I just reached the 6th floor of Ibag Tower, and some of the fights are just ridiculous.

Here is the worst example:

The enemy is an archer, so it can use Lightning Attack. Furthermore, the enemy has 34 agility, so going first is simply not possible.

The enemy can, with one action, hit four times for over 300 damage per hit. How are you suppossed to survive that? Even worse, this enemy can act twice per round. Add the beheading chance and the combination of poison and Persuit Sweep and this isn't exactly fair. Getting low AC on your front row isn't a good defense because this enemy can target your back row. Also, according to the Japanes wiki, your AC needs to be about -45 to avoid it.

According to the Japanese wiki, the enemy's number of attacks were cut in half in the 3DS version.

Also, apparently in the later floors (16F), there is an even more dangerous enemy.

Well, Ibag Tower is very definitely last bonus dungeon, so you are expected to be demolished :) Though I really wish there was a way to increase primary stats beyond racial maximums (without modding). Maybe there is something in that tower which allows to do just that? Just my assumption, I don't know what to expect from those bonus dungeons yet.

I also wonder if it is possible to get negative status immunity on your characters via means of endgame gear and alchemy?

Also I saw screenshot with what I think is very definitely true final boss's bestiary page (it was a spoiler, but I can't unsee it now), so if you think that those archers are bad, you didn't see a thing.

What concerns 3DS version, from what I heard it was totally rebalanced (to be easier overall), and even first dungeon has a bit different layout. I'd stick to this version as it is more "authentic". They also brought back some elements like donations (Gold for EXP) and "Angel of the small window" (that Google translation is so bad, it is hilarious) - craftable item which activates mini-map.

Elminage Original has an awesome "Are you prepared?" Sign exactly for the mood of this thread. Also here is example of how mini-map worked in Elminage Original.

According to the Japanese Wiki, while that particular enemy was nerfed (I really don't like that term), apparently in the 3DS version you may have to deal with multiples.

Anyway, I just got a Spirit Pact Nue (Samurai) with Swallow Killer. My idea is that if ze defends a back row character, ze can counter attack. Now I just need some good ranged weapons (that God Slayer looks really nice, but I wish I had another one).

Also, that God Slayer makes it tempting for me to bring back my Valkyrie; it just needs a little curse removal.

Hacking the game is starting to get tempting. If I do, howerver, it will mainly be to get some more skill diversity. (I'm thinking along the lines of giving my thief more songs, my fighter Swift Attack, my Lord Cleric Spell Power UP (which Lords and Valkyries actually get in the 3DS version), my Cleric Physical Attack Power Up, that kind of thing. (No hacking level 16k+ characters with 9999 hp.)

Also, is it just me or are there not enough ex skill slots to really make use of many of the skills?

The only status ailment I have managed to get immunity to is Beheading. (Pinpoint Shield has 90% beheading resistance, but is cursed.)

We are spoiled by ability to choose EX-Skills :) First 2 Elminages didn't have this, though they also had more powerful class skills. In example, Lord's Court Sanctuary was increasing resistances by up to 95% and capping quite early.

Lord and Valkyrie are already very powerful, with "Cleric Spell UP" they'd just render Clerics entirely useless :)

There are some other things to consider when it comes to balancing classes. One is that some classes level up faster than others. For example, Clerics level faster than Lords. Therefore, a Cleric with Physical Attack Power Up will (at higher xp totals) outdamage a Lord using the same weapon. Similarly, A Cleric's cleric spells will be stronger than those of a Lord's, even if the Lord gets Cleric Spell Power Up +1. (If I hack, I would only be giving my Lord the non-+1 version, making zer cleric spells only comparable to a bishop of the same level.)

So, I really don't think Clerics would be entirely useless. (Remember, Clerics can wear good armor and wield the Aas (really should be Earth) Shifter.)

Another thought might be to give the Alchemist some utility skills (Mysterious Bag?) and maybe War Rite (does anyone here actually use that skill?).

The reason I think there aren't enough slots is the sheer number of skills that typically go unused. Have you ever seriously used War Rite, Glutton for Punishment, Song of Hope, Avenge, Mark of Ruin, or Level Drain? (If you have, tell me how well the skill works in practice.)

War Rite doesn't look useful at all, unless there is some catch.
Glutton for Punishment is way too risky.
Song of Hope doesn't look reliable.
Avenge - well, it is better to reload when someone dies (finding Goddess Kiss trap will take more time than reload)...
Mark of Ruin - way too risky.

But Level Drain on other hand.... Hmmm, I can't remember being offered to choose this EX-Skill. In my opinion, It might be useful only for theorycrafting purpose. You will deal more damage by direct damage than monster might lose in MaxHP and # of attacks (which will require 5 uses of ability, so 5 rounds if 1 lv is drained?).

All this abilities sound nice to experiment with, if we were talking about different game, here monsters won't wait while you slowly drain them away.

Also, manual lists strange EX-Skill - Nocturnal. Does this game even have day/night change? Another EX-Skill - Sun's Blessing?
"Oracle"? Doesn't look like useful EX-Skill, but what does it even do?
"Find Treasure". What's the point if it is easier to farm fixed encounters and random encounters are quite rare?

Many of those skills are interesting only from mechanics point of view, otherwise they look quite useless (EX-Skill "Last Stand"? More like EX-Skill "Reload"!).

On other hand, skills like "Tackle" can critically change the difficulty of encounters. I can't take on Floor Masters yet, mostly because it is harder than impossible to outdamage their HP regen. If I had Tackle, same Vovalketer would be already dead by now.

What would be interesting though is if characters were getting another EX-Skills of choice at some predetermined levels. Then useless skills will become more appealing. As it stands now, 6 chars, 6 EX-Skills, so no place for something like "Last Stand".

Some of these skills are not quite as bad as you might think.

War Rite: Always goes first. Damage bonus is 50% and applies to spells and breath attacks. Unfortunately, costs 1 SP to use.
Mark of Ruin: It's a 50% damage bonus (again, applies to spells and breath attacks). The HP loss is 10% of your currnent HP; it will never kill you. Treatment won't work, but all other forms of healing (including Turn Recovery and Song of Healing), will work fine.

Oracle: Will randomly multiply experience and gold earned by random amounts (could be less than 1). Active skill, but doesn't cost SP. It might be able to switch experience and gold rewards, allowing you to potentially get large amounts of gold. (Unfortunately, you don't know the effect until after the battle.)

Find Treasure: I find this skill useful when just exploring. Sometimes random encounters don't feel so rare. Also, without it, there is one encounter in Ibag Tower 6F+ that will give nothing if random. (0 exp and 0 gold) (Hint: it is identical to a certain event battle.)

Reload: This "skill" has a significant downside. Every time you use it, more time passes, which can be around 16 days In Ibag Tower. This in turn results in everyone, including characters you're not using, getting older.

Tackle also has a minor downside. If an enemy has negative turn recovery (rare, but it happens), tackle will prevent it.

Also, keep in mind that summoned monsters may have ex skills. For instance, both Pixie and Ghost Herbalist have Tackle. (Treatment is also useful, as summons with Treatment come with a Full Health Potion.)

Part of the reason I want to hack more skills onto my characters is so that I can actually play with some of the "less useful" skills. It feels like certain skills (Swallow Killer) are mandatory, causing other skills to go unused.

By the way, have you ever tried the ex skill "Cruelty"?

No. i have following skills in use:
1. Brace (Lord). When it triggers, situation is usually far out of control. Not sure if it was good choice.
2. Mysterious Bag (Valkyrie). Why? Because I can't see loot wasted.
3. Find Treasure (Thief). I'd rather take tackle.
4. Spirit Contract. Not sure if Magic Essence could be better choice with Rapidos.
5. Divination (Alchemist). Not sure if it is needed on combat-char, but you get no rocks with this skill.
6. Song of Healing (Bishop).
I tried Absolute Wall, it looked useless. If it allows Turn Recovery, it might be good, but I didn't have Turn Recovery back then. So this is something you might want to check for survivability in Ibag Tower. Well, if it works like in Disgaea, where monsters like to poison themselves just to deny you whatever little EXP and Gold they can give, it is probably good to stop such a spiteful behavior by Tackle :)

Here are my thoughts on those skills:
Brace: I think this skill could be useful on a Samurai. If you block one attack with Brace, you have another chance to trigger Swallow Return.
Spirit Contract: The attack bonus is nice, but it only applies to Fire/Ice/Lightning spells. It doesn't even apply to items that cast those spells, whereas Magic Essence does. Also, Rapidos only lowers resistance by 30% of the base. So if you're trying to petrify Terrors, one Rapidos will only lower magic resistance from 80% to 56%, and your petrfication attempts will still likely fail.
Divination: Actually haven't used it, so I didn't know about that. Maybe I might hack it onto one of my characters.
Song of Healing: Personally, I think a Bishop would be better served by Magic Essence (make mage status spells more useful) or Hand of Kindness (make low level healing more useful). I prefer Song of Healing on a Thief, Alchemist, Servant or Summoner because they often have nothing useful to do.

My setup is as follows:
Nue Samurai (replacing Dragonewt Fighter): Swallow Killer. Just added so I don't know how useful, but I have noticed zer attacks breaking enemy weapons.
Gnome Cleric: Hand of Kindness. Has the most HP in my party (now that I have replaced my Fighter). Hand of Kindness is less needed for a Gnome Cleric, but it keeps her low level spells relevant. With the Aas (Earth) Shifter, she can actually do good damage, with a Comet Hammer as backup for fighting gods. (Unfortunately, the game is sexist and won't let her equip an unmodified Hekaton Hammer.) As I've mentioned before, giving a Cleric Chi Wave looks like an interesting setup.
Dragon Lord Lord: Mysterious Bag. Keep in mind that Mysterious Bag does not work if the character does not survive the battle. Healing magic is basically useless at this point without Hand of Kindness (Feireed excluded). The Holy Saber is nice, though not as powerful as a weapon (against most enemies) as the Earth Shifter. (Also, remember that male and female characters can't equip the Holy Sabre.)
Hotlet Thief: Song of Healing. Thieves are not that good in combat to be honest. Problem is that bards aren't that good either, and hunters and ninjas have passive skills that are not always desirable. If you're into hacking, thieves have just enough room to get all four songs. (Bards do not, incidentally.)
Hotlet Alchemist: Find Treasure. I am finding this to actually be useful, however she is often sitting doing nothing during battle. I did get her a Mandragora Club (rare drop final story dungeon B1-B3; uncommon drop first bonus dungeon B3) so that she can paralyze rows of enemies.
Faerie Bishop: Magic Essence. My favorite setup. Faerie does more good than bad in terms of bishop equipment and also makes her fast. Bishops get more HP than mages (which makes a difference at low Vitality), and Magic Essence makes her sleep and petrify spells more effective. Attack spells really aren't that useful late post game when enemies regularly have over 1000 HP. (For a Don Magus with Spirit Contract to reach 1,000 damage with Raglass, he would need to be over level 3,000).

I may need to change my setup later, and I note that the only practical way to get AC low enough to survive is to use a brawler or ninja. The problem with ninjas is that they can automatically hide, and my ninja was the character I wanted the enemies to target. (The issue with hunters is that their persuit can end a battle against a petrified enemy when you would rather spend time healing with Song of Healing. I have not actually used one, however.)

A few things:
Nukes are significantly less useful at the point I've reached unless you have a lot of them. My bishop, even with an upgraded +4 Ice Charm, still only does damage in the mid-200s. Status ailment spells are far more useful at this point.

Getting good AC early on isn't too hard because of armor. The problem is that armor bonuses to AC slow down, while level increases do not. Having characters gain multiple levels from one trip is not unusual at this point.

A couple things of note that happened in my last trip to Ibag Tower:
1. In one battle, I managed to break that deadly enemy's bow. My Nue counterattacked, and zer attack broke the enemy's weapon.
2. Another battle with one of those archers. I checked the drops for the battle (debug code that was left in the game) and it indicated that a God Slayer would drop, so I decided to fight. Unfortuanetly, I got Miracle Enemy Teleported away. Fortunately, I didn't have to reload because I was dropped close by and the enemies hadn't had a chance to kill anyone.
3. Another battle with a God Slayer drop. My Lord (with Mysterious Bag) got killed, so I had to revive zer. Fortunately, the revive succeded, or else I would have had to choose between losing the spear (full inventory and no Mysterious Bag), or losing all of the experience one of my characters had gained (level loss from Miracle means losing all the experience from the expedition so far, and this was near the end of the expedition).

1 HP gains happened as far back as the original Wizardry. If you have access to the original Apple II version, try having a Bishop identify item 9 and then leveling that character up. (One interesting little difference: In Wizardry, Vitality changes before HP is calculated. In Elminage Gothic, it's the reverse.)

Here is how the to hit algorithm worked in the origianal Wizardry:
For Priest, Fighter and >= Samurai: hit = level / 3 + 2
For Mage, Thief, Bishop: hit = level / 5
If Strength > 15, add 15 - Strength to hit.
If Strength < 6, Subtreact 6 - Strength to hit.

Weapon to hit bonus is then added.

Then the calculation is 21 - AC + hit - (3 * target position)
is then clamped to the range [1, 19]
and is then checked against random mod 20.

For enemy attacks, the calculation is 20 - AC - attacker level + some value that depends on which spell (if any) the target is using.

One more random Wizardry 1 fact: (MA)HAMAN can rarely cause the caster to forget spells. (Then again, the code for those spells is really messed up.)

I wish more people would play these types of games so that I have more people to talk to about them.

As another note, I saw a video of the 3DS version that was just posted on Youtube and I noticed one other interesting version difference: Song of healing will heal you in the last round of combat, making the skill noticeably more useful.

Where did you get this info? I looked everywhere, and the best I found was some Wizardry III re-engineering project and Wizardry VI+ mechanics (which are very different from older Wizardries).

I am not sure all these things work exactly the same in Elminage, target position doesn't look relevant (though I think I have more misses on enemies in back row than in front, not sure if it was just bad RNG or not). Though this formula proves it works like with THAC0 just with positive hit value. Thus, so far I think to-hit formula looks like this:

%Chance to hit = (AC + Hit1 + Hit2) * 5
Hit1 is Hit Chance from weapons (very easy to see)
Hit2 is Hit Chance form everything else (stats, levels, buffs, etc.).

E.g., Vovalketer has +5" Hit1 on his Vorpal Sickle and it seems that he always makes full attacks (8/8 hits) against 10 AC. Which means that he has at least "+5" Hit2. If to believe manual and you, 20 Strength gives "+4" Hit2, so Level seems to play role here ((10 + 5 + 4) * 5 gives only 95 %Chance). Just need to see at what AC he will start missing at least 1 out of 8 attacks (which has around 34% chance to happen with 5% Miss chance) to derive his Hit2.

Same for character against Vovalketer (I like him, because he is non-random and easily accessible) - need to see when characters stop missing against his 2 AC to derive character's Hit2.

I think we are close :) Though I am afraid that Luck stat might screw results if it is involved in calculation of Hit Chance. What did Luck do in old Wizardry?

Hmm doesn't it do so already?

Someone decompiled Wizardry 1 into Pascal. Unfortunately, the place I found it is on a site that has pirated software, so I am pretty sure I can't link it here.

Anyway, looking at the decompiled source, luck affects the following:
Your chance of losing items after a party wipe. (Note that cursed equipped items are never lost.)
Saving throws (which are affected by race and class and level), which affect:
Chance of avoiding silence from MONTINO (but not other status ailments from spells)
Chance of taking half damage from breath attacks
Chance of avoiding status ailments from enemy physical attacks (including death but not drain)
Chance of avoiding Mage/Priest Blaster (or being paralyzed instead of petrified)
Chance of avoiding Poison Gas traps

That appears to be all the uses of Luck in the original Wizardry.

Wizardry 3 was also decompiled.

Pascal sounds nice, i worked with it a bit before. I am pretty sure Luck mechanics were greatly altered in Elminage, as Elminage has much more elaborated resistance system. I think Luck has effect on everything which is shown by Dice of Fate outside magic resistances as flat dice throws when I checked), on avoiding triggered traps and on nothing else.