One of the biggest hurdles in a completionist speedrun of M&M 6 is getting to the magical shops. As you just can't afford to sleep around, you're bound to do plenty of adventuring in evenings and at nights, and those lazy shopkeepers work only 8 hours per day - where the hell do they think they're living in, a democratic country? Maybe they want a union too? Some benefits, good insurance and early retirement plans? Lazy bastards. If only instead of the bookhouse boys here was our M&M VIII lich, oh he'd shown him... But nah, we're the good guys here, unfortunately.
The point is, it took us a while to get to the shop & identify all those amulets & rings we've looted from the drake swarm, but at least our patience was rewarded with an excellent air magic amulet. Sparks is our main damage dealing spell and getting +5 dmg per spark (+25 per cast at expert level) is pretty significant. Can't have enough of those. Well, you can, but it's hard to.
Cleaning up some inventory space, we proceed with our adventure.
Shadow Guild is an easy, but flavorful dungeon. Monsters here are ridiculously low-tier - you'd have to rush the game areas in an obsessively specific order for them to give you any sort of challenge.
However, the place is heavily trapped - sometimes (like with these spikes) it's just for show, but there are lots of places here that deal slight magical damage to you.
And, as you can see, that slight damage can accumulate quite unpleasantly.
The greatest thing about this place (apart from the fluff and an extremely good loot-to-difficulty ratio) is that it's one of the few dungeons in the game that actually features puzzle. There's a hidden room here, which you can reach only by jumping between different "suspicious floor" tiles in this room. The overall sequence of jumps isn't exactly logical...
But once you do enough jumps, the gate opens (and if you're lucky, you're even teleported to it).
It also spawns a single genie - a foe of much bigger caliber than the local rogues, but even so he can't do much on his own.
The room we teleport in features another genie (this one is unique monsters, but in this case it's actually much weaker than the average one), some rogues...
And four closed doors, locked by the classical parser riddles. This is nothing surprising for a blobber, but in this game, considering it's mostly about hack&slash, it really felt weird.
More genies & more loot, but the greatest reward of this place are these 4 teleporting doors.
Specifically the two of them that are able to bring you to Castle Ironfist. In my lazy speedrun it's not as important, but in a true rush (especially in the 5-day challenge - it's impossible if you don't use these) they're priceless.
Our priorities lie elsewhere, though. So, cleaning the guild, we've jumped to the Kriegspire. We already know there's an awesome temporary boosting, drake fodder spawning well here, but it's not alone in its greatness - there's another excellent artificial excavation here, pretty much making the game economy's on its own.
It allows us to buy 5k xp for 5k gold (not for entire party - for the person who drinks from the well), basically, it converts gold to xp. Compare our gold reserves - yeah, just now we've bought 85k xp per character, that's about two and a half levels at this point. That's like completing two or three major quests or like killing 30 tier-3 dragons (and that's not an easy feat to accomplish). It's not exactly gamebreaking or overpowering (not for the mage party, at least), but it gives you an actual way to spend your money. Furthermore, it gives some food for the thoughts.
For example, why am I dragging Hawk's merchant skills to the mark of 13? Because selling items is your main source of income, especially with mystic+spell master combo making us gain but 70% of the gold we find. And the difference between merchant 7 (the minimal requirement for skill mastery) and merchant 13 is being able to sell for 66% and 100% at New Sorpigal correspondingly. Yeah, so merchant 13 gives us 1.5 times more gold (roughly).
Now, with it you'll be able to dump somewhere about 3.5kk gold into the well, meaning that this 63 skill points investment buys you an extra 1kk of experience - that's at least 8 levels which at the same stage will bring you at least 120 skill points (and HPs & MPs, obviously). And that's in a semi-speedrun - in longer game (with wiping those dragon areas at least twice) you'll gain an even greater profits out of that.
Another thing to consider (in the same longer game) is gaining merchant mastery for everyone. Training becomes incredibly expensive in the late game so if you go to level 130 (at least), you'll surely recoup your 18 points investment. If you want to go crazy munchkin about this, you can even play crazy munchkin with hireling switching. It goes like that:
1. You kill large batches of monsters (multiple dungeons or overworld maps) with your average traveling npcs. For mages party, it's our current combo, for everyone else it's instructor+teacher for 25% xp bonus (and no, instructor+banker for 15% xp and 100% gold found retained isn't better - the thing is, most monsters give much more XPs than gold, so 10% in xp rewards is usually bigger than 25% in gold reward). You don't loot the monsters.
2. Then, once you've killed lots of crap, you switch your henchmen for a merchant+banker combo and loot the hell out of it.
3. Then you hire a merchant+trader combo and sell your stuff/train. At late levels, just merchant's +6 skill bonus applied to master level skill can easily save you 3k+ gold per trained level.
You train, hire your traveling npc back and, when the need arises, rinse and repeat. Oh, and you don't just hire travelers from streets - you map the houses in towns which contain them so you're not wasting excessive time looking for them. But, all in all, that's really excessive, so do it only if you're, like, absolutely mad about this whole thing (or attempting to go singleton - singleton runs may require this to be successful).
One other thing to note is that you can easily break the game with this (which is not advised) - there are at least 3 sources of infinite gold in it, after all (NWC 10k chest; circus; dragon looting). And this infinite gold means infinite xps, meaning that if you decide to grind the hell out of this, the whole game loses its fucking point. So don't please- even if you want to, just use editor, save your time.
Another this to consider is, well... See, in mage party, every member is more or less equally useful so we spread the xps. In melee party, however, the majority of your late game damage comes from your hour of power+day of the gods combo, meaning that your light caster trumps everyone else. Therefore, you dump all of that bonus xps on said caster, trying to get your light magic skill to a ridiculously high point. Because, well, 1 point in light magic is, like, 1.5 damage from heroism, 1.5 armor from stoneskin, 1.5 attack bonus from bless and a longer haste duration (because it always runs out of power in the most unpleasant moment imaginable). And it's also +6 to your stats, so 4 points in light magic is another 1 damage, 1 armor, 1 attack bonus, 1 lvl worth of hp&mps and 1 recovery speed (which is huge for all non-dagger weapons). I'm counting with the light magic ring bonus here, but you'll find at least one in the obelisk treasure so it's guaranteed. And that's for each party member - no other skill will give you as much. So if you go into melee or balanced build, you just overcharge the light mage.
One word about well's weird scripting - either it's bugged or specifically limited, but it'll either give you 10 uses per visit (until you rest), infinite uses per visit (groovy) or no uses per visit (bogus).
Finally, I must say that this well is one damn great design feature here. It's small, it hardly required any work, yet it makes a whole economy of the game work (which, let's admit, is extremely rare in the world of RPGs) and creates a bunch of interesting choices. It's only flaw is, probably, low profile - this feature should've been more formalized in the game, like, introduced to every training center or whatever as one well is really easy to miss. Still, it details like this that make me say that M&M 6 is vastly superior in design to VII and VIII. Yeah, they've expanded on the system, opening more party compositions & stuff, but most of that expansion were extremely hastily thought so the quality suffered.
KK, enough chatter, let's do some adventuring. Or, rather, prepare to do some adventuring by training our dagger skills (though we won't need them at this point, but whatever).
Let's mop up another rather effortless dungeon - Free Haven's sewers.
They're pretty huge, but they're not as densely populated as the size would imply and monsters here are really weak. I mean, rats, what else needs to be said?
So it's mostly a matter of long-distance running, a marathon of some sorts.
There are also some hidden goodies, hidden in the grates here...
But their quality matches the level of local inhabitants.
Somewhere in the western section of sewers there's a prince of thieves hideout. The whole affair with Anthony Stone saying that the bugger will hide under his bed (and him literally doing this) is fun, but not extremely hard to solve - in this game, you usually click on everything unusual you see, just in case.
But we're not done here, not that fast. One of the downsides of being a hero is that you've got to fight all evil you find, no matter how boring that may be. Now, the designers provided us with well of infinite (but slow) healing here to soothe our pain, but, in the end, all this does is making this dungeon even more boring.
And no, effortless slaughter of hordes of small monsters doesn't make it fun. I mean, it was fine at level 5, but how do you get here at level 5? Well, if you're not rushing it specifically.
There are also lots of coffee ingredients here. Too bad there's no cherry pies lying around, but it can't be all good and perfect, you know.
At last, the vermin here comes to an end. Couldn't 've been soon enough.
And the reward is also weak. The monetary part of it - xps are fine.
After such borefest it's only inevitable that we do something dangerous for a change.
The entrance of this dungeon is somewhat confusing - first you have to run around the door until it sucks you int (it seems like a puzzle, only it's not)...
Then you encounter some really weak (at this stage of the game) enemies, possibly misleading you about the nature of this dungeon...
Nah, main dwellers of this place are rock hard. Well, death knights, the lowest tier of them, are more or less tolerable...
But cuisinarts are ferocious - basically, in terms of damage output & durability they're as tough as red dragons. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.
Also, one of the biggest disappointments in my gaming career is related to them. See, I was loving this game as a kid. Didn't know the language that well (that hardly has changed, though), but played it in english because russian translation I had was critically bugged. So, obviously, lots of the things in this game looked crazy awesome to me back then and among the best were these guys - Cuisinarts. Soulless pieces of animated plate armor, hell yeah, whatever. The only problem is, no dictionary contained translation of the word "Cuisinart". But I've never despaired, knowing that it probably meant something like "villain" or "slayer" only, y'know, much more obscure, extreme and cool. Then I grow up, gain access to the internet and what do I learn? That cuisinart is a fucking brand of fucking food processors. Fuck.
So these guys aren't as spectacular as dragons, but take lots of punishment while dealing plenty of damage. We understand that it's not a time to be conservative and unleash our full magical power on them.
Shrapmetal is especially good against them since their physical resistance is significantly lower than their magical ones.
Thankfully, this place is not 100% cuisinarts or else we'd deplete our mana pools instantly. Also note that these enemies are able to invoke the "afraid" condition on our party, however, it barely means anything.
Apart from the tough monsters, this place isn't special at all - there is, like, one secret room here, but it's not that hard to find and it's not required to solve this dungeon.
Killing all fighters on the floor level of fortress, we find the quest item we need. But hey, who leaves before exploring the whole place?
Well, maybe I do. But only to heal then charge back into fray.
So the rest of this place is uneventful - sparks for the smaller ones...
Shrapmetal for the bigger ones. And we're done here.
Ahem, not before looting the treasure ones - the obvious one, opened with two keys, taken from the corpses...
And not so obvious one, located behind the hidden door on the floor level. I almost forgot about it, but the treasure signs on the minimap helped me here - wizard eye never ceases to be cool.
We-e-e a-a-are the champions, my frie-e-end.... Honorary ones, yes.
Darkmoor - time to do one of the worst chores in this game, killing all trashmobs in this area.
Local undead are weak, but numerous. Even by the standards of this game, extremely so. And they're immune to armageddon spell (that's even if we were using it). And there are also harpies who could've fallen victim to armageddon, but as I've said, that's out of our reach. So we have to kill them manually (well, magically, but with less comfortable magic) while suffering the effects of their curses.
Lots of skeletons here. Lots and lots and lots.
We try to kite them so they gather into hordes, becoming choicer targets for meteor showers. Even so, it's tedious.
Luckily, there's another of those baa temples here so we have access to almost free regeneration. Now if only they could regenerate the time you waste on this crap...
But we're not here for skeletons, wights or whatever.
We're after dwarves. Bad dwarves.
Some oozes, too. It makes zero sense for oozes to be here and for dwarves to tolerate them (well, considering there were oozes in mines of M&M 7, I guess caverns are their natural habitat in this world, and so are mines, still, doesn't explain the friendship between these ones - can you, like, train them? pet oozes, huh?), but we're not here in search of any kind of sense anyways. Besides, as a magic-bases party, we're always happy to see oozes in any shapes and amounts.
We also find library here, with some spellbooks, even. But they're of the lowest levels possible and are really useless to us.
Of course, after our struggles with cuisinarts, local dwarves look barely imposing. That's one of the problems with this game - there's too many low-level and mid-level dungeons and too few high ones, so once you level up a bit (and it's extremely easy to level up even without having vast knowledge of this game) going through them becomes less exciting.
On the bright side, I do love M&M VI for its textures - it really shows that they had more time to polish this game, so unlike with 7 & 8 where all dungeons looked alike, here lots of them have more or less unique looks.
Another thing I like about this dungeon is that it actually shows devils infiltrating different layers of enrothian society, trying to provoke rebellions & unrest in each one of them. IIRC, it's not even mentioned or hinted anywhere that dwarven usurper Snergle is a pawn of theirs, but once you see these devils here you quickly understand what's going around. Yeah, that's what I like about VI's lore, an atmosphere of mass infiltration and total corruption.
Wish they had better infiltrators, though, as those devils aren't quite a threat as they should've been. Well, at least we're killing everyone here really, really fast.
And from one of the local prison cells...
We get what we need to proceed with these dwarven subquests.
Doesn't mean we're leaving anyone alive here, though - they're all traitors so it's for their own good.
We also find that it's finally wednesday so we can travel to castle Alamos.
We won't spent much time here, however - it's just to make Andy a master of light magic (and also strengthen his sperms in the process, I hope, he could always use some help with that).
As we've discovered a sign of devil conspiracy, let's strike them back.
Devil's outpost is a pretty simple... You can't even call it a dungeon - just a room full of devils. We spam shrapmetal ASAP...
As they can burn out our mana pools with a single attack, so what's the point? Besides, we're not that good at tanking them.
Had to burn through couple of black coffee bottles, but still, we've cleared this place from our first attempt. Time to learn what the hell those devils are doing (though it would be only logical for them to actually do hell, well, at least raise it a bit)...
And deviler said information to proper authorities.
We also bulk up a bit. A tiny bit - I go greedy here and decide not to master body building because, well, mages get only 84 hp out of it. Still, I probably should have - don't think in pure hps here, think in levels. That's still 21 level worth of hps for ya, and if I'm glad to get that +30 lvl well bonus, I should've been glad to master the bodybuilding. Ah, what's done is done, anyways.
Enough distractions - let's finish our dwarven affairs.
This place has a different layout, but all in all, it's just snergle's mine mark II (no oozes here).
One of the points is interest here are ore patches on the walls - they can either give you some money or damage your whole party. Both money & damage come in insignificant amounts, so it's more about cutesy than anything else.
There are also some bats here, but they're so weak at this stage it's not even funny. We allow Andy to test his light magic mastery on them - why not?
And some of those crystals can be gathered & sold in the magical shops.
Waterfall nearby also features a small secret - a random item - but we were not very lucky with that.
Yeah, tons of small rewards here - slight (but always useful) bonuses to our resistances.
All this stuff really tries to excuse this dungeon being more of the same.
Meh, they can't be all winners. At least this place is easy & fast enough to clean up with fireballs..,
Unless we're talking about final battle, that is, where you are put knee deep in the dwarves - literally, you open the door that key open and a boatload of bearded fellows spawns around you.
And another horde rushes towards you from that room, so you're literally drowning in them.
However mediocre they are, in such insane quantities they begin to pose a threat, so we're forced to fire our most powerful spells...
And when that proves to be too slow, we retreat and scorch them from a considerable distance.
I don't complain, though - it was actually good to feel at least a tint of danger here, even if it was created by means as stupid as insane copy/pasting. Well, truth to be told, they're not that stupid and can (or, rather, should) be used while designing a good game, it's just that they should be used carefully - once in a while it's fun to get completely overwhelmed (especially if game offers you AoE damage sources, as blasting crowds of enemies at once is excellent), it's just that M&M pulls that trick a little bit too often.
Once we destroy the horde, we meet the little man in the red...
No, not this little man.
This one. Different fashion sense, different hue, beard and no love for dancing.
Despite him being a scary usurper, he's a total wuss in melee. Eh, he should've taken lesson from Hitler and never met armed hero without a powered exoskeleton & couple of miniguns.
After long looting of those many corpses, we find the last curiosity point of this dungeon...
And finish the quest. Obviously, we have no need for the master axe skill - no one without masochistic tendencies should have a need for it.
The final dungeon of this update is one of the best ones in this game (if not the best one).
Too bad you can't quite relay it's grandeur in static pictures.
Exploring the halls of the firelord is real fun - lots of pathways to explore, some secrets to uncover, some clever trap, good stuff.
Another strong point is that enemies are pretty weak here, so the focus is on exploring, not fighting.
The place also looks really pretty (at least by this game's standards, but I really have nothing against VI's graphics) with lots of varying textures.
Yeah, there are monster filled places here...
But, as the monsters are weak, even some bad spells can be used to quickly get rid of them.
And then it's just exploring-exploring-exploring, exploring the different corridors so you can help the Firelord.
Not to mention that this place features a great foreshadowing, offering you to find an item that won't be useful atm, but will help you a lot much later in the game. And to get it, you need to fight this strange, out of place looking monster. Man, wish there was more stuff like this in this game's dungeons.
TBH, there's so many pathways here that it's quite difficult to kill everything in this dungeon - you have to be really methodical to find all of the goblins & ogres here. Well, at least the main quest here is not as hard to complete.
We inform the Firelord...
But we're not done until we get the strange creature's treasure.
Then we sell some of the amber that could've been found in the Halls - it's not that profitable, but hey, it's better than just throwing that stuff away.
End of part V.