noobish question

[December Mourning]

Ok, sorry in advance for the noobish question but there must be something im overlooking.

i have a level 16 bishop in my party. his wizardry skill is 54 and divinity skill is 52. his air skill is 39 with 125 sp. his divine skill is 76 with 204 sp. i have 3 spellbooks that he can not use (it says he is not powerful enough to understand the writings) they are set portal, return, and heal all. Am I missing something here? Why cant he use these spellbooks? Its somewhat frustrating.

[Wild Rose]

Hi December. Welcome to the board. Your problem is that for Portal (set & return) you don't have enough skill in Air. For a level 5 spell you need about 60 pts in the skill as well as what you have in what ever book necessary - example Wizardry. You can Train the skill up by useing Air spells every battle and eventually points will get dropped in. Check out the Tips Tread, there is a very good chart that explains this all much better.

Best of Luck

actually, the minimums for learning spells are not in the realms (eg air, fire) but in the books (alchemy, divinity). so, the reason you cant learn with that bishop is that s/he has not developed their books enough.

for example, the heal all spell is level 5. that requires the bishop be level 11 and have 60 in divinity. since you have 52, you cant learn it.

the short recommendation is, whenever you build a bishop, focus on developing your spellbooks. bishops dont get that nice 25% bonus the pures do, so they are always lagging behind on book learning. early you might pump the realms at level up, just so you dont fumble every spell you try, but from then on, book book book!

.
okay, that was the simple answer... now the tricky bits...

there are two exceptions. first, your effective skill for learning is equal to the spellbook level plus 10% of the realm skill in the realm the spell is from. so, regarding heal all, you could still learn it if your divinity book skill was 52, and your divine realm skill was 80+ (52 + 10% of 80 = 60).

the second exception regards level. you dont have to have 11 levels of bishop, or priest, to learn heal all. you could have 5 levels as priest and 6 as bishop - the levels are additive according to the books you could have learned while that class. in fact, you could have 5 levels of bishop, 5 of priest, and 5 of lord, which would add to 11 levels of divinity book...

but wait, it's even more complex than that - your level is not just calculated on a book level, but on each individual spell... so in the case of the portal spells, you need level 11 in any book in which portal is possible (which is all of them). so 4 levels as mage, 4 as alchemist, and 3 as priest would be enough levels to learn portal (but you'd still need 60 in one of the spell books, or 60 with the help of 10% of a realm, to do it!)

whew.

wolfie has a great calculator on his website to do all that for you.

[Scatter]

Good one, Sultan!!!
As to your Divinity skill, Charm a lot...hopefully by now you have a couple Mana Stones, so you can do that indefinately, but it's not that bad, it doesn't take very long to qualify.

[Wolfie]

Spell learning is all clearly detailed here, including if you should change your character's professions at some time.

Also, as mentioned, check out the signature below for a link to the Wiz8SpellAbility spreadsheetm to quote my web site:

After playing Wizardry 8 for awhile, I was continually finding spellbooks and being offered them from merchants in the game, but when my spellcasters would try to use them, would get this message "Bloggs is not powerful enough to understand the writing". Then I found an old message that had been posted on VN Board's Official Wizardry 8 Board by one of the Wizardry 8 programming team (Alex Meduna, Wiz8 Lead Gameplay Programmer / Designer), I got the idea to make a spreadsheet to do the calcuations for me. A copy of Alex's original message can be found here.

Includes suggestions even if you don't have Excel, Enjoy!

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