Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems Missing an Elven Ceremonial Object

The only way to 'zoom in' is to lower the game resolution.

As you may already have discovered, you'll need to go back and finish off all 5 of the Black Ring bosses. The final fight will not start if you use the teleporter pyramids to get over the spikes.

Fortunately I didn't have to sit there wondering what was going on! I eventually looked on the Gamebanshee guide wondering why my attempts to hunt down the bosses didn't seem to be going anywhere and realised my error.

Although I have a save right outside the dungeon, I don't fancy killing all eleventy billion gargoyles again so I'll attempt to chuck my pyramids back over the spikes: or rather through them as I also discovered I can do.

It's a pity I'm approaching the end: I never realised DD was so much fun. Y'know, in spite of everybody else saying it is! I'll resume Beyond Divinity next, although I think just mostly not being set on Rivellon (at least AIUI) makes it a bit harder to tune into.

Hmm, spoiled a bit by my second encounter with Josephina, who was a big enough pain the first time round but who seems utterly invulnerable to everything I can throw at her now: flash attack, hell spikes, curse, elemental hail, life drain, a big sword with frost damage, summons, nothing has even the slightest effect. I've read various tactics and tried all sorts of things, but absolutely nothing works.

I found her much easier the second time around; I hit her before she could finish summoning (warrior character with the passive Stun skill maxed), so she kept retrying that and never moved on to attacking.

Did your character get blinded? Hell Spikes should have still worked then, though. Try using a shadow potion to take a break and set up for another attack (a warrior character using their special move will not turn visible if they don't direct target a nearby opponent).

Burning wall can be very effective, if you have it or spare skill points.
That's probably the best tactic you may not have seen already in topics like Chasing Josie...

I may give Burning Wall a try: I still have a spare six points to spend on something interesting. The main trouble is that even when I use Flash Attack, the Beige Shield of Invulnerability comes up before my sword strike even happens and it's all downhill from there; I'd hoped to get away with shadow potions and area attacks but I still turn visible as soon as I use Hell Spikes (which have no effect anyway thanks to the Beige Shield) and she immediately skewers me back, at a huge health cost in spite of me having 100-200 shielding against the various types of elemental attack (though I'm not sure they're relevant).

I'll try the Burning Wall but I may need to resort to cheating!

Still no joy: there were a couple of times I just used the "hit her until she's dead" approach but unfortunately relying on the weapon's frost damage to stun her is much too unreliable so at some point she'll just side-step me, outrun me and as soon as she gets to complete her chain of spells it's pretty much game over: I find her utterly unassailable from that point onwards.

I did eventually succeed by resorting to cheating, but I'm not particularly happy about that. I am utterly useless at boss fights though and as a rule I hate them, so I guess I can now revert my sword back to its previous attributes and continue (as an aside, I noticed that the one-handed sword seemed to have a much better success of striking than my usual two-hander: I guess it's faster).

Still, it wasn't as bad an experience as DKS' notorious Zeppelin escort mission. D:

Josephine shouldn't be anywhere close to invulnerable; she can blind the character and dish out decent damage (nothing armour, HP bonuses and restoration potions shouldn't be able to handle), but isn't particularly resistant to damage.
What level / class is your character?

Hell Spikes do physical damage, so you'd need Aura of Guarding to add a little protection for that, not Spell Shield.

If you didn't try it, circling opponents with Burning Wall can do a lot of damage quickly, with good timing and coordination, or slow / damage following opponents.

Er, yeah, I may have messed up my character build slightly, as I tend to do. I started off as a mage, and then decided an archer was more my sort of thing, before finally settling on a one-handed sword. And then a two-hander.

I suspect that my stats pane probably reflects the rest of my rather meandering and ill-conceived specialisation, since my characters seem to invariably end up as the old adage, Jack of all trades and master of none.

A mage gets less hit points per constitution point than a warrior, though with decent equipment bonuses it should still be ok (and less damage bonus per strength point). For a melee character the points put into intelligence would probably have been better spent split between strength and agility (relying on equipment bonuses for mana).

Just before the final fight, my stats were as follows (the number in brackets indicates the values with no equipment, without Finnigan's lockpicks in my inventory).

Level 53 Warrior

Vitality 1260 (444)
Magic 574 (30)
Strength 145 (111)
Agility 150 (112)
Intelligence 18 (10)
Constitution 100 (74)
Offense 124 (89)
Defense 108 (78)
Damage 139-178 (54-64)
Armour 484 (0)
Lightning Resistance 95 (25)
Fire Resistance 110 (25)
Poison Resistance 35 (25)
Spirit Resistance 95 (25)
Reputation 51
Weight 4500 (3820)

Thanks for posting that so I can compare: I think it confirms my suspicion that it's probably amazing I got as far as I did, even on easy. I'm reminded of my first attempt at Ego Draconis where I was being repeatedly pwned until I read some guidelines on how to do a proper build and how to not waste points, since I seem to be incapable of figuring it out for myself.

I may attempt another play-through now I'm almost-but-not-quite at the end, only this time I'll start as a warrior as that's obviously what I seem to find most comfortable in DD. Which is odd, as that was generally my least-preferred build in D:OS, though I admit that was probably in part because I always used to play mêlée characters and figured I should diversify a bit. But I probably shouldn't diversify with the same character in the same game.

I'm also wondering if I've somehow overlooked some of the better equipment in the game: in fact I only had four bits of the Dragon set (shield, cuirass, belt and gloves) so maybe I should've spent a little more time looking for the others. I was a bit disappointed by the damage rating on some of the swords, though: even Sword of the Gods seemed about as effective as a stick of celery sometimes.

I decided to restart using an actual warrior character this time and I have to say it's significantly easier. Part of that will just be that I have a better idea what I'm doing second time through, but I was surprised as how easily I breezed through the Aleroth catacombs at a low level, even completely clearing out the bottom one. I admit I'm still playing on easy because I'm a bit hopeless, but I guess I'm a bit less hopeless if I actually choose a character build that matches the playing style I'm using!

Now I just need to find a guide to spending skill points: at the moment it's all basic utility stuff like lockpick and identify, but I could do with a better idea of what I should be using in combat.

Getting the dwarven smith to upgrade the cuirass with the Dragonheart Gem (Warrior guild quest) and showing it to the king will get you the helm, to complete the set.


Warriors tend to have plenty of skill points, especially is relying on found or purchased spell books for mage spells.
Free skills, and spell books you can buy

The passive Stun skill is nice, but at low levels it doesn't get triggered very often, so you can wait until higher character levels to boost it.
Besides the obvious Sword Expertise, Augment Damage and Augment Defense:
A level of Repair is useful (I put 2 points in and had 3 pieces of equipment with that bonus, so could batch repair damaged equipment to maximize the value when trading... not that you need to worry about getting enough gold in the game).
I found level 1 of Reflect Missiles helped in spotting ranged opponents in forests, but I didn't boost it past that 'testing it out' skill point.

Keep any items you find with Pickpocket, Identify, etc. Alchemy level 1 is very useful for making restoration potions.
I maxed Magic Barrier, though eventually equipment bonuses should provide most of your resistances. A level or 2 of Survivors Instinct helps to top off your hit points when you return to populated areas to trade or turn in quests, but the healing is not fast enough to make any difference in combat.
Telekinesis is handy. I maxed Spell Shield and Aura of Guarding from purchased spell books, and used them during the middle of the game. Restoration can be maxed with spell books and quest rewards.


Stat points for warriors tend to end up as 2 parts strength, 2 parts agility and 1 part constitution, but that varies quite a bit at the beginning, depending on the bonuses and requirements on the equipment you find.

Early Starter Tips (NON-Spoiler Version)

ARIC'S WARRIOR GUIDE

That's very helpful, thank you. I feel like life in DD is an awful lot easier than last time, although I kind of miss my mage's ditzy-sounding voice.

It's also nice to have side-stepped some of the potential embuggerences such as refusing to get George's drudanae for him, sorting out the assassin subquest and remembering to take a look at the Thieves Guild.

I'm trying to remember the stuff that I'm gleaning from the guides you've posted: there's so much of it! But at least I'm making less of a mess of things than I did the first time through.

I suppose I'll continue to use this topic for my random dribbling in order to keep it in one place.

I thought I'd take a few screen shots of DD so I could look at the artwork in a bit more detail, and I have to say it's amazing: cropping and enlarging random bits (and smoothing the jaggies away) there's so much detail there that I realise I don't normally see, whether my character, others, even just the background image.

I thought that because I was running it at a higher resolution than it was actually designed for that I was miniaturising everything into oblivion, but I just did a rough back-of-an-envelope calculation for what I'm currently using (26" monitor at 1920x1200) in comparison with what would've been a fairly typical screen at the time DD was originally out, something like a 17" CRT at 1280x1024 (at least). What surprised me is that my monitor actually has fewer pixels per inch than the older type contemporary with the game, ~87 vs. 100, so its pixels (and therefore the details) are actually bigger than they would've been back in the day. Weird, that; I guess it's just because there's so much stuff on the screen all at once that you're sort of overwhelmed and none of the individual bits of artwork has as much of a chance to stand out.

I did try running it at a lower resolution with automatic resizing to fill the screen and I think it did look better, but I found myself just not wanting to get used to a much more limited overhead view.

Which I guess is where BD (and subsequently D:OS) have the advantages of being able to zoom to suit one's whims at the time. But DD is mostly set in the green-and-leavy parts of Rivellon and BD... isn't.

The original release of DD supported 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x786 resolutions (a config file edit could set the resolution higher, but that could cause the game to crash when opening the main map, the frequency of which was resolution and system dependent). Beyond Divinity added 1280x960.

Oh I see. So to pick a couple of examples, say 1024x768 on a 17" screen or 800x600 on a 14", that'd be around 75 ppi, so the individual bits of the image would be physically a little larger than I'm seeing, though not by a great deal.

I guess I just have to accept I can't have it all! If I want as much of the world on my screen as it can manage then the individual details do tend be be drowned out, but I'm not sure I could really live with the restricted visibility I'd get from the zoomed-in image, as much as it looks nicer and more artistic.

I should probably be less nerdy about all this and go and skewer some zombies instead.

Hmm, run into another "no dialogue" problem: I've now completed the Council of Seven quest, recruited the dwarf after recovering the Axe of Stone, freeing the elf and implicating the mayor, but the king has no dialogue option suggesting anything about the dragon armour, nor anything acknowledging the end of that quest.

I did approach him before remembering to pick up the manuscript so he asked for proof, but now he has nothing but his usual dialogue options regardless of whether or not I speak to Eolus before or after or get him to join the council or not, the king has nothing further to say about the matter. Is his dialogue irretrievably broken? I know the dragon armour dialogue is glitchy when talking to Sir Patrick but I seem to have found a new problem before I've even got that far...

Do you have the letter on you when you talk to the dwarven king? You need to toss it into the throne room and pick it up after entering, or toss a teleporter stone in to bypass the guards that take your stuff (or kill them using Poison Cloud, or something, cast near but not directly on them, to do damage without turning them hostile or resulting in a reputation drop).
IIRC the dwarven council member can take the letter and axe if you talk to him first.

I never thought about that! I'm not sure how I did it last time as I'm pretty sure it didn't involve me having to do that, but maybe that's why the Sir Patrick bit was glitchy.

I'll give that a try and see what happens. Worst case I have my savegames backed up from halfway through the mines part of that quest so I could start over, but I'd rather not...

Throwing the manuscript into the king's chamber did the trick: I'm glad it didn't involve violence, I generally prefer to avoid that except with characters I really dislike.

So about 1/10 for my creative thinking, again.

Next step Sir Patrick, who is also not being helpful, but I read your solution to that elsewhere, namely try talking to the king and his blacksmith again.