My bard fails too much when trying to learn spells
Alonso
Member Posts: 806
My bard seems to fail too much when learning spells.
I'm playing BG2EE with a Level 9 bard protagonist. I just arrived to Athkatla with tons of spells that I gathered in Irenicus dungeon. I kept all of them because I was waiting to get my hands on a genius potion before attempting to learn them. After drinking the dope my intelligence skyrockets to 22, which means that my chances to learn a spell are 98%. However, each time I try to learn the spells I get between one and three failures of a total of 14. I have tried six or seven times and not a single time did I succeed to learn all the spells, which would be the most expectable outcome with a 98% chance. All the spells are between levels 1 and 3, so that should not be the problem.
In this thread @Ariathor described a similar problem. After a lot of discussion we discovered that the explanation is a hitherto unreported feature of the spell learning mechanics: If you try to learn a spell that belongs to a school other than the one you're specialized in, you get a 15% penalty in your chance (happily that feature is correctly documented since then).
That explained everything in that case because he was experimenting with a wizard. But I am dealing with a bard here. Why the funny results? What am I missing?
I attach the game save in case you want to give it a go.
Edit: Changed the title of the thread to suit better its contents.
I'm playing BG2EE with a Level 9 bard protagonist. I just arrived to Athkatla with tons of spells that I gathered in Irenicus dungeon. I kept all of them because I was waiting to get my hands on a genius potion before attempting to learn them. After drinking the dope my intelligence skyrockets to 22, which means that my chances to learn a spell are 98%. However, each time I try to learn the spells I get between one and three failures of a total of 14. I have tried six or seven times and not a single time did I succeed to learn all the spells, which would be the most expectable outcome with a 98% chance. All the spells are between levels 1 and 3, so that should not be the problem.
In this thread @Ariathor described a similar problem. After a lot of discussion we discovered that the explanation is a hitherto unreported feature of the spell learning mechanics: If you try to learn a spell that belongs to a school other than the one you're specialized in, you get a 15% penalty in your chance (happily that feature is correctly documented since then).
That explained everything in that case because he was experimenting with a wizard. But I am dealing with a bard here. Why the funny results? What am I missing?
I attach the game save in case you want to give it a go.
Edit: Changed the title of the thread to suit better its contents.
Post edited by Alonso on
0
Comments
This is concurrent with other peoples' findings, and not with what should be.
The differences you mention are relatively small. For Safana it's 60% versus 70% and for Neera it's 66% versus 75%. Did you take into account the penalties applied for trying to learn spells above their level?
The only way to test Safana as a Bard is to Keeper her into one, an experiment I am sure would reveal no additional information whatsoever.
And this is definitely not a case of me having extremely bad luck with the RNG over and over (I already have about 100 sample attempts, always the same result). In the thread I linked in the first post the OP had a similar situation and eventually we discovered the famous undocumented penalty, which has been finally documented in v2.1, probably thanks to that thread. I'm almost certain we will eventually discover something similar here.
I eekepered Safana into a bard, then gave bot her and Neera a potion of mind focussing, I unloaded my scrollbox and started learning.
20 scrolls for Safana resulted in 12 learned spells (with two scrolls too high level) int 19
18 scrolls for Neera resulted in 12 learned spells as well (with 1 being too high level. Int 20
This is consistent with other people's findings, and not with the % shown
Do wild mages have a school of specialization? The manual is unclear about this: Does that mean that their school of specialization is wild magic (which has three spells of its own) and therefore they get the 15% chance penalty when learning any other spell?
Also: Is it possible that the level variation also happens when she tries to learn spells? I know that's not what the manual says, but it doesn't say the opposite either. Should this be the case, it would have a huge impact in learning chances.
Regarding Safana, is there any chance that EEKeeper changes anything that might affect her learning chance?
There's an 85% chance of having at least 11 successes with 18 INT for 14 scrolls, but only 36% of at least 13 successes and only 10% of 14 successes. A 98% chance for 22 INT with a 15% penalty is about the same (83% probability).
For a 22 INT, the odds of at least 13 successes should be 97%, while should be a 75% chance of 14 successes.
At least in later editions, when you multi-class, you don't suddenly forget how you did everything you were doing up to that point and then instantly remember it down the line, like you do with Dual-classing in Baldur's Gate, which I assume is the way 2nd Edition operated like.
It's just goofily implemented in the BG series.