Safiya the Evoker: Editing specialist wizard school

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Since there doesn't seem to be any information on the 'net about changing specialties and since the user-friendly character editor doesn't have the option to change Wizard specialized school, I thought I'd share what I found.
The program:
TlkEdit
tlkeditr13b.zip
http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/2datlkgfferf-editor

Now, neither of the exe's worked for me (both complained of a missing dll), but, with Java installed, double-clicking on tlkedit.jar brought it up.
After you click open, navigate to your savegame directory, and pick the character file; you're going to have to choose "All Files - NWN 2 mode." (I'm not sure the mode makes a difference on open but you might as well pick it here. Opening it in NWN2 Mode sets it to save that way by default, so it's probably safer.)




After you get it open, Wizard School is under ClassList -->[x] --> School. As Safiya is a Wizard(7)/Red Wizard(10) you'll see her two classes as ClassList [0] and [1]. Her Transmuter class is under [0].
"ClassLevel 7." She has 7 Wizard levels. We must be in the right spot!




As you can see, the code for Transmutation school is 8. If you want an Evoker, change it to 5. For the other schools, you'll have to run your own tests to find the values. (I made an Evoker, saved him, then opened him up in the editor to find that Evoker was 5.)


Now, after doing this, when I went and used my old editor to de-level Safiya down to 1 and rebuilt her in-game as a Wizard(5)/Arcane Scholar(7)/Red Wizard (I have the NPC multiclassing mod, of course), after I finished I found she had lost the "Arcane Scholar Spellcasting (Wizard) [1889]" and "Red Wizard Spellcasting (Wizard) [1886]" feats somewhere along the way, leaving her with only a spellcaster level of Wizard(5). I had to add those feats back in.
(Since I was doing a LOT of fooling around testing things out, losing those feats may have been the result of something I did elsewhere. You may not suffer the same problem. I'm just putting this info here in case you do hit the same bug and were thinking that the game won't properly parse a changed specialty. It does.)

Result:



This was a test of her as a Evoker(5)/Arcane Scholar(7)/Red Wizard(10) with Practiced Spellcaster. Her caster level is 22 + 4 (practiced spellcaster) + 5 (Red Wizard) = 31 for Evocation spells. Ice Storm's cold damage is 2d6 + 1d6 per 3 levels in cold damage, so 31 caster levels should give us an additional 10d6 cold damage, for a total of 12d6 in cold. Maximized Ice Storm did 67 points + 5 (resisted) for 72 cold damage = 12d6.
Success!

Here's something you RP purists will love: Kaji seem to be tied to Transmutation. I have one edited savegame where he's stuck at level 2 (with no points in open lock or disable device) and one where he can't be summoned at all. So if she's not a Transmuter, don't expect her to have her Transmuter familiar.

Oh, and since so far I've only changed a Transmuter to Evoker (which have the same prohibited school), I don't know how the game deals with it if you change specialty while knowing prohibited spells. It may allow you to cast them illegally, you may not be able to prepare them, or it may break the game until you edit them out. Enjoy the surprise!
(E: The game seems to allow you to cast prohibited spells you know, so there shouldn't be a problem)

---------- Added 0 hours, 44 minutes and 5 seconds later... ----------

Oh, and on a tangential note, be careful if you decide to level Safiya as an Arcane Scholar. The game treats Improved Empowered Spell as an Influence feat for her. If you don't have enough influence the scripting will remove the feat regardless of the fact she has a class that grants it.

 

This was about changing the school of a specialized wizard, not the ancillary Arcane Scholar multiclassing I like to add for the Improved Maximize. The character editor that used to be linked on this site (and can now be found here) doesn't give you the option to change specialization, nor can you change the level 1 class. You can take a character down to level 1, but if that level 1 is a specialist wizard, you can't go past that and undo or edit the specialist school. (e.g., you can bring Sand down to a level 1 Transmuter, but it's impossible to make him anything other than a Transmuter with that tool, nor can you completely redo him and make him into, say, a Barbarian. You're stuck with 1 level of Transmuter.) The tool I found and linked in the OP gives you more options. I spent around four hours messing around in the toolset and spent another couple hours on google trying to find a way to change Safiya's specialty, and since nowhere did I find a post that actually told me how to do this, I decided to write a guide once I figured it out. (It certainly didn't help my search that IGN just dumped the entire NWVault. It's NWN2's version of the Megauploadpocalypse.)


Safiya is originally a Transmuter/Red Wizard. While thinking ahead to the 1/2 HoF run I was about to make, I was irked by the fact that this is a pretty stupid combo in game terms. What does Red Wizard's +5 caster levels, additional +1 to overcome SR for the chosen school, and +4 defense to the chosen school, do for Transmutation? Nobody with an INT over 8 would pick Transmutation. Transmutation may make sense in the Forgotten Realms setting as a whole, but in the narrow NWN2 implementation it doesn't make much sense because the only worthwhile offensive Transmutation spell is Slow. I mean, look:

http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Transmutation_spells

Disintegrate? Waaay overshadowed by Isaac's Greater Missile Storm.
Greater Shout? Again, you have to be joking compared to IGMS or Improved Empowered Firebrand.
Extract Water Elemental? Again, can't compare to IGMS.
Shout? This one's closer since sonic ain't bad and it's up against the Lesser Missile Storm which is only a quarter of its bigger brother, but here you're up also up against the uncapped, no-save Ice Storm.

Note everything better just happens to be Evocation.

Since you get +1 DC for every 3 epic caster levels, the Red Wizard's +5 to caster level gives you +1 or +2 DC for your mass damage dealers like Firebrand and Improved Empowered Incendiary Cloud. (30ish rounds of 6d6/rd AOE damage? This is needed for sanity in 1/2 HoF since it often puts you up against opponents who can only be hit on a 20. [heaven help when you're rolling for those 20's against 50% concealment!])
The +6 to overcome SR? What school has all the no-save damage spells whose main weakness is running into SR?
-Polar Ray
-The entire Bigby's line
-Isaac's
-Ice Storm (which is also uncapped, so the +5 levels gives you an additional 1 or 2d6 damage)
-Scorching Ray
-And even the old standby, Magic Missile, which has saved my bacon more than once after exhausting every single higher level spell slot.

The +4 to defense? With Evocation being so good you're throwing them out there no matter what, so the greatest benefit is in the help in dodging your own spells!

Now, there's also something to be said for Necromancy, but since I personally get far more out of Evocation, I went with that.


Since school specialty does have an impact on gameplay, it's something that someone else out there might also want to mess around with. Since the information on how to do this was not easy to come by, I decided to dump what I found.

 

She gets resisted pretty often until she starts racking up the levels. With +6 to caster level to overcome SR from the Enhanced Specialization, I haven't seen a spell resisted since her early 20's. The same can't be said for Gann or Kaelyn.

 

Cool. One of my favourite mods for the BG games is lvl1NPC, so I can understand where you are coming from. Maybe I'll do some editing if I get back to nwn2.

 

I apologize for necroing. I think this is a question a lot of players might be interested in. I chose a Generalist Wizard as a starting class. Later regretted it, one extra spell per level is far more useful than a handful of lost school spells, especially as my character multiclassed. I have to say, penalties for specialization are far too mild compared to advantages. There's really no reason to pick Generalist over any of the specializations.

Bottom line...half way into campaign, don't want to start all over.

Tried this editor. Program works, values changed, save loaded, everything stayed the same. Changed school to 7 (for Necromancer), changed starting package to 33, wizard still stays Generalist. Seems to me like it does nothing. Any ideas as to what could go wrong? Perhaps I have some spells memorized from the prohibited school? But the author of this thread managed to get it to work all the same.

EDIT: This is odd, I ran the program as administrator, pointed it to the save folder located presumably in :/mydocuments/neverwinternights2/saves directory, selected the player.bic file. No value changes at ALL when I load a save, even mundane stuff like gold and xp. For the record, I have a legal copy of the game purchased from GoG.

 

It is possible it still pulled the virtual store thing, or it saved it in the administrator's my documents folder instead of your folder.
Look around in both locations for another copy of the file.