Hexxat can be killed ... but what about Clara?

Remove all ads!

Really showing my naivite' with online forums and that I have way too much time on my hands ... LOL.

I've gone back and repeated quests in the BGII:EE so many time and with the best gear possible before each quest that I was able to kill Hexxat before she could drain Clara. Dumb I know, to bother with but I couldn't resist trying to save the innocent NE Clara.

Hex dies with her body rotting outside her crypt but then Clara stands around wanting to do the quest still. IN the tomb, next to the crypt where she was supposed to get eaten. LOL

Glitchy game doesn't allow me to save her, does it? Or is it that I'm just not supposed to have a paladin save an NE NPC? DOH.

 

I's not possible to save Clara without exploiting/modding the game, and in the first case she will still glitch out whenever you enter the copper coronet with her in the party.
For more info see this tread on the beamdog forums, the OP there used a cursed scroll of petrification + stone to flesh to avoid Clara getting perma-killed so she can be re-added into the party.
Keep in mind that for this method to work you're going to have to be really lucky since a cursed scroll of petrification can only be gotten in BG2 as a random treasure drop.
Importing from BG1 (where the scroll is a guaranteed drop) won't help here since you lose your gear at the start of BG2, so besides finding it naturally your best bet is to cheat it in using console or EEKeeper.

Also worth keeping in mind is that even by keeping her through this method, you won't be able to actually add her back to your party in ToB.
Another way to 'save' her is by using EEkeeper to actually remove the references to her override script entirely, should stop her quest from firing off & her saying you need to go to dragomir's tomb all the time.
If using EEKeeper/console isn't your cup of tea there's also the All things Mazzy mod which has a component that changes the quest so you can save Clara. (and stake Hexxatt through the heart too!)
The mod is probably the closest thing to what you want - not only can you save Clara, it also adds banter and interjections, as well as allowing you to summon her back once you move to ToB.

 

I guess then I glitched the game’s intent. LoL !!! I killed her Vampire mistress, and she survived, by having Improved Haste on all my other characters, barkskin on Clara and my Caviler equipped with the Purifier in one hand and another +4 in the other, it helped that my Thief/Fighter had ASASSINATE ready and hit the Vampire right off!

Thanks for letting me know, I really wish the game would allow freestyle without cheats. That way the npc you save can be around later (and romancing Neera wouldn’t end - )

 

No worries, you're not the only one that prefers Clara over Hexxat.
I kind of feel like Beamdog dropped the ball on this one slightly - where the original companions all have their possible conflicts with each other (Edwin vs. Minsc/Keldorn vs Viconia, etc,) that might lead to them fighting or one of them leaving the party the game never straight up forces you into picking one over the other unless you actually stick 2 incompatible npc's in your party.

With the whole Clara/Hexxat quest you don't get this freedom to pick one and leave the other, so the whole quest feels railroad-y; you can only choose to either not complete the quest or lose out on Clara

 

Well, not exactly. The OP seems to have demonstrated that it's technically possible to "save" Clara without (apparently) any mods or cheats, in the sense that he successfully stopped Hexxat from killing her at the end of Clara's quest, although it's evident that Clara's script doesn't recognise that this outcome is possible and therefore leaves her useless after being saved.

But yes, it's clearly not Beamdog's design intention that Clara can be saved, so I guess it counts as a bug that (with an unexpectedly high-level party and some luck) it can actually be done.

 

Yep. And as an ‘old’ gamer, playing a game based on the Original “White Box Set” of D&D I was saddened that trying to ‘rescue’ the damsel, even a Neutral Evil one, wasn’t a possibility for my Paladin/Cavalier.

Too bad Beam Dog doesn’t read these boards. They could make the games better, and sell updates, DLC, and other perks to old time gamers, like myself.

Thanks for all the feedback btw. I was just wondering ‘why’ I couldn’t free Clara. It makes me wonder, too, “What if Clara was only NE because she was possessed?

A whole other character development/ storyline to rescue her instead of just ‘killing’ the Vamp.

 

Well ... I agree that Beamdog haven't quite implemented this perfectly (as your "saving" of Clara demonstrates), but their narrative expectation appears to be that habitually damsel-saving types (such as your Cavalier) wouldn't normally be trying to recruit Evil-aligned companions. Thus you're not really expected to be desperate to save Clara, if you're the sort of character who would have recruited her in the first place (i.e. generally a bad guy).

Of course, in practice, players frequently assemble mixed-alignment parties, so the assumption on this point by Beamdog's writers may have been a little narrow-minded!

 

LoL - I guess that’s why they picked their name. BEAM - as in a narrow beam of light, and DOG - as in good intentions but fast money made them rush the job!