[5th Quest Entry] HeroOfFire

[Zweldron]

Did you try a fairy fountain? It's odd that the Triforce doesn't remove the jinx but you should be able to remove it with a fairy fountain, or an f6 continue if the fairy fountain doesn't work (just saying to fix your problem in the moment, it's still something that would need to be fixed if HeroOfFire goes on to the finals).

I tried everything. NOTHING removed the jinx- triaforce, fairy, f6-continue, nothing. The only thing I didn't try was a potion (for obvious reasons!)
Fortunately, I make detailed maps, so I decided to retry (back to just after I completed dungeon 2), but it only took me an hour to redo all the stuff I lost (as you can tell from time of this post; oh, and I did use the digdogger trick to speed up getting through those rooms). Well, actually, a lot of secrets on the overworld are no longer uncovered, but I got the heart containers and magic sword again (again, thanks to my detailed notes).
Anyway, I'm going to save my progress more often (since the other posts in this thread indicate there may be more of these bugs lurking), but since I didn't waste too much time, I will continue to finish the quest. The bug is going to hurt my rating, but it won't be a 0 (as I stated before). If I want to be honest, my 0 rating for maps that couldn't be finished was actually only one category in HoMM (I had three ratings for design, description, and entertainment; this problem only causes an automatic 0 in the design category), so here it will not clobber everything.

Edit: Well, I finished it. total time by ZQ is just under 8 hours, which means that it took me about 10, considering my previous problems, and that I got hit with the uncurable item lock again in dungeon 9, after exploring all but 4 rooms of it.
Critical bugs aside, this quest was fairly easy. I used a total of 2 potions the entire time, and my only deaths were pre-dungeon 1, during my overworld exploration. This quest would have been great for a 3rd quest, but it really doesn't have the oomph that is expected of a 5th quest candidate.
I did like the ladder upgrade, and it made certain rooms interesting to navigate.
I would have liked to see better cluing of the dungeon locations, but I located all but the ones requiring the whistle before doing dungeon 1, so that wasn't an impediment to me. The clue for the location of the magic key was nice, but I think it would have been better to see that clue in dungeon 6 instead, as that was the first place the clud would have been applicable. If I hadn't gotten that clue for the key, I still would have expected it, since the trick was already done once. General note to map designers: if you are going to do a trick that you think needs cluing, then give the clue before the first time you do it.
Anyway, my overall impression was that this was a solid map, which really should have been more carefully inspected before release. reading through this thread, the critical problems have been there for several months- if the map has been updated, no note about that is present, so I have to assume the problem still exists. My final rating, which is reduced due to the bubble problem, is 2.28 / 5