Dustin_00: LOLS -- after all the struggle with Level 9 stuff, Werdna was cake, even with a Level 10 Wizard instead of a Level 13.
Weird number of Murphy's Ghosts down there, I wasn't expecting that, but simple to defeat. The Will'o'wisp I ran into was annoying -- should have tried Darkness on it to make it faster for the Fighters.
Stacking Darkness on Werdna makes your Fighters brutal on him. Tiltowait + Malikto wiped out the vampires (not sure if they damaged Werdna).
Lame: Final victory message having a scroll bar so you can't screen capture the whole message. (Or, maybe if I'd been playing full screen instead of in a Window, it would have all been shown???)
MORLIS is twice as powerful as DILTO for dealing with those Will-o-wisps, which, by the way, are worth a ton of XP.
Poison and Frost Giants are also worth a ton of XP, and it turns out that they're level 1, so (in most versions) MAKANITO will make them suffocate. (Also, Earth Giants, but not Fire Giants.)
Enemy XP, at least in the original Apple 2 version, isn't actually stored in the enemy data, but is instead calculated based on the enemy's stats, and for whatever reason, magic is weighted extremely heavily, causing magic resistant enemies to give tons of XP.
And yes, the game balance is really off here. The enemies on level 10 vary so widely in difficulty that, in the remake, the trick I found of pressing escape and quitting during battle to re-roll the encounter might not be a bad idea. (When you quit during battle, your party's stats are saved, but not the current battle state. Therefore, when you reload, you'll be at the same spot, but not in battle; if you're on a placed encounter spot, a new battle will start immediately, but the enemies will most likely be different (and if you have any good characters might even be friendly). You must have gotten lucky with the encounters down there.
Actually beating the game can be easy, but to me the real fun is building characters, particularly those with all the spells, and perhaps going for rare treasure, like the Muramasa Blada. Thins is, you really don't need to do this to beat the game, as you just demonstrated, and the permadeath with forced auto-save makes that particular style of playthrough more frustrating than it should be.
By the way, for anyone reading this in the future, make sure to attack any friendly *WERDNA* that might appear. If you don't, you won't get the amulet, and you will need to cast LOKTOFEIT (not recommended; seriously, what were they thinking with this spell?) or MALOR to escape. (Teleport traps are not an option, due to no other placed encounters being reachable.. In some versions, quitting the game and reloading will reset the floor, but I'm not sure if that happens in this version.)