just out of curiosity, how does patch 1.3 affect respawn times (in general). i have downloaded the patch several times, but have never been able to get it to run. hadn't worried too much about installing it, the only problem i've had with the game is the crashes, and for the most part they only affect me in the cities when interacting with vendors, so i just make sure to save before i as to see what they have for sale.

i think the patch may have "fixed" some cheats i was playing around with.

cheat one. spent time doing nothing other than going into and out of sturmford collecting the 2 clovers available for a couple of days of game time. i did some quick calculations and figured out if you invested 52 days of game time in sturmford at the beginning of the game you could collect enough clovers to raise your skill points high enough to grand master all 23 skills for each member of the party as promotions allow it. depending on the make up of your party it could take appreciably less time, allowing for the skills party members cannot learn.

cheat two. spent time doing nothing other than beaconing between between the outside of drangheim prison and the room inside with the black chest (didn't even have to fight the guard captain that stands outside the room, other than when i went in to set the beacon). collected around 50 of the 60 items i know can be gotten from black chests. after collecting this bonanza of items, the black chest went dry, yeilding only about 1,000 gold per trip. i moved to another chest to see what would happen, that one yeilded only coin.

the black chest exercise did not give me any duplicate items, with the exception of fre's items and these were only duplicates because i had gotten the first of the fre's items from the genie in the ruined temple. (i played around with beacon there for a bit, and got 5 of the 6 fre's items, plus duplicates, before i got tired of that bit of cheating, the genie never gave me a fre's heart. got that from the black chest experiment.)

i'm curious if it is possible to get duplicates of the black chest items, there are some things that would be really nice to have for each party member, witchbane or brongnoker and walking boots to name a couple.

the black chest in the connecting tunnels between thronheim and yorwick was unaffected by the black chest drought, but that chest only gave me spencer's obedience the few times i beaconed in and out. i didn't check, but would guess the black chest that gives up everstrike is similarly unaffected.

i noticed when fooling around with the black chests and genie that there are several groups of items designed for particular 2nd promotion classes, fre's for priests, broderick's for paladin's, prize for gladiators, and death for lichs. are there any similar groups for the other classes? the prima guide lists the prize and fre's items, but has no information on the broderick's and death items. i would assume that as with the fre's items, there is a way to collect the prize, broderick's and death (as well as for the other classes if they are available, but i haven't discovered them. (perhaps fighting in the thjorgard arena for the prize items, i haven't played a gladiator yet, so don't know if i would get something other than coin for competing there.