Archaic to a fault, the character creation and combat system in Wizardry: Labyrinth Of Lost Souls can be utterly incomprehensible to a new player — especially since there’s no tutorial!
Forget about the starter party found in the Guild. They aren’t built to last. We’re going to skip those lame adventurers and show you how to steamroll the entire game by building an ultimate party of second-tier characters right from the start.
Registering New Party Members
20’s not bad, but we can do better
After creating your base character, it’s time to put together a new party of adventurers. Ignore the pre-created options and instead build your own crew to take advantage of the random rolling mechanic.
Head to Guild and choose Register. Before picking a name, race, or gender, take a look at the “Bonus” number listed above the base stats.
In most cases, there will be a really sad number here, like 7 or 10. You might see a 12 your first time. That’s a nonsense number that will result in a sub-par adventurer with low health and no ability to pick a second-tier class immediately.
To avoid this problem, back out of the screen and choose Register again — you’ll notice the Bonus number is different as it re-rolls every time you enter this screen. Keep doing this until you get a worthwhile number to work with. A Bonus of 30 is what we’re aiming for, but if you get tired of re-rolling, anything in the 20-30 range works fine.
The Bonus is totally randomized each time you go to the Register screen, but it tends to become worse over time, which means you need to reset the counter eventually.
Continue this process until you consistently get a Bonus in the 6-10 range over and over. At that point, return to town and press the “S” key to bring up the main menu and choose Return To Title.
From there, continue your game, then repeat the process of Registering a new adventurer until you get the number you want.
It is possible, but highly unlikely, to get a 40. Spending the hours necessary (and yes, it will be hours unless you are extraordinarily lucky) to get the very rare 40 Bonus has one main benefit — due to the base race stats a human, elf, or dwarf can start as a Ninja from Level 1.
Alignment, Second-Tier Class Requirements
Now that you’ve got your high Bonus, it’s time to start building a character. You will need to decide on both alignment and where all those points will go. Evil adventurers won’t work with Good, and vice versa, while Neutral will work with either.
There are ways to work around this restriction to still have a full party of both Priests and Thieves since Priests can be Good or Evil. However, there are two second-tier classes that will never work together: the Ninja (Evil) or the Lord (Good).
The Ninja is, hands down, the best single class in the game and capable of one-hit killing many enemies. However, you may want to go the Good and Neutral route instead to utilize our ultimate party build.
Class, Alignment, Stats List
Below we list out each class along with their alignment restrictions and the starting stats they require. If you use the Wizardry re-rolling method above, you can start most adventurers as a second-tier class. Otherwise, you will need to upgrade them over time as their stats increase while leveling.
Don’t forget you don’t actually have to go into combat to level at all! Spending gold on tithing at the Church can quickly level a new adventurer as far as you need to take them.
Class | Alignment | Stats |
---|---|---|
Fighter | Good Neutral Evil | Strength 12 |
Mage | Good Neutral Evil | Intelligence 12 |
Priest | Good Evil | Piety 12 |
Thief | Neutral Evil | Agility 10 Luck 12 |
Bishop | Good Evil | Intelligence 13 Piety 13 |
Samurai | Good Neutral | Strength 15 Intelligence 11 Piety 10 Vitality 14 Agility 10 Luck 9 |
Lord | Good | Strength 15 Intelligence 12 Piety 12 Vitality 15 Agility 14 Luck 15 |
Ninja | Evil | Strength 15 Intelligence 15 Piety 15 Vitality 15 Agility 15 Luck 15 |
Building the Perfect Party
Here’s what you need to know that Wizardry doesn’t tell you: each party member can change classes three times, and they retain all their spells from the first two classes.
Although it sounds counter-intuitive since your group will be squishy at the beginning, one of the best party lineups consists of a full six spell casters with a mix of Mage, Priest, and Bishop.
By using the point-scumming method above, each Mage, Priest, or Bishop will start with enough HP and physical damage to survive if you put your extra points in Vitality and Strength. If you aren’t brave enough to go full speed ahead with all six glass cannons, it’s also viable to use one base Fighter in the front row instead.
If you don’t intend to switch to the Ninja class at any point, make all six adventurers either Good or Neutral. If you want Ninja, then go with Evil instead.
After they gain all the spells from their original class while leveling up, head to the Guild and switch that character to the opposite class — from Priest/Bishop to Mage or vice versa.
From there, level them again until they gain all the new class spells, resulting in a character with all the healing and damaging spells at the same time. For the final class change, switch to a melee-focused class such as Lord or Fighter for an entire uber party of ultimate multi-classed adventurers.
This method leaves you without a Thief for treasure chests or a Ninja for one-hit kills, however. If you want to add a Thief and eventually upgrade to Ninja, make sure your Priests/Bishops are Evil instead of Good. You lose out on the Lord class, but the trade-off can be worth the loss.
Have any other great Wizardry: Labyrinth Of Lost Souls party builds we should try? Let us know which lineup you use in the comments below!
Published: Jan 14, 2020 03:45 pm