Wizardry 8 Party Creation Advice

Lol, thanks for all the suggestions, Dte! This won't be my first Wizardry 8 trial, per se' (I vaguely remember a swamp and a volcanic-ee area with rapax from my best attempt 4 or 5 years ago). And I chiefly want a "fun" playthrough - not terribly concerned with min-maxing - mostly just being able to use/see most of what the game has to offer, whether that be items or big bada boom spell effects.

Your ranger recommendation is an interesting one, especially in replacing my alchemy requirements with his/her abilities. Am I right in my belief that manually searching with other professions leaves you open to surprise attacks?

The only game version I have is 1.2.4, so the latest one. Is pick-pocketing completely defunct then? Howso? Is it basically impossible to get a successful skill check? Or do NPCs no longer carry anything of value? Truth be told, the more I consider it, I'll likely make a rogue regardless; I'd like to resurrect a feisty hobbit D&D PnP lass.

In the same vein as that rogue, the samurai is mostly for roleplay. I mean, how many other games have samurai! !!?

So, if I were to take the valk as the third in the front line, that would leave bishop + ranger + either gadgeteer, bard, or another mage class as the final 6th. Hmm.

Hey Dte, I didn't say I don't like Valks. What I said was I wouldn't have BOTH a Sam and a Valk in the party. I would have a Ninja as my locks and traps and for the CofC!!

Can someone refresh my memory on how lightning strike worked? IIRC it was totally random or maybe based on your encumbrance.

I like Sams because sams are cool and for the same reason as drithus, you don't get to play samurais too often. I would have liked to have gone for the Asian trifecta with sams, ninjas and monks, but I hate monks. To me they're a boring class no matter what game I'm playing. Give me weapons not fists of fury.

Pulled the trigger (again).

Samurai
Rogue
Valkyrie
Bishop
Gadgeteer
Ranger

I'm sort of worried about losing a specialized caster... but hoping that the latter 4 professions in that list shore up the loss.

What patches should i use on this game?

Here is the 1.24 patch and I would highly recommend Wizf8ast. It speeds up the movement of the monsters.

Damian Mahadevan said:

What patches should i use on this game?

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The final version was 1.2.4. Here's a link to the patch.

There's also an unofficial patch to speed up combat in the game. I didn't use it when I played, but I'm sure someone here can point you in the right direction if you want to try it.

*Edit* Oops...looks like skavenhorde beat my reply.

Thank you.

Drithius said:

I chiefly want a "fun" playthrough - not terribly concerned with min-maxing - mostly just being able to use/see most of what the game has to offer, whether that be items or big bada boom spell effects.

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You might also take RPC (recruitable characters) choices into consideration.
For a "fun" playthrough you definitely should use them I think.
Imo, there are 2 which are easily better than the others - first one is a valkyrie which has ties to the main plot and as such has somewhat more content and second one is a monk who can´t cast spells, but is great unarmed or with staffs, is an unique character with fun comments and, unlike other RPCs, will go with you almost everywhere.
If you count these two into your setup, you can replace valkyrie with some other class in your base party composition.

Also, don´t underestimate fun factor of bards - they´re very useful, at least in the early to mid game, and without them all those nice instruments will be for naught! Plus, if you have gadgeteer and bard in your party you got all useful psionic spells covered and can develop your bishop in other directions (I´d probably go with priest and mage spellbooks in such a setup, leaving alchemy for the ranger).

I wouldn´t worry about not having a spellcasting specialist much - the last 2 spell tiers are not really all that useful, buffs + debuffs + portals are where it´s at in W8 and all the most useful ones are in the first 5 tiers.

Samurai, rogue, gadgeteer, bard, ranger and bishop (plus later added valkyrie and monk RPCs) sound like a potentially fun ride to me.
You might also consider the bard to supply your rogue roleplay option (female hobbits are among the best choices for bards) and replace the rogue with a "slice´em, dice´em" lizardman fighter, for example.

Consider making the ranger mook - mooks get a tiny bit of race specific story content and later you get access to a pretty useful weapon only they can wield.

Drithius said:

Your ranger recommendation is an interesting one, especially in replacing my alchemy requirements with his/her abilities. Am I right in my belief that manually searching with other professions leaves you open to surprise attacks?

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You are correct, plus you cannot run with manual search on. You WILL be running--sometimes for convenience and sometimes screaming like a schoolgirl.

Drithius said:

The only game version I have is 1.2.4, so the latest one. Is pick-pocketing completely defunct then? Howso? Is it basically impossible to get a successful skill check? Or do NPCs no longer carry anything of value? Truth be told, the more I consider it, I'll likely make a rogue regardless; I'd like to resurrect a feisty hobbit D&D PnP lass.

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Totally nerfed. It still works and there's still good loot to steal, but SirTech made a couple changes that make it *very* impractical. First, if you fail, you lose access to the vendor for a period of time until you can bribe/sweettalk your way back into their good graces. Second, if you succeed, vendors "notice stuff missing" and gradually connect it back to you. So, regardless of your results, you end up barred from vendors. That's bad news since the ones you'd want to steal from are also the ones you need to shop with. Third, Brenda claimed that they had somehow coded pickpocket results somewhere so that doing the save/reload dance wouldn't work. Never have been a pickpocket in any rpgs I played, so I can't verify that last part personally.

Drithius said:

So, if I were to take the valk as the third in the front line, that would leave bishop + ranger + either gadgeteer, bard, or another mage class as the final 6th. Hmm.

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That's the beauty of Wiz8 right there. It's impossible to cover everything in a single party so you have to make some choices and your experience with the game will be measurably different based on those choices.

skavenhorde said:

Can someone refresh my memory on how lightning strike worked? IIRC it was totally random or maybe based on your encumbrance.

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It's based on a stew of stats and skills, although encumberance isn't one of them. For all practical purposes, you might as well call it random because the influence of the character numbers seems rather minor compared to the influence of the "roll".

It's been awhile and I normally don't have a pickpocket either, but couldn't you use charm on the vendors to get back in their good graces?

Thanks for the reminder about lightning strike. For some reason I thought that encumbrance had an effect on whether or not you initiated it.

Well, if you're encumbered you lose attacks and if you don't attack you won't get the lightning strike critical, so I suppose there is a link, but AFAIK the actual encumberance value isn't part of the calculation.

I'm actually tempted to start another playthrough already but I'm having a heck of a time deciding on a party.

DTE ( or other experts ), is lockpick necessary? Can a combo of knock-knock and bash get you through the game instead?

Can the Rogue backstab from any position or do they have to be within melee range?

I know the general consensus about dual classing is bad in Wiz 8, but I'm tempted to take a Bard to 11 (heal all, haste, soul shield, magic screen), power train Lockpcking and Music and then switch him to a Valk or Fighter to use back row polearms. I wasn't that impressed with the L14 & L18 instruments during my last playthrough. Thoughts?

LuckyCarbon said:

DTE ( or other experts ), is lockpick necessary? Can a combo of knock-knock and bash get you through the game instead?

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Theoretically, it's possible to go without. You have to outfit one of your toons with the Poseur's Hat (always found on the monestary first level) until you get strength and the knock spell. Eventually, you'll want at least 2 toons that can capably cast the knock spell. Without "stacking" knocks, you'll never get thru the 8-tumbler locks on the Peak (among others).

LuckyCarbon said:

Can the Rogue backstab from any position or do they have to be within melee range?

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It's a melee attack, so you've got to be "eligible" to make the attack.

LuckyCarbon said:

I know the general consensus about dual classing is bad in Wiz 8, but I'm tempted to take a Bard to 11 (heal all, haste, soul shield, magic screen), power train Lockpcking and Music and then switch him to a Valk or Fighter to use back row polearms. I wasn't that impressed with the L14 & L18 instruments during my last playthrough. Thoughts?

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There's nothing to say you couldn't do that. Bards do fizzle a bit in the late game so a plan to address that can't be all bad. As you note, you'd have to invest a fair bit of time training the music skill.

Are their any mods to lessen the# of monsters even with the speed mod I found fights taking forever. Especially the wasps. I enjoyed the begining of wiz 8 very much but fighting seemingly hundreds of the same monsters in the same area ruined my enjoyment about mid game.

One quick question regarding Bishop spell picks for someone intimately familiar with Wizardry. I'm wondering which spells to pick up during level-ups in preparation for saving future spell picks.

This site says to opt for Mind Stab, Heal, Web, & Missile Shield and then to save further picks. Are these safe bets? I don't recall the details on the skill system and if/how skilling up in certain schools will preclude me from skill-ups in other schools; so, I'm somewhat ambivalent about forging ahead blindly.

There are a few buffs you want to run constantly. Missle shield is one of those. Heal is kinda a no-brainer. Mind stab is OK, but I wouldn't call it pivotal. I find web to be disappointing. I'd put Shrill Sound much closer to "pivotal" since it's the first decent area-of-effect damage spell you can get.

You want to pick spells so that the books overlap. So, for instance, if you have Light and keep it running at all times (you should), your fire skill will increase. If you use energy blast for your level 1 attack spell, it also boosts the fire skill.

My "mandatory buffs" list:
Light, enchanted blade, missle shield, magic screen, armorplate (and you'll want to cast element shield and/or soul shield in the first round of most fights)

FWIW, I wasn't tremendously impressed with your link. While most of the advice is decent, some of it is kinda fuzzy and I noticed a couple things that were quite simply wrong. I did some Google searching for Jandril's site to offer you a top-notch alternative, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore.

Aye, I was actually looking at that link because it offered a different angle on things. I've looked at Jandral's spotlights as well actually, using the wayback machine, as well as this Gamefaq on character creation.

Basically, I'm just trying to get a handle on the skill system all over again - it's just so foreign from the standard D&D stuff. I experienced the same sense of being lost with Drakensang as well. Different is good though.

edit: just stumbled upon a restored version of Jandrall's site: http://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/jandrall/

I really should get into Wizardry 8 again. It's just so much fun planning out a party with character classes and skills. It's just a shame that the actual game, mainly because of the combat, isn't quite as good.

Bishops do confuse me, because there is either too much choice or too much to cover, depending on the other classes in the party.