Gothic 3 Dual Sword Mastery

Being a poor twitch gamer, one handed swords did not work well for me in this game. In a fight I would typically get knocked on my ass and if I wasn't careful I would soon die. But when I switched to Dual Sword, I never got knocked down. It was a great battle tactic I only learned near games end.

I am about to make a decision about which side to choose(Beliar, Innos or Zardas) . I have done nearly all the quests. But I have yet to be offered the Dual Sword Mastery skill. It turns out only one trainer in the game world offers the training to the Mastery level and he resides in Ishtar. But I have been unable to get into Ishtar due to me being a goody goody. I need 75 rep points to get into Ishtar but 20 (out of 100) come from killing Water Mages and another 20 come from killing Nomads and Nordmarians. Thus no way to get in unless I literally back stab some friends.

So on a depression/rage I went into Ishtar as a mealy bug and nearly looted the place blind. Yeah, the front guards would chase me a bit but if I put a scare spell on them, they seemed to forget my indiscretions and we were all friends again. (outside the city)

I even tried turning from a mealy bug to my avatar inside the city at a discreet location in the hopes that the skill giver would talk to me, but no . . . it was fight fight fight, get out of here, die, bang, clash, run for my life.

I was all depressed until I read there was a sword you can make that will give you the Dual Sword Mastery. But none of the smiths in Varant had the plans so I then went to Nordmar and none of them offered the plans. Being a little agitated and a little ignored, I decided to loot the treasure chest of one of the Nordmar smiths while he slept. But while the sword plans were not in there, the actual sword was.

Upon equipping the sword, I got Dual Sword Mastery. Now I can be a dual sword master without having to kill my friends. OTOH, I read in some forum that Dual Sword Mastery is the weapon of assassin and evil folks. (Reference Star Wars and a ton of martial arts flicks). And good guys are not supposed to be dual sword masters and the game designers wanted it that way. Well I am not evil and I did not kill my friends to get the skill.

OTOH, I did steal to get the skill and I have this extreme compulsion to go back to Ishtar and kill everybody. hmmmmmm, maybe they were right!!!!!!!!

The recipe for making the sword is probably found in one of the "special chests". Basically, those special treasure chests have fixed loot, but based on the number of chests you've opened. So the first such chest you open contains item X, the next contains item Y etc.

I don't remember how far down the line the good blacksmith recipes are, but they're too far down in my opinion. Unless you're going for something very specific the way you did, you'll most likely have everything you need by the time you open the later chests.