Spell learning chance is broken
Clangedin
Member Posts: 6
After being frustrated with a chain of spell learning failures I decided to check if anyone else on the forum didn't trust the percentages the game tells us.
I found a few topics, mostly from 2012/2013 with people complaining that the sample sizes were too small. So I did what every bored (and slightly frustrated) programmer would do - I wrote a program to automatically learn scrolls, check if it was successful and if so, erase them from the spellbook.
I've just finished a run of 50.000 attempts and the results are quite far apart from what the game tells me it should be.
Difficulty: Core rules
Intelligence: 19 (95% chance theoretically)
Character level: 10
Spell: Magic Missile, level 1
Attempts: 50.000
Successful: 40.443
In practice an intelligence of 19 gives us an ~80% chance instead of the 95% chance we should be getting.
I found a few topics, mostly from 2012/2013 with people complaining that the sample sizes were too small. So I did what every bored (and slightly frustrated) programmer would do - I wrote a program to automatically learn scrolls, check if it was successful and if so, erase them from the spellbook.
I've just finished a run of 50.000 attempts and the results are quite far apart from what the game tells me it should be.
Difficulty: Core rules
Intelligence: 19 (95% chance theoretically)
Character level: 10
Spell: Magic Missile, level 1
Attempts: 50.000
Successful: 40.443
In practice an intelligence of 19 gives us an ~80% chance instead of the 95% chance we should be getting.
9
Comments
Theoretically the concept can also be used for more dastardly deeds, like rolling till your character has a total ability score of 95+
If Beamdog forsees a problem with this I'll refrain from uploading it.
[edit]
And there's a catch to it as well that I should probably mention. After each action (going to the inventory, opening the scroll, learning the scroll, etc..) there's a 150ms delay to allow the game some time to perform the necesary actions. All in all it takes ~1 second per scroll, so that 50.000 run I mentioned took about 14 hours.
I really don't think uploading it will be an issue.
I wonder how it would work with a single-class non-specialist mage.
I'll start a run of 25.000 attempts when I go to bed. That should be done by the time I wake up. I did a short run with Neera and 1.000 timestop scrolls yesterday. She was succesful on 691 attempts. She was wearing the golden ioun stone though, so her intelligence was at 18 during the test. So that conforms to the -15% theory.
[Edit]
The (C#) application can be downloaded from https://mega.co.nz/#F!CwAh1B7R!O_X2yofy3nVUx6FjEd3T3g
Be prepared to spend a few minutes figuring out screen coördinates before it'll work properly.
Single class mage, level 7, 19 integelligence
4820 successfull attempts out of 5000. (96,4%)
So it looks like single classed mages are working correctly.
Not an issue? Or documentation somewhere needs updating?