cant dual class if "level up" is unused.

daniem

I want my berserker to dual class to a mage.
After pressing dual class i am taken to the pick your spells screen.
It tells me to select 538970603 spells to have in my spellbook, (or by retrying, 0 spells)
and i cant continiue until doing so... (which is impossible).
The problem came because i was lvl 7 but ready to level up to 8.
If i pressed lvl up button and then dual class it seems to work fine.

Emptiness

I assume this is intentional, for two reasons:

1) When you dual-class, all xp beyond that which is required for your current level in your current class is lost. Being unable to dual-class in this situation protects you from losing more than a level worth of xp.

2) If reason 1 was "fixed" by allowing all xp beyond that which is required for your current level in your current class to carry over to your second class, then that would open the door to exploitation. Specifically, it would be possible to save up enough xp to reach one level higher in your second class than you have in your first one before dual-classing. This would allow you to avoid the awkward period of learning your second class without access to your first one, which is the "cost" of dual-classing.

However, it is a problem that the dual-class button in available to click when it is not possible to dual-class successfully. A good fix would be to gray out the button in this situation (with a tool-tip on mouseover that explains why the button can't be used).

Aranneas

@Emptiness what if spare XP carried over at a reduced rate? like you get half, or a third, or a quarter of your spare XP added to your new class after the switch... seems like a potential mod idea if nothing else >D

Emptiness

I don't really see that it solves anything, though. The ideal time to dual-class will still be immediately after reaching your target maximum level in your first class. The only reason to wait would be to exploit the carryover. Dual-classing is already fairly hard on new players (there are a lot of ways to do it "wrong"); this would just be one more mistake they could make.

My other objection would be that, for those players determined and skilled enough to play the game with a solo character, this would make things much easier when using a dual-classed character to do so. There's more xp around than one character can use, thanks to the xp cap, so a penalty to the carryover isn't much deterrent, and getting rid of the training period for the second class would take away a serious hurdle that must be overcome. This is a fairly minor consideration, though, as I would imagine that the solo character community is fairly small. I've never done the game(s) solo, so if some people who have want to give their opinion of how this would affect them then that should carry more weight than my views do.

karnor00

I don't see any reason to prevent dual classing in these circumstances. Simply make it so that any excess xp earned before you dual class is lost (which is how it works if you are partway to the next level).

It sounds like a simple bug to me.

Aranneas

@Emptiness doing the math, with about 20% carryover it's pretty much impossible to exploit - you would need to save 5x as much xp and you want to carry over; so if you have 1.5 mil in your first class (roughly speaking the area where a lot of dual classing is going to happen) and want to match that in your second class, you're still going to have to do some work in the new class since the most you could carry over is 1.3 million XP if you bring yourself to the cap.

it's just a little extra bonus, something to make any overage you happen to get - for instance, from a big monster kill or quest reward that brings you noticeably over your target - feel less 'wasted', and helps out more for casual playthroughs if anything.

Emptiness

I don't think that carrying over 20% would break anything. I admit I was thinking of the 8M xp cap, which gave me more room to imagine exploitation - but as you point out, most dual-classing is going to take place before ToB.