Orc/Ogre Cave quest empty?

Okay, started a new game and wanted to give a quick update:

The bug with the duplicates of the party appearing in Hommlet is still there. Very annoying.

Cure Moderate Wounds isn't blank anymore in the Druid spell selection screen - it's gone completely, replaced with Warp Wood I think. Is that intentional, do people prefer all the other spells over the healing one? Could get tricky if a Druid is your only divine caster.

Something new, though it might be intentional: I'm using Allyx's Shop Map without the two extra options (naked PCs and the other one), and while the other characters appeared there just wearing the farmer's garb, the one that had taken Exotic Weapon Profiency (Bastard Sword) also carried a bastard sword. Makes a bit of a difference, considering the price.

On a side note, am I the only one who hates the in-game font? Never can tell 6 and 8 apart ...

 

Would be great if someone changed the font. Without my PnP knowledge, I'd often be at a loss if a weapon does D6 or D8.

I'm on my fourth or fifth install now, with different official/unofficial patch combinations, and it happened in every one, as I recall. No problems at all with looting. When I came here, I expected the clones to be THE BIG BUG, but instead I found lots of talk about looting, which works great here.

System: Celeron 2.0, 512 MB RAM, ASUS Radeon 9600SE, Windows XP SP3, DirectX 9.0c.

When first browsing here, I read somewhere that even with the Modpack, it's still a good idea not to scroll in Hommlet while the party is moving. I've been heeding that and it seems to decrease the number of occurences of the bug, but I don't know if that advice actually referred to it.

I've noticed the bug occuring in three ways, always and only in Hommlet:

1. I let my party move and a duplicate of one or more characters remains behind. It goes through the moving animation but remains rooted to the spot. It stops moving when the original moves, and stays there, doesn't go through the animation again even if the original does. Many clones can be created this way. First time I encountered the bug, my Druid's animal companion populated the whole place with identical wolves.

2. I scroll away so that my party is off screen, click for them to move somewhere, and find two sets of characters arriving. One comes to a stop and then remains there, while I still control the other.

3. I've left Hommlet and return, only to find copies of my characters standing around. Sometimes spread out like normal, sometimes all occupying a single character's space (that looks weird). Again, they don't move, and can't be controlled by me.

I can attack the clones and kill and loot them, they don't fight back. I wonder what my therapist would say if she knew I sometimes do that. If I leave a map that has clones, their data gets used, so when I arrive at the new map, all the XP, items etc I gained since the clones came into being are lost.

What I do is not scroll while the party is moving, and only move them from one visible spot to another visible one. Makes running around the village a pain, the reason I haven't tried Desperate Housewives. When I leave Hommlet, first thing I do at the new location is save and travel right back, to see if there are clones (I usually find them outside the inn). If not, I reload the save. Then I do my thing on the new map, and save before I travel to Hommlet so that I have something to go back to if clones appear while I'm there. Still have to replay stuff every once in a while, clones are sneaky buggers. And the paranoia's bad, I'm constantly checking my characters to see if they're still the originals.

Three things that might or might not be related:

A. Sometimes, and only in Hommlet too, my whole party is selected but when I click for them to move somewhere, not all of them do so. It looks like they're still all selected, but only the ones that moved then will continue to respond to move orders unless I reselect all and have them meet up in a spot between those that moved and the ones that stayed. Occurs most often right outside the brewery, but can happen everywhere in the village.

B. My graphics lag A LOT. Map scrolling, all animations, and "special effects" like spell area graphics or five foot step visual representation, nothing runs smoothly constantly or appears right away often. So far it's just annoying, but I'm afraid what will happen in battles with lots of magic effects happening. I used Web on the zombies in the Moathouse, and that fight became a bit of an exercise in patience. My in-game graphics settings are as low as possible, as far as I can tell. For some reason, it seems to be worse with the CMF compared to 5.0.0.

C. I get the occasional crash to desktop. Most often when I talk to Burne and his sound file starts playing, but I think it can happen everywhere.

 

Ooh, thanks, I wasn't aware of that. The post doesn't appear special and doesn't react to mouseovers, I never thought to click on it. Using it helps a bit.

I'm mostly tired of the early part of the game, as I've played that a couple of times now in the past week or so, only to reinstall and start over with a new patch/mod. I have yet to make it past the Earth Temple. With the measures I described, it's not too bad anymore, so I'll keep playing for now. There's nothing obviously going wrong during installs, and I have followed Zebedee's instructions, so I have little faith in trying again. But once I've completed the game once, and if I feel like replaying, I'll probably experiment a bit there.

 

More ...

- In 5.0.6, I seem to be unable to complete Burne's Agent Revealed quest. The person I need to talk to is never in the worker's camp, no matter at which time of day I try.

- The Robes of Midnight appear in the radial menu under equipment, but they don't have any power that could be activated. Also, their description says they give +2 WIS, but they only give +1.

- The Sword of Silver Chaos is a bastard sword, but the description says Profiency: Martial, Greatsword.

- I think there is an issue with weight calculation of potions. My cleric had lots of single unidentified ones in her inventory and wasn't encumbered. Then she cast Read Magic on each one and stacked them together where appropriate, and suddenly she was. I'll try to recreate this when the opportunity comes up.

Did I get it right that one should be level 5 when going to Verbobonc? Thing is, I've done the Hommlet quests, the Grove, Moathouse, Meadows, Orc cave, Nulb quests, fishing trip, Hickory, and the tower with the brigands, and I went in the back entrance (I assume) to the TOEE and killed the woman in white there before I went back and started on the TOEE from the top ... and now I've cleared out the Earth Temple level and my NG six PC, no NPC party just turned level 9. So I'm worried if I go to Verbobonc now via the prisoners on that level, it will be too easy and make the rest of the temple even easier. Then again, it seems there are still some issues with Verbobonc, so maybe it's just fine if I skip it alltogether? I don't see how I could have been level 5 for it without skipping earlier parts of the game though, even with a full normal party of five PCs plus three NPCs.

 

I was able to complete all of Verbobonc with a 5 PC, 2 NPC party at level 8 with some moderate difficulty. Your ease or difficulty will mostly depend on your party makeup and playing style.

As to "issues" I've been palying v. 5.0.0 with no issues of any kind in Verbobonc. I was able to complete all the quests without issue.

Good Luck and don't miss out on this area. Co8 did an excellent job and even left room for improvement and additonal conent.

 

I noticed I'm not always gaining XPs from battles anymore, I assume this is due to the CR being too low? I only ever played 2nd Edition PnP, so I don't know much about CR rules. My party's lvl 10, I guess some encounters are too easy now. I did only now complete the Amii's Cure and Agent Revealed quests though, and they didn't net me any XP either.

 

Are you sure you're not playing with the level cap on? If so, you're capped at level 10 and will not gain any additional XP for anything.

 

No, I set the cap to 20 in the frontend, and I'm getting XP for some fights, just not for all. And not for those two quests.

 

Goodness! I guess I should have been paying better attention to my XP gains. I never knew that XP gains could be influenced by CR and the like. Good to know for next time.

 

What about the quests though, do they have a CR too? I thought they'd give fixed amounts.