Potions of Insight/ genius

kursel

Hi,

why should I use potions for intelligence or wisdom, even as a mage, except fighting Mind Flayers? (My intelligence is 18). Maybe for success rate with memorizing scrolls or a loreboost? But if thats it I would rather sell them.

borntodie

If you boost your int to 25 you will never fail to write a scroll. So yeah.

jmerry

Learning spells is indeed the primary use of intelligence-boosting potions (genius/mind focusing). Mind Flayers aren't present in BG1.

At difficulties of normal and below, spell learning is an automatic success and you don't need to worry about the percentages. However, both the maximum level of spells you can learn and the number of spells per level you can learn also depend on intelligence. You can learn a rather large number of spells at 18 Int, but not all of them. Once you hit the cap, you need to drink those potions or erase spells if you want to learn more spells.

At higher difficulties, it's about removing the chance of failure in spell learning. High-level scrolls are a scarce resource, and it can be really demoralizing to fail. I usually drink enough potions to boost my mages' Int to at least 24 before a major spell-scribing session - that's certain success even with the 15% penalty for specialists outside their specialty.

When I started out, the potions weren't a priority. I might keep them around because they didn't take up much space in the potion case, but I didn't go out of my way to collect them. Now that I play at high difficulties, I actively seek them out in shops to buy.

Potions of insight, that boost wisdom ... those are mostly useless. They don't last long enough for your priests to memorize extra spells, so all you're getting is lore and a few dialogue options.

sarevok57

if you have edwin on your team the potion of insight is kind of good for him, since it will give him a 20 lore bonus which can save you on some money if need be to identify some items ( since he can't use the identify spell ) so once he hits level 5, he can have 35 lore with that potion which can identify a lot of the minor magic items in the game ( which there are a lot of )

plus in BG 2 the potions of insight are actually useful if you have mages with less than 18 WIS for wish spells ( the level 7 and 9 variants ) because if your WIS is less than 18 you will more often than naught get some whacky results from wishes, and especially if your WIS is 9 or lower, yikes...