> If answering this question would be considered a 'spoiler', please won't someone just e-mail me and tell me what I need to know. I've never played this sort of game before and reading a lot of these posts has thoroughly discouraged me.
> I have 6 Characters, Lev. 14 Knight, Rogue, Sorceress, Wizard and lev. 12 Assassin and Sorceress. Sorceress has up to #14 Wiz. Spells. My Rogue has #1-#14 Sorc. Spells, and my Assassin has 1-25 Wiz. Spells. The only none magic character is my knight.
> It's taken me WEEKS of several hours a day to get them this far. Just please tell me answers to this and the next question so I'll be able to decide whether or not to forget the whole thing.
> 1) What exactly is the most elementary, basic group and levels needed to WIN? I am very reluctant to have to start retraining anyone.


You've gotten a lot of good responses to your post, but I'd just like to add that changing the character classes of your characters (preferably not all at once) and retraining them in other classes will NOT NOT NOT require you to spend additional weeks of time leveling them back up. If you change, for example, your knight to a sorcerer, then venture out with your five solid guys and one level 0 sorcerer, you can go deep and fight monsters high in XP that were unavailable to you when you first started out. By the time you return to town after that first excursion, you could easily find your new sorcerer levelling all the way up to level 8 or so all at once. Only a small number of excursions later, you'll be back in shape. It'd probably only take you another couple of sessions, and at that point you'd have an additional, perfectly fine spellcasting character.

I don't recommend changing ALL your characters and having to retrain them all at once, because you won't have some advanced characters with high agility and IQ/wisdom to carry the brunt of the "retraining" battles. But you could retrain two or three characters at a time, no problem. You just have to make sure you aren't depending on the usual level of performance from the newly changed characters right off.

Like others have said, though, it's not strictly necessary to change the classes of any of your characters. It usually makes for a more powerful party, which in turn makes things rather fun, but it's not strictly necessary.