Quote:
Originally posted by farl:
One side question comes to my mind. Without a pure spell caster, one focus of my all melee party is magic, but the attributes intelligence and piety are completely neglected. Are the initial values high enough to develop decent spell casting just by practice?
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Yes, the keyword being "decent". You will NOT have spellcasting experts by any means, but you will be able to functionally cast most low-mid level spells to moderate power levels fairly reliably with practice at their base INT/PIE levels. Don't be worried about it, though: you'll have much more powerful combatants as a result of that sacrifice, and if you do ever want to explore Magic more fully with dedicated spellcasters, there's always next game. (Plus there's a couple of NPC casters you can pick up to experiment with if you want.)
As for the "haste" comments and relation to development of SPD: That's absolutely correct but Farl's party does not include a Bard, Bishop, or Psionic. His only possible haste caster is the Dwarf Monk, who will probably not be doing so reliably enough to design everyone's attribute plans around. That being said, with my own Wiz8 parties every time I've played so far I have had a Bard, Bishop, and/or Psionic (usually both a Bard and Bishop in fact), and I usually do de-emphasize SPD for my characters as a result.
Even in Farl's party, you really only need a couple of characters to be fast, for minimal casting purposes. (Basically one for late-game Element Shield and one for late-game Soul Shield.) In fact, with so much melee power, for his party it will actually be an advantage for most characters to not be so fast: that increases the likelihood that they will be able to move a little at the beginning of combat to get into close combat range and still attack afterwards instead of losing combat actions.
Quote:
Originally posted by TinyMage:
And whats this about martial arts??? are you nutz? even with a terribly weak weapon he will do more damage ( and more instakills ) then barehanded.
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Flat-out false. You obviously haven't tried it yourself. Search around the forum and you'll find plenty of evidence disputing this. The Martial Arts using Monk is, in fact, the 3rd most powerful melee combat damage-dealer in Wiz8, behind only the backstabbing Rogue (#2) and the berserking Fighter (#1). What makes the Monk's Martial Arts so nasty, above and beyond the Monk's %25 class bonus, is that secondary attacks are exactly as powerful as primary attacks with Martial Arts. (You get the same mix of kicks & punches from both the primary and secondary attacks.) You also don't need to raise the Dual Wield skill to get secondary attacks with Martial Arts, which every other combat class has to contend with to power up its secondary attacks.
That being said, the staff is still not a bad choice for a Monk, particularly due to the extended reach ability. Also, if you prefer critical hits over raw damage, the Staff of Doom is fantastic for any character, including the Monk. The Zatoichi Bo gives you the flexibility of auto-switching to either barehand for martial arts or a sling for ranged (since it's not cursed like the Staff of Doom), but its lower instant kill stat and moderate damage means that it's worse than both: pick the Staff of Doom for better criticals, and Martial Arts for better damage. Plus, the Staff of Doom is available much earlier in the game than the Zatoichi Bo, although both are guaranteed finds.