Well, I keep going back to the Might and Magic 2 grind, despite having numerous frustrations with the ancient game engine. The basic grind is fine except that the difficulty setting doesn’t seem to do anything. For instance, I have it set at Inconspicuous but I still receive ludicrous number of opponents that are completely random. And it doesn’t seem to matter which zone you go to because the enemies scale with your level and possibly HP. I can’t tell if this is an issue with a particular version of this game (e.g. Apple 2, etc.) but it seems borked.
I ended up using the Hillstone gold to XP conversion to boost my characters between of the nonsensical mid level grind. Once you get to a certain level though, you need to start boosting attributes especially Speed, Accuracy and Might. Endurance should always be your first attribute to boost so you can maximize your HP when you train. Intelligence isn’t too difficult to get up either as you only need to deal with a single encounter. Luck feels more like a luxury to boost but you only need to deal with a single, fixed encounter, which is more annoying than anything. Personality isn’t as terrible to deal with compared to Luck but you have to split your gender up from what I remember. Accuracy by far is the worst because of the endless encounters and the fact that almost all movement spells are negated.
For this latest run, I mostly had been using some of the new characters I created (Knight, Robber, Barbarian) and three premades along with Holy Moley and Mr. Wizard as Hirelings. I ended up Duplicating a few key pieces of gear too because my damage had been substandard. I realized that you really need high end weapons to pump out good numbers. Also, I found that only the Archer class does consistently good damage. Ninjas would be in that category but their assassinate ability doesn’t occur frequent enough. Same with Robbers and their critical hit ability.
This situation made me think about Knights and Barbarians in general in how they simply don’t do enough damage. I know there’s a few decent weapons like the Titan’s Pike and Photon Blade but outside of the ones I’ve found in the Dragon’s Dominion, I haven’t found anything better. Instead, I’ve used the Swift Axe weapons for these two and think that they’re very weak. I might try something where I use the Enchant Item spell to see if I can elevate either one. I’m guessing that having “low” (sub 100) might probably is hurting both classes. Also, with the Titan’s Pike, you double the damage compared to a Swift Axe. But the idea with Enchant Item is that you take lower level ones and get a high level Sorcerer who can push the item’s level. If you succeed, you immediately save. And if you get a good one, you Duplicate the item. This method requires a lot of gems, but you can just grind out more gems in the Dragon’s Dominion. Now, I’m not sure how the spell scaling works or if it’s just a single +1 at a time. So I might try this out soon.
That said, getting to this point was quite infuriating. It made me realize just how poorly optimized and/or overtuned older games were. These days I simply don’t have the same amount of patience as I did compared to when I was younger and had the free time to grind for hours at a time. The only real advantage I have is that my computer is far faster and I don’t have to deal with disk swapping. Also, having maps and hints online bring a lot of QoL that those old games lacked.
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