Why has the Gale necrotic aura bug not been fixed for 3+ years?

[J.Yamaha]

As per title, you can find posts about this from 2020. Gale gets knocked down during combat, when reviving him he has a necrotic aura that will kill all your party members very quickly and there's basically nothing you can do except reload to an earlier save.

No I'm not talking about if he gets killed and you do the little quest thing to revive him. If he's knocked down in combat you don't even trigger the cutscene to start the mini-quest which explains what to do and how to resurrect him etc, and you can even find 2-3 year old posts saying that the bug still happens after completing this part of his story. Yes there is a fix which I mention at the end of this post but this is clearly not intended behavior and ties into a wider issue of knock-down in combat being treated as a death, which it shouldn't otherwise why is there a "death roll" system.

I want to have him in my party but this is just really f---ing pissing me off having to reload and re-do fights just because he gets knocked down. I expected a fix at release or in the first few hotfixes, or y'know, sometime in the last 3 years since this has been reported.

Do developers even look at these forums? I doubt it, but if a dev is reading this, can you please give some indication that you are at least working on it? Or should I just straight up start a new game and murder Gale right at the start and never play with him.

Even just adding some interaction where this whole thing is explained before ruining people's playtime and forcing them to look for answers externally..

If this was an intended mechanic it wouldn't be fixable via a long rest - which also has issues in and of itself, such as him killing people at camp (Scratch, companions) with the aura before you can actually start the next day.

[TheSEP42]

Yeah this is really frustrating me as well, it's not explained at all why sometimes the necrotic aura appears when he's downed. It doesn't happen to me every time he's downed, and I've noticed that sometimes the aura doesn't appear after revival until after combat has ended.

A clear explanation of what causes it from the devs (ideally in game so like you said, people don't have to search externally and potentially get spoilers).

It is frustrating to a point where I'm considering ditching him from my party and respeccing another character to be a wizard. Which seems against the general principle of things being more organic.