To Larian: Delete this quest. Entirely. No, you can't save it; the house is perfectly designed to show off all of the problems with the way your engine works, and every single point is perfectly optimized to show you a miserable experience.
Here's how it went for me on my one friday evening when I got home from work and had like an hour and a half to play and just ended up alt+F4ing it all away:
I was merely walking by the house when I got put into combat because my PC sorcerer's See Invisibility pierced the invisibility of a random ghost inside the building, on the second floor. I slowly, very slowly, so very, very slowly because everything is turn based speed and doors are tiny, manage to get into the house, and start dealing with ghosts. Then I encounter the skills.
Oh gods, the skulls.
- Point the first: the undead, the unholy, and the demonic should never ever at all in any way shape or form have blanket radiant immunity or resistance. If you really want to, you can put in stuff like one-shot resistance to illustrate how it *tries real hard* to get some semblance of resistance to something, and maybe even give it the damage feedback ability for that one shot... But if you have a problem with demons, undead, or hauntings, the cleric/paladin with radiant tools should be your first go-to.
- Point the second: 50 damage or go home? And it's 50 all per one damage packet, and not the total damage of a hit? Pure insanity. "Oh they're vulnerable to remove curse!" Yeah, no, there are a dozen of them, and you don't have that many scrolls or cleric slots to bother with that nonsense. Especially if the *easy* counter is the most boring one: Plant yourself 7 meters away (because they have 6 meter thunderwave range), and plink them with firebolt. If you don't have the cantrip +castingstat amulet, you have a 5.6% chance of rolling a 25 or more. This will take a while. Or you can waste fireballs at it. No two skulls seem to be in range of the same fireball, so I hope you brought enough to share.
- Point the third: If you insist on such a stupid enemy as the can't-kill-me-lol skull, make sure it works, okay? Make sure it doesn't use thunderwave to blast someone into a wall, notice that they're still in range, thunderwave them again, notice they are still in range, thunderwave again, and repeat until the target is dead in one single turn because for some reason your super special skull monster can't be bothered to adhere to the one-action-per-round rule.
- Point the fourth: The first skull I found I tried to fireball. It worked. Then, next turn, the nearby guards used their extra-sensory perception powers to detect my rude and destructive ways, and elected to declare war on my party for destroying an endtable. Wonderful work, chaps! Truly, high marks, all around!
- Point the fifth: One of the skulls is *inside* a stairwell, and it can't be killed, and it can't attack you, and you can't do anything about it, but it will keep you in combat mode for as long as you are within the zipcode. Seriously, was this quest playtested at all?
Alright, onward with the hell house. Finally reach the artist and the lady of the home. Can't talk to them because I am in turn based mode, they are cowering, and right-click>talk does nothing. Is this a bug? Most likely. But, eh, Act 3 quests, whotchagonnado? Back to the staircase. Slowly make my way up, revealing (the way See Invisibility works, you best have a Primary Caster with it, because otherwise the enemies have too much of a chance to make their save (another meaningless diversion from 5e rules), and that just means that the fights take longer. Again, nothing in the house is actually difficult or challenging, it's just that it takes so long, is constantly turn based, has so many bugs, per-floor-movement and targeting does not work because of how the camera focuses and eliminates upper levels, obvious moves become impossible because the UI doesn't want to allow them, and it just eats away at your resources (or your time), for nothing.
Finally get to the top of the attic. Find the cursed painting. "Burn it", it says. I toss a firebolt. It spawned a ghost. Okay, time to escalate. Fireball. Another ghost. What? Okay, just for the sake of stubbornness, let's try wall of fire. Yep, spawns a ghost each turn. Lovely. Remove curse? Narp. Fine, google time.
Quick rewind: the day before, I found an interesting house with no doors. Walking around it, I found that it had a hidden wall entry on the side. Entered it, got told off by an undead servant to leave, then was immediately attacked (by everyone inside the house). Oh, there's a lich! Quick, kill it! No, wait, it says it can't be killed. Did I just stumble into a quest? Nothing is triggering for my journal... whatever. Let's see how far I can take this. Oh, wow, I killed him? Yeah, turns out not much can survive direct confrontation with a hasted Karlach-flavored halberd. Oh, look, loot. And a useless +1 torch, lol. BTW, the quest this was supposed to tie into never triggered for me. Talked to Thrumbo beforehand, he just asked me to leave "his" house. Whatever. Lich was alive again after a long rest, as was expected.
Anycakes, google says that the only way to destroy the haunted painting is to use the useless +1 in-no-way-marked-as-a-relevant-quest-item torch that looks like one of those dime-a-dozen unique weapons that are actually just +1 weapons but fancy.
So there I am, in the attic, and looking at my options. Where is the torch? Not on any of the characters I have right now. Maybe in camp? Maybe Lae'zel has it? No way to tell. I am, naturally, still in combat, so... do I now spend ten minutes slow-walking my entire team out of the house, so that I can get out of combat, so that I can go to camp and check? No, screw this. Alt+F4.
Delete this house. Delete the artist. You can't even have him draw Astarion, what the hell is the point? Just have Jannath host an artsy party forever and be done with it.
To players: Until Larian wises up and deletes the quest, just... in Act 1, when you meet the artist enslaved by the Zhents, just stick a knife in his throat. Just stab him and be done with it.
