So far I have been playing with a PPAS party, and despite what it looks like at the outset it's my strongest melee party yet. At Level 50, Paladins and Archers are yielding 100~120 dmg (plus 10-20 elemental damage) at near-30 recovery time, and the Sorcerer is yielding 74-80 dmg at 27 recovery time. I'll elaborate how it came to be this, but this is all with the assumption that the Greyface patch, which fixes the dual-wielding recovery time issue, is installed.

Skills:

Paladins and Archers Master Sword (8) and Pump all the points into Master Axe (Currently 18~20). Master Sword is there to use the sword on the left hand; Axe is the chosen weapon because it is the only weapon where pumping skills into it simultaneously yields (1) Attack bonus, (2) reduced recovery time, and (3) Attack Damage. The lone drawback is that it is quite slow (100 base recovery time vs. 80 for spears and 90 for swords), but after 20 points there is no difference, esp. after hitting the minimum 30 threshold with the Haste spell. Spears don't come with the reduced recovery time benefit, which limits its use to the early to mid-game for Melee parties. Paladins have Master Plate (4) and Archer has Master Chain (10) to eliminate recovery time penalties. Expert Body (4), Expert Mind (4), Master Spirit (4) are scattered around two Paladins, just for the sake of curing status ailments.

Sorcerer experts (or masters, if you value the triple damage chance) Dagger (4) and Pump all the points into Master Light (Currently 22). Put enough points into Master Dark (Currently 11) to make Day of Protection useful. The point of pumping all the skills into Master Light is to take advantage of the status boost by Day of the Gods (10+4*skill at Master Light), but more importantly Heroism spell included within the Hour of Power (5+1*skill at Master Light). In order to point-maximize Light magic, Water and air magic are mastered by the Archer (12 and 4).

Items:

Choosing the right weapons is the most important. In the beginning, use single-handed spears (without pumping any skills into it) to take advantage of the spear’s two-hand bonus. Expert Spirit and Fire as a priority to take advantage of Bless, Heroism, and Haste, the three most important spells for Melee combat. Master Sword at a relatively early part of the game, and dual-wield with Spear. When there are enough points into Axe (10~12+) to offset the recovery time penalty, switch to Axe-Sword dual wield.

Try to get at least one Vampiric weapon to all four characters. Mordred obviously works for the Sorc, but it will take some work to get the Vampiric Supreme Axe, Mighty Broadsword, Lionheart Sword, or Master Cutlass to the remaining three characters. The other weapon should ideally have "of the Dragon" (+25 might and +10~20 fire dmg) enchantment. The axes can generally be gotten from Minotaur Kings, which only give out One-handed and Two-handed axes, or you could try your luck with the Dragons and Wyrms at Dragonsand.

Finally, it is critical that the Sorc holds an amulet or ring of Light Magic to boost Day of the Gods and Hour of Power effects. At Master Light, Day of the Gods spell boosts 10+*4 points per skill, so with the Light Magic ring or amulet the effect gets boosted to *6 points per skill. At 22 Light magic, that adds up to 142 boosts in statistics; couple that with +50 stat well in Sweet Water, we’re looking at 192 boost altogether. Heroism works the same way; at 22 Light magic, 5+*1 per skill translates to 5+*1.5 per skill with the amulet or ring of Light magic, which is 38 boost in damage.

For this type of play, the most important stat boost is Might. Speed is not important in the late-game because you’re already up against the minimum 30 threshold of recovery time; Accuracy too, since with Hour of Power cast, you’re never going to miss much with the added attack bonus. With Might, every incentive exists to get to 400 and 500 Might. The non-linear calculations of effects of statistics are such that until 400, there isn’t much of a boost from added 50 might. But once you get there...

From Grayface’s Mechanics explanation:

All statistics give bonus according to the table below.
The first row is statistic barrier (or breakpoint). The second is effect you get from getting equal or bigger statistic. Example: If 400 <= Might < 500, then you will get +25 to melee damage.

Statistic Effect
500 30
400 25
350 20
300 19
275 18
250 17
225 16
200 15
175 14
150 13
125 12
100 11
75 10
50 9
40 8
35 7
30 6
25 5
21 4
19 3
17 2
15 1
13 0
11 -1
9 -2
7 -3
5 -4
3 -5
0 -6

So whereas 300 might and 350 might are separated by only 1 damage, getting to 400 suddenly adds 5 damage, and getting to 500 still 5 more. Try obtaining high +5 might enchantments (like +25 Might rings or the Atlas relic with +100 Might) to get to 500 threshold. It’s hardly impossible: with 20~30 Light magic cast with the Light Magic ring/amulet and the Sweet Water +50 fountain, it should be obtainable if you target Might specifically.

So, putting it altogether, you should be able to get about 110-130 damage for the Paladins and the Archer with around 20 Light magic. One additional point in Light magic leads to +1.5 damage. So hiring Spell Master and Mystic adds +7 to Light Magic, which should boost another 10 damage or so. I think by the endgame I should be able to get to 140-150 damage.

While the general consensus is that Magic is superior to Might in MM6, I think if you play it to this extreme Might is much more versatile (as anyone who played solo Knight would know) and perhaps equally powerful. If you haven’t tried this type of play, I suggest you try it out.

Seeing your numbers it looks as if the sorcerer would have about the same damage as the hybrids if he had spent as many points for weapons (20 dagger and mastery grant 20 percent triple damage chance and 16 more skill would also grant +16 to hit) so a melee party only consisting of sorcerers and druids looks doable.

You're right-- it's doable. The point of this was to maximize damage done per turn at minimum recovery time, and since axe was the ideal weapon for that, I excluded classes that did not have access to axe. But perhaps increasing chance for triple damage to, say, 20+ % would somewhat make up for that difference. Right now my Sorc at Might 400+ is dealing approx. 100 damage. If her chance for triple damage were 20%, then that would put her average damage at 140.

But if you did that... you wouldn't be able to put much points at all into Light/Dark spells, which kind of defeats the purpose of choosing Sorc in the first place. So I'm not sure if there would be any benefit to going that route, esp. if the primary mode of combat is melee.

I agree on Light and Dark. And one reason why the Druid can almost be a game breaker.

That reminds me: though the Druid class is a hybrid, it actually can get more spell points per level up than either the Sorcerer or Cleric because of using both of their dependencies. Though it's not double. No Light/Dark magics and I think no dagger, but the stunning staff is quite helpful during magic-less moments, like in Darkmoor Castle.

Druids can use daggers.

Oh great! I thought maybe they were limited by that. Maybe it was Clerics instead. I have to get back to that someday, I have a few ideas I want to try out.

Clerics can use maces which are far better than daggers. Also keep in mind that chance to do triple damage by daggers is only 10%, it doesn't change with skill, and it only triples the base dagger damage. Daggers are good for sorcerers, because they cannot use any other decent weapons.

I thought the chance for triple damage was equal to skill. That's what it says in-game, at least, when I right-click on the skill.

Description is misleading. Grayface says otherwise and I see no reason to not trust his info.

Hm. Do you think there might be a way to test it?

If you are able to tell whether an attack does triple damage, I could think of a couple ways to test:

1. Raise your dagger skill to 100. At this point, if the chance is equal to skill, you should do critical damage all the time, so if you don't, the chance is not equal to skill.

2. Lower your dagger skill (via hex editing or an external editor if needed) to 0. At this point, if the chance of doing triple damage is equal to your skill, you should never do triple damage.

You may need an external editor to do these particular tests, but this should work. If it's not obvious when triple damage is dealt, you could keep track of the number of hits it takes to kill a specific enemy, and reload once you kill that enemy to see if the results are consistent.

Skills are hard-capped at 63 (at 60 without cheating). Also it is not easy to see if actually triple damage happened because of damage resistance and that triple damage applies only to dagger's base damage. So with 2d3 (2-6) daggers it is possible to roll 2 damage and get it tripled to 6, which still fits 2-6 damage interval. So player would have to use weakest dagger (2d2) and hit monsters with 0 physical resistance (mainly peasants, fanatics, rats, bats, spiders and cobras). Gathering enough data from that might be the only way to test it.

By the way, best dagger (Artifact) has base damage range 10-14, which means 10% chance to do 20-28 more damage, which means 2-3 more damage per hit on average, which is quite weak in comparison to what other weapons can offer.

Hex-editing Skill Level to 0 is not possible, character simply unlearns the skill.

What if the character still has a dagger (or whatever weapon) equipped?