All pawn specializations in Dragon’s Dogma 2

By James On Mar 27, 2024

Pawn specializations play a big part Dragon dogma 2 — they can effectively grant great passive abilities to your pawns, as well as other pawns you’ve kept, resulting in big effects as you explore Vermund, Battahl, and beyond.

In this Dragon dogma 2 guide, we explain how to unlock pawn specializations in Dragon’s Dogma 2. We also show you a list of all pawn specializationsand, crucially, tell you how to change pawn specializations.

All pawn specializations in Dragon’s Dogma 2

You can think of a pawn’s specialization as one of its properties.

Image: Capcom via Polygon

As far as we’ve seen, there are six pawn specializations in Dragon dogma 2. See below for a full list of all pawn specializations we’ve encountered so far:

Surgery: Grants the pawn initiative to use curatives against both you and any pawns in your party
Logistician: Have the pawn combine items, both from your inventory and from the inventory of any pawns
Forager: Highlights the locations of items available to forage Dragon dogma 2 map, including minerals for upgrading weapons and armor
Hawker: Have the pawn offer to buy items from your backpack, for a price
Forest wordsmith: Teaches the pawn Elvish (useful when visiting Sacred Arbor)
Aphonite: Forces the pawn to stop talking (in most circumstances)

Since the effects of pawn specializations also provide de facto benefits to your character, it’s worth diversifying your party so that each pawn you follow has a different specialization. There is no point in doubling down on a pawn specialization; if a pawn knows how to translate Elvish or mark your map with resource locations, you don’t need another with the exact same skill.

Unless you don’t want to hear about all those damn ladders, in which case you should fill your party with pawns that have the Aphonite specialization.

You can filter pawns by specialization on certain rift stones.

How to Unlock Pawn Specializations in Dragon’s Dogma 2

You can unlock specializations for your pawns via Specialization Tomessingle-use items that can change your main pawn’s specialization. Dragon dogma 2 indicates that you can find useful items by befriending people, and that’s not a lie: you can earn specialization books by completing side quests and main quests for characters.

Kendrick gives the logistics book for pawn specializations to the player in Dragon's Dogma 2. — Kendrick, pictured above, will give you the logistician’s tome.

For example the Logistics tome can be earned by completing the main mission ‘Heels of History’. After saving Malcolm by talking to the other kids in the slums of Vernworth, you’re eventually approached by Kendrick (whom you may have met during ‘The Caged Magistrate’) as you walk through the city streets. hand over the volume to the logistics employee. This allows you to teach your main pawn the Logistician specialization.

Arisen approaches Malcom who is watering plants in a garden in the slums of Vernworth in Dragon's Dogma 2 to obtain the Logistician pawn specialization. — You can get the Forager’s Tome from Malcom, pictured above.

In fact, another tome can be obtained in much the same way. Revisit Malcolm in the slums of Vernworth, whom you rescued as part of the ‘Heels of History’ quest. After you complete the quest, Malcolm will visit you while you are in Vernworth and the The Tome of Forager on you. This allows you to teach a pawn the Roughage specialization.

Dragon's Dogma 2 Auriol and Flora in Vernworth — Flora, who is in the background of this shot, gives you the Chirurgeon’s Tome.

If you are looking for the Chirurgeon’s tomeLook no further than the side quest “Medicament Predicament”, the quest for Flora in Melve. Once you’ve acquired ingredients for Flora, you can find her in Vernworth, near the Merchant’s Quarter (something you do as part of the ‘Ornate Box’ mission). She will present the Chirurgeon’s Tome as a thank you for your earlier help. This allows you to teach a pawn the Chirurgeon specialization.

It is worth mentioning that the methods of obtaining the specialization books in Dragon dogma 2 seem somewhat arbitrary. For example, we had to wait more than an in-game week for Kendrick and Malcolm to give us their respective specialty books, and we couldn’t approach them for those books; they had to come to us first and start a conversation.

We will update this guide as we learn more methods for unlocking specialization books in Dragon dogma 2.

For more Dragon dogma 2 explainers, see how to unlock all the vocations, check out our list of the best augments, or poke around our interactive Dragon dogma 2 card.