Today’s lineup of RPG monsters that have been giving me grief are from Might and Magic 6.

disclaimer: it’s possible that my problem was simply attempting to fight some of these when my party was a bit under-levelled. It’s also possible that I’m bad at RPGs.

Harpy Witches
These ladies manage to be obnoxious in two different ways. First up, they can cast curse on your party. This spell hits all four of your guys at once, and doesn’t appear to need to be aimed. It just instantly applies and so can’t be dodged. Since the harpies are often airborne, you may not even notice they are there until there’s a sudden blippy noise and a blue flash on your character portraits.

Being cursed basically means you hero suddenly becomes woefully incompetent. Their spells fail with a useless fizzling noise. They can’t shoot strait, their arrows firing harmlessly into empty space. They wave their swords around like a kid with a flag at a parade. Trying to direct a team where everyone is cursed is a frustrating shambles.

There’s a remove curse spell, sure. But if you’re up against several harpies at once, they’ll just re-curse you all, several times over. With that ever-irritating BLIP noise telling you it happened again. So decursing is only really viable if you can run away and then adopt hit and run tactics with bows and spells.

Once in melee range, the harpy witches are not particularly hard hitting. However, each attack has a small chance of prematurely aging your characters. I’m not sure exactly what effect that has, but it’s presumably its some sort of stat penalty. I don’t particularly want my guys accelerating towards middle age as they blunder around, and I’ve not yet found any sort of reverse-aging spell.

Fire Archers
A more straightforward problem, these ladies launch exploding arrows. So they they are effectively carrying rocket launchers. That’s fantastic news, apparently we’re playing Doom now.

Melee enemies, even when very tough, can be dealt with by keeping your distance and using turn based mode. Shoot them full of spells and arrow, go to realtime and retreat, go back to turn based and shoot some more.

High end enemies with projectile and spell attacks of their own are more challenging. In turn based mode you are stationary, so you’re extremely vulnerable. So I have to go over to the chaotic mess that is realtime combat, where it’s much harder to co-ordinate your actions. I found myself using the most ridiculous tactic of running in erratic circles, to throw off their target-tracking, whilst stabbing the “attack” button every time my characters were ready to use their own bows and spells.

source: crpaddict.blogspot.co.uk

Evil Eye
Good grief. Welcome to ranged-enemy hell. They bomb the hell out of you with elemental spells that also cause secondary effects like sleep or fear. Also, while you might expect a magic-based floaty head monster to be balanced by physical frailty, the weakest version has as many hitpoints as a heavyweight like a dwarf lord or an ogre chieftain. I’m going to come back and try this dungeon again later.

Now, just so this item isn’t entirely me complaining, here’s an enemy that is awesome!

Lizard Wizard
I like these guys just because they sound like some sort of 70s prog rock band. They’re not especially challenging, most likely because off the vast amounts of LSD they’re taking. Also they’re preoccupied with writing some 19 minute songs for their next concept album.