Merek and Lothander, possible bug?
The_Cheeseman
Member Posts: 175
Just wanted to share my recent experience with the Merek and Lothander quest (poisoning in BG city). On my last two play throughs since the update, picking up Merek’s antidote after killing him does not cure the poison, nor award exp or finish the quest. Manually drinking it also does nothing. The only way I was able to get the quest to complete was to charm Merek and have him give me the antidote.
Note that I am running an EET install, so I cannot be certain if this is a base game bug or one introduced with a mod. But I thought I’d post about it to see if anybody else was running into the same problem.
Note that I am running an EET install, so I cannot be certain if this is a base game bug or one introduced with a mod. But I thought I’d post about it to see if anybody else was running into the same problem.
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Marek and Lothander’s antidotes no longer combine and the poison is no longer cured after picking up Marek’s half. However, I can manually drink Marek’s potion and get cured and XP but then I’m stuck with Lothander’s half which you can’t interact with and no longer appears to have a purpose.
Marek "gives"(dies) you the real antidote and the quest ends/you get the XP when you drink it.
Didn’t the most recent patch notes mention something about making the poison status more visible for the player, or something? Anybody know what was actually changed?
Maybe some mod is interfering, but I have very few of them (SCS, NPC Projecet, Rogue Rebalancing, Atweak and Item Revision).
The quest worked fine in my 2 unmodded playthroughs.
I’ve only done one playthrough since 2.5 was officially released so I don’t have a broad sampling. I don’t currently have SoD installed. Just vanilla 2.5 - not even an XP cap remover.
I've attached a new save with the quest complete.
Reading your summary of actions, the only thing I can think of (other than a bug) is that you may have attacked Marek before talking to him. I agree that doing that should not affect the quest, since that should be tied to just using the antidote, but it's not uncommon in BG to have to talk to someone to complete a quest. There are instances where that's not necessary in similar situations, e.g. you can attack and kill Tranzig without talking to him, but I think those are exceptions to the general rule.
It *does* do something weird with importing/exporting the character - once you've used it and import the character (even over to BG2EE) you'll get another 10 000xp and the "You have been cured of Marek's poison" journal entry.
You mentioned this POTN47 file - I downloaded it and put it in my overrides folder but it doesnt seem to be working...is there another step I am missing?
Thanks so much!
@subtledoctor and @benibel
Every time I get the antidote, the quest is being completed, with given XP and Journal update.
Yet, after few in-game days, my whole party members dies, leaving my MC the only one unaffected.
Drinking the antidote with all characters makes no change. It only works for the Main Character.
I tired to kill Marek or charm him to give the antidote to me. Neither of those options resolved the bug.
I am running of "clean" Steam version, no modes whatsoever.
Now I have spend 50 h of game play that I cannot finish and am too frustrated to start all over again to get to the same point.
Anyone able to help? Thank you.
Also, did you skip any parts of the quest? Did you attack Marek or Lothander before getting the quest?
Could you attach your save?
Seems like this bug is that the potion 1. removes the poison from character 2. only MC needs to drink it 3. once MC drinks it the effect should pass to all current party members - The 3rd part seems to be bugged. I believe in previous old games, all party member needed to drink it and since they restricted it to the MC only, there must be a lost code from the vanilla game that collides with the new code.
Solution would be either. A ) fixed the 3rd point B ) reverse the requirement and have the whole party drink it and be affected by it - after-all, there are 10 vials of the antidote.
Weird thing is that I seems to be the only one having this issue. Bug might be caused by some weird quest combination that I made with my play-through. Not sure. Yet, I cannot continue the game which is pretty sad.
The quest progression I have done:
1) Meet both of them and they tell you about the poison
2) Meet Lothander and he asks for help
3) Talk to the fortune teller and give info on how to help Lothander
4) Help Lothander (he gives you fake antidote)
5) Face Marek (Kill him and charm him to give you the real antidote)
6) MC (and everyone in party) drinks the antidote
7) Quest completed (only MC gets the note in a chat that is healed)
8) Few in-game days later - whole party turns to monstrosities which instantly kills them
I attached two saves (before confronting Marek and after confronting him by charming him to give me the antidote).
Thank you for all your help
That sounds like the werewolf curse, not the poison. Did you start the werewolf island quest and not finish it?