Humanoid

Unverified post, so I can't say for sure, but it seems magic resistance is both the chance to resist (as in evade) and a flat damage reduction (as in armour). Against something with 0 resist, 170 magic and 1 point in a spell school gives a (170x2 + 1x5) +345% modifier (i.e. 445% damage), compared to say, a GM in that particular school with 50 points in magic giving (50x2 + 25x10) +350. The numbers are not nearly equivalent (GM is eight levels worth of skill points whereas the 120 magic difference is worth 30 levels) but show it's not unreasonable to get viable spell damage with either approach. The GM gets 35% spell piercing, but I suspect most enemies have higher resistances than that, so full resists will still be a problem, creating a situation where you either gamble on that chance (and suffer some flat damage reduction on top) or pick an alternate, weaker school. The other problem is that a quick look at most late-game enemies, and they often have resistance to almost all schools (frequently with a single exception), so it's actually going to be pretty common to find that even if you GM three schools, your target will be resistant to all of them. I'm not sure there's actually much a conclusion to be drawn from these mechanics. GM is as usual incredibly powerful, gaining a +175% modifier over simple masters, but master over expert gains a pretty modest +40%, the equivalent of five levels of magic (versus three levels worth of skill points), but with the single school limitation. Indeed master over novice is only +70%. Remembering that these values are additive, not multiplicative, I'm tempted to say the conclusion is GM what you can GM, but if you can't, spreading those skill points out is probably better than mastering. GM is extraordinarily efficient in terms of investment/return, mastery is the opposite and should only be done if you really need the exclusive spells it grants. P.S. The numbers for the calculation are 2% spell damage per point magic; 5% per point in relevant school; a further 5% per point retrospectively for GM in the relevant school.

Assuming you're going archer-archers and steadfastly refusing to put points in their melee weapon skills, probably 4xScouts, since Rangers, once promoted to Warden, get point blank shot which allows them to do normal damage in melee range. Scouts don't get anything of the sort and will be forever doomed to do half damage.

It counts as a win if you can kill the boss in one round ....but you don't get the ending cutscene.

I wasn't aware that the magic stat countered resistances, since I haven't seen the calculations reverse engineered yet. I wonder if it does, or it just makes the base damage so high that partial resists are still worthwhile damage. I have to say I was disappointed with my GM Fire Rune Priest's damage with Fire Blast, I saw many, many full resists in the end game. I have seen the melee hit chance formula, and though I don't recall it off the top of my head, it was such that hit chance increased linearly for a given enemy up to the value of that enemy's evade value. Once your attack value exceeds the evade value, diminishing returns hits so hard that it makes raising the stat any further a very poor investment. The magic number, by the way, is 85% (a number that can be changed in config.txt), which is your hit chance when your attack value exactly matches the target's evade rating. Some general things to come out of that were that: - The enemy with the highest evade value in the game has a mere 155 evade, and that's the humble goblin. - Any increase of attack value above that yields an increase in hit chance so trivial that it's essentially a waste of points. Even then you'd be optimising to fight a trivial enemy anyway, so the actual ideal value is even less than that. - You get 50 points base attack rating. GMing a weapon is another 50. Add in item bonuses, spell effects and the two-handed/dual-wielding skills and you're already very near, if not over that soft cap. - This has important implications for the value of perception, which would drop to near-zero in such a situation. Might is king, followed by Destiny. - Due to the lower base attack value for the off-hand, and the fact that the dual-wield skill only raises attack value of the off-hand, it means there is some reasonable scope to add a modest amount of points into perception for these characters, making them the ideal perception door openers. You probably won't need to allocate a single point of perception to two-hander type characters ever.

If you have to find the entrance to it, then it's not the final dungeon.

Sure, but when "party isn't set up to find them" means "any party without a Freemage" then we're getting into ridiculous territory. Five classes get access to Light Magic, only one gets access to Dark. Yeah. Not to mention that halfway through the game they do an about-turn and decide everyone gets access to them anyway. Which is better in the long run because around that point they also decide it's a good idea to hide at least Grandmaster trainer behind a secret door.

Magic fabric. Which is to say, Gore-tex product placement.

Nah, opening secret passages is fine. Detecting them is a problematic mechanic, they set up a spell that's both annoying to use due to short duration and is extraordinarily limited to just one class in the entire game, or they make you use a hireling to compensate, except that the first hireling forcibly leaves midway through act one, and the replacement is in act two, guarded by enemies balanced for a later part of that act. Then midway through the game they decide to drop all that and give everyone detection for free. I can't begin to comprehend the rationale behind the system in general. I suppose there is a valid complaint about the stat checks in that not everyone will have the given stat, particularly perception since it's a terrible stat to take, but also might for all-magic parties. The various spells that boost your stats help to some degree, but the harder checks still require investment of valuable actual points that d be best employed elsewhere. But yeah, it's a smaller annoyance than the detection mechanic in the first place.

Yep, and also mostly replaces the utility of the dog (though it has a secondary perk of -25% difficulty on actually opening the secret door). God that spell/mechanic was one of the worst design decisions in the game.

I tried to play it when the game was 10 years newer than it is now and couldn't get past Liberty Island, so yeah, that's my admission.

Games don't tend to handle multitasking well though. So for a properly elegant solution, you'd need an ingame browser. This can be justified in-universe for contemporary and future settings (why do you think Shepard has a private terminal?), but somewhat difficult to implement in traditional fantasy.

I'd like to say there's no nude mod for Dwarf Fortress, but I'm not game enough to Google it.

Pfft, that was just a ripoff of Ultima Underworld and its Slasher of Veils.

Yes, it is. It's a bit weird how the quests are built like that. On the one hand I hate it in many RPGs where you can't get certain quest items until you actually have the quest. But this approach in this is messy when combined with the class-exclusive quests, especially since the game outright tells you what these quests are about and highlights the quest items when you're in the relevant zone. I was baffled by the game telling me I should use the Hidden Scrolls and Mayneri's Pendant in the Crag when I couldn't find anyone to accept them, both of those turned out to be promotion quests. I'd say the older games' approach of letting you complete the quests anyway, making you an "honorary" Archmage or Archdruid or whatever, was a reasonable compromise that should be brought back.

I don't see how that helps, a hammer isn't generally used as a thrusting weapon.

The game lets you continue after finishing the main plot.

Might be a choice of B, C, or DD.

I hate dungeons but the overarching concept is interesting enough for me to keep an eye on (kind of how I felt about Rogue Legacy). If they can guarantee the DRM-free option I'd probably make a goodwill pledge regardless.

Cheer up, you're still far too pretty to accurately cosplay an Oblivion NPC.

I felt DA:O was Bioware trying to get back on the horse but falling over in the process, getting their foot stuck in the stirrup and being dragged around by the horse who had promptly bolted (resulting in DA2 and ultimately ME3). So now the problem is twofold in that hopefully the hospital scans will show that nothing got so broken so badly that it'd never heal properly (loss of the docs), and that they haven't developed a post-traumatic fear of horses as a result. Okay, tortured analogy over. I apologise in advance.

No date yet, but the upcoming patch will apparently include three new dungeons. https://mightandmagicx-legacy.ubi.com/opendev/blog/post/view/information-about-upcoming-patch

Heh, I've never actually seen the phenomenon ever down here in any context. Although there apparently is a PAX Australia now.....

Well, yes, branding on clothing is free advertising too, but the difference is that proper human billboards generally spend their time wearing that get-up while doing something relevant to that get-up, i.e. stand outside a store and try not to look too bored. I haven't seen any cosplayers in their game outfits while buying their groceries or going out for coffee.

They're like human billboards for a new age. Except that human billboards generally get paid for it. I might be a hypocrite though, I'd gladly wear an "Ask me about LOOM" button.