Blast Furnace dying too fast!

OK so on the Hero morality mission that has: "Rescue the hostages then deal with Blast Furnace" in the nav has a HUGE problem!

I was converting my Rogue Stalker to full Hero last night when I got this last mission. I had already spent hours getting tips and finishing the missions when I finally walked into this mission and started prowling. The first thing I realized is that not all of the hostages are in order from front to back.

The 1st hostage (out of the 6-8 times I ran this mission... I'll explain that farther down.) is almost always right after you walk in, in the main hall. The 2nd was in random spots, but almost always on the 2nd floor of the map and the 3rd was so random that he never appeared in the same spot twice and sometimes was down on the 1st floor. This on it's own was irritating, but I eventually figured it out.

Ok now on to Blast Furnace. After rescuing all hostages and starting to feel heroic I walk into the last room, where Blast Furnace was standing. Like all Stalkers I've seen, I was in Hide. I walked right up to him used Build up then use Assassin Strike on him. He of course falls over and dies, but he now wants to talk. So we talk and some Soldiers come and try to stop us, but after they showed up Blast Furnace disappeared.

At first I thought this was normal, so I went on and fought the tiny wave of soldiers. When I finished the wave I had nothing to do in my nav... I looked all over the map for Blast Furnace or something on the map and never found anything. I went out and did the mission five more times before I finally realized what was causing the problem. Blast Furnace was disappearing because I was killing him in one hit.

This is something I strive for as a Stalker. I was to be able to walk up to anything and kill it in one hit... Now that being said I turned off Hide, the last time I ran this mission, and walked up to Blast Furnace and just whacked him with like three hits and he fell over. (With only 1/8 his HP gone...)

Now I did all the waves of soldiers and each time had to talk to Blast Furnace... So this is why I couldn't finish the mission.

Now I see this as a bug. Just about any Stalker at that level should be able to kill him in one hit... So this is a huge problem for all/most Stalkers that want to go full Hero and that get this mission while on the redeeming path.

I must ask for Devs to fix this quickly so no one else goes through the hassle I did to finally finish this. After all the running around I did I could have finished an ITF by the time I finished this mission...


Another thing too... I sent in two petitions about this and didn't receive a response until this morning... What's happening with in game support? We used to get responses in 20 mins or so, but now I don't get responses till a day or two later... It's just kind of disheartening...


Edit: OK after talking with NCsoft support, I told them the whole story after they got my original petition last night and here is their response:

In Neverwinter Nights we could turn on a flag on a critter to mark him as "Immortal". An immortal npc can be fought and damaged all day long but you could never, by any means, remove that final hit point.

Npc's like this where you have to talk to them after a brief fight should work like those immortals.

I don't think I would have had the patience to run it 5 times. Kudos for figuring it out.

Just adding a +1 to the file, here...

I ran into exactly the same problem with this mission last night, while running it with my own blue-side Stalker. Shade one-shotted poor Blasty and he vanished rather than sticking around to talk to her, preventing the ambushes from spawning.

I suspected killing him out-right must have been the problem, so I just /bugged it, then reset the mission and ran it again. Being careful *not* to AS Blast Furnace into oblivion on the second run-through made everything work as expected.

So... yeah. This mission presents a bit of a problem for Stalker players who aren't aware of the problem. It's a pretty good bet that most of us will go for the one-shot kill, and then be unable to complete the thing.

I just got this problem with my Stalker. I'm glad you posted, ZanderCross - otherwise I'd likely continue to sit here, confused as to why I can't finish this mission. Bad bug.

i know in a bunch of the loyalist arcs there were mishs to take someone out and as a stalker i 1 shotted them, if they were needing to talk to me when they were injured, even if i 1 shotted them they would stand back up and fall over again (as blue borderedand around 25-50% of their hp left) so i could still talk to them.

i believe this is supposed to be whats happening in this mish but is not working properly.

I have a different problem with this mission. I can never find Blast Furnace. I rescue everybody and beat all my opponents but Blast Furnace never appears! I've done this mission four or five times and the same thing happens. I spend fifteen or twenty minutes looking for him to no avail.