Blacktargaritaville

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

So the two things you'll never hear me say are, "I think I have enough flax seed for right now," and, "Nah, I don't really need any more black tar."

 

If you circle the Shivering Isles side of The Fringe wall there's black tar within easy reach: it hangs down from under the trees' roots and you can just walk under the trees and pick the stuff.

 

Swampgas Hole has quite a bit of black tar, but you have to do a dungeon crawl to get it. On the plus side there's also Rot Scale -- about the only place you can find Rot Scale in any serious quantity, in fact.

 

So where do you go to get black tar? And where's the best place to get bone marrow? Those shambling skeleton things only appear in like groups of 2. Collecting bone marrow is a major pain.

[ub3rman123]

http://images.uesp.net/thumb/2/2f/SI-Map-BlackTar.jpg/356px-SI-Map-BlackTar.jpg

 

What do you do with black tar anyways? Seemed useless to me.

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

Black Tar is doubly useful, first for the "Damage Speed" poison (mostly of use to archers) and second because it crosses "Damage Health" with "Shock Damage" and is much easier to obtain in quantity than Ectoplasm.

It's also compatible with all other poison ingredients, as all 4 of its properties are harmful.

 

Damage Speed may seem a poor cousin to Paralyze, but if you ever see what it does to an ogre I promise you'll get a laugh out of it.

 

I defeated the Gatekeeper a couple of times without doing either of the two quests just to see if it could be done. He regens hp really fast, but I hit him with damage agility, strength, speed, and fatigue poisons and he was rendered completely helpless.

After that you can hack at him all you want and keep him continuously poisoned with all 4 damage types and he's doomed. (At the time I also hit him with Damage Endurance -- this was before I found out it didn't work on NPC's.)

 

I actually wish there were more fights like the Gatekeeper, where if you don't do the "weakening" quests you get a really tough fight. Unless I'm fighting a huge horde of powerful creatures I don't really need to use poison. How often does that happen?