The spell selection interface gets seriously cumbersome with lots of different spells memorized

PugPug

Anyone who's played a sorcerer or had a high-level Aerie (cleric/mage) in their party knows this.

You click the little moon-and-stars button and get a row of spell icons. You can scroll to the right or the left. If you have a lot, you might have a lot of scrolling -- both with the mouse and with your eyes -- to do.

It'd be good if maybe two rows appeared instead of one, or better yet, categories appeared. Say, click the spellcasting button, then the Level 1 Spells button to see those spells. Or maybe offensive and defensive spell buttons.

sarevok57

in ToB they added that little book thingy so you could skip right your cleric or mage spells right away without having to scroll forever, but yeah, there is lots of scrolling with spells at those higher levels with those classes

Dee

My ideal has always been to have separate spell action icons for wizard and priest spells, and further separate them by level.

Zeckul

110% agreed. Anything that reduces clicking and scrolling ("excise" in UX terminology) makes for a happier more productive user, especially if he's on iPad using his clumsy fingers rather than a mouse.

kilroy_was_here

I know what you mean. It gets to the point where I will memorize 5-6 of the same 1st level spell just to save myself the clicking if I had picked 6 different ones.

Do we have any updated UI shots that show if this is the same or not?

Bercon

In the screenshots UI has been identical to the old one. However, given their extra time I believe they are redesigning at least part of it. The spell selection menu is probably the worst part of the UI (not necessarily that bad in BG1 but still) so hopefully it'll see some changes.

Space_hamster

I like the two row idea...and it probably wouldn't be too hard to implement.

ryu1

Yes, perhaps when left-clicking the Cast Spell icon, the spells appear as they originally did in the linear form; right-clicking brings up symbols representing Mage/Cleric spells (if applicable) otherwise immediately show symbols depicting the lvl of spell. Similar to ideas suggested above but if I have low-level spell-casters, I would prefer the linear form (don't want to go through 2 or 3 categories just to find and use the couple of lvl 1 spells my Mage memorised)

Dee

Well, any UI bar is limited to twelve keys because of how they're mapped to the F keys.

But you could easily have ten spell icons, plus one icon for "next page" and one for "return to spell levels".

Even a sorcerer with a Ring of Wizardry will only ever have twelve spells per day (and they'll be stacked on a limited number of spells known), so ten icons per level should be sufficient.

sarevok57

@Aosaw unless the ring of wizardry is like the shadows of amn one where it gives you 1 extra 5,6,7 level slot, i wonder which one they will use?

Dee

The ring of wizardry should be staying the same. The 5/6/7 ring would be almost entirely useless in BG1.

And the 5/6/7 ring shouldn't stack with itself either, incidentally. It should fall under the "similar bonuses don't stack" clause, which is a corollary of the "bonuses don't stack with themselves" clause.

sarevok57

actually the 5/6/7 doesnt stack with itself, you can get 2 of them in SoA and it actually does say something on those lines