I beat it. I’m going to start a new game with a prick elven mage. I’ll learn blood magic, engage in deceit, and
go against Alistair and let Loghain live. Alistair started to get on my nerves. I’ll also take Morrigan up on her offer.
Okay, this can’t be right. Steam says I’ve played about 57 hours and the game says I’m only a little over a third of the way through. As much as I love this game I’m having trouble imagining there’s THAT much content, does the game start wrapping up faster after/during the landsmeet or do they start forcing me into random exotic locations or something?
If you’ve completed all the side quests in Denerim around the Landsmeet and you’ve arrived, then yes, the game does wrap up pretty fast after that.
[spoiler]Feh, I missed Duncan’s shield so I have to do almost all of Denerim over again just to talk to Riorden. So I get to storm the goddamn Arl’s house… AGAIN, and save the stupid city elves… AGAIN. And beat that sidequest arcane horror demon again! Oh well, at least they weren’t too long.
ETA: Oh, and do the landsmeet again and save Redcliffe again. So basically everything I did today is wasted.[/spoiler]
Where’s he?
Actually his name is Gaxkang. I think I must have been thinking of some other game
I just figured out the tab key shows you all the clickable stuff around you. VERY handy in the tower, where many quests depend on you finding little bits of paper strewn about the various rooms. I’m guessing it’s also very handy everyplace else in the game before I figured it out as well.
Heh, I checked that instinctively, it’s usually Tab, Alt, or Z in most CRPGs I’ve played.
The one thing this is still missing from days of yore is a “loot all” button. I can’t remember if it was BG or NWN that had it though, I know one of them had a button which would automove your character to all lootable enemies in your line of sight and open the loot screen. Very handy.
I always appreciated the item filter in Dungeon Siege that let you specify what items you wanted to ignore so you wouldn’t have to sift through all the low level garbage treasure.
There is also a filter in Titan Quest, but in DA there isn’t really much to loot; I grab everything I could since I have a tough time getting gold.
Anyone has any tips for farming gold?
It picks up, I’ve found piles of 12-20 gold just lying around after certain boss battles, if you pick up really good equipment it can also help.
Yep. Pick everything up. I think I’m certainly going to do a second playthrough in which my main character is a thief specializing in dual weapons, bring around two arcane warriors and a huge tank and have that as my party.
The more I play, the more disillusioned I get. It is beginning to feel too much like a single player MMORPG. Too much emphasis on crowd control, and forcing me to cheese tactics. Too much reliance on magic. There are taunts to draw aggro - this is LotRO or CoH as single player (and I’m sure WoW is the same, but I don’t play). With only 4 slots, I feel I either need to make Morrigan a Spirit Healer and give up some offense (notably the fire line), or I need to always take the two mages. As a dual-wielding ranger/duelist (to be), I rarely get to bring Leilani or Zevran unless I want to go to “easy” mode. I do get to cycle through the tanks, though a female love interest tank would have been a nice alternative.
Part of the problem is the nature of the beast - even my beloved Baldur’s Gate games had several different tactics, because the boss fights tended to always work the same. You had to fight mages one way, dragons another, liches yet another. They were all scripted the same, so the PC team pretty much could always use the same tactics. However, BG didn’t feel like a MMORPG.
And for LOTRO, you can bring 6 people in total.
The problem is a change to the game system, I would analyze. The system changes from D&D style where a ‘hit’ is rare as compared to their homebrew system where you have at least a 50% chance to hit (which is not mitigated by armor, but by Dexterity) .
I always bring 2 mages with me too. Archery is too underpowered (no ranged stuns, charge-ups on archery abilities is too long, combatant switches to melee despite having the melee archer talent etc.)
That said, I have no idea how the game would work in other ways because of the ‘surefire hit’. Priority is placed on CC and healing in such cases. Maybe there may be a mod which changes Armor to Defence, and the game would feel more like BG.
Well the effect of armor on damage mitigation is really low. However changing it alone won’t effect much because Arcane warriors will get any benefit as well and still be mage focused. The main good change I could see would be more warrior passive skills that don’t suck stamina, but make melee damage and damage reduction much better for a skilled warrior.
I’ve found as necessary as healing is it still rarely helps. I can have Shale in stoneheart mode with balms up the ass and a good pack of archers will pick him off in moments. This is okay when you can run and pull people off, but boss battles can get very tedious when they’re backed up by squads. Though I do revel in caster battles because my Arcane Warrior is pretty much immune to everything in shimmering shield mode (except the stupid soul prison, I can’t count how many times a battle has gone: pull -> hexed -> imprisoned -> mortality -> gangraped by archers and an ogre before anyone can retaliate. Blood mage enemies seem to have an ability that can do this to the entire party at once. I press f9 a lot during those battles). On hard I pretty much HAVE to use the xtreme cheese force field tank, at least from time to time. I can’t even imagine what pain nightmare difficulty brings.
Funny, I have to figure out the tactics to get Leilani to switch to melee weapons when in melee, versus using archery. And how not to have people I’m not micromanaging just stand in place and to attack something. Heck, even sometimes when I micromanage, they still don’t attack (I’m looking at my ranger’s bear for that one). A flank option would have been nice for rogues (if enemy is fighting another ally or incapacitated, then flank and attack - is that so hard to program?)
I’m not sure I like armor as defense. I like how NWN (3.5e?) works - heavy armor penalizes dexterity, but both dexterity based and armor-based designs work. I’m not quite sure what the trade-off in DA:O is.
I find enemy AI to be poor, something that was fixed back in Icewind Dale. How do I pull just 1 - 3 enemies out of a room with a bow?* Before an ID patch, you could walk up until an enemy appeared in the fog of war, and only face that enemy. Bioware fixed that, yet the equivalent appears here. Despite that, when it comes time for the boss battle, you gut stuck in an cut scene that leaves you in a horribly defensed position, often in a locked room (no escaping to the fallback, trapped position). You went from being able to pre-trap Irenicus before he turns red to walking right up to Jarvia and saying “Please surround me, including hidden lieutenants, before the battle starts.” Where is the happy medium?
*That’s rhetorical, not a “how-to” question. It’s my main tactic.
Hehe I remember in Baldur’s gate I and II you could kill an enemy still in fog of war by centering an AOE just on the edge of what was revealed, and he would just stay there bleeding to death.
I’ve got about 50 hours in the game so far (spread across three characters). I’m really, really digging it. I don’t usually get into the RP aspects of RPGs, but in my opinion this one is just very well done. I’m actually interested in the characters and look forward to the funny things they’ll say and where their respective stories will lead. I love the random banter that the NPC party members have between each other when we’re just wandering around (like Wynne teasing Alistair for checking out my character’s posterior :o) I’ve started actively looking for gifts that I think they’ll like…
Sten likes art, Wynne likes books, Leliana likes religious crap, Zevran likes leather, Morrigan hates her mother… 
Of course the fights are way fun, too. I finally got my tactic screens set up so that the party members are doing what I want them to do, and fights are relatively smooth. I still have to do a degree of micromanaging, but usually only to position them just so. And there are still a few fights that catch me by surprise so I end up having to reload once or twice… I think I need to put a few more points into survival to help with that issue. Having lots of mana and health potions is key, and making sure to program them into the tactics screen, so that the characters automatically use them when their health/mana gets below a certain point.
One tip I can offer folks wondering which area to start with on the Blight questline:
once you’re through with the Grey Warden starting zone, I recommend tackling the Circle Tower first, since that’s where you find Wynne, who is by far the best healer. You’ll still pick up a couple other npcs on the way (two in Lothering, possibly one other on the road). Also, it’s important not to piss Wynne off until after you’ve completed the tower - I made a mistake that ended with her being decapitated by another party member just before the big boss fight. :smack: So I had to backtrack a little bit.
I never did get the dog party member on my main character (Dalish Elf). I think there are a couple places where you can get him, but I have no idea where they are. Can anyone enlighten me? Am I just SOL past a certain point?
When you go from the racial starting areas to Ostagar, there is a side quest to bring a flower back from the Kokari Wilds, and give it to the kennel master.
After the Tower of Istral (sp?) finishes, and you pick up Morrigan (she likes the jewelry gifts), you head out down the road to Lothering. On the way, the hound is offered to you as a potential party member.
I don’t know where the second instance may be, as I never had turned down the dog on the road to Lothering.