Can I Change The Spells In Aloth's Grimoire?

[grausch]

 

I really don't get it, why do people expect Wizards to be the only class with full access to ALL their abilities?

 

 

​I don't think anyone expects full access to all their abilities, but merely preserving the long-standing ability to select from the whole spell catalog.  There is a whole dimension of RPG gameplay which gets obliterated by these changes, and for many of us it was an important aspect of RPGs.  BTW, many other casting classes (clerics, druids, etc) also had dynamic access to their whole spell catalog, so it's not just wizards.

​

​Traditionally, dynamic selection was a core aspect of casting classes, going clear back to P&P and for decades of CRPGs since, but was balanced against real rest restrictions.  However, this started to break down when CRPGs began to pursue a more mass market / casual audience, many of who would play by spamming everything they had even in small fights to feel powerful, and then be left in a lurch.  Players complained, and CRPG makers responded by relaxing hard rest restrictions more and more, making them into soft restrictions, or sometimes no restrictions at all.  That appeased the people who didn't like long-term gameplay decisions, but it did massive collateral damage:

​

• ​It negates the importance of smaller fights.  They no longer have any meaningful cost, because you auto-regenerate what you used right after.  In the traditional way, even the small fights are part of grinding you down over time.

  ​

• ​You no longer have to play smaller fights efficiently.  You're getting everything you used right back.

   

• ​You no longer have to make meaningful choices about which spells to use, or limit yourself strategically.  They're all coming right back.  An element of decision making is hence rendered obsolete (granted, one many people didn't like - but others found quite appealing).

   

• ​It removes flexibility around creating your own combinations.  You get to pick a few permanent ones, but otherwise are restricted to "canned" sets, so a whole aspect of creating custom novel strategies is lost.  Less thinking / creativity results.

   

• ​A class differentiator is now lost.  Previously you had sustained damage classes, and powerful but intermittent damage classes.  Some players couldn't tolerate one PC not doing something in every single fight, or doing only a little in some fights, so this differentiator has been more and more lost over time.

   

• ​There's little to no long term strategizing.  The "unit of attention" becomes a single fight.

   

• ​The feel of being on a journey is eroded, and hence, the immersion of the game.  Now I just feel like I have an unrelated series of standalone fights, and I'm reset after each one so I can meet the next with the full catalog again.

   

• ​There's no more satisfaction in avoiding resource starvation, because I'm getting reset after each fight.  A whole element of enjoyment is thus erased.​

   

• ​There's no more pressure when you start a fight down to a few weird spells you've never used before, and have to improvise and create clever tactics.  All fights are driven towards the same thing, because start each fight with my spells reset.

​I could go on, but suffice it to say many of us see the loss of these things as a catastrophe for the genre.  It sacrifices long term considerations on the alter of the short attention span appeal.

​

​I understand many people like it and want that more "action" experience where all their skills and abilities are reset after every single fight.  That's cool with me - to each his own!  That's why I think it should be a game option, like "hardcore" mode: "Let me pick my own spells, but don't bloody reset them or my HP pool after each fight like I'm playing Diablo".  That way both camps can have their preference.  That has happened with other "casualizations" of CRPGs - e.g, early CRPGs had severely restricted saves, where you had to make it back to a safe place to save, and there were no quick-saves or mid-stream saves or any kind.  There was a lot on the line, sometimes hours of gameplay, so you were forced to take matters seriously rather than mash F5.  That annoyed a lot of players, so that also was changed, but many games still provide it as an option - and many players still use the option!  That's all I want: an option, so I don't have to deal with what feels to me like an eviscerated RPG experience.

​

​EDIT: fix missing words.

Agree fully with this post.

 

While I have not spent a lot of time with the game yet, the new spells / rest mechanism has taken away an awful lot of the strategic play from my druid. At level 3, my spell selection is limited immensely and by not having access to different spells, it restricts my options. Sure, I could pre-plan my spell selections to synergyse my spells more, but losing the flexibility I had previously is quite disappointing.

 

From a strategic point of view, I liked needing to manage my resources. Blasting through all my spells in one encounter, just to have them back for the next one, makes it seem like the game targets a different audience than PoE I did.

[TheisEjsing]

• ​The feel of being on a journey is eroded, and hence, the immersion of the game.  Now I just feel like I have an unrelated series of standalone fights, and I'm reset after each one so I can meet the next with the full catalog again.

Abit dramatic, no? Having one all powerful book where you can use your magic eraser to endlessly write on top of written text to get the best meta spells is immersive.

 

Having to actually make a choice, by looking through dusty old books to find the one you deem has the best spells on it's pages for an encounter with the limitations it presents is just taking you out of the experience?

 

damn, being a mage surely has to be convinient to be immersive, huh..

Edited May 13, 2018 by TheisEjsing

[Kyberus]

I strongly agree with sentiments expressed by demeisin. 

 

As to being able to write books or move pages from one book to another somehow being unrealistic... these grimoires came from somewhere. Someone writes the damn things (Admittedly someone you may have killed). They already established that. The whole world suddenly developing the inability to write is at least a tiny bit bizarre.

 

I would also argue the effect is most crippling for the enjoyment of druids and priests: many of their spells were relatively conditional. Those spells now will not see use, which substantially limits the variety of play. Not so much power, per sei, but certainly variety. 

[spardeous]

I am largely in agreement with the OP here. Limiting the Grimoires to a "read-only" state by-and-large defeats the purpose of them in the first place.

Limiting Grimoires to 2 spells achieves the outcome of reducing a caster's situational utility by approximately half - there was no need to 'hard-roll' them.

[Archaven]

Unless it changed, they're permanent.

 

Now instead of swapping spells around grimoires, you swap grimoires themselves.

 

 

I very much agree, I do not like this either.

 

I'm possibly not even going to make a single wizard playthrough just because of that

 

they are forcing this to make swapping grimoire part of the game mechanics (with cooldown) which i dislike as well

[Purudaya]

​

 

 

This also means that finding new Grimoires focused on specific domains is more interesting and Grimoires are more like any other loot.

 

​Maybe, but they sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater, and made the class not nearly as fun because of it.

​

​I think they could have made grimoires more "special" to find just by having more spells that were only found on grimoires you found in interest places or on difficult opponents, but couldn't learn via the level-up mechanic.  But let me learn them, so I can select the set of spells I find most appropriate for what I expect to encounter, and form my own dynamic strategies via synergies between the ones I pick.

​

​

 

I think there are at least a couple of these  - I saw one grimoire spell that summons a staff made of snakes that you certainly can't pick at level up (unless one of the specialists has it). 

 

I actually kind of like the new system as it encourages you to play around with spells you might not otherwise use. I've never found Aloth lacking for levelled spells and the ones from his various grimoires have actually come in useful in a few fights. 

[Tamyn]

This thread has helped me, since I was confused picking spells on level up yet having my grimoire already full at level 1.

[Slotharingia]

I'm not convinced this system is actually easier to get than the old one. The grimoires seem to have a variation of spells you can learn on level up, with one or two at higher levels that are different. I feel it would make more sense if Grimoires only contained spells you cannot learn on level up, and there were less of them but each one was genuinely unique.

[DaKatarn]

I’m agree, this choice of spell mechanic is the real MISTAKE of this game. It’s a game-crushing for gameplay and for roleplay immersion.

 

Wizard’s main trait is to be POLYVALENT with a pool of varied spells and the possibility to custom his choice.

 

It’s like DD4 and it is a fail.

Edited May 12, 2018 by DaKatarn

[Ashen Rohk]

I do miss being able to load up a single grimoire with spells, but maybe that's my D&D talking.

 

There were a few instances in PoE1 where a spellcaster would have an exceptionally rare spell in a book and I'd copy it over, but now the skill system is in place I see the need for a single full grimoire being reduced.

 

As much as fun as it is to have a full spellbar and be spoilt for choice. If they took it away from Druids/Priests it would've been daft not to do it for wizards too.

[Eurhetemec]

 

​Traditionally, dynamic selection was a core aspect of casting classes, going clear back to P&P and for decades of CRPGs since, but was balanced against real rest restrictions.  However, this started to break down when CRPGs began to pursue a more mass market / casual audience, many of who would play by spamming everything they had even in small fights to feel powerful, and then be left in a lurch.  Players complained, and CRPG makers responded by relaxing hard rest restrictions more and more, making them into soft restrictions, or sometimes no restrictions at all. 

 

You're being incredibly misleading here, to the point where I wonder if you're like 20-something and just talking about a time you never knew, based on fragments of articles you read about games.

 

The sequence of events you outline is flatly untrue. I say that as someone who has been playing CRPGs and P&P RPGs since the 1980s (and still plays both). Yes that makes me terribly old.

 

The "mass market"/"casual audience" stuff absolutely never happened. That is a complete fantasy, and basically from MMORPG culture, where MMORPG fans like to claim any change is "dumbing down".

 

In the real history of CRPGs, they've always been extremely diverse in how you got mana, and how much of a true "per rest" resource it was, all the way back into the 1980s. And I say mana because virtually all games used that mechanic, unless they were D&D-derived. Indeed that's been by far the biggest change, far bigger than anything you're talking about - resources other than mana. And a bigger change still than that, and one I note you are not complaining about was making HP-style systems not be "you are damaged until you get a magic heal or sleep at an inn".

 

Again, though, back to the 1980s we had CRPGs where:

 

A) You had a Vancian/D&D-style deal, where you didn't dynamically select spells, but picked a fixed bunch before/after sleeping (D&D rules suggested it was after but games often made it be before). Obviously actual D&D/AD&D games worked on this basis.

 

B) You had games where casters had a mana resource which could only be replenished by actual sleep, hard rests as you put it, and sometimes only in limited places, and perhaps if you were lucky by potions which randomly, rarely dropped.

 

C) You had games like B, but where potions were pretty common, or possible to buy and/or manufacture, and often the real balancing point was the opportunity cost of using potions.

D) You had games where mana regenerated continuously at some rate (often very slow), but where the hard-rest requirement was already gone.

 

E) You had games where mana regenerated continuously, and perhaps quite quickly, but where reagents where a huge deal, and spells were more like consumables than anything else.

 

And more!

 

And this was all in the 1980s and very very early 1990s, long before any kind of "casual audience" existed, long before "marketing" and "audience feedback" (beyond angry hand-written letters!) were a thing. We're talking about another era here. Yet you're misrepresenting it as if it were some MMORPG-style player-developer feedback loop. That's ridiculous nonsense.

 

This whole "lel casuals spam spellz like morons" thing is just gibberish, too, and again it reeks of MMORPGs, not actual CRPGs. "Casual" players have no specific way of playing. Some are cautious and barely even cast spells. Others are aggressive and rest frequently, and so on. The generalization you make is actively misleading. Further, on pen and paper games, what you're claiming is completely untrue, and we can walk through pen and paper game history if you like, but that's going to be a long walk. Fortunately I was playing P&P games from 1988 onwards and playing a wide variety of them so I am happy and able to discuss it if required.

 

Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options".

Edited May 12, 2018 by Eurhetemec

[Rulin]

2 quick questions, sorry if this has been adressed before:
Do I see which spells are in my current grimoire while selecting new ones during a lvl up? And are there spells exclusive to certain grimoires, so you are not able to learn them via lvl up?

[grausch]

Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options".

PoE 1 did manage to do this quite well though...

 

I can see the benefit of certain design changes, but the current system restricts my playstyle in a way PoE 1 never did.

[illathid]

 

 

​Traditionally, dynamic selection was a core aspect of casting classes, going clear back to P&P and for decades of CRPGs since, but was balanced against real rest restrictions.  However, this started to break down when CRPGs began to pursue a more mass market / casual audience, many of who would play by spamming everything they had even in small fights to feel powerful, and then be left in a lurch.  Players complained, and CRPG makers responded by relaxing hard rest restrictions more and more, making them into soft restrictions, or sometimes no restrictions at all. 

 

You're being incredibly misleading here, to the point where I wonder if you're like 20-something and just talking about a time you never knew, based on fragments of articles you read about games.

 

The sequence of events you outline is flatly untrue. I say that as someone who has been playing CRPGs and P&P RPGs since the 1980s (and still plays both). Yes that makes me terribly old.

 

The "mass market"/"casual audience" stuff absolutely never happened. That is a complete fantasy, and basically from MMORPG culture, where MMORPG fans like to claim any change is "dumbing down".

 

In the real history of CRPGs, they've always been extremely diverse in how you got mana, and how much of a true "per rest" resource it was, all the way back into the 1980s. And I say mana because virtually all games used that mechanic, unless they were D&D-derived. Indeed that's been by far the biggest change, far bigger than anything you're talking about - resources other than mana. And a bigger change still than that, and one I note you are not complaining about was making HP-style systems not be "you are damaged until you get a magic heal or sleep at an inn".

 

Again, though, back to the 1980s we had CRPGs where:

 

A) You had a Vancian/D&D-style deal, where you didn't dynamically select spells, but picked a fixed bunch before/after sleeping (D&D rules suggested it was after but games often made it be before). Obviously actual D&D/AD&D games worked on this basis.

 

B) You had games where casters had a mana resource which could only be replenished by actual sleep, hard rests as you put it, and sometimes only in limited places, and perhaps if you were lucky by potions which randomly, rarely dropped.

 

C) You had games like B, but where potions were pretty common, or possible to buy and/or manufacture, and often the real balancing point was the opportunity cost of using potions.

D) You had games where mana regenerated continuously at some rate (often very slow), but where the hard-rest requirement was already gone.

 

E) You had games where mana regenerated continuously, and perhaps quite quickly, but where reagents where a huge deal, and spells were more like consumables than anything else.

 

And more!

 

And this was all in the 1980s and very very early 1990s, long before any kind of "casual audience" existed, long before "marketing" and "audience feedback" (beyond angry hand-written letters!) were a thing. We're talking about another era here. Yet you're misrepresenting it as if it were some MMORPG-style player-developer feedback loop. That's ridiculous nonsense.

 

This whole "lel casuals spam spellz like morons" thing is just gibberish, too, and again it reeks of MMORPGs, not actual CRPGs. "Casual" players have no specific way of playing. Some are cautious and barely even cast spells. Others are aggressive and rest frequently, and so on. The generalization you make is actively misleading. Further, on pen and paper games, what you're claiming is completely untrue, and we can walk through pen and paper game history if you like, but that's going to be a long walk. Fortunately I was playing P&P games from 1988 onwards and playing a wide variety of them so I am happy and able to discuss it if required.

 

Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options".

 

 

Here here. The real issue had nothing to do with casuals and mass markets and more to do with how players (especially hardcore players) were actually interacting with these styles of games.

[Revenant12]

I agree with the op. I use to love finding new grimoires to expand my repertoire of spells and their utility, changing them out to fit my needs. I'm not very far into the game but one poster suggested that each grimoire serves a specific purpose, such as a grimoire dedicated to fire spells... I'm not very far into the game, but this is definitely not the case with the first 5 or 10 books you find. I feel like this is the designer's way of playing the game for us, and it really detracts from the enjoyment of trying new individual spells without changing combat on a whole. I know this sounds cheesy, but finding new grimoires use to be more valuable to me than any piece of rare armor or weapon and now I don't even want to play a wizard.

[dam]

It was done to make wizards more specialised in POE you can learn every spell by copying it into your grimoire making all other grimoires useless once you had copied any spells you didn't already have. You still get to pick 2-3 spells per power level. Learn the ones you are going to use the most and if you need a specific spell or spells only for a specific situation use a grimoire with that spell/those spells. Wizards are still very powerful.

 

 

Oh we understand the approach perfectly.

 

The problem with this is... it gets old ?

 

You're constantly using the same 5-6 spells

 

 

 

In the BG series you actually had the *choice* to specialize your caster or not :

- wizards

vs

- specialized wizards for bonus casts

vs

- very specialized sorcerers

 

 

The problem with the current incarnation of the mage/priest system in POE2 is that you do not get to make that choice.

Sure, Grimoires are around to help offset this specialization a bit and allow you to swap some spells in combat, but this is... I don't know, tedious ?

I, for one, have mixed feelings about this.

[Eurhetemec]

 

Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options".

PoE 1 did manage to do this quite well though...

 

I can see the benefit of certain design changes, but the current system restricts my playstyle in a way PoE 1 never did.

 

 

I'm sorry, not actually sure what the "this" in your reply is referring to. Certainly it didn't really offer a choice of playstyles, if that's what you're suggesting.

[Eurhetemec]

 

It was done to make wizards more specialised in POE you can learn every spell by copying it into your grimoire making all other grimoires useless once you had copied any spells you didn't already have. You still get to pick 2-3 spells per power level. Learn the ones you are going to use the most and if you need a specific spell or spells only for a specific situation use a grimoire with that spell/those spells. Wizards are still very powerful.

 

 

Oh we understand the approach perfectly.

 

The problem with this is... it gets old ?

 

You're constantly using the same 5-6 spells

 

 

 

In the BG series you actually had the *choice* to specialize your caster or not :

- wizards

vs

- specialized wizards for bonus casts

vs

- very specialized sorcerers

 

 

The problem with the current incarnation of the mage/priest system in POE2 is that you do not get to make that choice.

Sure, Grimoires are around to help offset this specialization a bit and allow you to swap some spells in combat, but this is... I don't know, tedious ?

I, for one, have mixed feelings about this.

 

 

The BG example is pretty bad. Wizards were flatly inferior to Specialists, because the extra spell per day per level was gigantic, and many specializations were not a meaningful restrictions (esp. with scrolls and/or another caster to deal with any vital spells).

 

Sorcerors were also not "very specialized", they had an entirely different approach to using magic, one more similar to PoE2. They had a limited selection but you could ensure it had all the very best spells you needed most in it.

 

If you're using the same 5-6 spells in PoE2, that speaks more to the design of the spells than the system. Clearly those 5-6 spells are overpowered and need to be nerfed, or other spells need to be buffed to bring them up to spec. We saw much the same thing in PoE1, anyway. You might have a very large selection of spells, but given how few you could cast per-rest, on harder settings, if you weren't just cheesing resting (as many did), you had to be careful about what you used, which generally limited to you to a small selection of highly effective spells, with the odd situation-specific spell being used.

 

I think one other part of the issue is PoE2 being too easy. If it were harder, we would see more grimoire-swapping at least, to pick spells people were vulnerable to.

[Mikeymoonshine]

 

It was done to make wizards more specialised in POE you can learn every spell by copying it into your grimoire making all other grimoires useless once you had copied any spells you didn't already have. You still get to pick 2-3 spells per power level. Learn the ones you are going to use the most and if you need a specific spell or spells only for a specific situation use a grimoire with that spell/those spells. Wizards are still very powerful.

 

 

Oh we understand the approach perfectly.

 

The problem with this is... it gets old ?

 

You're constantly using the same 5-6 spells

 

 

 

In the BG series you actually had the *choice* to specialize your caster or not :

- wizards

vs

- specialized wizards for bonus casts

vs

- very specialized sorcerers

 

 

The problem with the current incarnation of the mage/priest system in POE2 is that you do not get to make that choice.

Sure, Grimoires are around to help offset this specialization a bit and allow you to swap some spells in combat, but this is... I don't know, tedious ?

I, for one, have mixed feelings about this.

 

 

Priests and druids don't even get a grimoire so they can swap out spells and gain access to ones they lost. The combat system has been completely changed and wizards sadly got a limitation just like every other class but it's still a lot less of one than the other caster classes get.

 

I would have been fine with them just keeping the old system and I argued against them changeing it but it really isn't that bad IMO now that I have been able to play the game. I'm sorry you find it tedious I get that but then on the other hand I enjoy not having to conserve my spells as much as I did in the last game. So there are positives and negitives.

[dam]

Going to necro an old thread here, for the sake of my fellow Watchers.

 

 

Anyone wishes to do so, you can possibly swap grimoire spells with the Unity Console mod, available over at the Nexus :

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/2

 

 

The console works just fine on version 4.1.2 (although I haven't tried editing grimoires, I just respec) although some features aren't available anymore since 3.0

[DiabloStorm]

Going to necro an old thread here, for the sake of my fellow Watchers.

 

 

Anyone wishes to do so, you can possibly swap grimoire spells with the Unity Console mod, available over at the Nexus :

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/2

 

 

The console works just fine on version 4.1.2 (although I haven't tried editing grimoires, I just respec) although some features aren't available anymore since 3.0

May be using this in a future playthrough. Being able to edit grimoires is something that should have remained in the game, adding additional effects is interesting too, but extra.

 

 

 

You may need an edited file to make it work

Edited March 13, 2019 by DiabloStorm

[Purudaya]

​

​

 

I very much agree, I do not like this either.

 

I'm possibly not even going to make a single wizard playthrough just because of that

 

I've started with a potd wizard, and I'm really tempted to start over with a different class for that reason.

​

​I do not have any complaints about the effectiveness of the wizard. It's doing fine. Merely the fun of the wizard. It's maddeningly stifling not being able to pick your own spell combinations, rather than be limited to the few you learn + what the grimoire has picked for you, minus any overlap. It's destroyed one of the primary enjoyments of the class, a tradition going all the way back to pen and paper. Long term thinking is gone too, due to the instant replenishing of spells after each combat, "action" style. Instant gratification central.

​

​Don't get me wrong: the Deadfire world looks amazing, the art is unreasonably beautiful, the game is immersive, and the writing, humor, and voice acting are top tier. But oh man am I not happy with wizards. Probably going to restart with a different class and hope for an eventual fix or community mod.

 

​This would be easy to fix: the core mechanics are mostly alright. It's just the bits 'round the edge. People who don't want to edit the grimoires certainly would not have to do so. Just allow their editing as in POE1, and provide an "ironman" type game mode to turn off the infuriating Diablo auto-regeneration of health and spells, and I'm a happy Deadfire player. You don't even have to rebalance anything: I can pick an easier difficulty if potd is too hard with those restrictions. These two things are really sapping my enjoyment at the moment. Everything else seems wonderful so far.

​

I realize this was originally posted a while ago, but there are now god challenges and in game items that can make all abilities per-rest and remove automatic healing if you're really into that playstyle. Might be worth checking out.

Edited March 14, 2019 by Purudaya

[D'rnkin Debauchery]

On 5/9/2018 at 5:53 PM, Gary1986 said:

Yeah I'm gonna pass on that. I'm just not going to use Aloth or wizards.

 

Such a really bad concept. Now I end up with friendly fire AOE spells that I'd never of picked given the chance being used by Aloth as he's set to auto-attack.

I have to agree with your thinking on this! I like writing spells that I want into a grimoire then selling off the unused ones!!