I'm sure this happens in several portions of the game and is not isolated to the below example.

 

Particles generated passively (by monsters etc?) appear to loop behind the scenes while the game is paused. Upon unpausing after a long wait the particles all attempt to animate at once and cause massive stuttering and leave the game unplayable for upwards of a minute while all of the effects attempt to play out in a giant explosive mess. If you assume that a monster such as a Greater Earth Blight generates it's particles once every 10 seconds (or it's particle animation loops after 10 seconds) then if the game is paused for 10 minutes then there would be 60 animations attempting to render at once.

 

When I first encountered this bug I was fighting a Greater Earth Blight and a Troll that I managed to separate from the group during the bounty "The Dweller." My attention was required elsewhere so I had left the game in pause during combat for approximately 10-20 minutes. Upon coming back and unpausing combat the area around the Earth Blight immediately became a royal cluster@$%! of particles all attempting to animate on top of one another. I imagine the results would be far easier to replicate on a computer that is lower-end as mine is a pretty beasty gaming pc. Despite this after unpausing I could only hear the battle resume as the screen crawled to a halt while trying to render what appeared to be a hundred or more itterations of the Earth Blight's particle trail in one concentrated location, all at once.

 

If a member of development is unable to reproduce the issue then I will attempt to reproduce it and record it as well as document exact steps required. I imagine though it should be pretty self explanitory and a dev member could easily just spawn 5 earth blights and leave it paused for like 10 minutes and see if it happens for them.

 

 

I've observed this as well, but only with lightning effects.

Huh.  Is there something like this going on when you fight Raedric take 2?  Because that fight was basically unplayable for me (thank god for autopause) due to how choppy it was for most of it, and that's the only time I had anything like that all game.

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I killed "The Dweller" but when I looted his body, I only got a piece of "Awakened wood" and no head.  When I went back to the warden to collect my (much needed) bounty - no dialogue was triggered for me to collecct the bounty and the quest is still showing up in my journal as incompleted.  I went back to the same spot to see if I needed to kill him again or if I missed picking up his head and nothing was there. 

 

I did engage some bandits at my keep via "manual resolve" before I visited the warden, maybe that's why I didn't get to collect the bounty, but I'm kind of frustrated at this point.  (

 

Any help or pointers?