How to change Pawn Specialization in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Specializations are yet another way you can customize your Main Pawn in Dragon’s Dogma 2, but acquiring and selecting new Specializations isn’t as straightforward as other areas.

Unlocking new Specializations for your Pawn is hard enough as it is, and will require long and thorough interactions with very specific easy-to-miss NPCs. Add in the fact that the game doesn’t really explain the ins and outs of changing your Pawn’s Specialization, and this should-be simple task suddenly becomes a very complicated one—and one that you can quickly regret. Read on to learn how to change your Pawn’s Specialization in Dragon’s Dogma 2 and why you should be very careful about doing so.

Dragon’s Dogma 2: How to change your Pawn’s Specialization

Shockingly, there is only one way to change your Main Pawn’s Specialization: Unlocking and activating a new Specialization. There are six known Pawn Specializations in Dragon’s Dogma 2, and each one has its own complicated unlock process. To get a new Specialization, you usually need to complete a side quest or series of side quests for the right NPC, who will then give you a tome. Using that tome will immediately change your Pawn’s specialization to align with whatever knowledge is contained therein.

The confusing and downright questionable part of this process is that there isn’t any way to change your Pawn’s Specialization back to what it was before using a new tome. Because there are six Pawn Specializations, you can only change your Pawn’s Specialization six times, then you’re locked in permanently unless you manage to find a duplicate of a given tome.

This means if you have a Pawn with the Woodland Wordsmith Specialization that allows them to understand Elvish, then you find and read a Logistician’s Tome, the Pawn’s ability to comprehend Elvish will be replaced with an ability to combine items and distribute loot evenly across the party. Makes perfect sense, right?

It’s understandable that you can only have one Specialization equipped at a time for balancing reasons, but what’s hard to grasp is why you aren’t able to change freely between the Specializations that you have acquired tomes for. If you want to change your Pawn’s Specialization back to one that you previously had, you might not be completely out of luck, however.

I haven’t personally encountered it yet, but according to this Steam thread, you can get the Chirurgeon’s Tome (usually acquired by completing Medicament Predicament) by using the Rose Chateau‘s services enough times. This means that you can potentially change a Pawn’s Specialization back to Chirurgeon after switching to something else by acquiring a second copy of the tome, and the fact that there is a duplicate of this tome means there’s a good chance the others have multiple iterations as well—it’s just a matter of finding the damn things.