2881

As a mage you can specialize as an Arcane Warrior, which allows you to wear Armor based on your Magic stat rather than your strength. You can also use swords and other melee weapons. You won’t be the melee badass that a two handed berserker or reaver would be, but its there as an option.

2882

A lot of rogue skills use cunning as their ability modifier, and warrior use strength.

if you want to wield high level non-dagger one hand weapons you need to have high strength, I think some of the swords I got require 38+ strength to use.

Though rogue makes up the fact of using dagger by getting backstab.

One thing that kind of throw me off from DA and D&D is the armor system, in D&D high armor means your chance of getting hit is less, but hits still does the same damage landing on you, DA have both armor and defense, high armor means you take a flat out reduction in damage, I’m thinking maybe a literally 1 armor for 1 damage reduction, while Defense is the chance you evade/block attacks.

Every weapons have armor penetration that works on a 1-1 basis vs armor. vs certain enemies my berserker literally takes 1-2 damages a hit since I have almost 40 armors.

2883

What about for bow builds like the Ranger? It’s all dex, right? Can the Arcane Warrior use bows?

2884

I wouldn’t play a warrior personally, just because there’s such a wide choice of warrior NPCs and half the fun of a bioware RPG is exploring all of your companions’ stories.

2885

I was thinking Blood Mage and/or Arcane Warrior spec’d mage would be the route to go since there is no NPC with those, right?

2886

Yep, right. The only two mage NPCs are spirit healer and shapeshifter. Although of course you do get two specializations, so I don’t see why you couldn’t turn morrigan into a blood mage also.

I’m mostly concerned with seeing as much of the game as possible, which is why I don’t want to make a warrior and get stuck with taking both mages plus one of the rogues to build an optimal party.

Question, can you persuade or intimidate with party NPCs? Or is that limited to the PC’s skills? And how much persuasion/intimidation is there in the game; is it a major alternative to kill/sneak that opens up additional storyline like fallout or does it have less impact?

2887

it was impossible for me to get blood mage specialization due to morrigan wasn’t in my usual group and I’m not a mage.

No spoiler, but some of the specialization is quite hard to get.

you need 4 levels to max out a specialization skill, that mean if you don’t unlock that specialization by lvl 17, you won’t be able to max it.
I’m leveling quite fast, lvl 16 at moment, I’m still missing a few of specialization minus some that I couldn’t get.

2888

Thanks so much for the info-I would ideally like to use 1-handed swords to dual wield, so that is something to consider. I guess I could do a duelist rogue with a sword and board. Or even the arcane warrior as suggested.

I am somewhat concerned, as other people have mentioned, with the abundance of warrior types for NPCs and wanting to “see as much as possible” especially given the the likelihood that I will never play this game twice-if I find 50 hours for one playthrough it will be a small blessing, much less two. Perhaps speccing one of the many NPC warriors for dual wield could be entertaining, and I could try a high dex assassin rogue, or even an arcane warrior mage (been a very long time since I have played a mage in an rpg!)

Is it surprising that a game with a mere 3 character classes seems to have such depth in picking character specialization, or is this particular to my pre-rpg character creation anxiety that I mentioned earlier in the thread?

2889

DA’s rangers aren’t archery-focused, they just get animal summons.

2890

I’m the super lazy type on 360, so anything passive = the win, that’s why I made my rogue/bard went assassin instead duelist, because assassin have more passive than duelist!!!

2891

It is possible to do a dual-wielding warrior, it’s just that the dexterity requirements will probably pull points away from constitution, making the character less hardy. However, you have enough choices of tanks in your companion roster that playing a dual-wield DPS warrior is certainly feasible.

2892

Well, it’s really sounding like rogue is the way to go, especially since I’m not really looking forward to either of the rogue NPCs. I’ll just have to increase my strength up to medium armor levels pretty quickly to get out of the slutwear.

2893

I really strugged with playing a warrior vs a rogue for my first play through, and settled on Warrior. We’ll see how it plays out, Rogues sound extremely interesting.

2894

Don’t you have level up the ol’ seduction skill before you can even wear basic slutwear?

2895

Post pix before you do, k?

2896

Here you go, Tim.

gratuitous virtual beaver shot deleted

2897

So Steam won’t unlock until 3pm EST? That makes me sad… I wanted to play it all day tomorrow, Wed. are not so good for me. I think I would have went with Walmark or something instead of Steam if I had know it wouldn’t be unlocked until so late in the day.

2898

Another game release, another Steam letdown. You haven’t been paying attention if you didn’t know this, but you’re in good company.

2899

I’m talking about the difference between this and this. I rather like most of the armor designs, but the Light armor is definitely Not For Me.

2900

I love massive