Need help figuring out specialist learning bonus & penalties

hybridial

I've took it upon myself to rebalance the entire school system, and I was just wondering if anybody could point me to how I can modify the specialist learning bonuses and penalties so I can alter them in line with how I've changed the schools. I guess it might be a .2da file but it's a long list to go through.

jmerry

Nope. Specialist bonuses/penalties are all hardcoded. Badly.

Any mage or bard that is not a Generalist/Trueclass gets -15% to spell learning, except for spells of a school that exactly matches their kit ID for which they get +15%. The save bonuses/penalties for in-school spells are handled the same way, with the +2/-2 for spells of a school that matches the kit ID.

Then there's another bug, and everybody gets +1% to spell learning chances.

An example of this in action ... a berserker-mage dual with 19 Int has a 95% listed chance of spell learning success. As he's not a generalist, he gets -14% total to learning all spells not of the school "berserker". This is, of course, all of them. Final spell learning chance 81% for everything.

Even the spell slots are hardcoded, though this can be countered with tables and kit abilities. A non-generalist mage, sorcerer, multiclass mage, or mage-X dual gets +1 slot per spell level.

There are all sorts of unintended consequences here. Non-specialist mage kits like wild mages take specialist penalties. Kitted bards like Haer'Dalis take specialist penalties. Even characters that really shouldn't like Imoen (no valid kit, ID zero) take specialist penalties.

I suspect the bugs here are very old. The original BG1 had mage specialists as the only kit, so the system mostly worked back then. Then BG2 came out and vastly expanded the kit system. Things were copied that really should have been reexamined. And here we are, much later, with the legacy of that mistake still present.

hybridial

Thanks for the explanation, it did occur to me though that I don't actually have to do anything and I just wasn't thinking it through properly, because the penalty applies to any spell that isn't their own school, it's not something that needs to be changed in order to work when changing the opposition school or even what school a spell belongs to. Bit of a brain fart there, but thanks anyway for the extra info, it's interesting to learn about all this stuff.

Endarire

@hybridial
Talk to subtledoctor here because he already overhauled the casting system for EE games - arcane and divine!