Mastering Magic: A Guide to Scroll Learning for Wizards in Baldur's Gate 3

Spells, magic, the ol' secret saucery-with hundreds of magical abilities available in Baldur's Gate 3, it's no wonder you'd want to know how to learn new spells. Most of them are acquired through levelling, but the wizard class has its very own OP trait that lets you transcribe and acquire spells from scrolls that you find, adding them to your spellcaster's repertoire. This guide delves into the intricacies of learning spells from scrolls as a Wizard, including multiclassing considerations and strategic spell preparation.

The Wizard's Unique Ability: Transcribing Scrolls

In Baldur's Gate 3, the Wizard class stands out due to its exceptional ability to learn spells from scrolls. Unlike other classes that primarily gain spells through leveling up, Wizards can transcribe spells found on scrolls directly into their Spellbook. This mechanic allows Wizards to expand their magical repertoire far beyond their initial spell selection.

How to Learn Spells from Scrolls

The process of learning spells from scrolls is straightforward:

Acquire a Scroll: First, you're going to need a scroll. Scrolls can be found throughout the game world in chests, as loot from enemies, or purchased from vendors.
Open Inventory: Select your wizard's portrait and press I to open their Inventory, or press tab to open Party View and then select your wizard.
Right-Click the Scroll: Right-click on the scroll you want to learn.
Learn Spell: If you can learn the spell, the second option in the menu will list the price. Simply click it to acquire the spell. This consumes the scroll and costs a fee that scales with the character's current strength, but I found it was never more than 100 gold or so.
Prepare the Spell: Use Prepare Spells and un-select a spell to fit your new ability in if you want it available right away. If you want to see all spells available for your wizard to learn, press tab for Party View, head to the Spellbook, then click the Learn More spells option next to Prepare Spells on their character column. This provides a more in-depth list of all available scrolls you can use to get spells as well as what level they are.

Once learned, the spell is permanently added to your Wizard's Spellbook and can be prepared for use.

Preparing Spells: Customizing Your Magical Arsenal

After learning a spell, it's not immediately usable. Like any other spell in Baldur's Gate 3, you need to prepare the spell. This is done by going to your spellbook and then looking at the sheet for the Wizard. Here, you can see your list of prepared spells as well as all of the ones the Wizard knows. To make your newly learned spell active, you just need to prepare it, which likely means replacing one of your current spells.

As a Wizard, you can replace prepared spells whenever you want, so you can mix and match with different combinations and prepare certain ones for specific situations in Baldur's Gate 3. You can prepare spells at any time outside of combat as a Wizard.

For example, if you need to put out a fire and your Wizard knows the spell to bring forth rain, then you can quickly prepare that spell and be able to put out the fire. As a note, you cannot prepare different spells once you enter combat, so all of the preparation needs to be done outside of combat.

Multiclassing and Scroll Learning: Expanding Your Magical Horizons

The ability to learn spells from scrolls opens up interesting possibilities when multiclassing. A popular strategy involves taking a single level in Wizard on a character primarily focused on another class, such as Cleric or Sorcerer.

The Wiz 1/Cleric X Build

Whoa, I just tried that with Shadowheart. Fortunately I had a bunch of scrolls in my inventory, and sure enough, by making her a Wiz 1/Cleric 7 I was able to learn all the mage scrolls up to 4th level spells. So as long as you can find the scrolls, a multiclass wiz(1)/cleric(x) can eventually learn and cast every wizard spell in the game. Wow! I guess the downside is that you can pick only a few wizard spells to prepare, and their difficulty will be based on intelligence … but they can be of any spell level and not every spell has a saving throw. Huh, this makes me re-think my class progression yet again!

This approach allows the character to learn a wide range of Wizard spells from scrolls, supplementing their primary class abilities.

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Sorcerer Multiclassing

A perfect example is: if you have a char with 11 sorc + 1 wiz. In one of my playthroughs I have a F1/W1/Bard 9 (soon to be 10). I can learn wizard spells all the way up to level 5, because I have level 5 spell slots.

Retaining Spells on Respec

Kind of an odd little bonus to re-spec a character from wizard into a multi-class wizard/spellcaster: you retain all the wizard spells you learned from scrolls.Example: Start with wizard level 6 who chose Fireball at level up and then learned Fly from a scroll during gameplay. Go to Withers, re-spec the character to Bard 5/Wizard 1. Now you get to prepare only two wizard spells, but … the Fly spell is still in your wizard book and you can cast it using a level 3 slot. The fireball spell is gone, however, since that was selected and not learned from a scroll in this example.

Addressing Common Misconceptions

There are some common misconceptions surrounding scroll learning and multiclassing:

Level Restrictions: "a level 1 wizard can learn only level 1 spells. No Misty Step that way!" --- That is the case only if your char that contains this level 1 wiz class does not have a spell slot of a level high enough for the scroll being scribed.
Exploit or Feature?: I don't actually think it needs to be fixed, but any time I try explaining to people that a multiclassed Wizard using this trick is still weaker than a pure sorcerer they just stay mad and continue to view it as an exploit. Yes, and its not a bug. The PHB says that wizards can learn any spell from scrolls they have spell slots for. And in D&D5 you can gain higher level spell slots through multiclassing. So there is nothing to "fix".

Is a Multiclassed Wizard Weaker than a Pure Sorcerer?

All the memorizable utility spells? Druids can cast them all without needing to memorize scrolls. Damage spells? You pick fire or lightning and just upcast fireball or lightning bolt. Lightning is better as theres several subclasses that boost lightning spells, and also you get chain lightning with your level 6 slots. Theres no spells I absolutely needed to memorize, just that at first deep into act 3 I was struggling to find a lightning bolt scroll to try out the multiclass lightning spec, and its ok but still not as good as a pure sorcerer. The level 1 ritual spells like featherfall / enhance leap and such, you can pick them on an EK or AT if you really want them - Laezel with athletics and enhance leap basically jumps across the the entire map.

Strategic Spell Selection: Examples and Considerations

I am level 8 in my game now, and I am still learning what I do and do not like. I like dual wielding hand-crossbows quite a bit. Fireball is great, but glyph of warding is even better in some ways. More than one Misty Step is always good to have (see above).

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tags: #bg3 #scroll #learning #spells