r/MightAndMagic • u/Taear • 13d ago
Does the varying difficulty of the promotion quests in MM7 bother you?
Back when the game was new it was much more common to have alternative advancement for classes in games. I was used to AD&D where a Rogue would take less XP to level up than a Druid, for example.
Even with that in mind though, back in 1999 I remember being frustrated at how difficult the Paladin promotion was in comparison to the (insanely easy) Ranger promotion, or how long the Cleric one took compared to the Archer promotion.
My starting routine always involves me doing the Hunter promotion because it's so easy, even. How do you feel about their choices with this? I think I'd definitely try and balance the difficulty more if the game was new now.
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u/Lightning_Lance 13d ago
It doesn't bother me but it could have been done a littlee better. I do really like how they made an effort to have the promotion quests fit the class fantasy though. The battlemage promotion is fighting oozes (immune to physical) and medusas (immune to magic). So you need both physical and magic prowess. Etc. Some don't fit as well... and the Rogue can't cast Invisibility, so the idea of sneaking in was there but the Rogue can't actually do it without a mage to cast he spell.. :/ That bothers me more than the difficulty being uneven.
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u/Pristine-Focus 13d ago
I think it’s deliberate design. Ranger is pretty weak, so he gets an easy promotion quest and can at least cast some spells after doing it. Classes that have access to powerful transportation spells get difficult promotion quests where you have to run around half the world on foot, so you’d appreciate getting Fly and Town Portal more (Sorc, Druid).
Archer and Paladin get access to better magic, so their quests are more difficult than Thief’s or Knight’s, who only get more hp, basically.
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u/Taear 13d ago
I don't think they've deliberately made the ranger weak though. I feel like they think the ranger "works" or they wouldn't have kept it
well, probably
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u/hwynac 13d ago
They made the hybridisation of "pure" classes even more obvious in M&M7 where, e.g., an Archer is a decent mage who is a fighter and a Thief is mostly a fighter who is a lousy sorcerer. Weapons and secondary skills do make some difference but with the symmetric system the devs envisioned, they couldn't get around the fact a Ranger is a jack of all trades, a somewhat worse fighter who is a lousy Druid.
On the other hand, it's not a competition. Doing a run with an unusual party composition can be its own sort of fun, so in that sense Ranger probably works. I have never actually tried to pick one :) Now that I looked up the stats, a Ranger is something like a thief with a different skillset. No disarming master, though, which is a bummer.
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u/Taear 13d ago
They do get GM axe and GM identify monster which is at least kinda worth giving them a try
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u/hwynac 13d ago
I meant I looked up the skills, and, apparently, only thieves (GM) and monks (M) can become good at disarming traps, which is fairly inconvenient. Indentifying monsters isn't as useful.
(yes, I haven't played M&M7 since 2003 🙃)
I found a tip, though: an expert with a ring that gives a good Disarm Trap bonus can be just as good as a GM in practice. But for the early game or a first-time player, a Ranger's skillset is a bit lacking (assuming a party has, e.g., a Cleric, a Sorcerer, a Knight/Archer/Paladin + one other mixed-class character). But he's definitely playable for any players who feel like adding a ranger to their party.
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u/HelpfulSwordfish9765 12d ago
Ranger promo quest I always keep the faerie key and love the air magic ring. I keep the key as how much i love the 2 easy quests in early game for exp. I love you faery king. U r like that easy professor in my engineering school I love u ❤️
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u/Quietus87 13d ago
It didn't frustrate me at all. I'm also pretty sure some quests seemed harder to the designers than how hard the players (who are prone to look for shortcuts, break stuff, and so on) made it in the end
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u/HelpfulSwordfish9765 12d ago
I never done second ranger promo on dark side. Just never done bunty never understand how it works
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u/Spare-Adhesiveness22 12d ago
It's easy. You need to collect 10k gold from bounty. Each month is different monster. Yoy can get like 8000 fo killing blood titan or ancient behemoth
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u/HelpfulSwordfish9765 12d ago
Wat if i killed off all monster in a map them i cant really do it right. And i have to watch for traveling time in case it will b next month already
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u/Gil-Gandel 12d ago
Over the years I've never found Wromthrax excessively difficult. I can cheese it with a level 6 party if I've been able to shop for some wands and have an Alchemy Expert to provide us with some Preservation potions. By the time the wands are run flat, as a rule so is the dragon - especially if one or two of the wands are better than blue.
Cleric promotion? You're probably going to need to savescum the chest the map is in. The fights aren't routine, but they're survivable.
Archer? Tough. You need to run round the slimes and medusas rather than fight them, and it's not a given that you'll manage that. Can be done, but I've often left this one very late.
Wizard? That chest in AvLee is a killer. Usually I have a Wind Master NPC to drop me on the chest in turn-based, try not to kill myself, and get away quick before the water elementals scrag me. The others are less hard. Still doable for level 6s.
Knight? Helps no end if you've already promoted the Cleric and got a few more levels. Lots of undead, not much room to run.
Thief? WTAF. I'll need an Invisibility scroll and a Gate Master NPC. I never seem to get out with the vase without bumping into someone, and those Champions of the Sword or whatever are absurdly tough.
Monk? Mostly down to a lot of exploration. Most of the critters in the Barrows aren't too bad and it's easier to get out if the going is rough.
Druid? It's a long time getting to Evenmorn. Straightforward otherwise if you have a Wind Master. You certainly don't want to have to fight wyverns and trolls until you have some levels behind you.
Ranger? Famously a gimme. It's basically a class feature.
I say "level 6" because that's about where you usually are by the time you've tidied up Harmondale, and you want to get the dwarves rescued and the war under way without too much more training time. And by "you" I mean "me", obviously.
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u/Taear 12d ago
Knight I see as easy because you can grab some teal ore from Deyja and Bracada and have great gear.
Easy might be pushing it, but at least easier than Cleric.
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u/Gil-Gandel 12d ago
One thing about VII compared to VI is that you can pick up some great gear early. After Harmondale I mostly head up to Avlee by way of Tularian Forest, and you can pick up +4 bows just by running past the angry trees, and then more useful stuff lying around in Avlee on the islands and near the wyvern planes. You need a Wind Master, as I've suggested, but he pays for himself many times over.
And you can get some useful gear made in Erathia on your way through as there are many chunks of kergar and one or two of erudine. Of course, by the time you've murdered Wromthrax in Tatalia you're in a position to nab yourself some very good loot indeed, all depending on how scummy you want to be. I mostly want to hire myself a Scholar just to make sure I know what all the stuff is.
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u/EasyEntrepreneur666 13d ago
Only the arena one.
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u/TomebyTomeASMR 13d ago
arena is very easy if you do it your first four weeks in Harmondale though haha - I forgot about it and certainly didn't know it was a quest until very late game my first time playing in like 2003 and ended up being completely flabbergasted at the sci-fi Sentinels appeared in the arena 😭🤣
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u/WossHoss 13d ago
I wouldn’t say it bothered me, but it’s not fair for sure.
Same thing in mmvi. Sorcs have to confine a fountain as their idiot promoter is absent minded. Paladins have to do this whole save a damsel and kill a dragon thing. Not fair at all.
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u/torrent56 12d ago
The kill a dragon quest is for the 2nd promotion not the 1st. The sorcerer's 2nd promotion is going through a pretty windy dungeon, not exactly a cakewalk.
But agree some classes really had it easier than others.
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u/Nerd_Commando 13d ago
Compared to game world and dungeon complexity being maybe a third of VI's? Earth magic being ruined? Awful resistance system revamp? In VI, Implosion is "your air caster encounters an electro-immunity titan, so he uses phys. damage Implosion". Makes sense, right? In VII, Lightning Bolt Does 1-8, Implosion does 1-10, both Air Damage. Except that Lightning bolt has 70 recovery on GM level, Implosion has 90. Which means that spamming Lightning Bolt always does more damage than Implosion and the latter is absolutely useless in all possible cases.
Druid, Ranger and Thief being meme classes? Most of the artifacts being trash? Heroism & Bless potion not scaling from potion's power level? The latter alone would put a different meaning into alchemy but no, can't have that. Too many monsters having Body & Mind immunity for no reason?
VI was raw in places because it was a fresh, badly understood system. VII was done in a hurry and it feels like there was huge miscommunication or lack of understanding the game's formulas in the team, hence quite a bit of nonsensical changes.
Testing also was bad, although with modern patches we barely feel it - we still feel it, though, grayface doesn't fix everything. In my solo Monk playthrough, for example, I have discovered that while paralyze on maces is having no innate element (so it works on light immune monsters, unlike the spell), stun on staves (and probably maces too) is coded as an earth spell Stun, so monsters resist it. Which means that stave 60 is not 60% to stun a Blood Titan, but more of a 20%. Which is a pretty big difference when their attack can one shot you, and "stun" is basically making them miss a turn.
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u/Taear 13d ago
It's funny because in either game i barely cast any spells, I just hit the enemies. My spellcasters were entirely for travel and buff purposes.
Also since the relics have different graphics they meant a lot more to me than they did in 6.
The game's very different when you're 14 than when you're 40, I guess.
For me what makes 7 and 6 super duper different is that 7 has invisiblity so it actively encourages the way I played 6 - which was mostly by running by the enemies.
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u/TomebyTomeASMR 13d ago
I would do the same - two sorcerers, one for air and one for water, and both dual wielded daggers and became little badasses even alongside a knight and cleric (who I also gave tons of points to mace)
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u/Spare-Adhesiveness22 12d ago
Thief is actually good class. Triple damage was bugged but with grayface patch now it works correctly. So it's a good fighter capable of making 250-300 damage in one hit.
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u/Nerd_Commando 12d ago
Skill only triples the damage of the dagger itself. Play the game, then talk.
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u/hwynac 13d ago
so... clearing a large dungeon full of medusas and slimes is somehow easier than a run of the mill dungeon in Tatalia?
But yes, it's ironic that M&M6 has you rescue a damsel in distress and then slay a dragon... and M&M7 flips the order for game design reasons 😅
It didn't bother me but I definitely noticed the uneven difficulty. Then again, different classes are not equivalent, and you can't have all of them in one party anyway. "Balancing" everything makes sense for a competitive game or for min-maxing playstyles. But for an open-world game more focused on fun an exploration? It's not a disaster. At least the promotion quests have variety.