Dragonsplague is a disease in Dragon’s Dogma 2 that can spread through pawns, even to main pawns, and can turn them into dragons which can cause destruction to towns and kill every single NPC in them, including NPCs who are part of important quests. Because of how the game implements a single save file, a pawn that has late-stage Dragonsplague can easily ruin a player’s game experience if it is not caught early.
Read ahead as we discuss more about Dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2, including the signs and symptoms to look out for and what to do to prevent it from spreading.
What is Dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2?
Dragonsplague is originally caught by pawns if they get captured by a dragon or a drake while fighting it. During a fight against a dragon, a pawn can get grabbed by the dragon and brought to its chest where the infection will happen. At this point, if the pawn lives on, the Dragonsplague will progress into its stages and it can potentially get passed on to other pawns in the party.
Another way that pawns can contract Dragonsplague is if you hire an infected pawn from the Rift. This also goes true if your main pawn has it and it gets hired by other players through the Rift. Additional details on what to do when it happens are on the Preventing and Curing Dragonsplague section.
Dragonsplague can then get passed on to another pawn if your party sleeps on a campsite through the night. The disease then leaves the original infected pawn until they re-contract it again through the same means. If a pawn contracts it this way, the disease’s stage will reset every time as the infected will start from the early stages of the disease.
Dragonsplague Signs and Symptoms in Dragon’s Dogma 2
There are several signs and symptoms to look out for when dealing with Dragonsplague.
- Dragonsplague tutorial pop-up
The first sign is the tutorial pop-up that you will get the moment that one of your pawns contracted it, either through a dragon encounter or by hiring an infected pawn from the rift. The catch is that this will only happen once in a playthrough, so once you get the pop-up, look out for the symptoms of the disease to know which one of your pawns has it.
The small talk that you hear about Dragonsplague that you can hear from your pawns from time to time does not count and it does not immediately indicate that one of your pawns is infected.
- Glowing red eyes
One visual sign of Dragonsplague is when a pawn gets glowing red eyes which glow brighter as the disease progresses. The eyes have to be glowing and this would help in determining if a pawn has it, especially if the pawn itself has been given red eyes.
- Disobedient and brash attitutde
Another sign to look out for Dragonsplague is when the pawn becomes disobedient to your commands or they start to talk back in a rude manner. Beware that pawns with a Straightforward attitude can often be mistaken as having the disease because of their sarcastic retorts. In case it becomes hard to distinguish sarcasm from brashness, it’s best to resort to curing that pawn just to be safe.
The dialogue lines to look out for are somewhere in the lines of “I shall act of my own accord!” or “You needn’t command me at every turn. I know what to do!”
- Sensing an overwhelming surge of power
A symptom that can also be seen through dialogue lines is when the pawn mentions that they feel that they are wielding an immense power within them as if they somehow have the essence of a dragon inside them.
- Headaches and nausea
Another sign for Dragonsplague is when a pawn is on its idle animation, they will start putting their hands on their head as if they are suffering from a massive headache. Later stages of the disease will show them looking nauseous and spitting towards the ground.
There have been of reports coming from several players stating that they have only seen some of these signs and symptoms and not all of them happening at the same time. Some also report that they have not seen any of the signs at all, yet they still ended up facing its consequences, there hasn’t been any extensive testing done that would rule out user/player error yet.
Dragonsplague Consequences and their Triggers
The most dreadful part of having a pawn infected with Dragonsplague is if they enter its final stages and transform into a dragon themselves, or at least unleash the dragon’s rage within them. This only happens when you sleep in an inn or in your house in a town with an infected pawn in your party.
Resting at an inn triggers a cutscene showing the infected pawn with red eyes, and upon awakening, all NPCs in the area are dead. It will only be a short cutscene, but there won’t be any amount of time where you can act and try to prevent the massacre from happening. Everyone within the town you slept at is dead, including NPCs that are critical to the game’s story and missions, leaving you no choice but to use wake stones to revive them if you have any.
What makes Dragonsplague such a dreadful threat is because of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s single save file implementation. Once you sleep in an inn, the game creates or overwrites your save file as soon as you wake up, and if you wake up to a Dragonsplague aftermath, there is no other save file you can go back to to revert the event.
PC players through Steam can manually create backups of their save files to circumvent this event, but this might be seen by CAPCOM as tampering of the game’s files and it may result in a ban, so it is recommended to avoid this method.
How to Prevent or Cure Dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2?
The only true cure to Dragonsplague is by killing the infected pawn, and the easiest and most effective way to do so is by brining. “Brining” is simply the term used in the game to throw someone in a huge body of water as this results in an almost instant death. So if you suspect or know that your main pawn is infected, give them a brine bath and just simply resurrect them and they should be cured from the disease.
As for hired pawns, you cannot cure them yourself as you can only dismiss them from your party or give them a brine bath in order to get rid of the threat of the disease from your own party. When hired pawns are killed this way, their Dragonsplague will not be necessarily cured away as the only ones who can do so are their creators. This means, if you kill or dismiss a hired pawn, there is still a chance that they will still have dragonsplague when you rehire them simply because their player creator has not cured them in their own game yet.
Going back to curing your own main pawn, it is best to take an extra step of precaution and kill/dismiss your other hired pawns before reviving your main pawn. This is to prevent your main pawn from contracting the disease again in case it still lingers in the other two hired pawns.
With those things said, if you want to do your part in stopping the spread of Dragonsplague, make sure to sleep at an inn once you have completely gotten rid of the disease from your party and after reviving your main pawn. Doing so will update your main pawn’s status to “cured” in the Rift, otherwise your main pawn will still show up as infected until you rest up at an inn.
Reviving NPC that were victims of Dragonsplague
NPCs killed by Dragonsplague can still be revived with the use of Wakestones, provided that they are still in the morgue and haven’t been buried yet. There have been reports that towns razed by Dragonsplague will slowly repopulate itself over time, so you do not need to revive each and every NPC. However, this does not guarantee that the important NPCs, such as quest NPCs and merchants, will be revived without your intervention, so it is best to prioritize reviving them first.
A good way to revive killed NPCs en masse is by obtaining the Eternal Wakestone from the Sphinx’s A Game of Wits quest where it is the final reward after killing the Sphinx. The Eternal Wakestone has a range wide enough to revive all townsfolk within the town that you are in. Be mindful that, despite its name, the Eternal Wakestone can only be used once.
