Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
Yes, I know that Azira has finished his LP of this very same game only recently and in no way I want to diss his hard work, especially considering the circumstances about it - the man was quite cool and stoic to finish it, really. It's just that he did a good showcase of generic playthrough of the game, while it allows for a number of more specific or, if you will, focused ones, each interesting in its own way. And that's why I start this LP, to further show what M&M VII's system is capable of. And, if anything, Azira's LP is of great help to me as it's a real timesaver - I can skip showing lots and lots and lots of duplicated stuff (like videos from the game, for example) and put more focus on a gameplay.
Allow me a couple of words on theory, though. First thing first, I want to talk about a challenge of this game. Because, since it's not that atmospheric and not that explorative and absolutely story-light, challenge is what makes this game fun. However, once you look close you understand that it's not like there's any real challenge in the game, it's not like you can lose it. I mean, you absolutely can't lose it - you are allowed to respawn infinitely, after all. And there are lots of healing spells, potions and henchmen and lots of opportunities to backtrack or to rest right inside the dungeons, so killing hordes of enemies is not a problem - sooner or later, you'll grind them to dust.
Now, here are the keywords - sooner or later, that's the challenge of this game. And I'm not talking about speedrunning - sure, you can do it, and the game kinda rewards you for it in ending points, but it's definitely not for everyone, some people (like me) prefer to do everything that the game proposes to you and even more, so speedrunning kinda kills the thrill for us. No, I'm talking about doing as much as possible in the littlest amount of real time possible, cutting on the grind and backtracking and repetitiveness. Sure, you can't excise them completely, but you can lessen the "chore" part of the game.
So it's all about playing fast and efficient party. But what's an efficient party? See, the weakest place of late might and magics is that characters mingle horribly with each other. No, really. Let's look at the three combat archetypes of the game:
1. Fighter - his purpose in combat is to do small but sustainable amounts of damage over long periods of time as his high hp allow him to take quite a beating. Oh, and he works on the short distance only, obviously. These are the knight, the monk, the thief and the paladin.
2. Archer - he's pretty much the same as fighter, except that he deals his damage on the long distance only. These are archers and all (in VIII they're joined by the dragons, though dark elves are better).
3. Nuker - his purpose in combat is to deal huge amount of burst damage over a short period of time as he is quite limited by his low hp and depletion of mana pool. He can work at any distance, however, if you have the right spells for it. These are clerics of dark alignment and wizards of both alignments (although archmages are worse than liches, obviously).
Sure, there are also the buffers (clerics and light wizards), but they just make other characters do their stuff better without altering their strategy much. And that also means that druids and rangers are POS classes and you should try to avoid them in efficient parties.
As we see, those classes don't work together greatly. I mean, you have 2 nukers and 1 fighter - you rush into melee range, but by the time your wizards are already half-dead and out of their mana, your knight is still relatively healthy and willing to chop. if you stay in combat, your wizards die - knight can't tank for them as there is no mechanism for tanking. If you retreat, you're wasting the knight's potential. This goes the same way for other class combinations.
So there should be more focus in party, I think. Both in class combinations and skills - instead of getting lots of skills to their 10s, you should get one main skill to 20-30. That'll do the magic trick for ya, really. And here are the combinations officionaly sanctified by Pope Amole the Second:
a. "Four Riders" formation - 4x wizards on the dark side, each with dark magic over 9000 (20-30, actually). A real glass cannon (you'll want to hoard those +25 hp rings), but even hardest monsters in the game will die from 2 shrapmetals. Armageddoning the land of the giants is also cool, though.
b. "Captain Planet" formation - 4x wizards on the light side. There are multiple ways of doing this - you either make every one a focused master of one of the elemental school (that's why captain planet - earth, fire, whatever), while also giving a grand master of light to everyone, or you can skip earth & go with light, water, water, air as 20-30 focused skills (that's more powerful). Note that in this playthrough you will absolutely need to have a mystic and spell master henchmen - rushing into tolarean forest straight after emerald isle for them is highly advised.
c. "That's Kull" - 3x of either knight, thief or monk in any mix + wizard on the light side. Depending on your choices, you will have a different progress with this type of party, but overall it's all the same - cast an light 30 hour of power then run straigh in and deal lots of damage with either armsmaster, unarmed or dagger skill of 30.
d. "Popamole bullshit" - a trio of paladins + wizard on the light side. Once again, it's light 30 buff plus mace skill of 30, giving you lots of hits with 30% chance to paralyze the target, effectively killing it. It's also is kinda more comfortable than kull as you can have lots of healing here, especially if you hire prelate + initiate from early on (+7 to self magic - great spirit buffs, excellent body healing).
e. "And They Shall Bow" - should be obvious by now, but I won't talk about it much because...
Allow me a couple of words on theory, though. First thing first, I want to talk about a challenge of this game. Because, since it's not that atmospheric and not that explorative and absolutely story-light, challenge is what makes this game fun. However, once you look close you understand that it's not like there's any real challenge in the game, it's not like you can lose it. I mean, you absolutely can't lose it - you are allowed to respawn infinitely, after all. And there are lots of healing spells, potions and henchmen and lots of opportunities to backtrack or to rest right inside the dungeons, so killing hordes of enemies is not a problem - sooner or later, you'll grind them to dust.
Now, here are the keywords - sooner or later, that's the challenge of this game. And I'm not talking about speedrunning - sure, you can do it, and the game kinda rewards you for it in ending points, but it's definitely not for everyone, some people (like me) prefer to do everything that the game proposes to you and even more, so speedrunning kinda kills the thrill for us. No, I'm talking about doing as much as possible in the littlest amount of real time possible, cutting on the grind and backtracking and repetitiveness. Sure, you can't excise them completely, but you can lessen the "chore" part of the game.
So it's all about playing fast and efficient party. But what's an efficient party? See, the weakest place of late might and magics is that characters mingle horribly with each other. No, really. Let's look at the three combat archetypes of the game:
1. Fighter - his purpose in combat is to do small but sustainable amounts of damage over long periods of time as his high hp allow him to take quite a beating. Oh, and he works on the short distance only, obviously. These are the knight, the monk, the thief and the paladin.
2. Archer - he's pretty much the same as fighter, except that he deals his damage on the long distance only. These are archers and all (in VIII they're joined by the dragons, though dark elves are better).
3. Nuker - his purpose in combat is to deal huge amount of burst damage over a short period of time as he is quite limited by his low hp and depletion of mana pool. He can work at any distance, however, if you have the right spells for it. These are clerics of dark alignment and wizards of both alignments (although archmages are worse than liches, obviously).
Sure, there are also the buffers (clerics and light wizards), but they just make other characters do their stuff better without altering their strategy much. And that also means that druids and rangers are POS classes and you should try to avoid them in efficient parties.
As we see, those classes don't work together greatly. I mean, you have 2 nukers and 1 fighter - you rush into melee range, but by the time your wizards are already half-dead and out of their mana, your knight is still relatively healthy and willing to chop. if you stay in combat, your wizards die - knight can't tank for them as there is no mechanism for tanking. If you retreat, you're wasting the knight's potential. This goes the same way for other class combinations.
So there should be more focus in party, I think. Both in class combinations and skills - instead of getting lots of skills to their 10s, you should get one main skill to 20-30. That'll do the magic trick for ya, really. And here are the combinations officionaly sanctified by Pope Amole the Second:
a. "Four Riders" formation - 4x wizards on the dark side, each with dark magic over 9000 (20-30, actually). A real glass cannon (you'll want to hoard those +25 hp rings), but even hardest monsters in the game will die from 2 shrapmetals. Armageddoning the land of the giants is also cool, though.
b. "Captain Planet" formation - 4x wizards on the light side. There are multiple ways of doing this - you either make every one a focused master of one of the elemental school (that's why captain planet - earth, fire, whatever), while also giving a grand master of light to everyone, or you can skip earth & go with light, water, water, air as 20-30 focused skills (that's more powerful). Note that in this playthrough you will absolutely need to have a mystic and spell master henchmen - rushing into tolarean forest straight after emerald isle for them is highly advised.
c. "That's Kull" - 3x of either knight, thief or monk in any mix + wizard on the light side. Depending on your choices, you will have a different progress with this type of party, but overall it's all the same - cast an light 30 hour of power then run straigh in and deal lots of damage with either armsmaster, unarmed or dagger skill of 30.
d. "Popamole bullshit" - a trio of paladins + wizard on the light side. Once again, it's light 30 buff plus mace skill of 30, giving you lots of hits with 30% chance to paralyze the target, effectively killing it. It's also is kinda more comfortable than kull as you can have lots of healing here, especially if you hire prelate + initiate from early on (+7 to self magic - great spirit buffs, excellent body healing).
e. "And They Shall Bow" - should be obvious by now, but I won't talk about it much because...
Because we need a lil' bit o' fanfare for the starters.
Not that it has anything to do with the game or with fantasy or with sci-fi or whatever, but I like lame puns and oldschool industrial, so deal with it.
Here's our party - 3x archers to do all the killing and a strictly supportive wizard. We take no armor skills as it'll only hinder us before we master it, lowering our DPS, so instead we get learning & magics to spend less cash on them(they're expensive - more expensive than armor, actually) and spears as they're one of the best early-game close combat weapons, especially as our strength is low.
In attributes we focus on speed and accuracy for our archers - since they fight from great distance, they can allow themselves to be sorta frail. We take a beefy dwarf as our wizard, however, as we don't want to have a 16 hp elven wizards - there's frail and there's dying from a loud sound, y'know. And int is not as needed for her as she won't cast her offensive spells often - her priority is to buff and transport us.
We play with a grayface's unofficial patch by the way - it doesn't alter any content, it just fixes a number of bugs (but not all of them, unfortunately), makes some interface improvements and enables a 2x speed mode, doubling the speed of the game and hugely reducing the tediousness of it.
Here you see our attack speed - that's why we take unarmoured speedy goblin, as for the other character it would've been something around 110+, meaning ~15% slower. That's a lot.
And that's why spear is teh best - it's one of the fastest starting weapons and, once you'll find at least a basic trident, you'll deal lots of damage.
Now the game begins. We open the first free chest and find ourselves lucky - plenty of gold inside and a longbow which 5d2 is better than starting 4d2 crossbows.
Then we head for the temple and donate the gold five times. I'll show you later why this is important.
On our way to the second free chest, we collect some yellow ingredients. While they seem kinda useless in the beginning, they're actually the rarest and thus most valuable alchemic components. It's a good idea to hoard them from the earliest on.
I collect the chest (nothing fancy there, just money) and attract the attention of a couple of dragonflies. Carefully, I lead them after me.
KK, I botched this one. I lead them after me and allowed them to kill Sally, the girl near the dragon's cavern so I could pick her seashell for free, but I kinda failed at screencapturing it. Here you see the aftermath - me avenging the poor girl. This is only a shadow of carnage to come, though...
We touch the day of gods pedestal - it's quintessential to use it on a constant basis as the stats gain is great. Without it, emerald island would be much harder.
And we gain some free skillpoints from the contest thanks to the day of gods. Archers pump bows, Tjukurrpa gains a fire magic of 2.
Then we make a quick raid into dragon cave - we grasp the shield and the bow and run away immediately.
Finally, we make two red potions and exchange one of them for a fancy hat.
Then we go to the judge & lord Markham and finish the missing contestants quest as soon as we take it. We also give tons of the quest stuff to the judge.
And that's the point of donating & rushing the quest - immediate 10 reputation (5 from donate & 5 from quest - and you can gain it from donate only when you're at 0 reputation, so always donate first). Good reputation adds bonus to your merchant skill, making things significantly cheaper from you.
To press on the financial advantage, we add a merchant to the party. I hope she's also lesbian and feminist...
Oh, and beware of dupers! They look cool, but as they give you -5 reputation, their net gain is lower than from average traders. I guess it's higher if you have an expert merchant on higher, but we don't plan to have this level of skill so dupers are useless to us.
We also hire a healer lady who has probably seen better days... Healers are not as awesome in archer party as they're awesome in fighter party (you can easily start with 3x 70-90 hp characters so the full heal will give you great profit), but they're still good. 5% is nothing for the full heal that she gives us - that saves our time and compensates for the lack of cleric.
BTW, if you haven't noticed - I really dislike the cleric class in M&M VII. They're almost useless - their offensive capabilities are negated by stupid monster resistances (everyone and their mom don't give a flying fuck about mind magic) and their buffs are too easily replicated by light magic wizards, potions & henchmen.
Then we go train some skill. Merchant first as it'll save us even more money. We give it to everyone in the party as training becomes somewhat expensive further on, besides, it saves us from giving all the crap to one character for sale (that's why we also don't want to make it higher than 1 on any one char - money is overabundant and it's less hassle this way). Normal price for it is 500, btw.
We sell some of our loot - starting rings, needless feather fall spellbooks (no point in reading them for our archers), etc. Here's another illustration of what good reputation and merchant do for us.
We drink from a well of luck, giving +4 luck to everyone in the party.
And, almost emptying our purses, we buy the most important spell for us at this stage of the game. Fire aura adds 3.5 damage to each of our shots and, considering that your average bow does a 7.5 damage per shot, that's really a lot - almost half.
Then we go into dragonfly swamp, yet we don't engage them - just attract their attention...
And lead them straight into city, causing high fatality rates over local population. Well, it's all for the greater good...
After the glorious carnage is complete, we squash the few invader bugs remaining.
And then collect the lute...
And the fireball wand from the mound of corpses.
After taking hold of dead men's possessions, we clean the swamp from the insects.
This maneuver is kinda unfitting for the light-sided party, but we also can repent, you know, light forgives, besides, it saves you a lot of gold and effort as it's easier to kill the dragonfly swarm after their number dwindles.
We have to heal in the process, though - they sting. Well, whatever, it's not like we'll need another healing today.
Carnage and quest-doing brings us two levels of experience. We continue to focus on bow and fire magic skills.
Then we make another trip to the swamp - after you clean up the initial mess, a small cloud of dragonflies will respawn each morning. It's easy to kill them and it's really beneficial - you get free money this way, basically. Not much, but it helps.
We get more useful skills - alchemy is kinda important when you don't have a cleric. Heck, it's important even if you have one as, unlike with health, it's not like there's lots of way to restore mana & conditions & stuff. Always try to have a master of it. GM is useless, though.
Here are our skill levels before we venture to the temple of the moon.
Oh, and when I gave those quest items to the judge, I dropped the bow on the ground before his house - it's a good bow, no need to part with it early.
First line of temple's defences are bats - they're easy, too easy for us.
The chest that they've defended brought us a couple of tridents - they're worse than halberds, but at least better than spears that we have.
Then it's the turn of spiders & rats - fiery arrows leave them no chance to survive.
More rats means more practice targets. It's good that arrows are infinite in this game, though. Restocking would've been a pain below the back...
We encounter some "friendly" swordsmen, but, not trusting everyone, we decide to get rid of them too, just in case. They're slow and easy.
Dealing with them, we grab the floor tile.
In the other branch of the building, we find their leader - he's tougher, but still easily kiteable. It sucks to have no ranged attack - they either have a bow or bow in this game.
Sorry, I did it again. And, actually, this dude had a bow as the fixed loot (it's the same as the quest one), but, obviously, he couldn't use it properly.
We find a club amongst the loot. Although they have pathetic damage, clubs are one of the best early game weapons as they have terrific attack speed that is hardly hindered by armour. With high strength and fiery aura, they can popamole good.
Then we finish the quest line here, unfortunately parting with one of the bows. Our business here is not finished yet, but it was the only way of gaining enough experience to take level four.
We train axe skill, as it is harder to do later on, just in case, but it's a mistake since axe sucks - they're helluva slow.
Taking level 4, we push our prioritized skills at the mark of 5.
Now the time has come. We restore ourselves to full health and mana by drinking from the one fountain...
And gain significant fire resistance by drinking from another one.
And fire resistance pedestal helps us to become even more endurable.
Entering the cave, we start the turn-based combat and do some baton tossing while the dragon is distracted by some rats. This means that every character shoots at the dragon from the wand by passing it to each other after the shot.
Rats don't last forever, though, so, having dealt some damage, we engage in a more twitchy style of combat.
Running in circles around the dragon, we stop periodically and send a volley of arrows at it. Then we resume the running so it can't hit us with mighty fiery blast which would've been lethal if not for our resistance of 70.
Unfortunately, that's a slow process so, when our fiery aura runs out (and due to a bug, we can't renew it in this cavern), the dragon remains pretty healthy.
We find a wand on the ground, though, and it's deals 15-20 damage to dragon per shot. Equipping both it and the fireball wand, we resume our crazed dance...
Until another fiery blasts scorches the life out of the dragon.
Believe it or not, but we did the whole thing with but one reload and it was due to our stupidity - we shot the fireball wand from a bad placed and blasted ourselves to bits.
We don't savescum, however, so we get a ring of +20 health out of it and that's all. Savescumming from this dragon really spoils this game for ya so I advise strongly against it. The only exception is to loot carnage bow from it (and only the bow - no multiple loots) as it really changes your playthrough, but they are incredibly rare and getting one of them is boring as hell.
We're still lucky with this ring, though - 20 hps is a lot for the early-game wizard, so she won't die on us often.
Resulting experience gives us another level of experience.
To be continued...
Not that it has anything to do with the game or with fantasy or with sci-fi or whatever, but I like lame puns and oldschool industrial, so deal with it.
Here's our party - 3x archers to do all the killing and a strictly supportive wizard. We take no armor skills as it'll only hinder us before we master it, lowering our DPS, so instead we get learning & magics to spend less cash on them(they're expensive - more expensive than armor, actually) and spears as they're one of the best early-game close combat weapons, especially as our strength is low.
In attributes we focus on speed and accuracy for our archers - since they fight from great distance, they can allow themselves to be sorta frail. We take a beefy dwarf as our wizard, however, as we don't want to have a 16 hp elven wizards - there's frail and there's dying from a loud sound, y'know. And int is not as needed for her as she won't cast her offensive spells often - her priority is to buff and transport us.
We play with a grayface's unofficial patch by the way - it doesn't alter any content, it just fixes a number of bugs (but not all of them, unfortunately), makes some interface improvements and enables a 2x speed mode, doubling the speed of the game and hugely reducing the tediousness of it.
Here you see our attack speed - that's why we take unarmoured speedy goblin, as for the other character it would've been something around 110+, meaning ~15% slower. That's a lot.
And that's why spear is teh best - it's one of the fastest starting weapons and, once you'll find at least a basic trident, you'll deal lots of damage.
Now the game begins. We open the first free chest and find ourselves lucky - plenty of gold inside and a longbow which 5d2 is better than starting 4d2 crossbows.
Then we head for the temple and donate the gold five times. I'll show you later why this is important.
On our way to the second free chest, we collect some yellow ingredients. While they seem kinda useless in the beginning, they're actually the rarest and thus most valuable alchemic components. It's a good idea to hoard them from the earliest on.
I collect the chest (nothing fancy there, just money) and attract the attention of a couple of dragonflies. Carefully, I lead them after me.
KK, I botched this one. I lead them after me and allowed them to kill Sally, the girl near the dragon's cavern so I could pick her seashell for free, but I kinda failed at screencapturing it. Here you see the aftermath - me avenging the poor girl. This is only a shadow of carnage to come, though...
We touch the day of gods pedestal - it's quintessential to use it on a constant basis as the stats gain is great. Without it, emerald island would be much harder.
And we gain some free skillpoints from the contest thanks to the day of gods. Archers pump bows, Tjukurrpa gains a fire magic of 2.
Then we make a quick raid into dragon cave - we grasp the shield and the bow and run away immediately.
Finally, we make two red potions and exchange one of them for a fancy hat.
Then we go to the judge & lord Markham and finish the missing contestants quest as soon as we take it. We also give tons of the quest stuff to the judge.
And that's the point of donating & rushing the quest - immediate 10 reputation (5 from donate & 5 from quest - and you can gain it from donate only when you're at 0 reputation, so always donate first). Good reputation adds bonus to your merchant skill, making things significantly cheaper from you.
To press on the financial advantage, we add a merchant to the party. I hope she's also lesbian and feminist...
Oh, and beware of dupers! They look cool, but as they give you -5 reputation, their net gain is lower than from average traders. I guess it's higher if you have an expert merchant on higher, but we don't plan to have this level of skill so dupers are useless to us.
We also hire a healer lady who has probably seen better days... Healers are not as awesome in archer party as they're awesome in fighter party (you can easily start with 3x 70-90 hp characters so the full heal will give you great profit), but they're still good. 5% is nothing for the full heal that she gives us - that saves our time and compensates for the lack of cleric.
BTW, if you haven't noticed - I really dislike the cleric class in M&M VII. They're almost useless - their offensive capabilities are negated by stupid monster resistances (everyone and their mom don't give a flying fuck about mind magic) and their buffs are too easily replicated by light magic wizards, potions & henchmen.
Then we go train some skill. Merchant first as it'll save us even more money. We give it to everyone in the party as training becomes somewhat expensive further on, besides, it saves us from giving all the crap to one character for sale (that's why we also don't want to make it higher than 1 on any one char - money is overabundant and it's less hassle this way). Normal price for it is 500, btw.
We sell some of our loot - starting rings, needless feather fall spellbooks (no point in reading them for our archers), etc. Here's another illustration of what good reputation and merchant do for us.
We drink from a well of luck, giving +4 luck to everyone in the party.
And, almost emptying our purses, we buy the most important spell for us at this stage of the game. Fire aura adds 3.5 damage to each of our shots and, considering that your average bow does a 7.5 damage per shot, that's really a lot - almost half.
Then we go into dragonfly swamp, yet we don't engage them - just attract their attention...
And lead them straight into city, causing high fatality rates over local population. Well, it's all for the greater good...
After the glorious carnage is complete, we squash the few invader bugs remaining.
And then collect the lute...
And the fireball wand from the mound of corpses.
After taking hold of dead men's possessions, we clean the swamp from the insects.
This maneuver is kinda unfitting for the light-sided party, but we also can repent, you know, light forgives, besides, it saves you a lot of gold and effort as it's easier to kill the dragonfly swarm after their number dwindles.
We have to heal in the process, though - they sting. Well, whatever, it's not like we'll need another healing today.
Carnage and quest-doing brings us two levels of experience. We continue to focus on bow and fire magic skills.
Then we make another trip to the swamp - after you clean up the initial mess, a small cloud of dragonflies will respawn each morning. It's easy to kill them and it's really beneficial - you get free money this way, basically. Not much, but it helps.
We get more useful skills - alchemy is kinda important when you don't have a cleric. Heck, it's important even if you have one as, unlike with health, it's not like there's lots of way to restore mana & conditions & stuff. Always try to have a master of it. GM is useless, though.
Here are our skill levels before we venture to the temple of the moon.
Oh, and when I gave those quest items to the judge, I dropped the bow on the ground before his house - it's a good bow, no need to part with it early.
First line of temple's defences are bats - they're easy, too easy for us.
The chest that they've defended brought us a couple of tridents - they're worse than halberds, but at least better than spears that we have.
Then it's the turn of spiders & rats - fiery arrows leave them no chance to survive.
More rats means more practice targets. It's good that arrows are infinite in this game, though. Restocking would've been a pain below the back...
We encounter some "friendly" swordsmen, but, not trusting everyone, we decide to get rid of them too, just in case. They're slow and easy.
Dealing with them, we grab the floor tile.
In the other branch of the building, we find their leader - he's tougher, but still easily kiteable. It sucks to have no ranged attack - they either have a bow or bow in this game.
Sorry, I did it again. And, actually, this dude had a bow as the fixed loot (it's the same as the quest one), but, obviously, he couldn't use it properly.
We find a club amongst the loot. Although they have pathetic damage, clubs are one of the best early game weapons as they have terrific attack speed that is hardly hindered by armour. With high strength and fiery aura, they can popamole good.
Then we finish the quest line here, unfortunately parting with one of the bows. Our business here is not finished yet, but it was the only way of gaining enough experience to take level four.
We train axe skill, as it is harder to do later on, just in case, but it's a mistake since axe sucks - they're helluva slow.
Taking level 4, we push our prioritized skills at the mark of 5.
Now the time has come. We restore ourselves to full health and mana by drinking from the one fountain...
And gain significant fire resistance by drinking from another one.
And fire resistance pedestal helps us to become even more endurable.
Entering the cave, we start the turn-based combat and do some baton tossing while the dragon is distracted by some rats. This means that every character shoots at the dragon from the wand by passing it to each other after the shot.
Rats don't last forever, though, so, having dealt some damage, we engage in a more twitchy style of combat.
Running in circles around the dragon, we stop periodically and send a volley of arrows at it. Then we resume the running so it can't hit us with mighty fiery blast which would've been lethal if not for our resistance of 70.
Unfortunately, that's a slow process so, when our fiery aura runs out (and due to a bug, we can't renew it in this cavern), the dragon remains pretty healthy.
We find a wand on the ground, though, and it's deals 15-20 damage to dragon per shot. Equipping both it and the fireball wand, we resume our crazed dance...
Until another fiery blasts scorches the life out of the dragon.
Believe it or not, but we did the whole thing with but one reload and it was due to our stupidity - we shot the fireball wand from a bad placed and blasted ourselves to bits.
We don't savescum, however, so we get a ring of +20 health out of it and that's all. Savescumming from this dragon really spoils this game for ya so I advise strongly against it. The only exception is to loot carnage bow from it (and only the bow - no multiple loots) as it really changes your playthrough, but they are incredibly rare and getting one of them is boring as hell.
We're still lucky with this ring, though - 20 hps is a lot for the early-game wizard, so she won't die on us often.
Resulting experience gives us another level of experience.
To be continued...