Am I missing something here? *spoilers*

You sound disappointed... Then you probably don't want to know that you actually don't need the Sword of Gith to damage the portal....

No, seriously I think it is a matter of experience. A lot of people on the official forums has reported problems with killing the King of Shadows.

If you haven't played a D&D CRPG before, or are not used to 3.5 rules, I believe the KoS is challenging enough, according to the posts on the offical forum.

But you are correct, you don't need the Ritual powers to beat him, but they do makes it easier IMHO.

I was as you a little disappointed how easy it was allthough the battle takes quite some time. The 3 Shadow Reavers, or the dragon encounters, was much harder.

But then again I usually find the endgame boss in CRPG's much easier to beat than anticipated. It is for me usually a kind of anticlimax.

Unless it's Melissan in ToB

 

No I am not s***ing you.

Warlocks Vitriolic Blasts especially, and some high level damage spells, does damage the portal, as do some weapons as I.E. the Ironfist Hammer.

Well I have had more trouble with Firkraag, but Tholapsyx IS nasty and the 2 black dragons in Nolaloth's valley ain't pushovers either.

You know, the argument about standard adventurers succeeding where others couldn't, isn't it a standard plotline for CRPG's except the BG series and PS:T? IMHO it's a game genre cliché. Not that it's not illogical.

The biggest beef I have with KoS is that the dwarf in the Gem mines was right. KoS is a construct and still determined to defend the borders of Illfarn nothing more. Which is confirmed if you took the evil path. He is not a threat to all Faerun, just a part of the Sword Coast.

I mean, here we have the mastermind behind all the troubles revealing himself, and the only thing he says is along the line of "Me thinks you are enemy of Illfarn. Hulk smash!"

Now that is disappointing. I want a really evil Lex Luthor rant

 

I was disappointed by the Sword of Gith. My own gear did more damage. My weapon master already had his weapon for every occasion, which is sort of unrealistic, but then, it's fantasy, and I do have a bag of holding, don't I? Compared to that the SoG was crappy. Didn't use it at all toward the end.

If that blade'o'crap conjoured up an inter-planar war, what about my gear?

 

But it's so shiny...

 

Honestly I preferred carrying around the shards for their bonuses than weilding the sword too .

Of-course going from 2d6 to a d8 "universal" sword was very lame.

EDIT: Oh and as for the KoS fight... it was rather easy. I few of my members died, but they were characters I didn't care about in the first place. Between the melee characters and Sand, (I think just 4 or 5 of us), KoS went down pretty easy - at core-rules difficulty nonetheless.

 

@Beren:

I am honored, but I don't deserve credit.

I found out that some spells and weapons damage the portal, by reading what others has posted about it on the official forum, and then try it out.

So I am afraid it's not my original discovery.

I haven't noticed the Rift Hammer damaging the portal so I can't confirm it right now. Unfortunately my game DVD is damaged.

 

The sword is the best off-hand sword in the game. It adds a ton of bonuses, and gets short sword bonuses despite being universal. There is no way to ever forge a weapon as good as the gith sword as an off-hand weapon, but you can definetly get better main hand weapons. Like Crom Faeyr, it's best used for bonuses.

The ending makes perfect sense really. The biggest problem with the king of shadows is his ability to make the land itself die. There is no way to penetrate the evil that eminates from him. This is what caused all the death and destruction - he didn't actually run around and smack stuff. No matter how powerful you are, it would take ages for a single being to actually cause large-scale havoc if all you can do is hit one object at a time, hehe.

The party defeated him because they actually found a way past his aura of death/undead, past his incredibly large army of vampires and what not, past everything that gave him strength. They took the battle to the only place he was actually vulnurable; the heart of his empire.

If not, there would've been no way to defeat him. The party would've been squashed if they actually tried to simply walk up to him. In fact, they wouldn't even have reached him.

 

I would argue, Nolaloth being a dragon that wanders planes (probably a force dragon, which is the most powerful EPIC dragon in 3.5ed iirc), would be smarter than a half-orc with 8 intelligence in figuring out a way to kill the king of shadows. Anyway, when it comes down to it, all you really did was beat on the King of Shadows then destroy statues, then beat on him some more. Ritual of Purification removed level drain, but Nolaloth should be for the most part immune to that since a dragon like him would be casting 9th level spells like an epic sorcerer.

That's my only complaint about the ending besides the voicing that resembled a company running out of money and having a random programmer do the naration.

 

They were fighting for quite some time as far as I know, during the entire battle between the undead forces and the old empire. I assume that the King of Shadows was quite a bit more powerful back then - it was during his "glory days" after all, before the Gith beat him back and he travelled the planes.