GameBanshee Forums

Hello everyone!
I fired up this game for the first time yesterday, and was halfway through creating my party when I got a bit stuck. Usually I use elven diviners, but when I was leafing through the manual, I found that the only two ninth level spells available are of the conjuration school, forbidden to diviners. However, when I opted for a conjurer instead, I discovered that I couldn't learn any invocation spells (imagine a mage without magic missile and fireball!), though the manual states that the opposing school to conjuration is divination.
So now I have three questions:

1) Is the manual correct in saying there are only two lame conjuration spells available at level nine?

2) Would some kind soul inform me as to the correct opposing schools in this game?

3) All you people who have beat the game: which is your favourite type of specialized wizard for this particular game?

Thanks in advance!

1) Yes. But you're not supposed to cast level 9 spells from memory anyway. Even with TotL your mage will have only about 2,500,000 XP at the end in a 6 person party at normal difficulty.
You can increase the XP by heavy XP farming or changing the difficulty, but this might destroy the balance. Even insane difficulty is easier than normal because of the double XP gain.
2) The opposing schools change with the installation of HoW. Read the HoW manual for details.
3) Fighter3/Illusionist. I'd only specialise with a backup-caster in the party, like bard.

Thanks kmonster! I'll have a look at that new manual instead.

Hm, I remember reading somewhere that you could attain level 30, but with only 2+1 cds, obviously there isn't enough space for such an epic.

Now, I play very mage intensive parties, so I have a few multi and dual mages as well. But I always take one single class specialist wizard, just because I want that extra edge in terms of spell progression and spell count. So, given that, what would you recommend?

You can easily gain even the 22,500,000 XP needed for fighter30/mage30/cleric30 if you change the difficulty, do XP farming or use a smaller party.
But I recommend to enjoy this masterpiece the normal way the first time, save the powergaming ambitions for reruns in HoF mode.

Since you'll surely have a multiclass illusionist among your characters, I'd choose another specialisation, invocation and conjuration shouldn't be opposing schools.
With a bard in your party (recommend to get the highest casting levels for spells like haste, bard songs and other benefits) I'd choose abjurer, else necromancer.

For an arcane-heavy party you should know that you don't get your spells as easily as in BG2, you have to earn them by finding them. Of many spells (like em: hope, em: courage, improved invisibility) there only exists one scroll in the game.
There are many mirror image scrolls, but for stoneskin you have to wait until late in TotL to get a second one.
So choose wisely how you distribute your scrolls.
Nice starting level1 spells are burning hands, PfE, grease, Larloch's minor drain and shocking grasp, since there's only one scroll of this kind in the game.

Ok, thanks for all your advice, it's been very helpful. Now I've got a fairly good idea of how it's going to be.