Dragonborn Bug: Miraak keeps getting stuck/unkillable

[ZeroCore]

Okay, here's the issue; during the final fight with Miraak, once you get his health low enough, he teleports to the center of the area, turns non-corporeal (cannot be hit) and then kills/absorbs one of his own dragons. After he does this, his health is supposed to regen back to full, and then he's SUPPOSED to turn hit-able again and rejoin the fight.

 

For me, however, he doesn't. Either one of two things go on:

 

1: he fails to absorb the dragon soul for some reason, even though the dragon dies.

 

2: More commonly, after absorbing the dragon soul, he does regain health but does not rejoin the fight. He stays stuck in the center of the arena, does not fight, and stays non-corporeal and cannot be hit.

 

I have no idea what's going on here.

 

I tried reloading an old save. This did nothing.

 

I tried disabling ALL mods that I had installed and then loading an old save. This also did nothing.

 

I tried adjusting my load order with the nexus mod manager. I stuck Dragonborn at the top of the load order.

 

My load order now looks like this:

 

Skyrim.esm

Update.esm

Dragonborn.esm

HearthFires.esm

Dawnguard.esm

 

 

And that's literally all that I have active at the moment. Everything else, EVERYTHING, has been disabled.

 

It STILL refuses to work.

 

I even tried loading an old save that I made BEFORE I started the Dragonborn quest line. It still had no effect; Miraak keeps getting stuck in a non-corporeal state after absorbing a dragon soul, or sometimes he just fails to absorb a dragon soul completely even though he kills one.

 

I'm really at a loss on what to do here. I don't want to lose my save game, so I'd appreciate any help that anyone could give to me on this.

 

 

After doing a bit of research (and a bit of luck) I think I figured it out.

 

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but after a few more random reloads Miraak finally rejoined the fight and I was able to complete the Dragonborn quest line. Afterwards however, I couldn't cast spells while riding dragons (which was a pain). I did a bit of research and I found something; Dragonborn tends to glitch if the load order is just so, in a certain way. According to an old forum post I found on another gaming forum, the best way to avoid bugs in Dragonborn was to have the load order set as follows:

 

Skyrim.esm

Update.esm

Dawnguard.esm

Dragonborn.esm

HearthFire.esm (if you have Hearth Fire, like I do)

 

The reason why, I think, is that due to the update.esm file, the game doesn't like it when Dawnguard comes after Dragonborn in the load order, hates it if anything comes before either of the two in the load order, and also hates it if anything separates the two in the load order. Now I have no idea if this would fix the Miraak bug that I was dealing with before (that one more or less fixed itself through dumb luck) but now that I have the load order in that order, I can now cast spells while riding dragons with no problem so it stands to reason that if I did, in the future make another new character and playthrough that I should have no problems with Miraak or anything else in Dragonborn, at least if what I read on that other forum is true.

Edited February 1, 2016 by ZeroCore