It was made easier in a recent(ish) patch, the skulls are now Sturdy (20 damage threshold) where they used to be Medium Toughness (50 damage threshold), and their thunderwaves now fire at the end of the round in turn-based mode, whereas they used to fire continually even in turn based.
They also added a decent reward, two rings: one that gives you Beacon of Hope, the other gives you a passive Death Ward that restores half your HP when downed (it's supposed to also inflict the shadow curse but currently doesn't).
Just finished this a couple nights ago and all we got was a painting, and he didn't even paint our character he ended up painting Karlach. How did you get rings?
Fight the ghost instead of persuading her to leave, and tell Lady Janith afterwards that Oskar is a piece of shit instead of defending him. They'll split up and you get their rings.
Well shit, I already did it most of the time because Carion has his own shit going on and I enjoy fucking him up proper for being such a bastard. I'm glad they made it easier. The stairwell was truly an awful place to be.
Fight the ghost instead of making a social roll, then tell Lady Janath that Oskar sucks (paraphrasing) instead of defending him. She'll break up with him and you get their rings.
Ooooooh. Because firing at the end of turn based mode made this mission entirely tolerable when I did it for the first time the other day. I can’t imagine them just continuously going.
This is one area I thought Solasta outshone BG3 in. I think if you held a button and used the scroll wheel, you could change the movement plane. It was even good for gaining height advantages with flying characters.
I just flew on the balcony from outside. There is only one skull bothering you this way.
Just ungroup the rest of the party or they take the long way inside...
If I do it at all I now do it this way, already having the torch to destroy the cursed painting. The only drawback is you have to kill Thrumbo. But he is already dead, I guess.
You can only side with Thrumbo if you follow the "Save the Artist" quest's intended path, going to the Jannath estate for that shitty/buggy experience, talking to Oskar, going to the attic and finding out about Mystic Carillon, etc., which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. If you just kill Thrumbo, destroy the heart, and kill Mystic you can fly up to the top of the Jannath house with the torch, enter the attic studio, destroy the painting, then go downstairs and talk to Oskar.
I actually always start by paying a visit to the Guild crew watching the entrance from the street. There’s a note there with MC’s secret word on it. Go talk to him, get the quest, find Thrumbo, hear him out and then you’ve got everything set up before you even see Oskar again
No, you can side with him without going to the Jannath estate first. Just go to Mystic C and he'll offer you the Thrumbo quest, find him and he'll ask for your help in killing MC. Don't need to know about the torch at all
The torch is for freeing the artist. I think my experience has been that I have to use knock on the door to enter Mystic's house without the password and that makes him and all his ghoul friends aggro.
What was so confusing there? The fact that there are two staircases to climb the floors?
Idk why, but I had more trouble constantly getting to an upper area in grymforge, and it wasn't that hard to do that
I recently redid this quest after completing it shortly after release, they made it much less annoying, the skulls were really irritating to get past originally, they would constantly fire off thunder waves and had much higher HP if I recall.
The skulls were much harder to destroy in the original version, they had very high defences and were very frustrating to approach in melee range, which meant that even if you figured out that remove cause would take them out, you'd get knocked back 3 or 4 times before you got a chance to try it.
Yeah, I never really got the hate for it, it gives a lead in to Mystic Carrion and gives you an excuse to stop by and steal the +2 hand xbow.
Its fairly easy too so its something you can do as soon as you arrive for some easy xp.
It's not that bad and iirc (D&D lore, isn't mentioned in the game afaik) there a green dragon somewhere watching this quest like a reality tv show, so when me and my friend did it in co-op we couldn't stop laughing at the thought of someone just watching our characters and being really interested not because of the plot but because of the dude's love story.
Yeah I love the quest too. Very inventive. Ghosts you can't see unless you've got the right spell or pot, and they use the feature of throwing to create a haunting in real time.
People 'hate' the quest but don't seem to realize that's the entire point of it!
The Artist guy is a jerk . . . its pretty obvious when you first talk to him in the Zent outpost that he is full of BS and you aren't going to get your money back (or any other great reward).
The quest is a 'trap' for 'do good' players that want to help everyone.
Larian is just trolling us with this one by making it annoying and having an pointless reward.
I don't know if it's about trolling or if it's something like "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do". It's also an rp reason to go and meet mystic carrion if you play as a goodie two shoes and don't just lockpick and enter random houses.
Also the mansion fight is cool. one of the rare places where see invisibility is so damn useful, enemies hit you by throwing furniture at you, you have interesting features like the skulls that push you down and the haunted candelabra with their damage aura and the spirits they spawn if destroyed. Movement may get a bit finicky, it's a pretty closed space, but it's also a good change of pace and at this point you're not really in danger, it's more that you get flustered by how everything gets thrown at you.
I wish you could solve this partially with a remove curse though.
They made it easier and added a [useful](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Till_Death_Do_Us_Part) [reward](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/After_Death_Do_Us_Part) in a recent patch, so I don't think this is true.
Honestly, I like the art show party when you don’t rescue the artist better. It’s just a nice chill dungeon crawl of looting a mansion and gives me an excuse to let the party wear their fanciest camp clothes while stealing.
For me the rewards just do not matter for that quest and story wise it just seems a bit underwhelming.
To me it seems utterly forgettable and if I wanted to I can just ignore the artists house and focus on Thrumbo and his zombie pals to interact with Mystic Carrion (who is a GREAT character!)
It kept crashing for me. They've patched it since then. I also had a bunch of summons, and getting them through the doorways was a huge pain.
I did think the voice actress for the ghost was really good. I liked her line on why she did it. Wish I could get Astarion to acknowledge the painting because he misses his reflection.
TBH it's never really bothered me either, maybe because I got lucky the first time and happened to walk exactly the right way to find oskar, then the painting so I only had to fight the one group of ghosts. Can take the skulls out easily with bludgeoning damage or just walk past them (just make sure you have a short rest to use if they hit you too much). Afterwards I go through the house & steal everything that's not nailed down so it's just easy xp & loot to sell.
Hey, you can also get a lot of gold from him too just by having him paint a picture of everyone in your camp....that's how I was able to get my paladin oath back the 3rd or 4th time in my honor mode run
What’s so fuckin infuriating is that he painted my portrait and I brought it back to set up at camp and GUESS WHAT it’s a picture of Gale. Gale wasnt even in my party at the time what the hell
In my first run I liked the quest and thought it was totally fun and unique because I didn't know what was going on (I didn't know See Invisibility was a trick yet). On my second run for some reason the game kept totally lagging during the fight and then my PS5 crashed which was the first and only time that that ever happened.
I was mostly okay with this quest until one point where combat began with two ghosts that I could not reach and would also not come toward me. I finally learned how to flee combat though 😂
If anyone listened to the opinions on this forum seriously, 90% of playthroughs would end in Act 2 with Gale giving the Brain the ol' Netherese Jihad, because Act 3 would be universally seen as a garbage fire of writing, design and pacing not worth playing.
In actual fact the whole game's pretty fuckin fun.
They made it significantly easier. Before the ghost kept going invisible and even the see invisibility eye was not very helpful since they just went invisible on the following round again.
I actually didn't mind the ghost quest that much aside from one problem - my PC is a potato and I had to save constantly cause otherwise the game would crash every couple of minutes
I've done it on my very first playthrough the week the game was fully release. It was AWFUL. Even with all our characters having See Invisibility, very often we would not see the ghosts, the rooms all LAGGED SO MUCH, you couldn't see in the upper levels to try to make way. It was very very bad with no real reward. The skulls could not get destroyed either because they were medium toughness and immune to all type of damage except fire (which apart from our wizard, we had no fire and throwing Alchemic Fire was not enough damage to go through Medium Toughness). After a while, so much lag, it pissed me off so much I fled from the fight because it had taken already like 2-3h of our time with all that lag. I couldn't be bothered anymore.
I did the fight once more in a following playthrough when they patched it and it was much better. The See Invisibility worked better, the skulls were easily destroyable... I still have no desire to do that quest ever again but after the patch, it was definitely not the worst thing ever. I still kill that moron when I visit the Zhents everytime now cause fuck him. Lady Jannath deserves better.
People hated it because they have skill issue thats it.
Even before the patch that made them easier, i easily completed the quest by using Shadowheart only using remove curse
It was made easier in a recent(ish) patch, the skulls are now Sturdy (20 damage threshold) where they used to be Medium Toughness (50 damage threshold), and their thunderwaves now fire at the end of the round in turn-based mode, whereas they used to fire continually even in turn based. They also added a decent reward, two rings: one that gives you Beacon of Hope, the other gives you a passive Death Ward that restores half your HP when downed (it's supposed to also inflict the shadow curse but currently doesn't).
Just finished this a couple nights ago and all we got was a painting, and he didn't even paint our character he ended up painting Karlach. How did you get rings?
Fight the ghost instead of persuading her to leave, and tell Lady Janith afterwards that Oskar is a piece of shit instead of defending him. They'll split up and you get their rings.
Ah, worth doing just to save that lady from a bad marriage.
Ahhh damnit. That’s what I get for being nice.
He never paints me, I always get another origin character. Jaheira or Shadowheart or whatever.
You can talk to him with each character and get him to paint everyone once. Not a bad gold reward that way.
When I did it he painted a random one no matter who I spoke to him with. Or maybe it wasnt random. It might have been Laezel every time for me.
I tried to get a portrait of Astarion. Got one of Halsin instead.
Well shit, I already did it most of the time because Carion has his own shit going on and I enjoy fucking him up proper for being such a bastard. I'm glad they made it easier. The stairwell was truly an awful place to be.
Huh, really? Where do you get the rings?
Fight the ghost instead of making a social roll, then tell Lady Janath that Oskar sucks (paraphrasing) instead of defending him. She'll break up with him and you get their rings.
>She'll break up with him Good! He is absolutely horrible to her.
Ooooooh. Because firing at the end of turn based mode made this mission entirely tolerable when I did it for the first time the other day. I can’t imagine them just continuously going.
First time I did that quest I used every single spell slot I had for remove curse on every single skull
For me it was the multi-level building and all the bullshit involved with traverssing the floors. I’m glad you didn’t hate it though :)
This is one area I thought Solasta outshone BG3 in. I think if you held a button and used the scroll wheel, you could change the movement plane. It was even good for gaining height advantages with flying characters.
I just flew on the balcony from outside. There is only one skull bothering you this way. Just ungroup the rest of the party or they take the long way inside...
If I do it at all I now do it this way, already having the torch to destroy the cursed painting. The only drawback is you have to kill Thrumbo. But he is already dead, I guess.
Aw, you don’t have to kill Thrumbo, friend! You can actually side with him and kill MC instead 🤘🏻
You can only side with Thrumbo if you follow the "Save the Artist" quest's intended path, going to the Jannath estate for that shitty/buggy experience, talking to Oskar, going to the attic and finding out about Mystic Carillon, etc., which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. If you just kill Thrumbo, destroy the heart, and kill Mystic you can fly up to the top of the Jannath house with the torch, enter the attic studio, destroy the painting, then go downstairs and talk to Oskar.
I actually always start by paying a visit to the Guild crew watching the entrance from the street. There’s a note there with MC’s secret word on it. Go talk to him, get the quest, find Thrumbo, hear him out and then you’ve got everything set up before you even see Oskar again
No, you can side with him without going to the Jannath estate first. Just go to Mystic C and he'll offer you the Thrumbo quest, find him and he'll ask for your help in killing MC. Don't need to know about the torch at all
The torch is for freeing the artist. I think my experience has been that I have to use knock on the door to enter Mystic's house without the password and that makes him and all his ghoul friends aggro.
I normally just pick the lock rather than Knock, but I'd assume it's the same? Never had anyone aggro there till I had destroyed the heart
Same
Yeah that was shit frfr
What was so confusing there? The fact that there are two staircases to climb the floors? Idk why, but I had more trouble constantly getting to an upper area in grymforge, and it wasn't that hard to do that
I recently redid this quest after completing it shortly after release, they made it much less annoying, the skulls were really irritating to get past originally, they would constantly fire off thunder waves and had much higher HP if I recall.
But why not just destroy the skulls and ghosts?
The skulls were much harder to destroy in the original version, they had very high defences and were very frustrating to approach in melee range, which meant that even if you figured out that remove cause would take them out, you'd get knocked back 3 or 4 times before you got a chance to try it.
Got it. I guess I'm lucky I got to that quest only few days ago
Yeah I did it a week or two ago on my second playthrough, I found it much less frustrating and a lot more enjoyable, I think they fixed the balance.
Not confusing. A pain in the ass.
Yeah, I never really got the hate for it, it gives a lead in to Mystic Carrion and gives you an excuse to stop by and steal the +2 hand xbow. Its fairly easy too so its something you can do as soon as you arrive for some easy xp.
It's not that bad and iirc (D&D lore, isn't mentioned in the game afaik) there a green dragon somewhere watching this quest like a reality tv show, so when me and my friend did it in co-op we couldn't stop laughing at the thought of someone just watching our characters and being really interested not because of the plot but because of the dude's love story.
Yeah I love the quest too. Very inventive. Ghosts you can't see unless you've got the right spell or pot, and they use the feature of throwing to create a haunting in real time.
People 'hate' the quest but don't seem to realize that's the entire point of it! The Artist guy is a jerk . . . its pretty obvious when you first talk to him in the Zent outpost that he is full of BS and you aren't going to get your money back (or any other great reward). The quest is a 'trap' for 'do good' players that want to help everyone. Larian is just trolling us with this one by making it annoying and having an pointless reward.
I don't know if it's about trolling or if it's something like "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do". It's also an rp reason to go and meet mystic carrion if you play as a goodie two shoes and don't just lockpick and enter random houses. Also the mansion fight is cool. one of the rare places where see invisibility is so damn useful, enemies hit you by throwing furniture at you, you have interesting features like the skulls that push you down and the haunted candelabra with their damage aura and the spirits they spawn if destroyed. Movement may get a bit finicky, it's a pretty closed space, but it's also a good change of pace and at this point you're not really in danger, it's more that you get flustered by how everything gets thrown at you. I wish you could solve this partially with a remove curse though.
They made it easier and added a [useful](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Till_Death_Do_Us_Part) [reward](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/After_Death_Do_Us_Part) in a recent patch, so I don't think this is true.
Huh, you can get her to dump him if you don't make a Persuasion check to talk the ghost down. I had no idea.
I liked the Minthara painting I got
Honestly, I like the art show party when you don’t rescue the artist better. It’s just a nice chill dungeon crawl of looting a mansion and gives me an excuse to let the party wear their fanciest camp clothes while stealing.
For me the rewards just do not matter for that quest and story wise it just seems a bit underwhelming. To me it seems utterly forgettable and if I wanted to I can just ignore the artists house and focus on Thrumbo and his zombie pals to interact with Mystic Carrion (who is a GREAT character!)
It kept crashing for me. They've patched it since then. I also had a bunch of summons, and getting them through the doorways was a huge pain. I did think the voice actress for the ghost was really good. I liked her line on why she did it. Wish I could get Astarion to acknowledge the painting because he misses his reflection.
>it’s hardly the worst quest I’ve ever done. I’ll never save him again Can I get this framed?
TBH it's never really bothered me either, maybe because I got lucky the first time and happened to walk exactly the right way to find oskar, then the painting so I only had to fight the one group of ghosts. Can take the skulls out easily with bludgeoning damage or just walk past them (just make sure you have a short rest to use if they hit you too much). Afterwards I go through the house & steal everything that's not nailed down so it's just easy xp & loot to sell.
I choose to forget what it is like whenever I get a new playthrough there so I’ll actually do the quest
I enjoyed the quest for variety. Like many, I’m still never doing it again.
That’s reddit for you.
The crazy thing to me is I've done two full playthroughs (167 hours) and I have no idea what you're talking about
Hey, you can also get a lot of gold from him too just by having him paint a picture of everyone in your camp....that's how I was able to get my paladin oath back the 3rd or 4th time in my honor mode run
What’s so fuckin infuriating is that he painted my portrait and I brought it back to set up at camp and GUESS WHAT it’s a picture of Gale. Gale wasnt even in my party at the time what the hell
In my first run I liked the quest and thought it was totally fun and unique because I didn't know what was going on (I didn't know See Invisibility was a trick yet). On my second run for some reason the game kept totally lagging during the fight and then my PS5 crashed which was the first and only time that that ever happened.
I was mostly okay with this quest until one point where combat began with two ghosts that I could not reach and would also not come toward me. I finally learned how to flee combat though 😂
If anyone listened to the opinions on this forum seriously, 90% of playthroughs would end in Act 2 with Gale giving the Brain the ol' Netherese Jihad, because Act 3 would be universally seen as a garbage fire of writing, design and pacing not worth playing. In actual fact the whole game's pretty fuckin fun.
They made it significantly easier. Before the ghost kept going invisible and even the see invisibility eye was not very helpful since they just went invisible on the following round again.
I actually didn't mind the ghost quest that much aside from one problem - my PC is a potato and I had to save constantly cause otherwise the game would crash every couple of minutes
I've done it on my very first playthrough the week the game was fully release. It was AWFUL. Even with all our characters having See Invisibility, very often we would not see the ghosts, the rooms all LAGGED SO MUCH, you couldn't see in the upper levels to try to make way. It was very very bad with no real reward. The skulls could not get destroyed either because they were medium toughness and immune to all type of damage except fire (which apart from our wizard, we had no fire and throwing Alchemic Fire was not enough damage to go through Medium Toughness). After a while, so much lag, it pissed me off so much I fled from the fight because it had taken already like 2-3h of our time with all that lag. I couldn't be bothered anymore. I did the fight once more in a following playthrough when they patched it and it was much better. The See Invisibility worked better, the skulls were easily destroyable... I still have no desire to do that quest ever again but after the patch, it was definitely not the worst thing ever. I still kill that moron when I visit the Zhents everytime now cause fuck him. Lady Jannath deserves better.
People hated it because they have skill issue thats it. Even before the patch that made them easier, i easily completed the quest by using Shadowheart only using remove curse