Temple of Baa in Might & Magic VI I feel can be almost overwhelming if you are not certain what to do. There are quite a few large open areas with an insane amount of creatures to clear. This is also one of those places if you are not ready it will end quickly not in your favor.
This was not my first time entering into the Temple of Baa. I had done so a little while back for a huge spider bounty. At that time I discovered I did not quite have the damage output I would have liked to give this place a decent run.
This time around I had returned and I was ready. I feel the expressions on my party's faces show my excitement for the place. It can end up being a bit of a long run unless you have high damage. I ended up taking a bit of a break in the middle of clearing this one.
There are four massive caverns in the Temple of Baa that I decided I would work on clearing out first. If I recall but it’s been quite a long time now that not clearing them out is a bad idea. They also provided at my level a decent amount of experience.
I first started working on the one to the north. It was just filled with spiders for the most part. I still had yet to buy all the spell books for cures and stuff as I would have liked for this run. It is quite the distance to the church for here if I’d need a cure.
The trick with all four of these is to take them super slow. You only want to pull enough that by the time you are back in the main area of this dungeon, they are all dead. Otherwise, they spread out creating a lot more opportunities for themselves to get some blows in on the party.
Here is one such instance where I was pulling from the east cavern when things went badly. I was a little too aggressive in wanting to clear these out faster. I ended up having too many of them charging at me at once. By the time I made it to the top, there were still quite a few skeletons left alive.
Because of that, I ended up taking a lot more damage than I would have liked. Some of my casters were already getting low on mana anyways. So this provided an excellent reason to let them rest instead of using further mana to heal up the party.
While I could have used the torch spell to try and get more light to see around. I felt there was enough in each of these large caverns that I was fine enough. Some of them have cauldrons in the back of them that give you permanent resistance.
There are also things like piles of bones and trash. I tried clicking a few to see if I could find anything. The only thing I found was death and my character becoming insane. Perhaps I’ll try in a different run once this place has respawned to see if I get any better results than that.
Once those were all cleared out. It was time to head back into the main section of the dungeon and find a key. This one was hidden in a statue at the end of a winding corridor.
After that, it was about finding the right doors to open and looking for the keys. As you progress along creatures spawn in the main section. As such, I take it slow and re-clear any spawns before moving on to opening up more doors.
Most times you don’t have much of a choice. As you need to go from one side of the dungeon to the other to unlock the next door and find another key anyways.
One of the benefits of clearing out the caverns and those tunnels they connect is having a nice spot to fight. While ideally any spawns I get while opening doors I’ll be able to lure into the narrow hallways and finish them off quickly.
Sometimes things are just tricky. Other times I just don’t have enough room that I feel I could kill everything with spells and range damage before I hit a dead end. When that happened I’d just run past everything and down into the tunnels.
That would force everything that was aggression on me into a better conversion point. Reducing in many instances depending on the type of creatures that spawned the damage I was taking since I could stay ahead of them. Along with keeping everything in a single plane of sight for dealing damage.
After a few doors and a lot of killing, I ended up finding what I was looking for. As far as I’m aware nothing is stopping me from just rushing to the next part I’m heading to anyways. However, this key is a critical piece to have to make things easy.
I then went over to a door I was avoiding opening. There is a fireball that shoots every few seconds and I’d rather have it contained as long as I can. I also skipped out on doing the puzzle in the middle of the dungeon for the time being as well. As once you get those doors open the fireball shoots into the exit of the dungeon. A bit annoying to deal with if you need to get out of the dungeon in a hurry.
Getting around the fireball that shoots into the next section I want to get into was quite easy. You just run along this container of water. From there I’d be going up some steps and taking out some priests. I assure you they had it coming.
There then was quite a lot more fighting as you end up in a massive room. This is where things can start to get tricky for people who don’t know any better.
Since you are first fighting a bunch of persist you can use the pillars to try and block their spell damage from hitting you. Allowing you to just focus on a couple at a time. You could also run back out of the room and try to lure a few of them at a time out.
As long as you don’t run up to where the gong is while the priests are still spawned in and attacking you. Things tend to not be so bad.
There however comes a time when you need to run up to the large table. On it was a gong that I picked up. I then darted between the two torches on the wall and opened the hidden door with the key I had. That leads me into a nice long corridor that both help protects me and gives me all the range I need.
You might be wondering why I would need such conditions? Well, when you get close enough it triggers an insane amount of skeletons to spawn. If you look at the mini-map you can see all those red dots. That is not even all of them either.
I would take my time. Slowly walking up to the door entry into this hidden section of the temple. Till I knew I would be lured in a couple of skeletons at a time. Then I’d run back and take them out as they came in. Repeating this process many times.
Once I cleared out those. I would go up on either side of the tunnels. They would open up to a nice viewing point of the remaining massive army of skeletons I still had to take out on ledges.
While it is tempting to try and kill as many as possible while standing on the ledge. That just creates a lot more work when looting. I would just run back to the opening of the corridor and lure them in like before.
Besides after you kill a few of them they get under your line of sight on the ledge anyway. Not to mention all of them running around side-to-side makes them harder to hit than them running right at you in the corridor.
Once all the skeletons were dead it was time to loot. Lots of gold to be had!
After that was done I ran back downstairs towards the entry of the dungeon into the middle section. There was a puzzle I left unsolved till this point in time.
There are four doors that you need to click on. You either get a click out of them or take damage. Once you click on all of them in the right order they open to reveal a chest with another key in it.
Once you open the chest a lot of creatures spawn in. I had some clearing spells I could burst out some damage to make a getaway path. I then ran towards one of the tunnels leading down into a cavern. That would help group everything up better making it easier for me to kill.
The key I looted from that chest was the final bathhouse key I needed. Once everything was dead I went into that final bathhouse on this floor and looted myself a treasure Room key.
It was then time to head back upstairs. Avoiding the fireball that now had fewer things blocking its path. I would run back to those ledges to the back corners. They had hidden doors that I could now open with the key.
The Chimes of Harmony that I looted out of that chest I would later take back with me to New Sorpigal. Janice in the town hall is looking for them and gives a nice reward for their return.
I then used the second treasure key to open another hidden door on the other ledge. That room was filled with bags of gold. I’ll be buying quite a few spells with this haul of loot.
Once done it was finally time to leave. I ran off to the healer to cure my character. Along with selling a lot of junk, I was not going to use it. Yet another dungeon was completed. I’ll more than likely run this one again if I ever notice it has respawned. That however takes a very long amount of in-game time.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Might & Magic 6.
I wish I had known about games like this back in 1998 when it was released,I would have loved something like this back then. I didn't have internet until around the year 2000 so the only way I could have heard about this in my early teens was if someone else was playing it. I've listened to interviews with Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover talking about how the Might and Magic series was really influential to the way they designed Everquest and later Vanguard. Your screenshots do remind me of the graphic style of the original EverQuest. Maybe someday I will try this out, for now, it's cool to check out this influential game of yesteryear via your posts. That room with all the skeletons in it looks like fun to farm, I love a skeleton-infested area in an RPG....Last week I used a Barbarian warrior to kill around 1200 skeletons in this graveyard in the Barbarian starting area of Vanguard.One of them dropped an epic breastplate and my gaming OCD kicked in and said "Farm 1000+ to see what else is on their drop table" 3 days later I had 15 epic/heroic quality items about 2 dozen rare items and 30 odd green/uncommon quality items.....twas a ton of fun :)
I do miss a good old grind like all those skeletons you killed for loot. I spent a lot of my youth grinding away in different zones in EverQuest as well.
I think Vanguard was a game I only tried for a couple of days. I was looking for the next big thing at the time to get into. It was not it. Instead, I ended up getting into Eve Online for quite a lot of years and still speak with a few people I met in that game despite that we no longer play Eve.
I only ended up finding out about Might & Magic VI from a relative back in the day that was obsessed with the series. They had played all of them. It is tempting one of these days to see what else I missed in the series as I only have played 3 of them.
I could not even begin to guess how many skeletons I killed in this dungeon run alone. The good thing at least is zones and dungeons in Might & Magic VI can respawn. It however in most cases takes two in-game years for that to occur.
There are a couple of areas that are on a 6 month respawn timer that I enjoy clearing out. Even when I can one-shot everything I see in those zones with a massive area of attack spells.
Back in the day when I was a kid, I use to spam going across zone lines eating up 5 days of in-game time at a time. Just to get the dungeons and zones I enjoyed clearing to respawn so I could clear them again.
That 6-month to 2-year respawn timer is a really interesting mechanic, especially for such an old title. The first game I ever played that had loot farming and respawn timers was Everquest 2 back in 2004, that was the year I first had a PC with a decent graphics card. Before that the only RPGs I had played were the final fantasy series and the Baulders Gate Dark alliance titles on PlayStation 2.
You might enjoy checking out the Vanguard emulation server, so far I am enjoying roaming around the world of Telon more than I have enjoyed any online game. I never played it when it was live so the whole world is totally new to me. Back in 2007 my PC wouldn't have been able to handle the massive open world,I would have been lucky to get 5-10fps. The server is in an open alpha state with about 80% of the content implemented. All of the starting towns apart from the Dark Elf and Gnome have their quest lines fully scripted. The starting Isle of Dawn gives a very well-polished new player experience and rewards you with a pegasus flying mount at the end of the quest line.
Because it's still in open alpha you can use .rift command to teleport to any chunk of the game that has a rift stone,its useful for exploring the incredibly well-designed world. There are 15 players max on at peak times so if you actually meet and group with someone it feels special. Yesterday I was questing in the Silverlake area when a level 50 disciple wandered by and gave me a 1 handed mace which was a huge upgrade to what I was using.He told me some stories about areas he had been exploring which inspired me to visit those locations asap. I was surprised to find out the disciple could throw high-level buffs on my character without needing to be grouped with him, these buffs more than doubled my hitpoints and dramatically increased my damage output for 45 minutes. I was more than a little hyped about this situation and chance meeting.
We decided to check out a nearby dungeon known as the ruins of Cairnworth Hall, a haunted ruin that seems inspired by EverQuests Befallen dungeon. With the level 50 buffs I was able to solo the starting mobs which are lv 25 heroics,I was only a level 19 Cleric,each kill gave 7500 exp ,around 6% of a level I also got some loot ,fun times :). The dungeon looks good I will likely make a post on it soon.I haven't edited the footage I have yet but here is the start of the adventure, I ran out of disk space for recording which is why it kind of cuts out hastily.I managed to free up some space and capture more footage of the run which I will edit together at some point this week.
If you do feel like making a character on the server you can find the start-up guide here, its fairly straightforward,I didn't have any problems apart from the first 3 download links didn't work, the 4th link which is hosted by Mediafire worked perfectly and I was in the game fairly quickly after the download.
https://vgoemulator.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=4481
I use to love leveling alts in EQ. I had access to quite a few accounts so I would buff them to the hills and they would just go around slaughtering everything leveling quickly.
While I don’t have the time right now to fit in another game as some games I’ll be playing are releasing soon. I’ll try and check into at some point. Sounds like you have had some amazing adventures so far it in.
It’s great to see a community keeping an old game alive. Far to many games end up shutting down and that is the end of them forever.
It sounds like it is an amazing game just to explore around in.
A while after EQ I did try out EQ2 for a short while. It was just not the same to me. I just kept missing all the friends that no longer played EQ and I knew they did not move over to EQ2. I only got a couple of levels in EQ2 if I can recall before moving on.
I've played EQ2 more than any other game I guess, that was my intro to MMORPGs back in December of 2004.I bought most of the expansions until around 2010 when they introduced mercenaries and free to play and the game started to lose its magic. Nowadays its pretty silly with characters doing damage in the hundreds of millions to lame trash mobs and storylines that don't interest me at all.
2022 was the first year I got a taste of old-school original EQ. I played for a couple of months on the Project 1999 server. I made a dwarf cleric and managed to get him to level 20 but found that game far to grindey to really get into. I even lost a whole level trying to get from butcherblock to unrest, an aqua goblin killed me right at the start of the zone and I died maybe another 10 times trying to get my corpse back.I went from close to level 16 down to level 14 with one bubble of experience needed to get back to 15 , it was brutal and I didn't log back in for about a month.
I found the Vanguard emulator from watching a Youtuber called Superbitsandbob play it, we have pretty similar gaming interests so I tend to keep an eye on what he's up to if Im looking for new games to check out.
So far Vanguard seems like the true spiritual successor to the pre-Luclin Everquest legacy that Brad McQuaid was designing.I guess it makes sense as Vanguard was Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover's next project after leaving the Everquest dev team.
It's kind of sad everything that happened to cause Vanguard to be sunset, I would have loved to see it get at least one major expansion and some AA tress added. There is so much that could have been done with that world.
I guess the VGOEmulator devs can finally add new content or finish unreleased content like the Black Dragon Volcano/Dark elf raid zone.
I think Vanguard will be my MMO home until Pantheon -Rise of The Fallen releases, again another sad note that Brad McQuaid passed away before seeing that project come to fruition.
Anyways thanks so much for the vote on my little Vanguard post this week ,that means a lot to me :).
A title that I did not know and looks quite interesting, its graphics look good and its mobility more or less, but I will have to try it to see if I like it or not.
Thanks for sharing it.
For a 25 year old PC game it looks a lot better than one would expect.
yes, it looks much better, thanks for sharing.
I have never played this game, but it looks interesting, I wonder, how will be the combat animation. it reminds me of the adobe games from minijuego.com . cheers
Animations are not that great. The game is 25 years old. I never pay attention to them.