If I decide I want to play through Might and Magic 2 quickly, either as a speedrun or a more casual quick playthrough, what party would work best?

The problem with the more typical balanced party is the class quests; for each non-Robber class in the party, it is necessary to do a quest with just that one class. With the default party, where everyone is a different class, that's 5 class quests that need to be completed; it would be much faster if I could reduce that requirement to just 1.

So, when choosing this party:
* Which class would work best? (The ideal class choice would be one that's versatile but whose class quest is really quick and easy. Also, the party does need to be able to get through the final area of the game.)
* How many Robbers in the party? (Robbers can accompany other classes on their class quests, so including some won't slow things down.)

A few points:

1. At some stage in the game, you will need to cast Clerical spells for elemental transmutation. One of them is level 8, which can't normally be cast by a Paladin (except with the help of a certain fountain, or using a Shaman Pipe), so you will generally need to have (or hire) a Cleric for this part.

2. Some enemies are immune to certain types of attacks, so offensive spells are fairly essential in some cases. Archers or Sorcerers are best here.

3. As you mentioned, every different class that you have means an additional required class quest to obtain the "+".

I was thinking of a fast playthrough of this game before and considered using 3 x Paladin, 3 x Archer, because of the great offensive capabilities balanced with the ability to cast spells with each character. A robber can be hired at some stage if required.


Also a few tips:

1. Witch Brooms and Teleport Orbs can be used to cast Fly and Teleport, working around issues with access to those spells.

2. There is a fountain called "The Greatest Fountain" (E2 - 11,9) which temporarily sets every party member's level to 50 and stats to 200 for one battle or day. Very useful for a beginner party against specific enemies.

3. It's possible to obtain permanent Thievery with any non-Cleric by equipping a Looter Knife (available in the Ice Cavern) and then visiting the Master Thief in Sandsobar cavern. This gives a permanent +10% bonus to Thievery, even after unequipping the Looter Knife. You can cast Lloyd's Beacon and Surface to repeat this many times quickly up to some maximum level.

4. You can get some very useful items from the Dragon's Cave:
* Photon Blade - can be *used* to cast Implosion
* Gold Armour - can be *used* to temporarily raise character level for difficult fights
From memory, I believe it's possible to get these items without encountering any battles if you know which squares to avoid.

Interesting; I didn't know you could do that.

Of course, I found another trick that could also be used to get permanent Thievery, as well as boost other stats (including AC) permanently:
1. Equip an item that boosts the stat.
2. Use the item until it breaks. (There is a bug that gets in the way here; this either can't be done during combat or can only be done during combat, but I don't remember which.)
3. Unequip the broken item.

This gives you the stat bonus from the item permanently. You can speed this up by casting Uncurse Item (sets number of charges to 1; the spell doesn't work as mentioned in the manual), and you can also duplicate any item that it's possible to get as a random drop. The spell lasts a while, so using a Paladin to cast the spell will work. Also, the priest's blessing in town will, I believe, give you all the elemental transmutation effects until you rest.

(By the way, for casters hiring them is better than using your own characters because hirelings come with all their spells known, even those they aren't high enough in level to cast. This is especially handy for hard to learn spells like Divine Intervention, which works well in conjunction with Max HP potions.)