Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I've taken to liking the troll very much. GM Mace is a great skill because you can paralyze opponents. He can't use a shield so instead one strategy I use is to give the troll Master with the sword and place it in his left hand while wielding a mace. I'm using Judicious Measure and Breaker as my weapon combo. You get a massive endurance bonus for that. He's got Master in armsmaster, GM in Regeneration and Body Building, making him have superior hitpoints for his level (around 53). Just for fun, I've been bumping up his Body Building and Mace skills, making him a fighting machine. He's employing Erudine chain armor with expert level (he's got GM in leather, but Erudine chain is far superior in AC). He's got Longseeker too so he's got a massive accuracy score. Basically, he's the tank the group. I'm also using the vampire Elsbeth Lamentia you get from the beginning of the game. I wish they gave the vampires some additional magic like dark magic because their priest efficacy is quite low. Levitate turns out to be quite useful like in the Fire Elemental realm as well as in the Dwarf's Hideout when you're going after the artifacts. As a fighter though, she's pretty weak. Low hitpoints, no body building, limited armsmaster and weak armor skills. I have her with GM in dagger and Master in sword with Foulfang and Glomenthal. She can do some damage in close quarter combat, but in ranged combat she's downright weak. Lifedrain is pretty weak even though I have 19 points in her Vampire skill. Overall, they needed an additional few abilities to motivate someone using the vampire. But if you need a vampire, best thing to do is just pick up the level 50 one when it's critical. For character development, you can easily skip on the vampire and give the XP to something more essential like a dragon or archer. Having two dragons is quite fun as at high levels they can cause 100+ points of damage and have tremendous HP and AC to boot. The minotaur class doesn't look too appealing after all. They get the second best armor and weapon selection but they're a second hand fighter type. Magic-wise they're really weak, even weaker than the vampire. Honestly, I don't even see a point for them having any spells at all when they can only gain Expert level in three realms. For weapon skills, I don't think the axe skill is that great. Sword and Mace are the best hands down at GM levels. The minotaur can't even get master in sword, so you can't really use two weapons except with a dagger. Anyway, it's kind of a shame about 3DO going out of business. I haven't played MM9 but I heard it wasn't great. But I thorouhgly enjoyed the MM6-8 series. The graphics engine wasn't intense but the world was detailed and the gameplay was very good. In comparison, Morrowind has an unbelievably rendered graphics engine, but I felt that it was overwhelming. You just spent too much time trying to get from place XXX to place YYY. You could interact with it heavily but it felt alienated. More than that though, the game play was horribly slow. On the other hand, MM's game play has been addicting but you can do a lot more without feeling overwhelmed. It's tighter and more focused. The sad thing is that there won't be any expansions to the series. It'd be great if some hobbyists take up the cause of the MM6-8 engine and could create a simple builder kit that allows for the expansion of the game, much in the way Heroes of Might and Magic has a construction kit. Some things I would like to see: 1) The ability to be any monster type in the game; the dragon has been noted for being extremely broken, so I don't see it unfair to being, say, a ruby dragon. 2) Having the ability to customize the monsters statistics. Since there's a number of skills you can choose from, you could select the maximum level of a skill type and allow for one to balance it out themselves. It would allow for us to fix some issues like providing vampires with better skills. 3) Customizable items. The items themselves shouldn't be hard to render as graphics since they're 2d objects. So it's probably quite easy to create a special sword with abilities XXX. 4) Maps. That goes without saying. 5) Level progression in excess of 100. I read there's a maximum of 100 levels in a game. Levels are a mathematical function so there should be no limit in a game like this.