Might and Magic II - Part 16

Earlier this week I found out there is a Might & Magic X being made, so I decided my goal is to finish the entire series (minus the first game) before it is released. Hahahahahahahaha. Yeah right. But I will try my damnedest. So here's another update, not even a week after my last one! What the hell is wrong with me?

I began this update by doctoring my characters stats.



A few updates back I went to Castle Woodhaven and drank this Ogre Ale, it decreases Personality by 5 but increases Might by 3. This is a screenshot from that past update, because it really day 150-ish, so the circus is still in session. So I had everyone (except Ian and David, because why would they need Might?) drink as much Ogre Ale as possible, lowering their Personality to 0. And then I went back to the circus and raised it back to 100. Then drank more Ogre Ale, rinse repeat until everyone had 255 Might, which is the max.



Not knowing what I should do I decided to try out the Juror's Quests. For the Juror's Quests each class has to do their quest alone, or with a Robber. I brought random hirelings along as well. Ian, Hein and Fumbler go to free the good and evil Wizards on the Good and Evil Zones, respectively. I don't even remember what Fumbler was, but I'm guessing he's a Robber? Whatever, he was just there to take hits. We started with the Good Castle, for no real reason.



I guess we're going to be illuminated by the good wizard.




Lets Play: Let's Make a Deal!

Both doors go to the same place, but the correct door has no monsters on the other side. Door #1 was the wrong door, by the way. After you go through the door, it opens up into another room with 3 doors instead. Same idea, and then the next room has one more door, and so forth. I just randomly went through doors in hope of getting the right door, 90% I failed. The monsters weren't hard though, so it wasn't too bad, at the end of the guessing game there was a battle with 3 Iron Wizards, which are pretty tough, but Ian can one-hit kill with the spell Implosion.



We found our way to the end of the castle where Yekop is sealed. To free him there are two combination lock things on either side of him. Fortunately a statue in Atlantium told us the combination.



We free Yekop only for him to tell us to save Ybmug. So much for Good triumphing over Evil. So we head back over to the Evil Zone and enter the castle over there. Its more or less the same dungeon. This time though, I notice hints to figure out which door to go through. The hints were probably in the first castle too, but I didn't check the walls at all, so I'm not sure. Too bad I either misinterpreted the hints, or they were just dead wrong. Instead of Illumination, we go through a door leading to Despair.



Okay then, there are only two doors, so it must be Door #2! The wall lied. I get fought, kill some monsters and read the next hint.



This one is obvious right? More than one, but less than a crowd. If three is a crowd, and the number is larger than one, then it has to be 2, right? YeahhhhNO. What the hell?



There were 10 doors. The largest prime would be 7. Still wrong. Okay, seriosuly, what the fuck, game?



I though I had this one figured out. There were 12 doors, but the twelfth door was labeled #11, and the eleventh door was labeled #12, so I went through the door labeled #12. Maybe it was a trick and I was supposed to go through the door labeled #11? I give up...



These doors were lettered instead of numbered. I'm onto the game at this point and know it doesn't mean E. Yes, E is the first letter in Eye, but there is a door labeled I. I go through door I and it fucking worked! The first and only door I went through that didn't make me fight monster on the other side! I seriously would have had better luck guessing randomly like I did in the Good Castle. There was a few more hints that I got dead wrong before I finally reached Ybmug.



We unlock the two combinations and free Ybmug, who thanks us and tells us to go back to the Juror's on Mount Farview. Have you figured out what Ybmug and Yekop are references to? Spell the names backwards. Gumby and Pokey. Apparently, according to New World Computing, Gumby is evil and Pokey is good.

Alright, so the Sorcerer Quest is done, as well as the Robber Quest. 5 more to go! We return to Middlegate and remove Ian and Fumbler from the party and pick up Swift and Sir Hyron. I used Sir Hyron a long time ago, he was one of my first hirelings I think. Well, by a long time ago, I mean, a LONG TIME ago. He's less than half Swift's level. Hein, Swift and Sir Hyron set off to do the Knight Quest.




The Knight Quest was really short and sweet. All we have to do is kill the Dread Knight. It wasn't too hard, the battle lasted three rounds. Sure he knocked out Sir Hyron in one hit. His second attack critically wounded Hein to single digit HP. He never got a third attack. Our knights have proven their worthiness!



I think I did the Barbarian Quest next. It was just as easy as the Knight Quest, if not easier. The developers should have made a male Barbarian monster. It just so weird, especially since the enemies are given male names, and you see a half-naked chick instead. Anyhow victory was ours. Onto the Archer Quest!



Baron Wilfrey is kind of a douchebag. We're just minding our business traveling through the forest when he just throws his glove at us. He had no idea what he got himself into.



We saved the forest from the Douchebag Baron.

Next we did the Cleric Quest, which was kind of hard.



Ghost are a pain in the ass. They need special weapons to hit them, I don't really know how it works. Typically I have Jeanne kill them, while everyone else kills the other monsters with them, since only Jeanne can hit them. Too bad this is the Cleric Quest and Jeanne can't come. Hein was completely useless. Fortunately David has Moon Ray which seemed to be the only spell that damaged them. Bad part is that it did such pitiful damage. I was genuinely worried he was going to run out of SP before he killed them all, but he was able to pull it off.

So we found Corak's Soul after killing the ghosts. Thats one half of the Cleric Quest done. Now we have to take it back to Corak's body down in his tomb. That was annoying since we needed a pass to go to Corak's Tomb, which you can get in Sandsobar's dungeon. I'll admit I was using a guide, and the guide gave the wrong coordinates in the Sandsobar dungeon. I eventually find the pass and return to Corak's Cave.



There is a barrier blocking entry to Corak's Tomb. We go to the left and find another disembodied voice telling us he turned off the barrier. We proceed to the tomb.



We freed Corak and for some reason he decides to give us some advice. Too bad the advice was completely irrelevant since we have all the Encasement spells at this point. Its the thought that counts?

All we have left is the Paladin Quest! Bad part is that its in a dungeon we've never been to before. Even worse is the guide I was using gave the wrong coordinates AGAIN! The guide said the dungeon was in B1, when it was actually in C3. It took me forever to figure this out, especially since B1 is the tundra area, so I kept thinking I was just getting snowblinded and teleported around before I actually reached the dungeon. Eventually I gave up and used a different guide and found out I was in the wrong area. The plan was to go through the dungeon as a party so we can map it out, and then I can bring only the Paladins and Robbers to do the quest.



On our way to find the dungeon we find a doorway to hell! Enh, why not?



CAT FROM HELL! Cat corpses are easy enough, so we figure we got this in the bag.



But we were wrong. The Cat from Hell did something that hit 1500+ damage on 6 people. David and Ian were able to run the fuck away before they were turned into cat food. Upon reflecting on this battle I believe I could win it. It only knocked out the people it hit, if I had David use Moon Ray, it will heal the party, bringing the knocked out back to consciousness. We were doing fairly nice damage to the Cat from Hell, so I think we could stand a chance. It all depends on how much health the Cat has and how many time David will have to use Moon Ray. I'll have to try later.

Eventually we found the dungeon, and it wasn't so hard as annoying. Apparently it was some sort of military bunker or something. There were doors Marked Infantry, Legion, Command and The Sarge. The doors marked Infantry and Legion had a bunch of minor enemies right behind the door. So i had to fight 250+ Orcs in one battle, 250+ Goblins in another, and so forth. It was just annoying since they had no chance to kill me. Each Legion had its own Sarge.



I killed them both before they could attack, so I'm unsure if they are worthy of the names the game gives them. Having completely explored the dungeon, we return to town and kick everyone out of the party except Hein, Sherman and Jeanne. We return to the dungeon and go through the Paladin's Only passage.



Dragons have been a thorn in my party's side for a while now. I can kill them, but they usually come in packs which usually ends badly for me. This is a lone dragon, so I'm not too worried. And I was right it not being worried, we killed it before it could even attack.



The Paladin's are now worthy of... something. So all the Juror Quests are completed. Time to take the party back to Mount Farview. Once we get there everyone is awarded 5 million experience points. That is a metric shit ton of experience. We go to Atlantium to train, and each character gets at least three levels.



Ending stats from last update.



Ending stats for this update. I decided to show the actual Character sheets for my party this time to show off the stats. I think its kind of hard to read since I shrank the image a bit. I also wanted to show off the "+" symbol next to everyone's class, denoting that they have done their Juror Quest. I don't exactly know what the + symbol does. I dunno if they get more HP/SP when they level or not.

I need to find new equipment for some characters. Elayne's Might Gauntlets are useless now since her base Might is 255. As far as I know they do not add "invisible" Might that goes over 255. I'll have to find something else. Maybe some Accuracy Gauntlets.

Anyhow my team is pretty badass now, but their are still ridiculously overpowered enemies out there. Like the Cat from Hell, or those Cuisinarts from last update. I really think we're starting to get into the end game now though. To start the final main story quests, every character in the party has to have finished their Juror Quest. However, I still haven't even been to some of the castles yet, so I really have no idea how much more there is to the game. End of Part 16.

 

Might and Magic II - Part 15

Holy crap! An update?! Its been almost exactly a year, haha. Well... I don't really have an excuse. Without further ado about nothing, the update!

We started off in Atlantium. I kind of just wanted to familiarize myself to the game so I went to grind on some water elementals. I fought them for a little while, but didn't get any good loot. I felt comfortable enough with the game to go explore some. That was sort of, kind of, my first mistake.

That is one sexy siren. One minor problem about sirens...

The men in the party fall victim to them. They were all petrified from the singing. So Elayne and Jeanne have to fight this one out alone. Fortunately they are two of my best characters. Elayne is virtually unstoppable, and as a paladin, Jeanne can heal us if we ever need it. I realized after the battle that Jeanne could have used the spell Stone-to-Flesh during the fight. Oh well. I'm not sure if the petrified men got any experience from the battle or not. They probably didn't.

I'm not sure how this event never happened before, since it was over a spot I had already been on before. The game's events are scripted oddly, if you do not enter the spot from the right direction, the event might not even happen. Anyhow I searched and found some decent loot The Dark Trident is of particular interest, and is Elayne's new weapon, making her even more badass. The dark trident also adds 5 defense, which is useful since its a two-handed weapon.

I guess its a good time to explain why I have said Elayne is powerful twice already. Elayne is an archer.  Archers excel with bows (duh!), are decent melee fighters, and for some reason have the ability to cast Sorcerer spells. I'm not sure how/why, but she has the highest Might in the party. Might is basically Strength in any other game. So obviously she hits pretty damned hard because of that. Archers cannot equip shields, I guess because it takes to hands to use a bow (although that doesn't stop the knight or paladin from having a shield and a bow equipped at the same time). Because she can't use a shield I decided in the early parts of the game to give her a two-handed weapon. Two-handed weapons are insanely overpowered compared to the one-handed weapons. An average one-handed weapon does 1-10 damage, whereas an average two-handed weapon will do 1-20 damage. In particular, Elayne does 1-30 damage with the Dark Trident. Anyhow with a bow Elayne can hit twice as hard as my main fighters, they hit ~150 in melee, she hits ~300 with a bow. The downside is that if a character is in melee combat (denoted by a checkmark next to the character's name in battle) that character cannot use a ranged attack. So when she's in melee she doesn't kick as much ass as she does with a bow. However! because of her Might and how insanely overpowered two-handed weapons are, she can still hit on-par with the other melee characters. So she kicks ass regardless of how she fights. I keep in the 6th position since she has a higher chance of not being in melee range so she can annihilate things with her bow. This really makes me wonder how much damage a knight could do with a two-handed weapon, but I like how my main melee characters are tanks so I won't try.

I started just trying to finish area maps so I kind of just wandered around. In Sandsobar area I find...

The Farm of Fear, which totally sounds like a dungeon, but isn't. We end up fighting a bunch of Flaming Fears. They are actually pretty tough, since they have an attack that can hit the entire party for roughly 20 damage, and they use it quite often. Fortunately David has a spell called Moon Ray, which does minor insignificant damage to the enemy, but also heals the party 10-100 HP. If it gets really dicey, Jeanne and Sherman can cast it as well. Afterwards we explore some more and find our way to...

LeperCON! For some reason I didn't take a picture of the battle with 250+ Lepers. I think there was also a leprechaun or two, because this is Might & Magic after all, and the developers couldn't resist throwing in a pun.  (I'm too lazy to find a picture of a Leper from a previous update to show what they look like). Wandering around afterwards we run into a large party of knights, wizards and other things which almost kill us, but we run like hell away. If I was more careful, I probably could have won the battle.

Back near Atlantium, we find the Neutral Zone, the Evil Zone and the Good Zone.

Both the Evil and Good Zones have a castle that only Sorcerers can go in. I decide against going inside.

Still exploring around Atlantium we run into some dragons. I remember these things killing us pretty easily a while back, so I decide to test my mettle against them now that we are stronger. We annihilate them with very little effort, and I wonder how they ever gave me problems. On a shore nearby we found some rotting corpses, which I think may have been an event battle awhile back, because nothing at all happened.

Next I find myself back near Sandsobar again, I kind of just wandered the world randomly, no reason why I went to where I did and equally no reason why I avoided Tundara, Vulcania, and Middlegate. We found a Royal Territory.  Around this area I fought some pretty tough Valiant Knights and Wizards, as seen in a screenshot above. They were in small groups though so they didn't pose much thread like the battle earlier.

The Royal Territory leads up to Mandagual's castle. I don't recall why I did not enter the castle. Strangely enough, on the same secter of the map, there was another castle, Luxus Palace, which is so luxurious it has to have two lines of text. We also did not go inside. Further south we find the Mount Farview which tells us of the Juror's Quests.

I think I've seen some of the Juror's Quest areas in previous updates. Earlier I saw the Good and Evil Zones and their castles for the Sorcerer's test. I don't know how hard these missions are at all, but I'm assuming they're gonna be kind of tough. I'm not looking forward to doing the Sorcerer test. Magic is pretty powerful, yes, but sorcerers are still sorcerers, and have very little defense and hp. I guess its good I have a thief, and Hein is actually a decent enough fighter. I just don't think duoing a dungeon is going to end well.

We tried to explore the Desert of Desolation, but its really annoying. If you move through the desert, you'll get send to this oasis over and over again. As far as I'm aware, eating the fruit doesn't do anything.  Its nearly impossible to travel through the desert without getting teleported to the oasis. I tried for a bit, but gave up after finding the Fire Transmutation spell.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Oh....shit... Turns out it only happens to one character. I guess the others characters see the one person screaming in agony as his/her face melts off in an Indiana Jones-like fashion, and realize they should get the fuck away. So Jeanne, who is in the third character position, gets eradicated. I don't know why Jeanne got eradicated versus Swift, who is the party leader...Anyhow, a quick pitstop at Atlantium to resurrect Jeanne, and we decide we've had enough of the area around Sandsobar.

So we decide to explore the area around Tundara. The tundra surrounding Tundara is almost as annoying to explore as the desert, but slightly less. Snowdrifts can cause random damage to the party, and you can get snowblinded and lost, which teleports you to a road by the tundra. We eventually find the Air Transmutation spell, although I think I might have already had it before.

In the snowfield we find a talking Death Spider who asks us a "riddle" which is more like a direct question. Since we don't know the answer, it tries to kill us, which result in a battle that was pretty damned easy.

Wish I could have said the same for this battle... These guys just plain tore us up. 1800 damage! The person with the highest hp in the party is Thund R the barbarian, and he only has 500 hp! Thankfully there was only three so we were able to run away. We're close enough to Tundara, so we make a pit stop there to revive the dead, and then go back into the snowfield, because we totally learned our lesson.

Eventually we find an ice dungeon. We check it out. Those Valiant Knights from earlier are a normal enemy here, so the experience and loot is pretty good. The dungeon is only moderately annoying.

Uh, okay...

Oh, haha. Oh wait... These guys are actually kind of tough, and theres a lot of them. I lamented in a previous update about anything with "insane," "mad," or "crazed" in their name because they turn out pretty hard since they can go into a frenzy which hits 6 party members for a bunch of damage, but it kills the enemy in the process. That still holds true. Good thing these guys are relatively weak. We can kill them in one hit, however, there are still a bunch of them, so they can still attack. Their frenzy attack only does 15 damage, but since it kills the enemy in the process, another enemy moves up in the queue who can then frenzy and so forth. Fortunately they also have a normal attack, so that helps out. We eventually kill them all and get some half decent loot.

Turns out this dungeon is a little gimicky. Each path has a sign, which corresponds to a large group of monsters. Unfortunately just past the sign denoting what you will fight, there is a trap. The traps does two things. One, it propels you into the battle. Two, it halves the party's level. The level drain is the bad part. Its only temporary (until the party rests), but it can make these battles long and grueling. The monsters aren't too tough, but the level drain makes it so I can't use my insane spells to make the battle shorter. I can't use Megavolts or Inferno which targets 10 monsters. I have to use lesser spells like Lightning Bolt and Fireball which only target 5 monsters. And fireball is pretty annoying since it randomly doesn't work for seemingly no reason. Another annoying part is that the tight corridors mean only a few of my characters can melee the enemies. While this is good for Elayne, some characters aren't too good with ranged, like Ian, Hein, and Sherman. David cannot use a ranged weapon at all.

Each area had 50+ of the monster mentioned in the sign. Arachnids, rats, ogres, and thieves. The loot was pretty good though, so in the end it was worth it. A few characters got some new weapons. I actually found my First +10 item, and then shortly after I found a +15 Dagger. The +15 of the dagger almost put it on par with some of my melee characters' weapons. Too bad its only a dagger, although it was better than what my sorcerer had equipped.

There was also a path available to males only, and another only for females.

If you ignored the sign, it yells at you and teleports you a few steps back. So we come back with only the male characters.

Well, thats why we're here.

Oh okay, that was underwhelming. I didn't see much stat increase, and I'm not sure if this was permanent or just temporary. When I returned with only female characters, the same thing happened.

Upon returning to town, I saw that it was Day 140 which means that the circus is around. So I then spent the next hour or so cheating the system to increase my stats. I've already outlined how to do this in a previous update, so I won't repeat it here. However last time I did this I only did like Might, Endurance, and Speed. And I thought you could only enhance to 50. Turns out I was wrong, you can do it to 100. So I finished the stats I increased last time, and then increased the remaining stats to 100 as well. But thats when I noticed something odd. Why was everyone's stats peaking at 100 even? They all have equipment that increases stats, so why were they capped at 100? So I removed all my gear on Swift, and saw that a few stats fell below 100. I went and did the trick to increase his stats again, and they did increase. Then I re-equipped his gear, and his stats went OVER 100. I had everyone remove all their gear and continued stat increasing. So now the entire party has 100 base in every stat, and a little higher if their gear permits it. I know this is kind of game-breaking, but I honestly don't think its gonna matter too much. Might & Magic II is a hard game. You need any advantage you can get.

Ending stats from last update.

Sadly we only gained a single level, except for Sherman, who didn't gain a level at all. Stats in this game are kind of weird. Endurance didn't seem to have much effect on the hp of the party. However increasing the Intellect and Personality of my casters greatly affected their SP (Personality affect Cleric spell characters, while Intellect affect Sorcerer spell casters). I'm not sure if I trained my characters before or after the stat increase though. The only way to get HP as far as I know is to train, so it is possible that the Endurance doesn't have a direct affect on hp, until you train. When you train, the game specifically says how much hp was gained for that level. If that is the case, it doesn't really explain why the SP changed, because you would expect SP to increase the same way HP does. I don't think we found that much armor to warrant the increase in AC, so maybe Endurance doesn't even affect hp and just increases base armor class.

I'm not gonna lie like I usually do and assume I'm actually gonna update more often.  I have no idea how often I will update, and you should all know that by now.  I mean, the last update was nearly an entire year ago.  Hell, Part 1 was made in 2010...  At this rate, look forward to an update in March!

End of Part 15