2009 is still 14 years ago my man.
Ah, the old 4th floor Monster Allocation Center grind. After that, the only floor really worth spending time on is the 9th to gear up before tackling the basement.
Yep, which is what I’m doing now (9th floor). Too slow on the draw twice now and got myself some level drains, but they weren’t on anyone important (one of the two frontline Samurai). I’ve gotten a +2 longsword, a +1 longsword, and a +2 shield (also a +1 shortsword for the thief but he’s hiding in the back still). I probably need to start leveling another caster (just running 5 right now). I have to be very careful, because there’s so much that can kill me and limits to what I can actually do about it.
I don’t recall if I can get +3 breastplates on level 9 anymore. But +2 shields and maybe +2 breastplates and +2 longswords seem like the minimum before I try 10. Sadly xp grind gets slow until you get to 10, where it picks up again big time (if dangerously so). Oh, and diadems of malor, just for the AC. Which I think I can get on this level. Still a ways off from 12 for the casters - like 80k xp. I think I’ve done MAC the grind all the way to 13 in my life before, but that’s a going to take a long time to do. Still, it’s safer even with gear upgrades. I really desperately need madi and more Makanito casts.
I read something interesting regarding character creation. This may not be true, and if I once knew it I had forgotten. But allegedly it rolls over a modest range of values (what I read was d5+4) and then rolls a d20 and on a 20 you get +10 points, and then another d20 roll (and if that hits 20 you get another +10, and another roll). I don’t think this is true for every version of the game though. I remember things like 12s and 13s being possible, which wouldn’t happen in this system. And it’s not true in this version regardless of what code it’s using; I see something like 6 or 7 to 10 and 17 to 20. A post on the steam forums claims to have gotten more than 20. I don’t doubt it but I haven’t seen it and peculiarly I’ve never seen anything 11-16. Probably easily across 100 rolls at this point (17-20 is fairly common, moreso than I recall in either the original or the Archives version).
point allocation on level up (combined with no stat downs) is chef’s kiss.
Man, we really need a proper Wzi 6/Wiz7 remaster.
I think you can get most if not all the +2 stuff on level 9, including perhaps Plate +2. And the nice thing is that you can just leverage the Chute (!) to hit the teleporter back to the Castle when you’re done with the run, as long as you can beat or run away from that encounter in the Chute room. I remember back in the day it took us forever before we found the way to level 10. It was perhaps the last square on the level that we stepped on when trying to find the “stairs down.”
Guh, level 12 spell casters finally got me Madi and Madalto. That should help quite a bit.
@Freezer-TPF do you remember what level Frost and Earth Giants start appearing on? I don’t recall them being level 10 fixtures (I mostly remember poison giants thereabouts). Looking over monster tables, they’re the only non level 10 found monsters that are worth a shit xp wise. But maybe Frost appear on 10 and I just didn’t remember. Also, it probably is too hard to farm them on whichever other level.
+1 and +2 plate found, so now the two samurai have decent ACs. But I need to do something about the fact that my mage usually dies when the idiot theif sets off a blades trap and it hits her. Might swap a Samurai to mage and get another mook.
It occurs to me that the secretly, deeply underrated aspect of I-9 was getting characters who could reliably disarm chests. I think my thief (now 11) has been rolling like absolute garbage on his level up “chance to disarm” gains, since on level floor 9 I’m usually at about a 74% chance. Blades/Exploding chests account for about a third of my mage deaths.
Level 13.
Did not learn Titltowait.
So chapped right now.
I think you can get small groups Frost/Earth Giants (around 7K XP each for a 6 person party) on level 9, but Poison Giants (who die beautifully to LAKANITO) were only on level 10. One of the other XP biggies are Will-o-wisps, but I think those are only level 10. Maybe you can small groups of Greater Demons on level 9, but I hate those guys. I can’t remember exactly, sorry.
Uhh, ZILWAN should only nuke the undead. That’s quite a bug, unless your party member got bitten by a randy vampire.
Frost are 40k per giant (earth are 20k). Turns out earth show up on 9 but it’s very rare, probably twice in maybe 200+ encounters. I really think Frost appear on level 7 or 8 or something but I can’tr remember how rare they are (or are not).
Sadly, everything went to shit. I just teleported 8 down, 8e, 1n (just like I had been doing over 20+ level 10 runs at this point) to head to 10 and somehow wound up in a wall. Not that things were going well before that.
I can’t kill a lot of shit on 10 very well without Tiltowait. Lakanito was not proving helpful on poison giants, shockingly. Mind you I’ve only encountered them 3 times. “Good” encounter rate on 10 was abysmal - like way worse than I remember - and I have to reset a lot (I am not facing undead or bleebs and holy shit I seem to get bleebs like every 4th encounter; bleebs take forever as the mooks all still basically suck, even with +2 longswords). I’ve seen poison giants thrice, wisps thrice, greater demons twice, and a goddamned maelific once (and in an encounter with 3 poison giants; I got out by the skin of my teeth). And this is easily across 100+ encounters at this point, maybe closer to 200. And one of those wisp encounters was with greater demons and I had to jet.
I had to abort the maelific encounter after a disastrous first round (3 party members dead). Thinking about it, in the maelific encounter we rolled initiative poorly and I think the mage got nuked before they could get Lakanito off and that might have happened one other time (the first time. . .I’m pretty sure it got resisted. Or maybe I screwed up and accidentally cast makanito or something). So maybe I just got unlucky once. Fucking maelifics. it really sucks that they are worth so little xp, relatively speaking (Greater Demons are 40k per, but the Maelific is somewhere under 10k).
And now everyone is lost. I at least have plenty of decent eq at Baltics now (and even one +2 longsword; man the game was being stingy with those). But I am not motivated to play right now.
Someone posted about a playthrough of the Archives version way up thread maybe two years ago and they were getting insane gear drops left and right. But this appears to really be the Apple II version at core, and gear drops here sucked pretty hard (again, three +2 longswords across IDK how many swords at this point). There’s something unusual in this version too: every item (cursed inclusive) has a unique graphic and you can see the shaded outline of the graphic even before you ID the item. So there isn’t any actual surprise anymore.
And my samurai was definitely not undead :D That’s a crazy bug.
Another bug: sometimes encounters start with no surprise announcement but the enemy gets a free round. I discovered that you can just quit out quickly, but I’ve been having to do that on occasion because you obviously do not want to give things like Master Ninjas, Undead, mages, and anything breath weapon empowered free rounds.
I’m pretty sure that was me. :) I had an unusually good amount of legendary loot drops (I think I was carrying around extra Lords Garb just for the health regen), but the frequency of stat losses on level ups really killed the fun for me, especially after changing classes for Samurai/Lord and maybe Ninja (can’t remember if thieves dagger resets your stats to your racial base).
LAKANITO should be like 75-80% instakill against Poison Giants, but maybe the Apple II era code was not as generous. I think it worked maybe 25-33% against Greater Demons, but it’s pretty much all you have except maybe trying to MONTINO them. Level 10 is not really worth the pain until you have TILTOWAIT, and of course MALOR straight to the chute square is a nice time saver to start each run.
But that ZILWAN thing makes me think there is something seriously buggy about their code adaptation. Wizardry should not be that hard to get right. I appreciate the effort, but I wish they would spend their resources on remaking Wiz 6/7 instead. I hope that is in the works–would be an instabuy for me.
100%
The automap being slightly wonky is whatever - it’s EA - but the Zilwan bug is insane. Although. . . now it makes me want to try it on other enemies. Come to think of it, I once tried it on undead and it didn’t work. Something might be reversed (I wouldn’t ordinarily chalk up a failure to that being a problem except for me getting nuked).
But yeah, 6/7 please. I also wouldn’t mind 5 just to have a modernized Bradley trilogy. This is probably my biggest remaster want in the whole wide world.
Also, here is another bug:
You an attack all 4 rows in combat, no restrictions. Not subject to getting a surprise round. It’s nice for MAC grinding since you can reliably take out the high ninja before it can act.
I will say the art they’ve done for the new monsters is good. Interestingly, the demon art is extremely similar to some of the demon art in some of the Japanese games.
That’s always been the case in any version of Wiz I that I’ve played. Your front 3 can melee any monster group, and anyone can cast against any monster group.
Oh, I did not remember that.
This has to be the greatest “I hit level 13!!!” levelup in the history of Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord.
Booyah!
Oh jeez I have got to stop being dumb on level 10. Got lucky here.
So this jester dude appears on a loading screen and I’ve been wondering what monster this was. So when I fought one (and 3 Murphys), I thought I’d give it a whirl (and Tiltowaited anyway).
Well, he lived through the Tiltowait (although hurt) and the front row attacks (2 sam, 1 cleric), and booped one of my snoops. Had I looked at the old school UI (which was visible), the slime portrait would have told me it was the Flak.
Fortunately, that hit didn’t cause any problems. So yay me making like 4 or 5 saves or whatever (although paralysis wouldn’t have been an issue had I failed that).
I am curious about how they went from “super killer slime monster” to “uh, a jester thingy?”.
The incognito name for the Flack was Strange Animal I think, right? Odd choice of art. I cannot remember whether they had a breath weapon, but I’m pretty sure they could stone/paralyze you.
Some Googling shows some anime where it was a jester?
As for why? Hell if I know. Japan reasons.