Is your skill level high enough to buy Adept level spells?

In those few minuets before going to the college, did you do any quests or level ups or change the game difficulty?

You can buy spell tomes as soon as you find them at the merchant and use it sure. But the merchants won't have a tome for sale that is too much above your current skill level. You are 40 in Conjuration which is it seems enough to have Adept spells show up. 33 isn't enough so no merchant stocks the other Adept spells.

It is starting to become a more serious problem for me. I've started using more schools of magic and those are the ones not showing up. I've used the console a couple of times to add the books that should be for sale to my inventory. The problem is I don't know how much gold I should take out to pay for them. I really hope this doesn't have to wait until the January data patch. I'm hoping this can be fixed in the executable. I may have to break out some tools and take a look.

to bump up my speech level i went to the dragonreach wizard and bought EVERYTHING he had.... and then took those items to other merchants and sold them all back...

the next time i went to the wizard which was shortly after.... here he had not only adept but master books.. and my magic skills are below 25.

yes scaling is a big problem because it is so difficult to balance. I would prefer to have ebony weapons available from the start but at horrendous prices. Or available on very strong enemies. It would be a trade off : do i save up because i want that super weapon, and then can't buy a single potion for a while, do i use up all my potions and try to kill that enemy to get his weapon at the risk of getting beat up by a random encounter with a wolf...Same thing for spells (the trade off would include price and mana cost).

The enemy scaling is better than it was in oblivion but its still unbalanced for items. feels like that to me anyway

It seems that the 2 opposite situations are possible.
I have access to master level spells in alteration even though i'm only at 65...
And i still haven't found master level destruction spells even though i have a 100...
I haven't checked every spell vendor though.

On the PC version I'm finding that spell tomes are consistently available from vendors (assuming they have the spell tome at all) when your skill is 10 below the number needed to purchase the spell level perk (i.e. 15 for Apprentice, 40 for Adept, 65 for Expert). The vendor may need to reset, and you may have to completely quit out of the game and restart if you obtained the necessary skill level in this play session. I believe it is only the quit game/restart that is necessary, but will do further testing to try to identify this. Aetryn 19:30, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

With further testing, either is sufficient (if the merchant has stocked its inventory, you will need to quit out and return, but if the merchant is due to reset, obtaining the necessary skill is all that is needed). Perks have no effect on this. Note that using the setav console command will not trigger the appropriate shop enablement (even if you quit out/reload). You can setav to one less than the threshold value and then use advskill (e.g. player.setav destruction 64, followed by advskill destruction 1000 until it flips you over to 65). It's not clear (and harder to test without the Creation Kit) whether quest rewards that grant you one point in a skill do or do not trigger tomes to become available. advskill, as well as naturally earning the points, result in predictable spell tome appearance. Aetryn 02:28, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for figuring out when exactly the tomes become available. Just to fill in a bit more of the story, here's what I can tell so far from the game data:

• There's no level limit on Apprentice spells -- since all characters start with minimum 15 in skills, any such limit wouldn't really have any effect, but nevertheless one wasn't even coded into the game.
  
• The specific flags that control the appearance of the books are a series of global variables (GLOB records), with names such as "PCAlterationAdept", "PCConjurationExpert". The default value of these flags is 100; it gets set to 0 to make the books appear.
  
• Therefore, on PC if you wanted to force the books to appear, you can use the command set PCAlterationAdept to 0. You'll still have to go through the normal shenanigans to get the vendor inventory to reset.
  
• The master level books are triggered by global variables named, for example, "MGRitualAltBook". Again, default value is 100, and it's changed to 0 to make books appear.

I haven't made any attempt yet to start looking at game scripts, though, so I can't provide any extra info on what exactly normally causes the global variables to be changed. --NepheleTalk 02:55, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps then, they also consider your level in the equation. What level were you when this happened?