Request: Improve Wizard Specialization
1varangian
Member Posts: 367
I'd like to request that Beamdog revisits how Wizard specialization is handled in NWN.
The biggest flaw is that you don't get to choose your opposition school(s) like in 3.0. And the NWN opposition schools feel arbitrary and imbalanced. Evocation, Necromancy and Abjuration are not among the opposition schools at all, while Conjuration appears as an opposition school three times and Illusion twice. Thematically, Necromancy seems like something many spellcasters would abandon if they had to choose.
So please let us choose the opposition school(s) freely.
Another thing that feels off about specialization is that it's much more about the choice what you can't do rather than what you actually specialize in. It would be nice if specializing actually did buff spells or caster level of the chosen school, or would give the character some other relevant perks.
So maybe unhardcode the whole thing so that the community can make their own house rules around specialization? 5e has really cool ideas about specialization perks, I'd love to be able to have something like that.
The biggest flaw is that you don't get to choose your opposition school(s) like in 3.0. And the NWN opposition schools feel arbitrary and imbalanced. Evocation, Necromancy and Abjuration are not among the opposition schools at all, while Conjuration appears as an opposition school three times and Illusion twice. Thematically, Necromancy seems like something many spellcasters would abandon if they had to choose.
So please let us choose the opposition school(s) freely.
Another thing that feels off about specialization is that it's much more about the choice what you can't do rather than what you actually specialize in. It would be nice if specializing actually did buff spells or caster level of the chosen school, or would give the character some other relevant perks.
So maybe unhardcode the whole thing so that the community can make their own house rules around specialization? 5e has really cool ideas about specialization perks, I'd love to be able to have something like that.
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You could also remove the extra spell slot to balance any extra perks they get.
There's a lot of ways to make specialization cool and flavorful if it's unhardcoded.
Letting us choose the opposition school would alone go a long way though, giving the player the freedom to make the kind of Wizard they like. And it would be more faithful to 3.0.
But yes, unhardcoded would be a dream and at the very least the ability to choose ones barred school.
Return the spell school of the target.
int GetSpellSchool(object oTarget)
We could call these in the spells and alter them to give specialization wizards more bang.
There are some other things too like unhardcoding opposition schools or at least giving script functions to set and unset them, and for filtering spell selection too. Then having some learn/unlearn functions would really help flesh things out.
All stuff asked for near the start of NWN EE.
I invented a custom function that does this without NWNX. I described how it works on old bioware forums I believe. In short, you create a copy of the player character, grant him scroll of level 1 spell into inventory for each spellschool and call GetTalentBest, if the talent wont be valid, player cannot use that scroll which means his spellschool is one that makes that scrolls spellschool the opposite. It is bit more complex thań that obviously but it is doable.
I see what you mean I think there's room for more advantages and disadvantages for taking a specialisation, your giving up some versatility of spell selection for one extra spell slot per spell level, I'm happy to give up Divination (I do miss out on Premonition ☹️) but giving the choice to the player would be the same as a student forgoing training in one area of magic to more focus on others, I like the idea of double specialisation for Red Wizards of Thay which is also available in NWN 2 and a Red Wizard of Necromancy is very deadly.
E.g. I would like to play an Illusionist who focuses on control and mind magic and thinks elemental damage is crude and raising undead is foul (opposing school either Evocation or Necromancy, or both). Well.. Illusionists lose Enchantment so that doesn't work. And Enchanter doesn't work because they lose Illusion. Lol. Thematically, Illusion and Enchantment should be very close to each other instead of being opposites.
The themes of the 8 schools can't really be arranged to make sense as opposites to begin with. Therefore it would be much better to leave the choice to the player simply as "what the PC isn't interested in". The opposing school approach would work in something like DA:O where you have Spirit vs. Primal and Creation vs. Entropy which in fact do oppose each other thematically.
The concept of a Wizard who is completely unable to cast spells of a certain school "just because" seems really weird too. That's why it would be great it they could unhardcode the whole thing and let the community redo it into something cool and meaningful.
The specialization perks are flavorful and meaningful and there are no arbitrary limitations to spell selection attached. As Arcane Tradition it also goes beyond just specializing in a chosen school with things like Artificer and Bladesinger. It's a fun choice that gives your Wizard unique abilities. I would really like to see something like this in NWN: EE.
I don't know much about 5e but after taking a look at Wizards traditions starting at
LVL 2, 6, 10, 14 you can pick between Schools, Artificer, Bladesinger, Lore Master,
Technomancy, Theurgy & War Magic.
A quick look showed me this system looks pretty good and I think elements of this could be brought over, I personally like the idea of a Theurgist who gets to pick some Cleric spells by taking this path, I like playing BG 1&2 as a Cleric/Mage.
They won't replace any prestige classes as they kept saying they don't want to ruin compatibility with old content but fixing current prestige classes and adding new ones would be nice, Bladesinger, Red Wizard, fix the Palemaster, Mystic Theurge and more.
In NWN 2 there are extra feats for spell casters, Arcane Defence, Augmented Summoning, Practiced Spellcaster and Extra Slot, even these would be nice to have as options.
The only things I can see that they may be willing to do is adding feats, fixing broken classes and adding new classes.
In that specific context it wouldn't make much sense to have two different implementations of the same concept, such as bladesinger class path and blade singer prestige class. For further spell school specialization the 3rd edition rules has its own approach that I encourage people to look into, as well as prestige classes that enhance specializations I believe.
As for feats, I agree, more could be added. Some such as Arcane Defense are already in NWN but note they require spell focus as a prerequisite rather than spell school specialization.
Other common and easy to do mods are augmented feats for spell casting, and of course practiced spell caster. The later in my experience requires a modder to overhaul the spell scripts and replace the method for how caster levels are calculated, large packages like the PRC probably have this built in.
An extra request was to unhardcode specialization so that it would be possible for the community to create something like what Pathfinder or 5e have for specialization i.e. unique perks and ignore NWNs arbitrary prohibited schools.
Not just for Wizards but all classes, I know whenever I play NWN2 I always get the Able Learner feat to invest in a wide skill set and this is particularly useful to Wizards as there high intelligence allows for many skill points but they have limited class skills.
I think there are already requests to fix classes but as far as I know there isn't requests for more feats from 3.5e, so if anyone is interested we should start a new Trello request.
Even when NWN was getting regular patches there wasn't much in this regard either. For example expanding the effects and itemproperty functions to allow more options like max hp bonus/penalty, or fixing casting prestige classes. From small to big issues.
Adding more feats just adds more stuff, but modders can give you more stuff, if they have the tools to do so.