I've been playing VI and VII quite a lot, and beefing through VII again, but I usually stick to a "tried and true" party with a couple of samurai and a Valkery or two, a ninja and bard. When I originally played VI some years ago, I used a Ranger and even took them pretty deep into VII and just found it quite lack luster.

Anyhow, I just wanted to know what class or classes people have been going through VI + VII with , and which ones they favor and why.

I haven't played through these games myself, but I've watched them being played, have read some detailed strategy guides (or maybe just 1, for Wizardry 6), and have played Wizardry Gaiden 3 (which is completely different, but oddly inherited some of Wizardry 6's balance issues), so I do have some thoughts:
* Valkyries may be a bit too good in Wizardry 6. You have a class that can fight well, can cast Priest spells, and levels up faster than a Priest does. This means that, while the Priest has a head start on spellcasting ability, the Valkyrie will be better in the long run due to being a higher level at any given XP total. This really makes me wonder what they were thinking when they made the XP tables. (Also, is there a good reason to use Lord over Valkyrie if the character is already female?) (Side note: Starting as a {riest and changing to Valkyrie early (like level 2) is a good strategy in Wizardry 6/7; in Wizardry Gaiden 3, on the other hand, it's impossible due to conflicting alignment requirements.)
* In the long run, Bard may be better than Mage. Same XP rate, but Bard has mage spells and more that the mage does not get. (In WG3, Bards actually level *faster* than mages, but they have trouble with locked doors, but that's another story.)
* Bishops are lousy. The trend of Bishops being terrible in the Wizardry series continues. While they can learn both Mage and Priest spells, they have to alternate, so you can't take advantage of the skill system to specialize. Furthermore, Wizardry 6 Bishops have lower SP regen (though note that that's based off your starting class, not your current class, for whatever reason; Wizardry 6 has a lot of ugly mechanics like that). Honestly, I would suggest avoiding this class until late in Wizardry 7 if you're thinking of transferring them to 8 (where they're actually good, for once).
* Rangers are lousy in 6. Poor equipment, a less useful spellbook, and yet they have the same high XP requirements that Samurai and Monks have (and Lords, but keep in mind that Valkyries are a thing). (They're also lousy in Wizardry Gaiden 3, but at least got better in later Japanese Wizardry games; Dracon Rangers are really good in Wizardry DIMGUIL, for example.) It looks like they tried to address these issues, at least a little, in Wizardry 7, at least.

A Bard is essential in the beginning.
For the end game I prefer the prestige classes who can use the best weapons:
Lord for Excalibur
Valkyrie for Manead's Lance
Samurai for the Muramasa Blade
And probably some others I've forgotten.

Yeah bard can be solid all the way in VI and VII but I usually derp into Ninja with them late into VI. I haven't played as much Wizardry 8 but I think gadgeteer is really "better" overall between Bard and Gadgeteer but I haven't 'beaten' 8 so I won't say that with any certainty.

And to follow up on DTgreene's statement about rangers, I just found compared to everything else I looked at they just didn't have the options that say Samurai or other melee oriented classes bring. Being able to launch a "moderate" damage attack from the back row 1 time is not worth just being a constant let down in all other areas, a waste of Spell Points when you heal them, and there is nothing they have that makes up for being as they are in vanilla VI. I also found them pretty disappointing in VII, and changed them over to NIN some time deep in the run and they were better off by leaps and bounds. I'm not sure if they are a bugged class, but they sure seem bottom tier, right along fighter and thief, just with minor spell casting abilities.

I'm tossing around the idea of going heavy monk maybe by "mid game" in this VII run, all monk and 1 bard possibly, just to spice it up.

I think it's not a bug, but rather a balance issue. The developers weighted the value of ranged weapons too heavily. Unlike in games like Ultima 3-5 and Nox Archaist (and even Wizardry 8), there's no tactical combat, so you don't need to spend turns moving close to the enemy in order to attack, so ranged weapons don't have an inherent advantage over melee weapons, certainly not enough to justify high XP requirements and limited armor selection, not to mention the issue of ammunition,

A related observation is that Sir-Tech has also over-valued single use items, like scrolls and potions; this is why Alchemy is such a good way to make money in Wizardry 8, but it also hurts the usefulness of scrolls, especially when it's something like Magic Missile. It doesn't help that the scrolls can fail when you do use them, and there's a skill specifically for using scrolls, which can fail, wasting the overpriced item. (Wizardry 8 merged it into Artifacts, which helps; then again, the class that gets the 25% skill bonus to Artifacts is usually too busy casting spells (and is fortunately really good at it).)

By the way, please don't capitalize the first two letters of my username like that; they're the initials of a person I detest. (Won't go into this publicly here due to the "no politics" rule; if you want details, send me a chat message, or you could just guess and probably be correct.) It really depends. In Wizardry 8:

Bard:
* Gets instruments early, getting 2 before leaving the monastery and a 3rd before even reaching town. Gadgeteer only gets 1 gadget, and it's not until the end of the monastery, so no gadget use before that.
* Gets the party heal (which is actually good in Wizardry 8 for a change) relatively easily and in 2 locations; Gadgeteer gets it near a big fight (though it's possible to get it without triggering that combat).
* Late game, gets a heal + stamina restore + status cure; at a high enough level, the bard can even get a net gain of stamina by using it on herself*.
* Gets a Communication bonus and gets Pickpocket (even if Pickpocket isn't that great in 1.2.4, which is the version GOG gives you).
* Note that Bards do *not* get regular spells in Wizardry 8; a transferred Bard may have a bit of Wizardry skill from the transfer, but will have no use for it.

Gadgeteer:
* Eventually gets some really nice low level gadgets, including such spells as Guardian Angel (provides temporary HP) and Noxious Fumes (damage + status).
* Can use gadgets if silenced or in an anti-magic area (bard instruments will fail).
* Gets instant death attacks later on (but watch out if they backfire!)
* Gets a special Omnigun. Unfortunately, this weapon has a tendency to blind enemies, which makes them run away, which is really annoying in battles that aren't that difficult, and only desirable against melee enemies in difficult fights.
* Is better at lockpicking (but doesn't get the 25% bonus; it goes to Modern Weapons instead)
* Can't be obtained via transfer. However, if you side with the T'Rang in Wizardry 7, you can start in an area of Wizardry 8 that is close to those nice low level gadgets, and you can use the "Replace Character" feature to start a new one from level 1. (Class changing in Wizardry 8 usually isn't a good idea.)

Noted!

On a different "note", you haven't played through 6 or 7 yourself, but have you been considering it? Out of the 6-8 trilogy, 6 really is my favorite. I play it about 1 time a year. I didn't play last year all the way through, I blame COVID-19 and work shenanigans. I had work thankfully, just had to bend extra to get it. Some things about Valkeries and Lords tho, I think Valkeries can't wear some armor Lords can, but, Valkeries are usually "better" if you don't grind so much. They are great melee that can attack from the back row with lances, and to me just seem like great members with their early access to healing and restorative magic that gets rid of things like poison and paralysis. Taking a run through samurai with your Valkery early on gets you a few helpful spells like sleep or even knock, to play with, and access to Kirijutsu. Just a few levels can really help. Miss chance (if you're power gaming) can also be helped if you start as Samurai and take a few levels before converting. Valks also level much faster, to an almost unfair extent when compared to Lords, but a Lord rocking Avenger late game can, and valk for the lance does do some serious damage.

Bards are a beautiful class in 6 and 7, but a lot of their utility transfers over to other classes, so just starting as one then transferring to something else helps tremendously, starting as one simply to get the lute fresh out the gate as grinding for it later can be tedious.

6 can be manageable and enjoyable without madgod's forge editor, but I found VII to be very needlessly drawn out because of the mana regen rates while resting, and as I played it, I used a lot of magic. The little patch that speeds that process up in the forge editor is very helpful in making VII a much more enjoyable experience for me anyway.

I actually haven't been considering it, mainly because some of the uglier mechanics, like the base miss chance mechanic, the fact that carrying capacity depends only on initial strength, the fact that SP regen only depends on your starting class and stats, and the fact that the healing methods are inadequate later in the game.

Maybe I should elaborate on the healing issue. For this purpose, I'll only consider out-of-combat healing. Your options work out to something like this:
* Heal Wounds: Even at PL7, it *still* only heals an average of 31.5 HP per casting. When you have hundreds of HP, that's not enough to heal in a reasonable amount of time. (Really wish the games had Wizardry 8's auto-recast, which would have fixed this issue, at least outside of combat.)
* Healthful (Wizardry 7): From what I remember, this heals even less (per character) than Heal Wounds.
* Resting. Unfortunately, resting takes way too much real time, both for healing and SP recovery.
* Fountains, but that's only if there happens to be one conveniently located.

While earlier Wizardry games were worse for lower level healing, they at least have MADI for high level healing; Wizardry 6-7 don't have any suitable spell for that purpose. Actually, in Wizardry 6, at high XP totals Valkyries will be significantly higher in level than Lords, so even if you do spend hours power-leveling, Valkyries will still be better until you start hitting caps. Miss chance shouldn't be something I have to worry about. Why can't it be like Wizardry 1-5 where accuracy is solely dependent on current class, level, skill, and equipment? (Well, and the target.)

I'm reminded of another reason: I don't like how, in Wizardry 7, if you take too long NPCs can beat you to certain treasures.

I do believe MadGod's Forge Editor lets you 'patch" the healing rates per rest cycle. It's how I sped up my regeneration rates for VII. It's really the only way I'll play VII anymore because the healing process is an enormous pain in the anus.

And yeah the miss chance reduction mechanic being hidden is extra slap in the face, bringing it up in the game in some fashion would be helpful, but again MadGod's Forge Editor will allow you to modify what each class gets. It's sad it takes a 3rd party tool to adjust the game to be desirable, but the games are pretty fun for me anyhow regardless of tool use. If you ever do decide to try the games, do give the editor consideration, it may make the experience very enjoyable for you. I was able to enjoy VI with no mods, minimal assistance on my first play through but VI came to me many years after it had been released and I always wondered if there were "more wizardry" games, 5 having been the last I had played many years prior.

I think 5 was kind of a perfect storm of the old style Wizardry games, I have played 2 and 3 before but it was on a fan translated rom, they just didn't grip me the way 1 and 5 did. I have played one of the japanese games tho, Labyrinth of Lost Souls and it was "ok" for what it was. It seemed kind of like they could have done more with it, and the npc's didn't really do much for me either, but it wasn't awful. I had more fun with Elminage Original for some reason but they play very similarly. Elminage tho has that little crafting system tacked on, can produce interesting things with that. Speaking of Eliminage, have you tried those?

It's not that the base miss chance is hidden, but the fact that there are other issues with it as well:
* It improves by a random amount.
* It doesn't improve after class change until you reach your previous level. This means that a character who starts as a mage will be forever crippled in terms of accuracy compared to one who starts as a fighter, even if they end up in the other class.
* It stops improving after level 20, so eventually a poor base miss chance is no longer fixable.

Another thing I don't like about Wizardry 6-8 is that you can't return to the starting area to create characters mid-game and leave some back at the tavern, like you could in earlier games. (There's the replace character option, but it's not in Wizardry 6; to add insult to injury, the original manual mentions it, but there's a flyer that says the option was removed because the point of Wizardry 6 was "to play through the game with one party", which feels overly restrictive after playing earlier games in the series.)

I've played Elminage Gothic, got up to the final post-game dungeon, but stopped because the difficulty got too much even for me. The game may start off gentile, but afterwords it's as brutal as the early Wizardry games. One thing Elminage Gothic does well is that it gives every class a chance to shine; there's strong enemies that are vulnerable to instant death, along with enemies that a Samurai's counter ability is good against. I also like the ability to turn monsters into permanent party members, even if the chance of getting many monster types (especially spellcasting monsters and dragons) is far lower than it should be. One tip: To reach the end of the main story, you don't need to pick a lock. Also, the final floor of an optional area (of which there are plenty) is much more dangerous than the rest of said area (though that may not apply to the postgame).

I've also played Wizardry Gaiden 3, 4, and DIMGUIL (though I didn't finish that last one). They're a rather interesting take on the series, using traditional mechanics with the races and classes that Wizardry 6 added.
* Wizardry Gaiden 3 suffers from a few bugs that make the game harder than it should be. (One of these days I'll try to fix a couple of them using tools like windfish and sameboy.) There's also the fact that Bards and Rangers can't effectively open locked doors, and opening locked doors is *required*. Also, there's no interesting treasure early on, to the point where I recommend foregoing a Bishop and relying on the Alchemist spell that identifies items. (I also note it inherits some of Wizardry 6's balance issues for some reason, like Valkyries being great and Rangers being terrible.)
* Wizardry Gaiden 4 suffers from the fact that the first 3 dungeons all start at level 1 and don't take you that high level wise, so it takes a while before the game gets to higher level content. With that said, there's plenty of puzzles, NPCs, and multiple solutions to them. (I once cast the Charm equivalent on an NPC, and the NPC gave me the key I needed. It's also possible to pick the lock, kill the NPC, or solve the puzzle the "intended" way.) (Also, DO NOT CAT THE SPELL THAT REMOVES CURSED ITEMS. IT IS KNOWN TO CORRUPT YOUR SAVE.)
* Wizardry DIMGUIL is a bit better balanced combat wise (albeit with the postgame superboss being a bit ridiculous if you don't just MAHAMAN them away). The spell selection is smaller than WG4, and for whatever reason LOKTOFEIT is the Wizardry 1-3 version here.

Yeah that bugged me about VI, and it also seems like right at the beginning it says you can go back out if you want, but the door is locked when you try. There are things I liked about VI tho, more than the earlier Wizardry titles, like different shops instead of Boltac's Trading Post for all your needs. It is sort of like bumping into npc's in 1 - 5 that sell stuff but more like they are at set locations. It also gave a sense of progression for me, and also like if you were grinding end game you could go to which ever vendors sold things you wanted whether they be things you could turn around and sell in VII for some quick cash or items that were fairly strong and good things to import with. Usually tho, in the earlier titles if a whole group died in the maze you could take another party out to "get them", and that mechanic is not necessary in 6-8 as the game plays a little differently so that might be a consideration the author made when making 6 and 7. It would be awesome to see these games remade with some element of that in there.

I can agree tho, about miss chance reduction not being a stellar mechanic to contend with. It sort of gives the impression that maybe DW Bradley was trying to simulate the concept that 2 or more people in the same profession may not be true equals in terms of skill. Like even tho 2 people are Ninja, one may be more accurate than another .. it just didn't translate well in practice. The biggest bother to me is that it is kind of hidden from view altogether, and not really brought up in game at all. But many of the old classics had little things like this.

I grew up with 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and you basically had to have an advanced to degree in applied insanity to keep up with that stuff, ThAC-0 for the different classes is a trivial concern compared to knowing all the stuff 18/25 strength could do like bend bars lift gates %, or if your 17 or 18 constitution meant anything if you weren't a warrior class etc. Oh and high Int and Wis scores giving minor spell immunities. And the rules were right there plain for everyone to read, just very contrived and bizzaro. I still loved it back then. Probably would hate it now.

Don't forget the fact that there's no difference in HP for characters with 7 to 14 constitution. (Something similar applies to Wizardry games, at least 1-5 (though not 8).)

Incidentally, speaking of miss chance and THAC0, one thing that bugs me about older CRPGs is how often attacks miss at the low levels. In many of these games, a low level character attacking a low level enemy has only around a 50% chance to hit. I much prefer the way it is in games like Dragon Quest, where attacks almost always hit and it's damage that is affected by equipment and levels, not accuracy. (Final Fantasy is somewhat guilty of this; FF1 had attacks missing fairly often at the start, and FF2 has attacks missing pretty often when your weapon level is still 1. It's not until FF5 that accuracy became a non-issue in basic cases. Also, I note that Ultima and Nox Archaist, while not being based off AD&D rules, have a lot of attacks missing, at least early on.)

With that said, I like having the rules be visible to the player, though I do sometimes enjoy testing to see how things work. (Sometimes the rule as written down doesn't match the implementation. See the Dark Sun games, where healing doesn't have a range limit, for example.)


I think the mechanic was intended to keep class changed characters from becoming too powerful, but unfortunately it has counter-intuitive and ugly effects. I don't know why he decided to make the increases random.

As I said, the way Wizardry 1-5 handled it, where you lose accuracy on class change, but where it's solely dependent on the character's class and level, is better. (Although it improves too slowly; Fighter-types only improve every 3 levels, and the Sir-Tech games are typically winnable at level 13, right when the most powerful spells show up.)

I really like Lords. In fact, they are my favorite class in any RPG.
Why? I'm not quite sure, I just really like the connotation. Mechanically speaking, I do like healing fighters, but honestly I just like the name. "Lord" is a lot cooler than "paladin" to me.

I always make a Rawulf Lord in Wizardry 6 (which I still need to beat... I always get lost in the mines). A good dogge who is loyal to his companions and fights for justice! :')

That is fair, but mechanics aside I just like the connotation that Lords give me.
You have an extremely analytical brain, it seems, but sometimes it is nice to build a party based on aesthetics rather than stats. ;)