Gray-mages in Poschengband

[TheQuest]

I was looking for ideal magic caster class for myself and tried a sorcerer, which was ok to me, but then I stumbled upon gray-mage class. I liked the idea of having a fixed amount of active spells and ability to memorize a spell from almost any magic realm. But from class description I thought that I can like memorize a desired spell now, but at any given time I could "forget" that spell and memorize another one. But it now seems that you can memorize one, and you can only override existing one upon gaining a new study point (new level), which limits me to 50 memorizations for the entire game only.

Am I right?

If so, it kind of destroys the flexibility that I thought gray-mage have: being able to memorize 10 spells ideal for one fight, and, if necessary, dememorize them (maybe at some mage tower only) so that to memorize another 10 for another fight where spells are more efficient (due to resistances of a monster)

[emulord]

Havent tried them, but this would be cool. I'm a fan of features where you can recover from character building mistakes.

But yeah having to spend $ at a Mage Tower to switch is a good limit.
Speccing spells specifically for certain quests or arena challenges sounds fun.

[krazyhades]

You're approaching the class from the wrong perspective. You relatively rarely want to tacticooly re-memorize spells in the dungeon on the fly for particular fights. Just make sure you are using rarely-resisted spells for your offense, and fill in the rest with whatever utility etc that you need. 50 is way more than enough re-memorizations to make it through the entire game. If there's something you can't fight, just...avoid it, like always in *bands. Mages have a lot of options for avoiding things...

Grey mage is not about being flexible in the super short term, changing from fight to fight. It's about cherrypicking the very best spells from (almost) every realm to build a handle-anything spell set while also avoiding most of the hp and weapon/blows problems of sorcerer and also not carrying book slots. It's extremely extremely strong.

[Conker]

krazyhades explains it well. It's about picking the best of the best. The limited memorizations really won't come into effect.

My (only) Poschengband win was with a Grey Mage (Dark Elf, polymorphed myself into Demigod halfway through). It's neat being able to get the most useful spells, but in my experience your slots are limited enough that you rarely get to feel the full benefit of it; you invariably have to carry so many devices to make up for things that you may as well be carrying the spellbooks themselves.

For reference, my final spells on my winner were the following:

Clairvoyance
Device Mastery
Ultimate Resistance
Weaponmastery (can't even recall why I used this... to melee chaff?)
Breathe Inertia
Magical Armor
Door Creation
Dimension Door
Mana Storm
Healing

A lot of that is coloured by the fact that I was using it to fight the Serpent/PGR at the time, so I was defensively focused. Still, generally, you want non-elemental/non-resistable spells (Fist of Force, or whatever it's called, isn't a bad early one) or ones that can stun or otherwise disable the enemy. Dimension Door is probably the best spell in the game, I expect it to get nerfed to uselessness soon. Another strong one is that high-level light burst spell. That can really help you kill monsters much stronger than yourself, assuming they're light-vulnerable.

You can also use Polymorph Self and Restoration/Cure Mutation (again, I forget the actual names of the spells) to selectively mutate yourself or change your race, but your stats will quickly drop. I ended up having to spend hours scumming for stat gain potions to undo the damage I did myself. Worth attempting if you have a large surplus of them, I guess, but otherwise don't bother.

[GenericPseudonym]

Originally Posted by Conker

Dimension Door is probably the best spell in the game, I expect it to get nerfed to uselessness soon.

It already has been heavily nerfed from its original form. In Zangband it was only a level 14 or so spell in the third book, and the chance of randomly teleporting instead of reaching your target location was 1 in (clevel^2) instead of the current 1 in 7. The current version also takes about 1.5 turns worth of time, but I'm not sure if that was in Zangband as well.