All hybrid party

[Tyros the Demon Slayer]

My current party consists of no primary spell casters. It's a Lord, a Ranger, a Monk, a Samurai, a bard and a gadgeteer. They are all on level 6/7 having just cleared Arnika and now heading to Trynton. I've grabbed Myles (who does pretty well with Bloodlust) and Vi for the ride.

Has anyone had any success with a similar party? I am adding to the spell power of my hybrid classes (they all can cast L2 spells at the moment) as a top priority -- essentially buying/finding every spell book I can.

What, if anything, did you do to maximize this type of party's chances?

I can provide more detail on races, equipment, stats, etc. if that is helpful to your answers.

Thanks.

[xfactor]

I've done a couple of hybrid parties. The last one was an oriental themed party with Monk, Samurai and Ninja.

With a smaller party the skills went up faster anyway. The other thing to bear in mind is to try and assign specific tasks to each party member for their spellcasting. I've run parties before where I've tried to use two different spellcasters as the healers/buffers of the group and one has become much better much quicker (due to better Int or Pie scores usually). This left the other party member trailing behind and not pulling their weight, magically speaking.

I think you may have too big a party for my liking. An all hybrid party works really well at the 3-4 member level because they effectively level up like a balanced 6 person party so all you need to worry about is the generally lower amounts of HPs and magic points.

In your case spellbooks will be your best friend. One thing I've learned through bitter experience is to always buy a spellbook that you'l need in the future, even if you can't read it yet. You'll regret it if you don't.

Other than that I think you may need to try and find some decent weapons for the melee characters since their combat skills will suffer slightly with you concentrating on magic.

xfactor

[SpitBall]

never tried that kind of party. However, you mentioned something about getting spell-books. Early on in the game, I had some very good luck Shop-Lifting spell-books. Myles was pretty good at it, especially in Arnika. It can help if you are economically disadvantaged.

[Wereboar]

It depends on what difficulty level you are playing. If you are playing on expert, don't bother with offensive spells. They will become usefull around level 11-12 (when you can cast a level 3 spell at power 3), and become quite useless about 2-3 levels later, when monster resistances go up. Unless you go for powercast; in this case, you'll become strong spellcasters around level 18, which is near the end for such a big party. And you sacrifice lots of fighting power in the middle levels when you raise int instead of str/dex/spd.

I played some 4 character hybrid parties on expert ironman. Two died to deathsting apusses in the bluff, and one to high level beetles(?) in the swamp. In fact, they died since they didn't have a high level missile shield, and no x-ray. The parties that survived had much trouble in the level 12-17 range; then they suddenly became quite powerful.

So if you're playing on expert, it might be worth to buy scrolls of missile shield and armorplate if you find some.

Aside from this, a 6-8 character party including a bard (one of the most powerful characters IMO) shouldn't have problems that can't be solve by a few reloads. Especially if playing on normal difficulty.
In fact, i don't think any party of 6 different professions can have major difficulties in expert ironman (assuming you don't choose the worst possible races).