1st play through (current one) would be with a good aligned Dalish Elf who falls in love with the aloof and a bit evil Morrigan. He just can’t help himself. It’s like Tanis and Kitiara, like a moth to a flame.
2nd play through would be a human mage. A dark hearted SOB out to get as much power for himself as possible. BUT like Raistlin and Crysania, his heart melts for the frenchy goodie two-shoes.
I had it all figure out, but it it hasn’t quite played out like that so far. My actions have influenced a very positive reaction with Leliana, and I’ve worked hard at keeping Morrigan happy. Now they both love me. I fully planned on letting Leliana down, but then, she did it. The one thing that has 'caused me to do foolish things on so many occasions… she sang to me! Girls singing to me tend to turn me into a puddle of goo.
What ever shall I do?! Morrigan is such a bad girl. Naughty girl. But Leliena sings! And she’s sweet.
It doesn’t really matter anyway, she gets nervous when she starts to love you too much and as far as I’ve been able to tell the romance is unsalvageable in the end. The closest you get to closure being an optional, somewhat morally shady ritual at the end that she offers even if you’re not wooing her.
I’m just starting, and I wanted to ask: does the PC need to be the one with the social skills? I’m planning on recruiting Leliana, so can I focus my statistics on magic-related stuff and boost her Cunning, or should I focus on getting the Warden’s social skills up as well?
You don’t really need to boost cunning for social skills IMO, at least no more than the requirement to pick the skill in the first place - my warrior’s gone through most of the game with the second level and 16 cunning, and I don’t recall a single persuasion failure past Lothering (though to be honest, when I really wanted a success, I went for intimidation. You don’t fuck with the 48 strength gal :)).
That being said, what else would you pour your skill points in as a mage ? Tactics are useless since you’re playing the character, combat is so-so, alchemy’s awesome but only takes 3 points, poison and traps are handled by the party’s rogue, pickpocket is as useless as it has been in every RPG ever… which leaves survival, I guess. It’s true the radar helps quite a bit, but there again it can be handled by another character, like your tank.
Herbalism - nada, Morrigan or Wyne should be brewing potions for you
Survival - Only needed if you are a tank, for 3 ranks in it grants Physical Resistance. But if you are going for Arcane Warrior, it’s good to have so you don’t get chomped by Ogres. However, you need 16 Cunning…
Pickpocket - I think I picked some good stuff before; have to wait for a comprehensive guide.
Combat Training - I go with at least 2 ranks because at the 2nd rank it grants a bonus to mana regeneration.
Poison - Useless for mages
What I really hate about the game are those chests which need rank 4 Lock Picking and only yield…a health poultice…grr…
Really? I’m not finding Hard to be too bad but I did grow up on BG, BG II, IWD X and Planescape. Continual tweaking of character actions and positioning is almost second nature. Chances are that’s what’s helping.
Anyone bothering to try nightmare or is it simply abusive?
I may try it next time, but as it is characters just take too much damage. And it’s not just poorly specced characters, Shale with 40+ constitution can be almost down within half a minute with continual healing. On hard I had to occasionally resort to extreme cheese as it was (“extreme cheese” generally referring to taunt + forcefield, which didn’t always work if they broke aggro halfway through). I may try Nightmare on my second playthrough, but I won’t hesitate too much to switch back down to hard.
The conventional cheesiest of all cheese techniques is to have 3 mages plus one tank. Cast Force Shield on tank, and have the mages unleash their best AoE.
I’ve been contemplating a playthrough like this as well. This and 4 warriors.
Also, has anyone seen a complete and total walkthrough yet? I watched my girlfriend play and she found something I didn’t get to and vice versa.
In Fallout and Fallout 2 it was great. It was a huge XP boost at early levels, and later it allowed you to remove spare ammo from people you knew you’d be fighting with later, like the Raiders who held Tandy. The little money you got in Planescape: Torment added up.
The ability to steal Logain’s crown was definitely worth it.
I think that 1.01a is the one that made easy and normal easier. See the change log the first six items are exactly the same.
1.01a delivers the following changes and improvements:
• fixed potential corruption of character statistics
• fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
• fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
• made Easy difficulty easier
• slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
• fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays
Update: November 17, 2009
Ten days after the first patch, Bioware delivers the second update for Dragon Age: Origins. Version 1.01b fixes some minor bugs.
• fixed potential corruption of character statistics
• fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
• fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
• made Easy difficulty easier
• slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
• fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays
• fixed an issue with Vista and Windows 7 Game for Windows Explorer
• fixed an issue with Dragon Age and Windows Game Explorer
• updated Visual C runtime libraries
Yes, I have noticed this. The odd thing is that when I first start playing it seems like everything is moving too fast - I kept checking whether I had a haste spell going before I figured out it was just the game. Then it gradually slowed down until it was just annoying.
At least I managed to fix the crashing issue. Turns out the game apparently really doesn’t like Windows SP2 (I’d been avoiding upgrading to SP3 for other reasons until now, and I missed that part of the min requirements for DA)
If you let Alistair fight the duel himself, he just kills Loghain at the end. No discussions or options, just WHACK and off with his head. I couldn’t convince him to marry Anora, but then I didn’t really want him to anyway since my character and Alistair are in lurrve :D. I’ve split my save games to follow two different paths now, to see what happens if I nominate Anora versus Alistair for the crown. Alistair dumps you if he becomes king (well, if you’re an elf, anyway), but I dunno what happens later… that was as far as I got last night. Believe it or not I was actually kinda depressed after that - I think I might be a little TOO into the game, LOL. Anyway, I read somewhere that it’s possible to have a happy ending in spite of the racial issue - we’ll see.
Alistair certainly got angry at me when I made him king, but I was an Elf Mage and it was more frustration. He didn’t dump me at all, just gave me an “I never wanted this” lecture (which was kind of stupid since I was planning on explaining it to him because of earlier dialogue with him but all the conversation options where “Congrats!” and the like). Wow, the game must have unique scenarios based on your choices than I thought.
[Spoiler] To say that Allistair was “upset” with me would have been a severe understatement. I think if he thought he could have gotten away with it he would have attacked me right in the hall in the palace in front of all the nobles. I was playing a human female warrior and even though I didn’t pursue a romance with him, (I went for Leliana on my first playthrough), he was one of my party mainstays and he was there by my side all the way from Ostagar. I talked with him constantly and I think I exhausted all his dialogue options short of the romantic ones. I really like Allistair. I had his affection meter maxed out. As the only other warden in Ferelden, (that we knew of), I made sure he and my MC forged a tight friendship. I think that was what made his actions in the Landsmeet even more shocking to me, because it felt like a betrayal. In hindsight though it makes a lot of sense because I knew how much he admired Duncan. Revenant Threshold was absolutely right when he alluded to the fact that even characters who really like you have lines that they won’t cross under any circumstances. Allistair never spoke about Logain all that much, but letting the man he held responsible for his mentor’s death live after the duel was just too much I suppose. Letting Logain go through the warden initiation was what really seemed to push him over the edge though.
My first MC was a straight forward “good” character. She was kind, altruistic and attempted to find the best, most magnanimous solution to all the problems they ran across. On my second playthrough I’m playing an Elven Mage who is a selfish, opportunistic, power hungry bastard. (I know I’m not the only player who does this :p) I plan on making him a blood mage and he’ll take Morrigan up on her offer at the end, among other things. Ironically, it occurs to me that I’ll probably end up letting Logain get executed which means Allistair will probably stick around. The woman warrior that he had a true kinship with he winds up walking out on while the blood mage that he won’t be able to stand, (by the time I’m done at least), he’ll be with till the end. This game is far more intricate than I originally thought.
Hmm, I wonder if I can propose marriage myself to Anora? Does anyone know if that’s option for male characters?[/Spoiler]
That reminds me did anyone else get an endgame epilogue bug?
I got Alistair and Anora to agree to get married and share the throne, with Alistair continuing to fight. However at the end I very magnanimously allowed Alistair to strike the final blow and die. But then in the wrap up it told me about Alistair and Anora sucessfully ruling together till old age or something.
