Chauncey, did you get to successfully do the Arena of Heroes content? I played the 5.9.3 patch and the hot fix never worked for me. So I never got chance to do the Moat respawn or Verbonnec content before finishing the Temple and ending the game. Trying to decide whether to replay with the 6.0.0 patch (and a different party) or move onto one of the 27 games in my "to be played" queue.
ChaunceyK: I installed 5.9.3 & started playing just before they released 6.0.0...now I'm afraid to install the 6.0.0 for fear it'll interfere with 5.9.3 after I've made so much progress. :-/
But in answer to your questions, no I haven't even seen mention of Arena of Heroes in the game. I did do Welkwood Bog, but haven't seen any mention of a Moat Respawn. On top of that, I've heard alot in the game about Verbobonc, but no one I've come across yet has "pointed it out" on my map.
Admittedly, I've skipped quite a few quests (I'm more a combat fan than a FedEx Quest fan), so maybe I skipped over the people who would've pointed me to these places. I wish I could just wander wherever I wanted to like in Arcanum, and "happen" across these places instead of having to know exactly where I'm going because someone "told" me it was there. :-(
I've perused the Co8 forums (not losing gaming time, only work time) to figure out most of the content in their New Content mod. All of the new stuff usually has two points of discovery, one a person wandering around if you're in the mood to talk to everyone and two, Brother Smith.
The problem I had was that the new content via Brother Smith is linear. Brother Smith checks whether you've completed the last mission he gave you and checks your level so you can't do things out of order. In my case, I was able to barely survive the Hickory Branch new content and be given the mission of unlocking a chest in front of Smith.
On unlocking the chest, you get access to the Arena of Heroes. Unfortunately, 5.9.3 shipped with a buggy Arena of Heroes and can not be completed. I tried moving my save games from 5.9.3 to a new install of 6.0.0, but that caused a complete meltdown! The hot fix at Co8 did not seem to work for me either.
What I missed post Arena of Heroes (which works in the 6.0.0 mod) is a whole new city Verbonnoc with dungeons and missions and a whole slew of bad guys reinhabiting the Moathouse. I might be off with some of this info since most of is my gleanings from being a Co8 forum lurker.
Now back to you... How it'd go with the Elemental Factions? Been down to the Elemental Nodes yet. I won't give any spoilers for those except avoid the fire node.
Mimo
Edit: Robobrien - Welcome aboard!