Might & Magic 6 mod: MAW; Monsters, Arts & Wonders [30/7/23 update]

[raekuul]

If you can, please open an issue on Github for the steal effect crash - we worked around it for non-TCC by outright disabling the special for Thief and Cutpurse type monsters.

Sure. Do you mean the main repo or the TCC one?

Please open it in the main repo (so that the fix can percolate through to other forks - I want to play around with randomizing specials and can't do that when one of the specials is causing a CTD), and we can get it ported into the TCC one from there.

* TCC has a specitem "Right Hand Sword of Grish'nak" that crashes the game when equipped in the left hand. Is this intended? I wouldn't be surprised if it is, still weird though.

Please post the details of that crash to the TCC fork

[RawSugar]

Okay, I finally started playing MAW+TCC. It's fun!

Overall a pretty good spin on the classic game. MM6 did need something like this, especially the spell rebalance, as a lot of spells were borderline useless in vanilla. Can't say anything about weapon balance yet, as I'm still using whatever is handy without even Expert (magic takes priority).

my take on it is it makes it a game again. Before this mod i was starting to do things like low level runs or just 1 character because once you know the game it gets really easy - glad you enjoy it as well

archer vs sorcerer; the balance is more life or more mana, once you start throwing high cost spells the extra mana matters.
DoG: ranking 3 schools to get a similar stat boost will make your spells generally very weak, and Light has a lot of strong spells. its not just a buff scHool in MAW

[Tomsod]

So far so good. Getting 8 Diplomacy for the main quest became a team effort thanks to skill sharing. Paladin promotion was murderous, mostly because of the mercenaries which had ~1500 HP apiece. Had to bombard them with expensive spells from range and leave to restore SP after almost each kill. Wizard dungeon, OTOH, was easy, as oozes weren't tough and drakes could be avoided (still killed them all, though). And because of a script bug, I even got to keep the staff at the end!

Weird bug: the magic shop at the eel islands resets each time I reload the game. (Got almost the full collection of magic boosters, and sundry other trinkets.) I managed to stop this by buying something then leaving the area without reloading the game.

DoG: ranking 3 schools to get a similar stat boost will make your spells generally very weak, and Light has a lot of strong spells. its not just a buff school in MAW

I wonder about that. Prismatic Light is indeed very nice now, but I don't see any other good reason to invest in Light.
Sun Ray is strong, sure, but it's outdoor-only. Meteor Shower matches it (12d3 vs. 1d40), while being much cheaper and castable at night, and Starburst is even better. And also there's Armageddon! (nerfed now, sure, but still makes outdoors trivial) I suggest allowing Sun Ray indoors, then it would make more sense.
Destroy Undead is also very nice, but it works on like 3 different monster types, and 2 of them honestly don't need very high Light skill to be killed easily by it. So why bother?
The three debuffs can be good, but past a certain point they don't benefit from higher skill, as it only improves duration and most combats last less than half a hour. Another suggestion: let skill improve debuff success chance? It worked well in my mod.
Then we have two buffs, which are nerfed into oblivion, the ultimate cure that doesn't meaningfully depend on skill, and two odd utility spells which are still as niche as in vanilla. Overall, I feel like pumping skill points into Light is a bad idea in your mod, unless you really can't live without Prismatic Light. Meanwhile, investing into Self gets you stronger buffs, more reliable healing, and a couple strong attack spells that don't have usage restrictions and are probably more spell-point-efficient. Psychic Shock is in particular very strong even at my current 4 skill.

[RawSugar]

well you certainly dont invest in Light without wanting to use the buff spells, but if you do need them you can get 30 Light vs 15 in mind/body and 20 in spirit (or 20 vs 10+10+15).
that gives you the same stat buffs but lower hit, damage and AC (and no haste), it does give you healing, albeit at a relatively low rank. meanwhile light gets you some nice conditional damage spells and a small investment in spirit gives you some small healing. If you want a buffer i'd say Light is a good pick, with some strong spells to sink your mana in. Fair point about destroy undead and sun ray though. Its possibly DU should be calibrated to kill liches (lower cost), since for some reason death knights arent undead, and maybe sunray should be buffed similar to how some other outside only spells are

interesting about skill affecting debuff chance though, whats your mod ? that sounds like a tech we could use

[Tomsod]

Oh, right, HoP separate spells are also 1/skill, I derped and though they were 2/skill. Then I guess HoP at least makes sense, although only Stone Skin and the two Spirit spells benefit from skill fully (Haste and Shield are fixed except for duration), so the choice is between advancing Light on one PC, and advancing Earth and Spirit on two different PCs by necessity (unless you have a druid). But since Spirit is an even worse choice than Light for dumping skill points in, I guess Light wins here! Still think DoG needs at least x1.3 to not be worthless, though (Mind and Body are good resp. offensively and defensively, so I'd rather improve them instead, esp. since I need 12 anyway, and Spirit only buffs Luck which is an almost useless stat).

My mod is the Elemental Mod in the nearby topic. It's for MM7, though, so I can't give you the working code, only the idea. Basically, the odds (odds, not chance) of a debuff working are 30 to (monster resistance + level/4) in vanilla MM7. In my mod, every point of skill (spell skill for spells, weapon skill for e.g. mace stun) adds 2 to that 30. And the duration of the debuff spells instead depends solely on rank. I guess the precise mechanics aren't that important, the point is that debuffs are frustratingly unreliable and I wanted to improve them a bit. In MM6 it's even worse, as "level/4" becomes just "level", so monsters resist very often! I see the price of many debuffs is lowered in your mod, which also works, but making them more likely to succeed is an equivalent solution.

[raekuul]

The original problem with the MM6 debuffs is just that they all hit against Magic resistance, which is the most common immunity (one of the holdovers in MAW from Skill Emphasis is immunity removal, so now every debuff has "a chance" of working against anything), it's just at one point we got hung up on how much damage Finger of Death is dealing by proxy (since one of the ways MAW increases difficulty is by increasing everything's HP, which Finger of Death ignores HP) and rebalanced "all the debuffs" based on the changes to Finger of Death because... I don't even remember why.

We're currently reworking how debuffs work since we accidentally independently fixed it two different ways - by both increasing the debuff chance from MM6 to MM7 (thank you Eksekk) and by making the recovery periods more player-friendly (thank you RawSugar) and only recently noticed that both together make debuffs "too reliable."

[Malekitsu]

But since Spirit is an even worse choice than Light for dumping skill points in, I guess Light wins here! Still think DoG needs at least x1.3 to not be worthless, though (Mind and Body are good resp. offensively and defensively, so I'd rather improve them instead, esp. since I need 12 anyway, and Spirit only buffs Luck which is an almost useless stat).

Not sure you checked on the changes on spirit, the healing touch now offers a really good healing, share life healing is now improved and resurrection can save you in desperate situations.
Luck not only provides extra spell resistance (increased by The new stats scaling), but also offers resistance Vs all status(dead, erad etc) .
If you have a meele team you are going to love bless and heroism aswell, making it a really good option (and one of my personal favorite School for my beloved offhealer, the paladin, KPAD party).

[Tomsod]

Not sure you checked on the changes on spirit, the healing touch now offers a really good healing, share life healing is now improved and resurrection can save you in desperate situations.
Luck not only provides extra spell resistance (increased by The new stats scaling), but also offers resistance Vs all status(dead, erad etc) .
If you have a meele team you are going to love bless and heroism aswell, making it a really good option (and one of my personal favorite School for my beloved offhealer, the paladin, KPAD party).

Huh. I haven't in fact noticed the Shared Life change, as the new description wasn't shown to me (there's a typo in skem-spell-overrides.lua of the TCC fork, line 205: "life" instead of "Life"). I guess it's better now. But Body is still superior for healing (Cure Wounds > Healing Touch, Power Cure > Shared Life sans the equalizing effect, and Final Aid is better than Resurrection (cheaper AND faster) unless you're actually dead, and Guardian Angel should make death more rare even with 4 Spirit skill), plus there's an incentive to raise it to 12. If you want healing and buffs in one package then focusing on Spirit makes sense, I guess, but I have two Self casters so I'd rather improve Light (same buffs and a good AOE spell) on the paladin, and Body on the cleric for healing.

That said, I've understood the reason for my earlier confusion concerning Hour of Power, as Stone Skin is indeed 2/skill in your mod. Why haven't you done the same to Spirit buffs? With an x2 or even x1.5 multiplier I would agree that it's better than Light for melee. I wouldn't personally want Light to be the worst choice, but wasn't one of the mod's goals to make Light and Dark not superior to other schools? Spirit is currently inferior IMO, but instead you buff Earth, which is already crazy strong with all its attacking spells.

As for Luck, it's not completely useless, it's just the least useful primary stat. Elemental resistances are easily boosted by the related spells, which are in fact 7.5 times more effective per point of skill than the indirect boost from Lucky Day, even with your improved scaling. As for the condition resistance, all the worst conditions are actually protected from by magic resistance (which is, again, more efficient at this), except Cursed and Unconscious, and that's not just enough incentive for me. In my own mod, I've boosted Luck effect fourfold and also added critical hits for all weapons with base chance equal to Luck effect, and even with all that it became merely on par with Might or Speed.

[Malekitsu]

Not sure you checked on the changes on spirit, the healing touch now offers a really good healing, share life healing is now improved and resurrection can save you in desperate situations.
Luck not only provides extra spell resistance (increased by The new stats scaling), but also offers resistance Vs all status(dead, erad etc) .
If you have a meele team you are going to love bless and heroism aswell, making it a really good option (and one of my personal favorite School for my beloved offhealer, the paladin, KPAD party).

Huh. I haven't in fact noticed the Shared Life change, as the new description wasn't shown to me (there's a typo in skem-spell-overrides.lua of the TCC fork, line 205: "life" instead of "Life"). I guess it's better now. But Body is still superior for healing (Cure Wounds > Healing Touch, Power Cure > Shared Life sans the equalizing effect, and Final Aid is better than Resurrection (cheaper AND faster) unless you're actually dead, and Guardian Angel should make death more rare even with 4 Spirit skill), plus there's an incentive to raise it to 12. If you want healing and buffs in one package then focusing on Spirit makes sense, I guess, but I have two Self casters so I'd rather improve Light (same buffs and a good AOE spell) on the paladin, and Body on the cleric for healing.

That said, I've understood the reason for my earlier confusion concerning Hour of Power, as Stone Skin is indeed 2/skill in your mod. Why haven't you done the same to Spirit buffs? With an x2 or even x1.5 multiplier I would agree that it's better than Light for melee. I wouldn't personally want Light to be the worst choice, but wasn't one of the mod's goals to make Light and Dark not superior to other schools? Spirit is currently inferior IMO, but instead you buff Earth, which is already crazy strong with all its attacking spells.

As for Luck, it's not completely useless, it's just the least useful primary stat. Elemental resistances are easily boosted by the related spells, which are in fact 7.5 times more effective per point of skill than the indirect boost from Lucky Day, even with your improved scaling. As for the condition resistance, all the worst conditions are actually protected from by magic resistance (which is, again, more efficient at this), except Cursed and Unconscious, and that's not just enough incentive for me. In my own mod, I've boosted Luck effect fourfold and also added critical hits for all weapons with base chance equal to Luck effect, and even with all that it became merely on par with Might or Speed.

In fact heroism used to be 2 damage/skill, but it turned out to make spirit School waaaaay too op for melee party (to the point it was more effective investing in spirit rather than dagger to Increase dagger damage).
not sure if is possibile to put half values (Like 1.5).
Considering you are going to invest in body anyway for healing and my paladin is meele oriented I don't need the damage component of Light and buff is on a similiar level, but the occasional healing provided by spirit can save you any time the healer die or he can't keep up with damage(considering he spend Most time attacking melee I don't have Problem going out of mana with resurrection, also recovery time have been reduced).

I agree that in caster party you might even not need the offhealer and heroism/bless have no values, but it's not the same for meele, making spirit good or bad depending on the party composition.

It would be nice to modify/balance each stat individually, it is something we didn't look at yet, we just changed the bonus/skill, but it is something I'd love to do.

As for Earth School mass distorsion got nerfed, so it should be still be a very good School, but not op.

[raekuul]

Earth is still an incredibly good offensive school even with the Mass Distortion nerf - all the other spells hit against Physical resistance. And don't underestimate Turn to Stone.

[Tomsod]

In fact heroism used to be 2 damage/skill, but it turned out to make spirit School waaaaay too op for melee party (to the point it was more effective investing in spirit rather than dagger to Increase dagger damage).

Makes sense then. But I still think boosting Stone Skin so much was uncalled for.

not sure if is possibile to put half values (Like 1.5).

Absolutely, Lua is chill with floats. I've changed spellBuffPowers.Bless.proportional to 1.28 as a test and it just rounds the product down. I advise you to experiment with the precise multiplier if you want Spirit to be ahead of Light here like with two other combo buffs.

Considering you are going to invest in body anyway for healing and my paladin is meele oriented I don't need the damage component of Light and buff is on a similiar level, but the occasional healing provided by spirit can save you any time the healer die or he can't keep up with damage(considering he spend Most time attacking melee I don't have Problem going out of mana with resurrection, also recovery time have been reduced).

I agree that in caster party you might even not need the offhealer and heroism/bless have no values, but it's not the same for meele, making spirit good or bad depending on the party composition.

Alright, your build works too. I'm just a sucker for AOE spells, and Prismatic Light is the only one Paladin can have. That said, I do attack in melee quite often, just not all the time (crowds merit fireballs if at all possible).

It would be nice to modify/balance each stat individually, it is something we didn't look at yet, we just changed the bonus/skill, but it is something I'd love to do.

I've ruminated on this for my mod, and in the end I've changed Intellect, Personality, Endurance, and Luck (I wrote about Luck before). Might, Speed and Accuracy were OK in vanilla, but Int, Per & End only gave a really small fixed boost to HP and SP, besides the first two were practically useless to half the classes. So added extra effects to Int (small boost to wand power) and Per (adjust shop prices), and made the HP and SP boost proportional to level -- granted, that last change broke the late-game balance and I had to increase required XP per level to fix it, but perhaps nerfing the formula could've worked as well -- like your Bodybuilding, which also gives a percentile boost, but a really small one. The stats and their problems are the same in MM6 and MM7, so I advise you to look on these four, too.

As for Earth School mass distorsion got nerfed, so it should be still be a very good School, but not op.

Raekuul beat me to it -- yes, there's a bunch of other good spells there too. Rock Blast is my favorite, as it's strong and hard to resist (and AOE!), but apparently you've also buffed Death Blossom a lot -- yet to try it myself, but it was good even in vanilla, and with d10 dice it must be murderous.

[Tomsod]

Further observations:

* I was wrong about Death Blossom being OP -- I forgot that in MM6 it's just a single explosion rather than shrapnel, so with d10 it's just okay. In this light, in vanilla it must have been utterly pointless.
* Rock Blast aims at the closest enemy -- is this vanilla MM6 behavior or a mod change? In MM7 it shoots directly forward, which is tricky to aim, but at least you can aim it manually! As it's AOE, some distance from the explosion is preferred, you see.
* That bug with a shop restocking on a reload seems to affect all shops now? You may want to look into it.
* All your efforts making healing more expensive are thrown out of the window with a NPC in a Sutterville tavern offering unlimited free HP and SP refill. Sorry! That said, in vanilla you can sorta do the same with fountains, except they run out after a while.
* Body is a good healing school but wow are its attack spells ever crappy. I wanted my cleric to attack with Dark, unfortunately I musn't put points into it as it will boosted for free towards the endgame (had to reload when I remembered it). But for now she ended up without any good attacks at all!

[RawSugar]

* didnt know blossom was shrapnel in 7, so did wonder why you'd think it OP it can still be buffed, but not sure earth needs a strong outdoors spell.
* The mod adds homing to all missiles including rock blast, you can aim by mouse over your target. sometimes it reverts to vanilla behaviour though so be careful.
*shops and healing; we toyed some with adding difficulty via these but in the end settled on making them relevant rather than difficult. And yeah there are ways around them, if that is too bothersome as well
*body having low damage is part of the balance between schools. it's balanced so that getting a secondary damage school is worthwhile when going Body. its also not much better off than spirit, because arrow while strong isnt very relevant late game. thats the trade off, if you specialize healing you wont be very strong at damage dealing. You still deal a good deal better damage than using bow or attack spells at lower rank. and luckily you will be healing most actions soon enough, anyway

[Tomsod]

* didnt know blossom was shrapnel in 7, so did wonder why you'd think it OP :) it can still be buffed, but not sure earth needs a strong outdoors spell.

My stance is that either all outdoor spells must be strong, or none of them -- otherwise those that are not are comparatively useless. That's precisely my problem with Sun Ray. That said, d10 AOE is okay, it's just not great. It's on par with vanilla meteor spells now; the problem is that you've boosted those and Blossom is probably left behind (not sure how it feels to me yet, too few outdoor fights).

* The mod adds homing to all missiles including rock blast, you can aim by mouse over your target. sometimes it reverts to vanilla behaviour though so be careful.

That works with a quick spell cast, but what about casting from spellbook? I don't like keeping a friendly-fire spell on my quick cast button, too careless.

*shops and healing; we toyed some with adding difficulty via these but in the end settled on making them relevant rather than difficult. And yeah there are ways around them, if that is too bothersome as well ;)

Are you saying the insta-restocking shops are intentional??? Okay then.

*body having low damage is part of the balance between schools. it's balanced so that getting a secondary damage school is worthwhile when going Body. its also not much better off than spirit, because arrow while strong isnt very relevant late game. thats the trade off, if you specialize healing you wont be very strong at damage dealing. You still deal a good deal better damage than using bow or attack spells at lower rank. and luckily you will be healing most actions soon enough, anyway ;)

Nah, it's fine, I'm just bitching about not being able to train Dark. Mind is actually a very strong option now, and I could've learned that for the cleric, but the paladin already did and he isn't getting anything better, and I'm trying to diversify. I wouldn't have this problem in vanilla MM6.

[RawSugar]

its asymmetrical balance, present in vanilla, between the schools. we made blossom playable, even a little buffed thanks to large AOE, but not a super powerful spell like meteor/starburst. Earth already has a lot of very strong selling points.

Restock isnt intentional but its an exploit in a singleplayer game that was in vanilla, and unless its a TCC issue it only restocks until you buy something, then you have to wait for reset. I like to use it so i can buy the spellbooks i want but its up to the player how much they want to abuse it

Body damage spells are actually significantly buffed vs vanilla because they do physical damage in MAW and magic in vanilla. They had the same balance in vanilla. You still usually end up going Body if you want a healer and nothing else, it wouldn't really be a choice if the damage spells were also decent. You dont neccesarily need a fully specialized healer though, making the other schools or combining Body magic with a secondary school a fully viable option.

[Tomsod]

On shops restocking: that the shops choose their items on the first visit is normal to me. The bug is: if you quick-save and quick-load immediately after buying, the shop restocks again. I think it doesn't work on guilds, though.

I wouldn't have this problem in vanilla MM6.

Oops, bad wording: I meant I wouldn't have this problem in non-TCC MAW. This is not a complaint!

[RawSugar]

No worries, its great w some feedback, im just trying to lay out the reasoning for the choices we've made, you already have us reconsidering Light balance so keep it coming:)
hmm ye fair that does seem to be an issue and its not TCC related and its not a thing in vanilla. not gamebreaking but worth looking into - thanks !

[Malekitsu]

I'm back home and I finally can go back to work, so let's get started:
- As Rawsugar said we are discussing light and dark and the buffs in general
- I'd love to have more interesting stats, it might take as there are lot of ideas around
- Item Rework is something I'd love to do, but probably it will be just for lvl 255 mod.

I'm mainly working on the Nightmare mode while discussing some changes I'd love to do.
Beta should be released hopefully in a week, it will features:
Harder monster
Extra bosses with nice loot
Brand new unreleased dungeons

As for the actual updates:
- Updated TCC release with the last month changes

[Malekitsu]

Nightmare mode is now available, just download this folder and copy paste in your MAW folder:
https://github.com/Malekitsu/MM6-Nightmare-Mode
Make sure to make a backup copy.
If you crash upon loading make sure to read README file.

[RawSugar]

Optional mode 100 now up, this gives all monster +50% and +100 levels and adjusts their stats accordingly. Mode can be played either after clearing game (if you do set MonsterExperienceMultiplier=2) , or by using an editor like https://www.moddb.com/mods/might-and-ma ... -hack-tool to set your party to level 100 (give them 5 million gold and experience).

Here's what a level 250 gold dragon looks like;
https://i.imgur.com/ZAV6euK.png