Need to "cheat" to finish game - some help appreciated

[aiqtidar]

I'm in the Sanctum, about an hour or so after having run into the worst (and sadly, persistent) bug in the game so far. I'm playing an Alchemist, and my golem has been effectively permanently destroyed - his AI will no longer target monsters unless they're in melee range, and he will never use any of his abilities (including his shields, which means he's always getting one-shotted or two-shotted by the bosses).

I can't even take control of him or access his inventory to give him a better gear loadout. What's more, he has three of the four orbs in his inventory, which means that there are three portals that are permanently open.

Even with these handicaps, I can bring down one of the two bosses fairly consistently, and I know with complete certainty that if my golem was working properly I would be able to easily take them both down (probably without even having to resurrect). So with that in mind, I don't have any issues cheating to get past this last area so I can see the game's ending.

The only thing is, this is my first proper character, and I don't want some "cheater" flag to mar his entry in the vaults, or to disable achievements that I know this character deserves and would be able to unlock in a fair game. So if there's any way for me to get past this area without ruining this character's record, I would appreciate it if someone would let me know.

[SageAcrin]

There's an internal MD5 hash to a savefile, I believe, and an online check to see if you're been constantly connected or not.

Both of these could conceivably be defeated-I've never tried-but I'd really rather not say theories about this on a public forum, lest someone have less nice reasons than you to be cheating.

My suggestion would be to bite the bullet and risk invalidating your save online. Your profile is perfectly find with this and you'll get all the normal unlocks and achievements for clearing the game. The best way would be to just use the debug menu, which can easily be found on the wiki.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Of course, since characters lose connections on a more or less hourly basis, pretty much everyone gets the 'this character may have been played offline' flag, anyway. OR is there a more severe 'cheater' flag then that?

[aiqtidar]

Hmm... is the "This character may have been played offline" the only flag? If that's the case then I think I'm good - I don't have any interest in trying to defeat that flag (I play offline a lot since I carry my laptop with me on trains etc. that don't always have wifi and so that doesn't really bug me).

I thought for a while that this game might have a system similar to Fallout: New Vegas (I'm sure plenty of other games have it too) where if you open the console menu it disables achievements for the remainder of the session, meaning if you had to use the console to get around a bug in the game and missed out on an achievement in the process it would be very difficult to get it back, short of starting a completely new game.

But if that's not the case for this game, then I think I might be good.

[aiqtidar]

Well, I got the achievements on my profile, but my character's page is no longer updating. I tried deleting it to see if that would bring it back if I saved the game again but no such luck.