What I've done, and others are suggesting, is to wait until your spellcasters know *all* their spells before retraining. Then you don't postpone obtaining the best spells, or cut yourself off from those spells altogether if you retrain to a non-spellcaster.

> In the description the designer says he doesn't want to have killing of boring scores of monsters, and I don't like needless grinding any more than the next person. Depending on how one plays the game though, perhaps a little might be needed.

A little, but you'd be surprised how fast characters level up again, especially if you don't retrain your entire party at once. At the beginning, you level up on easy monsters with low XP. By the time you've acquired a few hundred hit points and strong spells, you're fighting monsters worth a *whole* lot more XP. Retraining your characters does weaken your party, but you're not starting out at square one again, either. If you retrain, for example, only half your party at a time, you can continue to adventure on almost the same depths you could before and recover the lost XP orders of magnitude faster than you did the first time. It's not uncommon for freshly retrained characters to go up the first 8 levels all in one shot, after a single XP-gathering expedition.