EDIT: Sorry-- I would delete this post if I could, as I've sort of figured out a solution to this problem, but apparently you can't delete posts.

I did encounter another incredibly annoying problem though, involving Black Garius refusing to die in the Inner Sanctum battle-- he just respawns endlessly at the portal in the middle of the room-- so if anyone happens to see this and know whether there's a bug here or if I'm missing something, any advice would be appreciated.

I've gathered from what I've read that it's normal for him to respawn from the portal a couple of times, but he did it in my game like twenty times. Apparently a cutscene is supposed to trigger when you beat him, but nothing was happening for me. Google wasn't very helpful here either, as searching mostly turns up information about an earlier bug in which the fight with Garius in the Crossroad Keep courtyard never ends. (I also encountered that bug, by the way, and had to fix it with a console command, so... yeah. I'm getting pretty fed up with this game.)

Original post follows.



All right, so I normally don't like cheating or lowering the difficulty or using exploits to finish games, but the entire final dungeon in the NWN2 original campaign is just one of the most thoroughly unpleasant gaming experiences I can recall ever having had, and in all frankness, I'm tired of constantly fighting with the terrible pathfinding and combat AI and bugs and I'm eager to be finished with this and moving on to MotB.

So, about halfway through the final dungeon I enabled god mode and let the AI deal with encounters for me while I went in the other room to eat cookies. Only, it stopped working for no apparent reason when I started fighting the three shadow reavers near the end. It was working and then it stopped. I reloaded and re-enabled god mode over and over, like eight or nine times, and it either does not work or works for a few seconds and then stops-- that is, I can see the little hovering zeros showing my party members negating all damage, and then suddenly I start taking damage again and everyone's dead.

Is anybody aware of any reasons that this particular encounter could be interfering with god mode? Or are there any abilities or conditions that could interfere with it? (Edit: as far as I can tell, God mode just decides to stop working sometimes for no clear reason, but re-selecting all party members and re-entering the command sometimes makes it work again. Sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it only works for a few seconds, but after a few tries it usually seems to "stick." Still have no idea what is causing it to deactivate.)

I've gotten the Garius-at-CK respawn bug only once in about ten play throughs; I've never had a problem with him respawning in the Inner Sanctum.

To eliminate the possibility of a mod conflict, make sure your override folder is empty. This folder should be in the "My Documents" installation, not the one in Program Files.

If that's been addressed, try luring Garius away from the portal before finishing him off. If I recall correctly, he regenerates quickly near the portal. It's possible that scripts are firing out of sequence here, and that's why you're seeing him respawn. That is, he may be healing fast enough in close proximity to the portal that you can't take him down.

Okay, thanks for the suggestion. I eventually just tried the fight again and he died on the first or second try, so maybe I was just unlucky before. I had tried luring Garius away from the portal and killing him in different ways in different areas of the room with no luck, so I'm not sure if it was a bug or if it worked for me on my second attempt because I killed him in a different way (like damage over time or something).

In any case, I'll go ahead and mark this as resolved since I've finished the game, even though I'm still not sure what was causing these particular problems or how to avoid them. Thanks again for the reply.