaluable.

 

[cvv]

Well W8 is finished and it was fun, a lot of fun actually, but boy does this game have a few issues.

Putting aside the sluggish combat, discussed above, my biggest gripe are the monsters, especially their level scalling and HP bloat. W6 and W7 handles this so much better. And my second big gripe is the "magic issue" which is somewhat related.

I was always looking forward to bigger and more destructive spells to deal with the trash fights faster but they always disappointed (as many people warned). That's because the monsters always seem to have about 10 times more HP than is your reliable (green range) destructive spell dmg output. By the time you get WMDs like Nuclear Blast or Earthquake, enemies start in the 300 HP range and have 80+ elemental damage resistance and many of them cast Elemental Shield. This renders those spells effectively useless. For the same reason the instant death-type spells like Asphyxiation, Death Wish or Quicksand are doubly useless (moreover the 7th level spells like Death Wish come very late in the game, if you don't powerplay, I got mine on the Ascension Peak )

And as for the disabling magic, most of it is also pointless, when Paralyze or Web is rarely successful and Blind is more annoying than anything since blinded monsters run away. Best magic school by far seems to be Psionics (in W7 it is the worst), at least this one becomes useless only at the very end.

On the other hand some protective spells - Magic Screen, Soul Shield, Elemental Shield and Missile Shield - seems a tad bit overpowered. Combined with high resistances my chars accumulated through leveling monsters could hardly touch me. The last fight was a joke and I was only about level 22. Also, as a side note, after dozens of hours of playing I still have no idea what exactly spells like Bless, Armorplate and Enchanted Sword actually do.

All this would probably seem a little weird but otherwise fine if I hadn't played the previous Bradley games right beforehand. Those are balanced so much better. There's still some scalling in W7 but so much more subtle and organic. And monsters aren't so ridiculously spell resistant.

(Also, fuck Gadgeteer next time. Most gadgets come late, there are much fewer of them than music instruments and many are underpowered. The Omnigun can be decent but blinds very often, which is annoying, and the ultimate - and truly awesome - addon comes at lvl 26 which means 25 million XP. Fuck that, next time I take Bard).

Don't get me wrong, W8 is still a great game and great fun, especially compared to...well, almost everything else, but it's not a work of pure genius anymore.

 

[octavius]

So better to spend your mand on buffing and protection spells?

And how well does Kirijutsu work on those monsters with 300 HP? Do they have resistance against that as well?

 

[cvv]

So better to spend your mand on buffing and protection spells?

Yeah, only most of them are cast out of combat. So if you have pure spellcasters that cannot fight, they just sit uselesslyduring combat. It's very recommnended that all members of your party can fight with a weapon as well, there are some truly awesome extended weapons for your casters so get them, learn them and use them.

And how well does Kirijutsu work on those monsters with 300 HP? Do they have resistance against that as well?

It's called "Critical Strike" in W8 (another reminder of Bradley's wonderfully quirky way with words) and it's probably the most fun aspect of W8 combat. It works really well and the crit geared guys like Ninja and Ranger can really make tedious fights go a lot faster I once have my Ranger crit 3 times out of six shots. That is of course extreme, with Elven Bow and Mystic Arrows, but even normally Ranger crits insanelly often, even very high level monsters.

 

[TigerKnee]

I'm currently playing Wiz 6 right now. There's a lot of people that believe that 6-7 is superior to 8, but to be honest, outside of multi-classing and combats in 6 not taking fragging forever to finish, I really liked 8 better in terms of dungeon-crawling/puzzle solving.

Char Development's a mixed bag between the two games. In 6, I liked that the points you gain on level seem to matter a lot more than 8 which seems to favor "grind through usage". And of course, multi-classing in 8 is almost completely worthless while it's kind of broken in 6. I think 8 added WAY too many possible skills to split your points between, which is one of the things that goes towards weakening combat Magic and hybrids in 8 - now spellcasters/hybrids not only have to raise their spell schools, but they have to put points in the individual elements too!?

I'm at the mines now and it's getting tiring because I can't wrap my head around the convulted multi-level maze thing it has going on.

Argh, what a shame that no one is continuing the branch of Wiz 8. Most of the Japanese games just clone the system from III-V, and no one in the indie scene seems to want to use 8 as an inspiration.

 

[theSavant]

Argh, what a shame that no one is continuing the branch of Wiz 8. Most of the Japanese games just clone the system from III-V, and no one in the indie scene seems to want to use 8 as an inspiration.

Yes unfortunately. The reason imo is that Wiz8 is much more sophisticated in its core than most other RPG attempts (even AAA games), especially in these aspects:

- roaming groups wandering through the whole level, able to change level sections, some walk through the whole world (e.g. Rattus Rattus - be lucky to find him after the bank robbery)
- collision management in groups, movement speed, pathfinding to circumvent target, flocking, evading other groups without blocking
- monster group AI (automatic assignment of a leader), fragmented monsters organizing themselves, joining other monster groups, even some kind of "Look-AI" which can see the player
- attack order, monster generator and scaling, battling between different NPC groups without player interaction

It's a major peak of complexity (apart from the skill system), but there are many tools nowadays which can ease up creating a dynamic system like this, however I don't see it happening (which is ridiculous given that Wiz8 was made 15 years ago). Many engines provide a pathfinding system out of the box, even crowd control and collisions. But we still see in most games only dumb monsters on the same ground forever until the player arrives and kills them. Totally blunt.

 

[treborSux]

Has anyone tried Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls? I'm weary of trying it because it looks really Jap'd out, but Japs really loved Wizardry more than anyone else so maybe they stayed true to it.

 

[TigerKnee]

I would actually be happy if they attempted to stray from the norm (like maybe to Wizardry 8 standards). They stayed so true to Wizardry III-V that the system hasn't changed much in 10+ years. If you aren't bored to tears of the Wiz 3-5 system yet, then go ahead and pick it up.

(I'm not a dungeon connoisseur the way CrookedBee is, so I can't tell you how good the dungeons/puzzles/setups are)

Edit: I changed my mind, reviews of LoLS state they didn't even try to put in any puzzles or do any sort of dungeon design, they're just square boxes with non-inspired design. So don't get it.

But really, pick up Tales of the Forsaken Land or Elminage Original instead. Those two also use the Wiz 3-5 system as a base but at least they tried to do something new there.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

It's called a shotacon forum I think.