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After spending the last few days grinding away at this game, I've come to realize that perhaps my experience would have been generously shortened if I took another mage rather than a fighter type.  Thus, here's what I believe the ideal starting party ought to be for Bard's Tale 3:

• Paladin
• Hunter
• Bard
• Rogue
• Conjurer
• Conjurer
• Magician

You definitely need at least two spellcasters at the start, mixing the magician and conjurer class.  But I suggest taking a second conjurer for the Trap Zap (trzp) spell as well as some of his more powerful, earlier healing spells (namely Flesh Restore). Fighters in this game only serve to absorb damage, but for the most part are quite worthless, especially at later stages. Hunters are the best fighters because they can critically hit, which makes them great for one shotting single monsters. After you finish the starter dungeon, they'll become invaluable, especially against handling creatures who possess high resistance against magic.

I would choose the paladin over the warrior and monk from the start. Monks cannot wear much equipment, so they'll be weak for a while.  Also, you're going to eventually need a Geomancer in your party.  If you take a monk, most likely they won't have the appropriate equipment and will lose all their natural bonuses, making them naked.  Although warriors can use virtually the same equipment as a paladin, a paladin does have a few pieces that will make a huge difference at the beginning of the game, most notably the Pure Blade and Pure Shield. Also, I believe paladins have a few innate resistances against magic compared to the warrior class.  By the time you're ready to convert your paladin to a Geomancer, most of his equipment will translate nicely for the Geomancer class.

Going back to the spell casters, if you go my route with the two conjurers and magician, I suggest having both conjurers switch off to a magician and the magician switching to the sorcerer class after hitting level 13.  With having three magician spell casting abilities, you'll soon be able to cast triple Restoration (rest) spells as well as Ice Storms (one of the better initial group effect spells).  The sorcerer can then concentrate on hitting level 9, which will give him/her Mind Blade (mibl).  I suggest getting this group to at least level 13 in their new spell class before hitting level 3 of Unterbrae. Without question, you should get your sorcerer to at least level 13 before tackling Brilhasti Ap Tarj, so he/she can cast Preclusion (prec).

In my case, I actually didn't go through this path.  I made the mistake of taking a paladin AND a warrior initially.  That made grinding a LOT tougher.  The reason is that I was constantly waiting for my spell casters to regenerate their spell points.  Since the game at earlier stages drops Harmonic Gems at an extremely rare rate, the situation would quickly grow frustrating. I think if I had taken three spell casters initially, I would have spent spell points at a far lower rate with the responsibilities spread around.

Now, here's another reason why you want three spell casters: one will eventually become a Chronomancer.  As a result, that will leave only spell caster (if you configured your party as I initially did) with the sole responsibility for healing and most utility spells, making spell point drain even a bigger issue.  In addition, the thing is that you want to be able to cast area effect offensive spells.  So having two people on offensive and one possible person on defensive will save you a lot of headaches.  Also, it'll make grinding faster since the best XP comes naturally when you fight against large groups.

Don't bother leaving your 7th slot open.  Summoned creatures and NPCs (i.e. Hawkslayer) suck.  You want all seven spots filled and with your own guys.

In my case, I decided to ditch my warrior when I finished Gelidia.  I just realized that I needed the 3rd spell caster because my two mages could no longer keep up.  So what I decided to do was build a new archmage.  The first I did was take my existing party to Lucencia to have my bard pick up Kiel's Overture and grabbed the Divine Intervention (DIVA) spell for both my mages.  Then I went back to the refugee camp and created a new conjurer (and a monk).  Using the monk in the first slot (along with a few other existing PCs from the pre-made party), I went back to the starter dungeon.  I teleported two levels below and just spun around, having my bard sing Kiel's Overture.  At this point, there isn't anything (outside of Brilhasti Ap Tarj) that can withstand that spell, so everything went down really fast.  It didn't take that long to grind my conjurer to magician and eventually sorcerer.  I tried killing Brilhasti Ap Tarj, but I didn't get the bonus 8 million experience (probably because most of the party consisted of existing people that already killed him).

As a result, I still needed to grind my new spell caster to archmage.  I went back to Arboria and flipped back and forth between the two houses in front of the king's castle, racking up a nice amount of XP.  Mostly, I just had my bard again singing Kiel's Overture, which made almost all the fights trivial.  Getting her to a level 13 wizard did take some time, but it wasn't impossible and in a few hours I had a level one archmage with all previous schools of spells (not to mention my main party getting a few levels in between).

Right now, I'm in Tenebrosia with most of my party around level 54.  I've turned my paladin into a Geomancer (currently at level 5) while my main archmage is level 23, my chronomage at level 22 and my "new" archmage at level 11.  I found that Tenebrosia is one of the best grinding zones before you hit Malefia.  Once you acquire the Gitterdamurung (NUKE) spell, you just need to park your characters next to the temple or wizard's guild and flip between two houses.  The XP in this zone is quite nice and there's good drops (and more Harmonic Gems).  I think you should probably aim for level 60-70 by the time you finish, maybe higher with this zone.  If you want perfect stats, I think you'll probably need to hit a little under level 100.  But by then you should be near 1000 hit points.  The main things outside of getting perfect stats is to get your spell casters (including your geomancer) to a reasonable level.  I think once you start hitting the 20's, monsters will have a harder time resisting your spells.  Second, you want to ensure that your spell pool is high.  If you don't have equipment that reduces your spell casting cost, then you should estimate enough spell points to cast a few nukes per spell caster.  The goal is to get enough hit points, spell points and stats to handle Malefia.

When I first played this game around, I was fortunate in being able to import my characters from Bard's Tale 2.  Most of my characters were around level 200.  So they easily had over 1000 hit points and spell points.  The only issue I had was that their stats were ridiculously low for their level (because of the 18 stat level cap in the previous games).  Also, since it took a ton of XP to level up, they did play a bit underpowered at first.

One other grinding tip is that you don't necessarily have to grind just for XP. You can grind for equipment as well.  In my case, I didn't have the spell power for a while to grind against large groups.  So I preferred fighting small groups of monsters (even singular ones) just to see if I could pick up a good item.  Once my guys maxed out in a particular zone, I could move on.

I don't like grinding in zones where there's no temples and wizard guilds.  The reason is that it's tougher to heal up after intense fights, hence making spell point expenditure a larger problem.  Also, it's simply harder to go back and forth between spots to see if you leveled.  As a result, that makes Tenebrosia, Arboria and Lucencia the better grinding zones.  Malefia is the best by far, but only when you've maxed out what you can and know you can handle that zone.

At any rate, once you have a decently powered party, you can easily take lower powered characters into high level zones, stick them in the back (or front if you have the gear) and just drop nukes everywhere.