Okay, this isn’t new for patch 9, but I can’t see any recent discussion on these oddities within the Shattered Sanctum.
This playthrough, my paladin didn’t care if the whole place went hostile so Dror Ragzlin and everyone around him was already red before I got near him.
First niggle is that outside the room where you find Ragzlin there’s an NPC called Smythin who I think we’re meant to see being pushed into the spider pit, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this play out correctly as he’s usually either dead before I notice anything going on or something goes wrong with the scene. In this instance, one of the nearby hostile goblins had a bit of chat with him as I got close, but there was no goblin actually next to him, so unusually he actually survived for a while. However, instead of taking the obvious opportunity to run into the now clear room behind me he decided to charge forward and take on Ragzlin and all other comers. He even survived for about four turns, despite being, I think, level 1. Now this is one of my personal bugbears. I HATE HATE HATE there being potentially saveable but apparently suicidal NPCs. Either make them impossible to save, or else have them show at least some self preservation. I can let this slide for EA, but in a full game I’d be save scumming trying to save him, cursing Larian for poor design all the while.
Second niggle is the spiders. Not sure if I started it by pushing a goblin into the pit, but once the fight started the large spider climbed up some webbing into the room with the dead mindflayer and started attacking goblins. None of my party were even to the doors of the room yet, so this was handy for me but you have to wonder why the goblins wouldn’t have cleared the webs if they thought the spiders might turn on them. (Of course, it’s possible to persuade the spiders to your side, but that’s not what happened here.) Neither spider attacked me, and the large spider perished in the fight, but the small one survived and was non-hostile after all the goblins died. I’ve not seen this particular behaviour before, though in one previous playthrough a spider did climb up its web and kill the goblin priest I’d freed from his cage. It feels as though the spiders’ tags/allies/allegiances aren’t set up quite correctly.
