SoZ spoilers

[deganawida]

I forgot to mention this cool little party dialog bit that I ran into last week: There's this cold iron mine that has been taken over by some company that won't trade with anyone. Turns out the company is a bunch of ogres. When you enter the mine, you're confronted by a couple of disguised oni. I don't know what happens normally, but my ranger, who had Favored Enemy: Giant, said, "Hmm, you smell like giant", and the ogre mages were shocked, transformed, and the battle was on. It was a great little addition to the system IMO.

[J.E. Sawyer]

Skullcrusher? Is that THE Skullcrusher from Pool of Radiance?

Yes. He is an old man in SoZ. You can either listen to his stories and receive a nice morningstar (Brainscrambler) or attack him to get his morningstar and the Cadorna Family Sword, which was gifted to him by Phlan ex-councilman Porphyrys Cadorna.

 

Also there is a special conversation chain between Skullcrusher and Ribsmasher if Ribsmasher is in the party when you meet SK for the first time.

[Gorth]

Is that the same Ribsmasher as you have on your soccer team?

[J.E. Sawyer]

Ribsmasher the character predates Ribsmasher as Alvin's nickname.

[Gorgon]

How do you beat the battle with the herald of Zehir. I mean the thing is invulnerable, even if you could stay alive long enough to focus on it, it regenerates.

 

Best effort so far has been to clear them out with the exception of one Yuan ti priest, and the herald. I cast 3 gate spells from scrolls, and all that did was slow them down a bit.

 

Is this the end battle.. doesn't feel like it from the journal.

Edited December 6, 2008 by Gorgon

[Starwars]

It is the final battle of the main quest. But you're free to explore and complete other quests once you finish it, the game only ends when you retire.

[Gromnir]

can't post at bioware, so we will make some observations in this place... mainly concerning some odd bugs we has run across.

 

bug 1) the conyberry meeting in which jon wright monologues for a bit after which there is a yuan-ti attack can result in a strange bug. if you save game after battle but before leaving conyberry tavern... then reload the saved game, the yuan-ti will respawn.

 

good: for the nutters who love infinite exp bugs you can garner 1900 exp each and every time you do the save, reload, kill yaun-ti cycle.

 

bad: if your party is injured, having to fight 7 or 8 yuan-ti holy guardians just to make it out o' the conyberry tavern.

 

bug 2) am not sure where, when or why this happens, but sometimes (very very rarely) when we transition from a location to the overland map, our character dies. can be perfect healthy in port last, and then transition to overland and all party members is dead. game over. huh?

 

played a bit o' motb wit soz loaded and the insta-death transition happened a couple o' times in the span o' 2 hours of gameplay.

 

bug 3) speaking o' motb...

 

after finishing soz, we took our level 18 character into motb for a short time. am not getting companion loyalty feats. safiya, kaelyn, okku and gann is getting their feats as normal, but not Gromnir's character. perhaps we has too many history feats already? not sure.

 

not an additional bug, but the oft mentioned shield equip bug also appears occurs with motb characters, so am guessing that the motb companions has the upgraded ai. after a fight we noticed dove armed with a bare fist and shield, having unequipped her mace o' disruption.

 

bug 4) have only seen this mentioned once, but the random special encounters, like the party polymorphed into chickens n' such, disappears from our game. it seems that any such encounter that moves also disappears. stuff like the wood elf, drow kinslayer and strange gnomes does not disappear.

 

possibly unrelated observation, but will bring up anyway. the disappearing special encounters quirk only began after we traded out our sorcerer for a wizard character. am not sure why this would make a difference, but that is following the change in our 4 man party, we noticed this quirk.

 

thankfully many o' the bugs is fixable via the console. npcs with missing feats and caravans that won't finish upgrading... the community has done a nice job coming up with work-arounds.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Atreides]

The Baanite's gloves with built in Inflict Moderate Wounds are awesome. I had to invest 10 points into use magical device to get around the Evil requirement but it's awesome.

 

I haven't finished the game yet, restarting a few times to "play right". Getting those gloves early to have them for most of the game was one example. That Baanite battle had great AI. Really like SoZ because of the trading and great party v party combat like that.

 

My main gripe is loading time takes very long now. Especially now that encounters make loading more frequent.