GameBanshee Forums

I just encountered an unusual bug with spell learning. It is somewhat harmless (though a bit annoying) and easily reproducible (on my PC - I wonder if others can reproduce it).

I have a human cleric who I dual-class at level 9 to a diviner (best specialist in my opinion unless you intend to play HoF which I don't like). This guy has 18 int and wis. Before memorizing spells he drinks two potions (potion of genius and another potion that increases both int and dex) that raise his int to 25. Now you would expect him to learn all spells (except conjuration ones of course) with 100% success, right? In reality however he still fails to learn some (10-20%) of the spells... The strange thing is my bard never had this problem. After drinking potions she learns all spells successfully.

I decided to experiment and instead of dual-classing the cleric to a diviner I dual-classed him to a generalist mage. The problem disappeared!

So it seems that for some reason cleric->specialist mages (I tried a necromancer as well) fail to learn spells occasionally even you bring their int to 25.

And in case you are wondering I have IWD+HoW+TotLM install with just one mod (Widescreen) that is unlikely to cause this problem.

Can someone try to reproduce this bug or is it just my install (make sure the difficulty is set to normal if you try to reproduce it)?

Happy New Year!



Update: I discovered that all specialist mages experience this problems, even single class ones. Also I reinstalled the game just to make sure it's not Widescreen that causes this bug. Well, I was right. It's still there even without the Widescreen mod. Also I'm surprised I've never heard about this bug... Am I the only one who uses specialists and drinks potions before learning spells?

That is a very strange bug. I think I may have only had 1 specialist mage in all the times I've played IWD1, so that never happened to me. I have had a dual classed XX/mage a couple of times and didn't experience it then either.

If it continues to be a problem you could do this:

When ready to learn the spells, change the game setting to "easy" (this setting means all spells are automatically learned, no chance of failure).
To keep things on the up and up you might also drink the potions. Either before or after since it doesn't matter. Don't forget to change the game setting back to whatever you had it on before though.

Thanks for the reply. I know that changing difficulty will solve my problem. I have actually tried it already. Though as I have mentioned it's a bit annoying because if you forget to change the difficulty back you may get ridiculously high experience rewards for quests. Then the only option is probably to reload since I don't want to remove experience with dalekeeper (I'm afraid this may corrupt my saves).

Also, it bothers me that you've never experienced this... I wonder if I can find md5 checksums for IWD somewhere. If someone could calculate that and upload it somewhere it would be of great help to people wanting to check out if their installation is ok. I would appreciate that a lot too.