Mysterious spell points

[Ziggurat]

Sorry to post again, but this game is still surprising me.

I switched a mage to a samurai. At the time she could cast a lev 3 X-ray. During the next 4 levs where she could not learn magic, her spell points increased enough to do a lev 5 X-ray. Is this due to getting more spell points automatically on lev ups? She had no magic enhancing doodads.

On another point, a warning?, I did the runes and staff trick at Northern Wilderness and decided to do the maze later. When I came back the shrooms portal was gone and I couldn't get it to re-appear. I had heard you have to complete the runes, but didn't know you had to do everything or lose it.

[Sinteuil]

I'm inclined to say it's due to leveling since presumably your casting skills didn't go up during the first five levels of samurai (or do they?). Hard to believe that in all this time I've been playing, I've never bothered to experiment much with class changing.

Too bad about the retros issue... Does that mean you actually have to enter the maze before leaving the area for the shroom portal to appear later on? I've never had it disappear on me, and I've even left to go get a staff after doing all the runes and come back to have it still work. Been lucky so far I guess! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 12-24-2005, 06:47 PM: Message edited by: Sinteuil ]

[Scatter]

umm, you sure you got the same save? Once you activate the shrooms, the door is always open. I've returned to it in many games in the mod where Lana put the Gorrors in the NW one.

Pure caster to Hybrid:
You lose some green circles when you first switch. Then as you progress, your actual caster level won't go up--and you can't invest points--until the fifth level as a hybrid, but you still get more green dots because SP capacity and casting ranks continue to increase as you earn skill points in the Realms by practise or combat; even though your School skill won't increase, the Realms do, oddly enough, and they have more influence on your casting rank.

[Sinteuil]

I just changed my alchemist to ninja to try it out. I'm finding that practicing doesn't seem to increase realm skills (at least I haven't seen any), but power cast does go up. On the other hand, realm skills do go up after leveling up. I'm imagining I'll probably have to wait until after the first five ninja levels to read spell books again. My sense is that class changing in Wiz 8 may be worth it for training stealth or L&T, but otherwise it's only really good if you're planning to level up your characters on the peak indefinitely anyway. At this point it's looking like this alchemist turned ninja won't have her high-level casting skills truly developed until close to level 30, but at least she's got power cast, power strike, and reflexion at level 22 already. But still waiting to cast death cloud beyond power level 1!

[xfactor]

As I understand it the spell casting skills for pure casters who change to hybrids are locked just like skills that no longer apply to their new profession. Effectively, they don't count as spell casters (no reading from books or increasing skills).

Power cast must be a special case since it's an expert skill and its only requirement is to have Int 100. I agree that this type of class-changing isn't worth it if you're looking to really boost your spell casting. I often do it with a Mage to Sam or Psionic to Monk just to allow the characters to use some of the late game armours and weapons and it means if they make it to level 5 they can learn the last few spells from their book.

xfactor

[Scatter]

yah, my mistake, only Powercast keeps increasing...i was remembering that a Bishop who switched to Ninja could still get Mental Magic skill increases (yah, only after 4 Ninja levels) and confusedly extended that to include the rest of the skills the rest of the time.

[Dean Jacobsen]

I usually go the other way. If I am planning to play a hybrid, I play the first three levels in the Monastary as the pure caster. This allows me to get the second level spell that I like early.
One level to train my Stealth and level five I go to the hybrid. During the next four levels the casting skill increases. I will have to find some saved games to see whether spell points increase as well.

Dean

[xfactor]

Yeah, changing early can work too. However, I often find that I prefer to build the skills up early so no one character is significantly behind any of the others in terms of key skills.

Granted, I don't train skills so that's one reason why I may prefer to change later but it always seems to me that it's better to specialize early and then change later on.

By changing later you don't lose too much in the way of skills since they'll be quite high anyway so losing a bonus shouldn't hurt too much. You also gain access to a lot of good equipment when going from a pure caster to a hybrid.

xfactor