Hey guys,
I have been ranting about the difficulty of the new DLC for might parties for a bit yesterday. Since them I calmed down a bit and started to take this DLC as an april fool's joke and also prepared a little something to lighten up the mood for all fans of might parties out there having trouble. Enjoy!
Somewhere in the Limbo two fictional devs meet:
Dev 1: Hey man, I was thinking about something special for our upcoming Might & Magic 10 DLC.
Dev 2: What do you have in mind?
Dev 1: Since all the players are geared up to the teeth at this point in the game, how about we base a story on a fact that the party gets imprisoned and all the gear is taken from them at the start?
Dev 2: Sounds interesting, how would you go about designing the gameplay?
Dev 1: Easy. As I said, all the weapons, armor, even items like potions and scrolls will be taken. Only thing that stays will be gold since we would have to set up a new variable to store the gold value until the party recovers their equipment and you know that our Variables guy is currently on vacation.
Dev 2: I see. What about balance across party types? I assume that magic parties will not have much trouble since they do not need armor or weapons all that much.
Dev 1: That's right. Magic parties will just breeze through with all that fancy liquid membranes, stone skins, regen and what not. I might put feeblemind on some mobs and offer no feeblemind removing potions to keep them from falling asleep.
Dev 2: What about might parties? I guess they would be have a hard time with all the weapons and armor gone right?
Dev 1: I don't play might parties too much, but I am sure they can still have it too easy with all those fancy skills from warfare. I think I saw that we even fixed the Windsword Perfect Strike this patch, so they might be borderline op. I am thinking about giving them only novice weapons and armor and only selling basic potions. There will not be enough money in the DLC, but they should have plenty of money lying around since what use is money for might parties right?
Dev 2: I played a couple of might parties and they sometimes focus heavily on destiny stat, which makes them dodge a lot. Do you have anything to up the challenge for those parties as well?
Dev 1: Don't worry, got that all covered. I increased the attack values on all the mobs, so it will be much harder to dodge everything. Apart from that I designed the first boss specifically with these guys in mind. I gave the boss and all his goons retaliation, so those parties would just kill themselves by attacking since they have next to no armor.
Dev 2: What if those might parties just camped the potion vendor for months and then breezed through the fight by having lots of reloads and drinking over 100 potions? We cannot have that happening now can we?
Dev 1: Always one step ahead of you :>. To spice things up, I gave the boss an ability to cast party-wide fireball that hits for 150 non-crit. Since those destiny parties usually have lower health, this should be enough combined with retaliation and regular atttacks to get at least some party members unconscious. Once they are unconscious, they are done since those parties have no healing for other party members to speak of and the vendors prudently do not sell any healing scrolls at all.
Besides, even if they somehow managed to survive all this, which I doubt, they would certainly have a couple of party members dead by now and the only healer available in this place is the next boss. Brilliant isn't it?
Dev 2: Well, that sounds like fun. I am sure the players will appreciate all the thought we put into designing this masterpiece.
Have fun
to hermes_tri241:
The devs certainly do not seem to mind doing this for the magic parties in this DLC (or the entire game so far), why make only might parties suffer?
to BrianCorvello:
There is a fine line between having to think and impossible odds.Having to go without decent weapons and armor against strong enemies is already pretty rough. Retaliation, mob skills removing all blocks and fireballing makes the fight impossible. I do not want it to be a cakewalk, just want to be a decent chance of winning (at least 20%) if I use all my guys to the fullest.
There is really not much room to think since the might party toolset is pretty limited, but I certainly welcome any strategies you think might work for this fight.
General setting:
Regular enemies have 3 melee attacks each that deal roughly 50 damage per hit (25 physical and 25 fire) and posses feeblemind attacks and retaliation. They also like to spam their skill Overwhelming assault that cannot be evaded or blocked and eliminates all blocks from target party member for the rest of the round.
Boss is a much stronger version of the above and hits for 100 damage per hit (50 physical and 50 fire) without feeblemind, but with the ability to cast fireball for roughly 150 damage to all party members and also has the Overwhelming assault skill
All mobs seem to also have a very high critical chance (at least 30%)
Party abilities:
Windsword (229hp, 171 evade) with GM warfare and 2H swords that can remove blocks from an enemy and hits twice every round for about 100 dmg each.
Bladedancer (279hp, 180 evade) with swords that can hit for another 100 - 150 dmg (enemies have evade 120+, so some swings usually miss)
Shieldbearer (418hp, 154 evade) with GM shield and mace that can stun someone or taunt on demand (high destiny)
Barbarian (554hp, 8 evade) with spear that has decent amount of blocks and does about 200 dmg per swing (high might, no destiny)
Shieldbearer has expert fire magic that allows him to cast Fire Ward (reasonably useful +9 fire resistance for 6 rounds)
Bladedancer has regeneration spell, but its pretty weak (75 heal + 25 ticks)
There are healing potions and mana potions available at vendors, but nothing else (light ward scroll doesn't help here)
Problems:
There is no way to prevent the boss from spamming fireballs since he is immune to skull crack / stun and taunt/challenge only forces him to target a specific member with the fireball, the other party members are still hurt. When the enemy uses Overwhelming assault, it always hits and all other hits that round on that party member seem to hit as well. To sum up, there is simply too much enemy damage output with no way to mitigate it and the health pools of the party are not enough to survive this long term (fireball combined with overwhelming assaults from mobs is a pretty much a guaranteed kill on a party member).
So tell me, what am I missing here that could turn this around (apart from starting a new party or modding the game that is)?
Thanks in advance
Just wait until you get to the Summer Palace.
Having no place to buy supplies at all is certainly a handicap, and the worst monsters here are the Elite Crossbowmen. They can cast Cleansing Light and Mass Cure, and I've had to restart that whole part of the game twice because I didn't bring enough Mana Potions. (Take it from me, dealing with the guys on the way to throne room if you run out of them IS impossible.)
I think carefully my fights. I have a balanced team. Played all the previous MM since mm6. Loved the difficulty of MMX.Originally Posted by Trubacek Go to original post
But the fight with Perren is f*cked up. Period.
In fact this whole DLC is ***** up. You just can't play if you don't have at least 2 mages, able to dispell the feeblemind, or the sleep spell of the inquisitors
My god, did you really test this DLC? It's worthless!!
Just try this with a balanced team, like 1 human mage, 1 orc fighter, 1 dwarf defender and let's say 1 elf archer/dagger.
You have 1 guy able to dispell (it's been completely enough for the whole game before this DLC), so when an inquisitor spell your mage to sleep, and he will, since he launchs the sleeping spell every two turns, that's it, in 3 turns all your team is asleep, and your game is over, you're dead.
WTF!