Stone Harpy

[Chris Schumacher]

Hey, are you guys ever going to fix this problem? I just dusted him off with a great dagger, a cross-bow, and a fire sword. In the original the only weapons that seemed to hurt him were a glass sword and the musket.

[Gunnar]

I never used anything more fancy than double handed swords, crossbow, and bow and even with that you could defeat the stone harpy (the one in Sutek's place at least) in the original.

[Darke]

I never used glass swords, or the musket in the original and I
defeated them easily (well, relatively speaking...) also.

[Chris Schumacher]

Hmmm.... That's odd. Back in The Day, people had a great deal of problem
defeating it, and these were people who were using Death Scythes, the Hoe of Destruction, Juggernaut Hammers and Firedoom Staffs. Perhaps the Stone Harpy is invulnerable to magic weapons?

[MV]

I agree with that.

I had a party of 8 and took on the harpy in the vault and everyone got slaughted.

Everyone was fully decked out with:

Sword of defense
Death Scythe
Fire Swords
Magic sword
Hoe Of Destruction
Magebane
And I had the Blackrock sword and casting energy mist, etc.

Then I just reloaded and hit the bugger with a glass sword.

At the time I never thought of trying a non-magic weapon.

[torgusdragon]

i could only beat him with a glass sword in the original.

[Darke]

The easy way to find out, of course, would be to make everyone
invincible and use only the magical, or only normal weapons and
see if you're able to kill the thing in the original.

[Pan Sola]

Eh, chris, you realize that Juggernaut Hammers and Firedoom Staffs deal a lot of damage to your own party members right?

Since the stone harpies usually show up in small rooms and narrow passage ways, I wouldn't be surprised if 2/3 of the damage your party receive comes from your party...

"Iolo! Stop shooting at me!"

Just a possiblity. I never used glass sword cept in one of the black thingies with a big etheral monster, and at the final battle. I might be using one musket, but I doubt it was the one muskey that saved my party of 8 from the onslought of 2 stone harpies...

Could it be that the addon for U7 decided to rebalance the game, making stone harpies weaker, so we have two different versions of what they are afraid of?

[Soule]

Well in the original..I could only hurt the harpy with the glass sword...

I remembered once I experimented using Power avatar and could not kill it! (I could not remember what weapon I used but it was not glass sword)

[Dino (can't log in)]

I had killed the stone harpy alone. My friends were getting killed all the time so I told them to wait outside, wore an invisibility ring, and went to kick its butt.

By the way, did you guys find the final battle hard? I always found it quite easy... but like half my party was killed in it. At that point, though, it didn't matter because I didn't need them any more.

[Chris Schumacher]

No, the final battle wasn't really all that hard, even when you don't clear
the room with Mass Death. What IS hard however, possibly the hardest fight in the game, is the Lich you have to fight to get to the Black Gate chamber.
It's easily the hardest fight in the game. Glass sword's are best here, since the Lich uses instant death spells.

[Dino (can't log in)]

I don't think I found that one hard. I might have reloaded a couple of times though to get by (alive). What I did find hard was that huge ethereal monster at the tetrahedron, for which I used a glass sword.

[MV]

Huge ethereal monster?

Black sword -> "What is thy bidding?" -> Death -> *click on monster* -> "Consider it dead".

[Dino (can't log in)]

When I first finished Ultima 7, it was without the add-on.

[MV]

Mmmmm, yea, same here. I think I did use a glass sword then too before I got the expansion as well. Now THAT was a long long long time ago.

OT: I scored another full copy of the original ultima7 with FULLY WORKING FLOPPY DISKS last week off ebay for only about $12 AUD. And I Winimaged those babies straight away too.

Whoo! Now I just have to find another serpent isle original to replace my current copy that has stuffed disks.

Also, did anyone else do the "cheat" with serpent isle and the SS expansion on floppy?

I figured out way back when I got both in '93 how to be able to do the SS expansion as many times as I wanted in a single game.

I think I installed it with expansion, played the SS, then backed up saved games, just installed serpent isle, entered and saved game with backed up saves, then reinstalled SI+SS AGAIN, and using that save again, the game thought I hadn't done the expansion, so I saved the world with the silver tree again and was level 10 and above in no time.

/OT.

[eruciform]

The only non-glass-sword way I've found to kill Stone Harpies is Death Vortex. Note: Mass Death will NOT affect them. In the goblin caves, where there's 4 of them on the chess board, come back only when you can cast level 9. Cast Invisible All, then go "activate" all four of them, then cast Death Vortex. It'll kill 2.5 of them. Cast again to kill the remaining 2 alive ones. Not sure if only "normal" weapons can harm them, haven't tried that...

[Crowley]

According to Exult Studio, stone harpies are immune to most magical damage types, but not normal damage.

[marzo]

Aye: the way to kill them is with regular, nonmagical weapons. Which any player is unlikely to have when they finally encounters them...

[Paulon]

As I recall, great daggers do work on them, at least in the original game.

[Korneluk]

I reckon the great dagger works because it hits as a non-magic weapon even though it morphs...