Most reliable anti-grinding Baramos kill: three doublecasters with bounce. Sages, pilgrim/wizards or wizard/pilgrims.
Step 1: ironize.
Step 2: ironize.
You are now in the limbo/punch turn. You do need to resist a limbo cast, but otherwise this is the ideal setup turn.
Speedup, ideally twice, and surround. Have the hero use the orochi sword. Next step: ironize, which will set you back at the limbo/punch turn. Next turn, cast bounce three times and use the orochi sword again. Now you're free to ironize cycle and set up as much as you want, as the hero is immune to limbo. I cast three bikills then ironized one more time, then attacked until he was dead.
If you don't have triple bounce, there's more RNG, as you have to rely on sticking sleep casts and you can't avoid non-first limbo shots. Again you can ironize cycle until a sleep sticks, but once it does, ironize is no longer useful for various reasons. This strategy is less reliable, but won't take that many tries, and enables a true low-grind runthrough. Having 3-4 sleep casters with speedup does make it very hard for Baramos to avoid a nap. It is funny to have a bikilling hero thrash away while three casters spam sleep.
Without at least a priest and a wizard, you probably have to grind up to level 33-35. With clever buff cycling, your pilgrim doesn't need healall, and your hero doesn't even need healmore. Level 26 is extremely doable. With the standard party, soldier-pilgrim-wizard, once you get over the limbo hump, it's entirely possible that Baramos will die before he wakes up.
Ironize is out of phase by one turn, functionally rewinding Baramos time when cast. Although don't forget DW3 bosses regenerate, so don't ironize after you start hitting him. Conveniently limbo/punch is immediately after the unbounceable firebreath turn.
I like watching my party survive a firebreath, then Baramos casts explodet again and kill himself with bounced damage long before he can finish a rank 4 pure wizard with firebreath. Wizard can't heal himself, and can't receive a heal through bounce.
Come to think I should have the hero parry on the blazemore turn if possible. Had a couple close calls with the hero getting killed by blazemore...
Also conveniently, Baramos doesn't reward his experience, so if you have XP OCD, you don't have to worry about it going out of alignment due to deaths or limbos.
When I saw that the best party was three fighters, I pressed X to doubt. Sadly this did take many hours of testing to refute, but in the end we find it is indeed, once again, Dunning-Kruger. "You can conquer the pyramid at level 11." Err, yes, every non-stupid party can do that. (No goof-offs or double wizard - and even the goof-off is debatable.) A player skill issue, not a party issue.
A better party is fight-fight-wizard, soldier-fighter-wizard, or even sooldier-fighter-fighter. You do want one fighter for turn 2 executions, but the first major issue with fighters is Kanave, where they are useless until you buy an iron claw. Soldiers have so much strength they can get by with a magic knife, while their huge HP makes armour pretty meh and healing more efficient. Wizards don't need weapons and the guy in 4 normally has a 1% chance of being attacked, so they don't need armour either. Fighters are suddenly extremely expensive at Kanave, which means lots of particularly boring grinding.
With sol-fig-wiz, get a chain sickle for the hero in Reeve, then an iron claw for the fighter in Kanave, and you can immediately head up Shanpane for the loot. Wizards also get you early outside, which is almost worthwhile all by itself. There's an argument for a pilgrim instead, but the argument is [buying herbs is annoying]. With soldier-fighter-wizard, you can kill Kandar early, by having the wizard parry on turn 1 while the other three kill a henchman. Of course this gets you higher than 11 for the pyramid, because Kandar is worth XP...
"You can confidently approach Samanao at level 16...oh and by the way I
killed Baramos at hero level 35." Not to mention that fighters level
slower, so that '11' is 12 or 13 for other classes. Though it is true that Samanao at 16 is a high point of fi-fi-fi.
Fig-fig-fig does make everything faster, due to preventing so many enemy turns, and secondly due to having high luck, more on that later.
Triple fighter stalls at Necrogond, and stalls hard at Baramos. Meanwhile my regular is killing Zoma at like 36 instead of 40+.
With a wizard in the party, there's far fewer enemy packs you have to run away from. I don't see any reason not to run from infernus crabs, because they're weirdly resistant to fire, but that's about it. Pilgrims can use infernos, but a) don't have infernos yet and b) crabs can spawn with the stopspelling cats, lol...
You can solve the Necrogond/Baramos issues of triple-fighter by making a sage, which you want to do with your wizard too, and the wizard will a) hit level 20 earlier and b) have 12-18 more MP than a fighter-sage. If you don't already have a pilgrim and wizard, there's no good reason not to get a sage. That is: certainly soldier-soldier-soldier is slower than fight-fight-fight, as they go second instead of first, but it's not particularly less powerful. Get chain sickles and chain mail for all of them: much cheaper than outfitting fighters at Kanave, and they can take on Kandar the first time they're in Shanpane. Having infinity HP is relaxing. They just also get a sage later, and soldiers level fast instead of slow. Bonus: they can melee turtles to death.
Stuff like trolls and kragacles is an issue for triple-fighter...but all happen far after level 20, so shouldn't ever be a real issue.
Admittedly three fighters and a hero with the meteorite armband is hilariously fast. I suggest instead giving the armband to the wizard, so he can perform his intended role of softening up the enemy groups. The fact the hero is kinda slow is in fact a benefit, as fighters killing things before the wizard can blast them is inefficient. They say you can't cast every fight. They're wrong, unless they mean cast every round (killing on round 2 is the fighter's job) or spamming bang as soon as you get it. Alt: sometimes you want to quickly open with expel or stopspell, so you meteor-speed the hero.
Also admittedly, I kinda like grinding, especially in Necrogond. You can in fact go infinite with three doublecasters in Necrogond. It's possible (if stupid) to replace all healing MP with robmagic.
If you also don't mind grinding, it's still better to change double or triple fighter into a soldier at 20, as a row 2 figher is a liability, that is, unless you really really love grinding and triple up on their high HP growth. The one leftover fighter can be used to crit metal slimes to re-level quickly.
I tried soldier-merchant-fighter for comparison, and it's a nice balance between sol-sol-sol and fight-fight-fight. The turban and iron apron make early merchants tanky, and they're not as slow as soldiers. Extremely playable. Just kinda go, don't think about it too much. You do want to class-change your merchant ASAP, though, and they make the worst sages. You want low int before transmutation, not high. Merchants are good enough, but still aesthetically problematic.
Fighters and wizards are both good at killing metal slimes.
Speaking of speed, effectively DW3 classes have either speed 1, speed 2, or speed 4. Soldiers have speed 1, fighters have speed 4, and everyone else is speed 2. Exception: wizards start getting good speed gains at level 30, meaning high-level wizards get to speed 3. Monsters typically have speed 2.
Speed in DW is very random; fighters just barely have enough speed to reliably go before soldiers. It's more of a maximum speed than a real speed.
I really do mind buying all the herbs, so my default party is fighter-pilgrim-wizard. I would prefer pil-pil-wiz or even pil-pil-pil, but the idea of casters in early DW is to buffer against loss of gold from death. No matter how little money you have, pilgrims can heal, and wizards just get better and better at doing damage if you can win even one fight before dying. If instead you go for a low-level low-grinding run, pilgrims and wizards feel a bit underpowered. The real payoff of the all-caster party is casting firevolt four times at putregons (with thor's sword), killing them in one turn. Meanwhile fig-pil-wiz doesn't class-change at all and gets lots of early high-level spells. Sages don't get revive without substantial grinding. My wizard almost got explodet before the end of Zoma's castle, wow.
Grinding a sage in Lancel's shrine, gaia's navel, is pretty cool. If nobody else class-changed, it really helps them catch up. Dying there doesn't cost you any gold, so feel free to take dumb risks and/or pop all the mimic chests.
Speaking of herbs, you can think of them as MP potions that restore 3-5 MP. Likewise the first wing of wyvern trades an inventory slot for 8 MP.
DW3 RNG is not fair. Do expect things to go poorly more often than they should. It's very possible to get 0 MP ups on the hero, getting return without the ability to cast it. There's little to no chance of ever catching up later - your hero will always be down 10 MP. My last wizard got return before he got fireball, meaning he could have got firebane before he got fireball, and almost got fireball and firebane on the same level. I've also seen 0 HP growth on wizards in the wild - approaching the cave of enticement with 8 max still on the sticker. All casters will hit their int ceiling, and at that point their MP should be int*2 minus their starting int. You will typically be 10 below that, often more, and almost never less. Being higher is impossible without savescumming.
On the plus side, apparently getting a poison needle proc is 'unlucky' and clearly happens more often than 1/16. That is, it's calculated at 1/16 instead of a 15/16 chance of being normal.
On the down side, 70% resistance (e.g. Baramos vs. sleep) should block six in a row in less than 1 in 1300 instances, and in fact it's closer to 1/100. Blocking four in a row (1 in 123.45679) is downright normal, like at least 1/4, hence the ironize cycles.
Due to this, I see no shame in savescumming. There's a listed "average" for hero MP, and it's more like a maximum than an average. Either blatantly savestate for +4 hero MPs, or go ahead and restart if you don't get enough MP by level 5 or whatever.
Details: earliest the hero can get return is level 7, meaning 6 ups. He should see 3 int ups, with 2 MP each, for a total of 6. He can see a maximum of 6 int ups with 4 MP each, for a total of 24. Notably 24-6 = 18, and 6-18 = -12, so there's lots of symmetric space that's zero.
Goof-off luck is real. Seems like it improves both stat-ups and definitely improves how far you can travel without fighting. Series of one-step fights don't seem to happen when I have a goof-off (or with triple fighter), so they may not be as useless as they seem. Seems as if the RNG does indeed have a luck factor, but they forgot to scale it by against level, so it's all calibrated against level 30/40 luck levels. Not to mention, before level 10, only goof-offs have nonzero luck gains.
However, encounter frequency might be level-calibrated. I keep finding that going in at a low level results in a huge number of encounters, whereas the place is practically empty only a couple levels higher. (In DW4 also.)
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