Recently, I started playing Might and Magic 2 again using Gog and a tool called Where Are We. The tool is quite good for those who want to bypass what pretty much is a very painful early stage leveling grind along with having some quality of life things like mapping tools. It’s not just for Might and Magic 2 either but other old dungeon crawler games with some mapping system. A lot of older games such as this or Bard’s Tale 3 required meticulous note taking and graph paper to handle grids. So this tool is very much welcome indeed.
One thing I forgot was how Might and Magic 2 pretty much is brutal at the start. You’re given crude weapons, barely any food and only 200 gold if you swipe it from the pre-made party that comes with the game. Also, the game sets the difficulty up a little high for starting players where you pretty much want to tone is down to the lowest notch for a long time. The problem is that I believe this game was aimed for players who planned to port their characters from the first Might and Magic where I believe you start anywhere from levels 5 – 7. So the starting zone is not trivial and requires carefully managed fights where after each battle you should save the game and run to the inn. Even when you hit level 2, your party probably will be very weak because you’ll have limited equipment and your spells casters probably won’t have any AoE spells.
In my case, I attempted to recreate my classic party of Paladin, Ninja, x2 Archers, Cleric and Sorcerer. Eventually, I would recruit Aerial and Cleogotcha since higher level versions of archers and sorcerers are tough to obtain for a while. So I just stick with these two. But it is challenging because the initial few levels are very melee intensive and you will want some beef to protect your party. I think most people take a Knight and Robber to handle tanking and improved lockpicking. However, Knights can’t cast spells and fall off in the late game while Robbers are only useful early on. Ninjas can assassinate which does double damage as well as being able to wield special weapons. In the case of using three Archers and Two Sorcerers, the main idea there is the sheer power and versatility with that line up. AoE magic rules the mid to late game and Archers can do tremendous damage at any range. Clerics are only useful for defense and on the outside where they can cast Moonbeam.
Regardless, leveling is quite tough due to the ever increasing amount of required experience. Roughly around level 9, you’ll feel a huge drop off and slow down. Some people probably end up trying to start some of the quests as those provide reasonable experience. However, that 9 – 17+ gap is painful because the middle leveling experience is very rough still. However, I found a good approach to handle that 9 – 17 gap.
There’s a pair of Cloud Dragons and a few Wyvern that try to ambush you in region A3 where you teleport to at the start. If you can defeat these battles, you can earn roughly 10k worth of gold per character. That means, you can get 20k at a time in that zone. Although you can move quickly back and forth between the zone to the right and A3, the easier way to handle farming gold from these two fights is to reset them in Where Are We. While it is cheating, I think it’s just a QoL situation because you’re simply eliminating the need to go back and forth. But I’ll do this technique until my characters’ packs are full, which can generate ~2million gold. With that amount, I can hit around levels 16-17 using the Gold to XP conversion thing in Castle Hillstone’s level 1 dungeon. I tend to level my Sorcerer up first, followed by Cleric and Ninja. You can’t do this with followers because you can’t pull their gold.
Once you get to levels 16-17, you can hit up E2, which has a fountain that you can teleport to and gain 200 to all stats and be level 50. While your hit points won’t be maxed out (unless you use some potion), you can use the newfound stats to whack a lot of hard monsters in that region. The one in particular worth attacking is the Death in a Box which results in 1 million XP or so per character as well as occasionally a Doomsday Box, which generally has some of the best treasure in the game. There’s a few other spots around the Fountain that provide high level encounters where if you’re lucky, you’ll fight something else worth numerous XP. With this technique though, you can surpass that hump of 17+ for your 20s. This technique isn’t as good as the B2 Cuisinart fight, but you probably have a better shot at winning a few fights here. I generally just do the four surrounding encounters next to the fountain then Camp Kill-U for the Death in a Box which guarantees a nice 1mil. After each encounter, I continue to drink from the Fountain since I believe it can only be used for a single fight.
I think this area provides a good way to level up just prior to hitting the Dragon Cave/Domain where you can get the 1k HP. I’m not sure when hitting that zone will be good (I might try it around level 30) since the Ancient Dragon will probably cause major issues for parties with low HP. I’m thinking that for that zone, I’m still going to try getting my attributes raised to at least 50 (I’m missing Speed and Luck) so that I have a chance against the Ancient Dragons. I’m a little cautious in general just because I wiped on a Black Ticket arena tight against a bunch of Armored Dragons. It made me realize that even if I had decent gear, I still needed the levels to one shot each dragon and be able to survive a blast of their breath attacks. Otherwise, I’ll have to look into getting Magic Shields and other equipment that provides some resistance (to avoid using the temple and saving on gold for now).
Also, I need to grab the remaining Hirelings so that I can do the class quests. I think for that, I’ll need to develop a robber or two on the side. But I simply don’t have enough characters to really handle that at the moment. I’m thinking the next few times I go out grinding in the E2 zone, I’ll try to remind myself to start saving spare good gear as hand me downs to the other Hirelings and the pre-made party. I know the last time I did those class quests I had used a bunch of Hirelings and had some existing characters with mixed levels. So I’ll probably do something similar.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.