I haven't gotten into late game yet, but, at least early on, bows and crossbows are far from useless.

I must add that except for the tips I've just read here, I haven't really min-maxed anything on my first playthrough. I went with tradition and my guts. So the part of course includes an elven ranger, Indira. And almost always I have a female shield dwarf included as well. I already see weird choices I've made that are far from optimal, rather dismal, actually, but I'm having loads of fun. I have Kenji in the party also, which means better rested outdoors (He cooks wonderful food), and I have that sneaky girl with me as well that detects traps and secrets (so perhaps no need for dark magic, then?). SO, I'm certainly bleeding resources or xp or whatever it was the hirelings does to you.

Put one point in bows/crossbows for everyone but no more. It's just there to use when you have nothing better to do, but the gains from upgrading both the skill, upgrading perception, and upgrading your weapons are pitifully small that it's not worth it for the maximum three turns-ish that you get to use them in the best case scenario. The problem is exacerbated by the encounter design wherein the hardest fights are often ambushes where you can't really get into position to shoot - thus creating a situation where you mostly end up using the bows for fights that are pretty trivial in the first place.

 

Another hint: Perception is a terribly inefficient way of improving you hit chance, as it's only worth one point per, erm, point. Contrast to increasing weapon skills, which increase it by two points, and increase damage by 5% on top of that. The heavy armour skill is also worth two points per skill point. The two-hander and dual-wield skills are only one point per point, but have pretty good expert and master bonuses. Anyway, the point is that if bows were a bit more viable as a primary source of damage, as opposed to just some supplemental damage at the start of encounters, then Perception might be reasonable value, but generally speaking, you're better off stacking Might plus the weapon skills.

 

Miscellaneous hint:

The quest NPC Edwin in Seahaven increases experience gain by 10%. The metagaming thing to do would be to pick him up immediately upon starting Act 2, and then drag him around without doing his quest.

 

 

---

 

Anyway, I restarted the game in order to min-max a bit more, not because of OCD, but because the game was simply turning into a tedious slog with my initial party. Decided on a melee-heavy party, because I hate mana management. Barbarian, Bladedancer, Crusader, Runepriest. Some observations:

 

The notion of tanking with a tough - likely a Defender - tanking character is appealing. But unfortunately until fairly late in the game, this proves to be pretty ineffective due to the unreliability of the skills needed to support this style. On the surface it's easy enough, one point in Warfare nets you the 'taunt' ability to force the enemy to attack your tank. But working against you are the difficulty in actually getting the attack to land, since your tank will have significantly worse chance to hit than a damage-oriented melee character. Both because of stat allocation, and because of the massive penalty incurred from wearing heavy armour. Even if you overcome that hurdle, you will not infrequently find that, for the enemies that matter, the target is immune to the effect. Note that the Master-level Warfare abilities might support this style better once you get there, but that's not available until Act 3.

 

Which brings me to a bit of a rant. The seemingly arbitrary location of trainers. Now, there has always been an element of this in earlier Might and Magic games, but the new version makes it quite a bit worse due to the content gating. You have no way of knowing at the start, but a seemingly arbitrary choice of skill may end up crippling you for some time due to this. A glaring example is the Sword skill. Both Expert and Master trainers are fairly easily accessible during Act 1. The expert Spear trainer isn't even available until Act 2. My 18-might Crusader, mainly built for healing and wielding a *one-handed* sword, is-and-was comfortably outdoing my 40-might spear-wielding Barbarian. It's extra unfortunate because a simple solution would be simply removing the pointless gate that blocks access to the second town, Seahaven, during Act 1.

 

I guess that technically makes another hint: don't take spears. Barbarians can GM two-handed maces and spears, so while in the long term it will end up even, you'll be suffering for a good portion of the early game.

Edited January 27, 201412 yr by Humanoid

Hah, I remember being in college without internet access and having to go to the library to look up the locations of the trainers in the previous M&M games.  

Playing with an all caster party is becomming near impossible once I started going up against mages who could disable my casters and monsters with high resistances. I started putting points in mele for my two rune priests to compensate, they already had a lot of extra health, so I would have something when i ran out of mana. Probably too little too late. 

I started off with a notepad and writing down the various details (if you neglect to read what the expert trainers tell you after training, there's no way to get them to repeat the location of the master trainer), but soon gave up and copy-pasted the various lists into a text editor and printed it out. I'd turn in my hardcore gamer badge if I had ever earned one in the first place.

 

 

Aside, I'm struggling to see the point in raising any weapon skills bar Magical Focus on the pure spellcasting classes - having a guaranteed hit on every attack surely beats the suboptimal hit chances using normal weapons. That said, both my spellcasters have amulets that prevent feeblemind, so I haven't found a situation where they were locked out of spells yet (other than general stuns and y'know, death). But only early in Act 2 so I don't know how it progresses.

Its a hedge against running out of mana. And also mana management. If I'm fighting single opponents I am just powerful enough to put them down without using spells. 

The orbs/staves are mana-free too. But that said, checking the skill tables the runepriests and shaman at least get master weaponskills. Druids and Freemages have no such ability (and poor druids can't GM magical focus either, so the worst of both worlds).

 

 

EDIT: Not mine, just a handy reference of the various skills. Checking out the tier bonuses (second tab) demonstrates how narrow your effective choices in character development are, for weapon skills in particular, the difference between a weapon that maxes out at Master compared to Grandmaster is over *double*. That is, 5% times the amount of skill points to max out master versus 8% times the points to GM. Yes, over double damage.

Edited January 27, 201412 yr by Humanoid

So far the only thing that bothers me is that my freemage cannot GM in fire spells.  

I'm not particularly concerned with min-maxing the game.  I just play the character classes I want to play.

I haven't gotten into late game yet, but, at least early on, bows and crossbows are far from useless.

 

later on you do not want to trade measly 50-80 dmg with casters or elemental projectiles that can kill you or screw you hard, hence they become useless. I admit though that having ability to do decent dmg with arrows is ok, if you are vs high magic resistant creatures that hurl spells or projectiles of their own on you, yet you cannot reach them but you have LoF. It is very situational though and I think I'd still prefer a second caster over an archer.

 

Early on I agree it is a good way to soften some enemies before they will approach you. Once you start hitting casters and ranged creatures with special effects, trading shots is not a good idea. better to engage them in melee and use perks from Warfare skill tree. The ability to disable casting or guaranteed hit for some mana cost is invaluable. Note that most of the bosses and elite creatures you will fight in melee and archery there is very poor.

So after I beat the game with my current party, the challenge will be to beat the game with an all archer/crossbowman party, on warrior difficulty, naturally. 

It would be understandable if they wanted to at least mitigate the overall ease of ranged vs. melee that's often a difficult balancing thingie in games, but it would feel odd to me if physical ranged was truly so limited in usefulness, assuming of course that one is able to build up a party based around such tactics via skill/gear options and all of that.  So Keyrock, if you (or anyone else) do try it with an archer-dominant type party some time, I'd be pretty interested in the result.

The thing with a pure archer party is that rangers and scouts, the only two classes who can GM a ranged weapon, can also GM a melee weapon. (Which, aside, highlights the sad plight of the ineffective Mercenary class even more) Without magic backing, they're going to end up mainly using those melee weapons - daggers and axes respectively. Which would work, but is sort of against the spirit of the challenge. A pure ranged party would therefore necessarily involve magic. Water magic, specifically Frozen Ground, which unfortunately neither archer class provides, and likely with the support of early Air magic, on at least a couple characters to position enemies who get close. You'll want the GM Water spell, Tsunami for sure too.

 

So first off I'd say there's a hard requirement for either a Druid or a Shaman for the Tsunami. Now the Ranger provides one source of Air magic, so you can probably do double Ranger if desired, plus a Scout - or triple Ranger I guess, but that'd be kinda silly. This would be the maximal archery makeup I'd think. More practically, replace one of the Rangers with any spellcaster except Rune Priest (the only spellcaster with zero access to Water) for redundancy purposes.

 

TL;DR:

 

Ranger / Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman)

 

or

 

Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman) / (Druid/Shaman/Freemage)

Edited January 28, 201412 yr by Humanoid

I don't think even in the later M&M's that I ever tried an exclusively archer party make up. But I tend to prefer ranged over melee in almost everything, so I'd often have mage/cleric/archer, then either a 2nd mage, 2nd archer, or maybe a melee...but that melee guy would always get equipped with a bow and 95% of the time would just use that, regardless of whether it was his "best" skill/dmg. Mostly because I'd rarely stay in melee range. His sword arm was for when I absolutely had to have it, like in certain dungeons/fights. Or occasionally I'd play solo ranged via never resurrecting the others.

 

Mages would have bows as well as backups. Course...like I said, that was in the later M&M's. For all I know that's not even possible in this one (non-archers equipping bows, I mean).

 

Anyway...I'm not concerned with whether it's the *best* or fastest or even the most efficient method. Only whether it'd be do-able without wanting to toss one's keyboard across a room before long.

I've played a couple of hours more, with a bow ranger and a mage with a crossbow as a backup, and I think I can say that it also depends on what kind of bows and crossbows you find. Without spoiling too much, I have ranged weapons that corrode the enemies armour and ability to hit my party heavily. Add to that a stunning percentage, and you get a picture of magical ranged weapons being of quite some use even in close quarters.

I'm assuming that once you complete the quest for the astrologer in Seahaven he will leave my party and I won't be able to hire him any more, correct?  If that is the case I will avoid finishing his quest for as long as possible so that I can keep him in my party and get the 10% exp bonus he grants.

Restarted with two mercenaries, a runepriest and a crusader. My casters were getting ineffective against enemies with magic resistances faster than I was able to increase their magic scores to compensate. It got to where I had no avenues left and had to spend all my money on potions. If you are using casters, best go the min-max route. 

I would imagine there's little to no getting around an all caster party being a serious drain on your money, since even with high mysticism skill and spirit, you're still going to be chugging mana potions or using up supplies all the time due to not having anyone in the party that can effectively deal good amounts of damage without spending mana.

I'm not surprised the game is not balanced for an all caster party.

Might be able to get away with an all hybrid caster party:

 

2 X Shaman 

2 X Rune Priest

 

Both classes can master in melee and both can wear medium armor.  No dark magic, though.

Keyrock: That sounds solid, and a party with two orcs and two dwarves is supercool!

Keyrock: That sounds solid, and a party with two orcs and two dwarves is supercool!

Agreed.  Not having to taint your party by including a filthy elf is always a bonus.

I almost feel dirty now, having earlier admitted I have two elves in my starting party. Even worse, my very avatar name is from my usual go-to char that breaks open new games, and it's always an elf or an half-elf, just out of tradition and habit. I haven't a thing for elves within RPGs at all, though. And I read just a few Elfquest back in the day. I thought Dragonlance had far too many of them, and dark elves I'm pretty tired of. I hope you'll show some leniency and let me bear this flaw like a scar. Btw, I really think orcs are cool, but I do like dwarves even better.

Edited January 28, 201412 yr by IndiraLightfoot

Elves are pretty macho in M&M, so I don't feel bad about having one in my group.