I finally, after 300000 side quests (I am a completionist) got down into the Deep Roads. They are very pretty. And this is the first point at which I’ve felt like there’s any real challenge left to be had in the game on the default difficulty setting. By which I mean I’ve encountered two (2) fights that caused a total party wipe. One of which was a legitimately challenging fight only mildly complicated by regular spawn-out-of-nowhere adds, the other of which was complete bullshit due to an unending stream of out-of-nowhere adds that juggled me into the wall and killed me, after which I ragequit.
(For the record, yes, I know I could turn it up to hard, but I don’t value challenge for its own sake. I value fights being intrinsically interesting, and most of Dragon Age 2’s battles are not.)
Mazuo
2942
In what way are they supposed to be interesting if not by challenge?
I’m 20+ hours in on nightmare, still in Act 1 but getting close to running out of stuff to do. Stuck on a battle with a few too many waves of enemies for me to handle, but I’ve been stuck like that before, hopefully will get past it soon.
I’m finding my characters could probably work a lot better in the way I want them to if I’d suck it up and go buy some respec potions, but I’ve been miserly holding on to every copper I acquire. Thought I found a bug with disappearing potions but turns out it’s just an evil feature. Elite rogues at least on this difficulty, not sure about others, can steal party potions and use to heal themselves.
Let me give you an entirely fictitious example: Combat 1 involves 8 guys with HP ranging from 200 to 1000 (your attacks dealing between 30 and 200 damage), with specific weakness to various status effects and damage types, and each one of the eight equipped with a couple of unique special attacks. Combat 2 involves 8 guys with HP ranging from 20000 to 100000 (your attacks dealing between 15 and 100 damage), immune to most status effects and without vulnerabilities, all of which share the same attack patterns. Once four of the first eight guys are down, 8 more spawn in.
- Which combat is more challenging, combat 1 or combat 2?
- Which combat is more interesting, combat 1 or combat 2?
Mazuo
2944
I was actually asking how an easy fight was supposed to be interesting.
When you talk about status effects, on nightmare I’ve had enemies immune to most magic. So I switched to a telekinetic staff that did physical damage and it worked. Seemed interesting to me. The enemies I fight also use special auras and abilities to wreck my party.
An easy fight probably isn’t interesting. But I’d rather have that than a hard fight that still isn’t interesting. Which was the case in the second tough fight I encountered in the Deep Roads, and I fully expect to be the case for most any fight in DA2 with the difficulty turned up, because the mechanics have been altered in ways that reduce the inherent interest value of most fights in the game for me, -and- the encounter design has been mostly lousy. (Aside from the first challenging fight in the Deep Roads, and…to an extent…the boss of that sequence.) Increased difficulty levels usually don’t alter mechanics or encounter design, just add HP, resistances, and enemy damage output, while reducing some or all of those for your own party. And enemies that are immune to most magic sounds like the polar opposite of interesting to me, so I’m fairly confident in my decision.
Mazuo
2946
If all enemies were, sure. Having to change your attacks is rather tactical as opposed to just spamming auto-attack, which is what some have complained about.
I’m really enjoying the challenge.
Having enemies immune to all of my special moves is what reduces me to spamming auto-attack. But anyway. I’ve had this argument before over Mass Effect 2, and I’m not any more convinced this time around. At least there’s some meat on DA2’s combat bones, even if it’s not as much as I’d like.
Mazuo
2948
shrug On nightmare I’ve yet to encounter any enemy that was immune to everything but I’m only on Act 1 so maybe I’ll be frustrated by that later myself.
maxle
2949
Having played further, my only real problem with the game is its encounter design–but it’s a big problem. I have no interest in playing this on anything higher than normal, because I’ve no interest in trying to playing a tactical combat game in which every single battle involves the developer shouting “ENEMIES SPAWN ON YOUR SQUISHIES BET YOU DIDN’T EXPECT THAT” at the player. If X-Com or Jagged Alliance 2 had been like this, I wouldn’t have enjoyed them at all. But yeah, literally every single fight is a “Gotcha!” which…well, I would love to see a postmortem in which the encounter design is discussed, because from where I’m sitting it’s unpardonably stupid and/or lazy and/or contemptuous of the audience.
Playing it on normal takes most of the irritation away, but that’s only because playing on normal takes away the need to play tactically. Which is a shame.
I doubt there is a “find your squishies, drop reinforcements on them” mechanic at work. At normal difficulty level running 1-tank 2-rogue 1-Anders parties, keeping the party more or less grouped together seemed more than adequate to keeping the squishies from tanking much. Running away from trouble with them seemed, if anything, a bit on the easy side.
I regret doing my playthrough on Normal seeing how deprecated it already is, but I really avoided reading out-of-game resources on character builds to avoid min-maxing like I did in DA:O.
The upshot was I didn’t really understand the significance of building the party around combo DPS, and instead built a party along DA:O lines - a heavily tanked 1HS with upgraded Taunt and everyone else with DPS upgrades and abilities taken for their individual face values.
Jag
2951
Wait, what? You sure about that?
There is not a second wave of attackers in “literally every single fight.” It happens a lot–most of the time, even. But not every time.
Anyway. Like Jason mentioned, you’re probably getting the second wave right on top of your mages because you’re not keeping everybody together. The usual RPG strategy is “Fighters run ahead, mages stay back and blast people” and that just doesn’t work here. They need to stick together. If your mages are lingering back around where you first spotted the enemy then yeah, the reinforcements that come “down that road” are going to run right into them. Human enemies tend to come in from a logical place like around a corner or from rooftops, so they don’t just “appear” in the middle of the fight.
Unless you’re talking about supernatural things like demons and wraiths appearing everywhere, in which case they can and will pop up in the middle of everything and make your life miserable. Seems appropriate, though.
You’re really being petty there. There is a second wave of attackers in almost every fight. In fact i’d say there is a 3rd wave of attackers more than there is no 2nd wave. It is pushing it a bit, but maybe even a 4th wave more than no 2nd wave, maybe.
And yes, in any fight in da2, you should assume once the fight starts, enemies will appear around the point designated as the center of the combat area at least one time, thus removing any sense of strategic party positioning. A dead end is no protection. Just another example of cutting corners in DA2’s design.
It’s not petty at all. I’ve read a number of reviews from professionals and user impressions that make a point of saying “literally. every. single. fight,” and it’s simply not true. It’s not petty to point that out.
And we’ve been over this, but I just don’t agree about strategic positioning being useless. There are usually a number of points in any given battle where you can put people and they’ll be out of the way. It’s usually not back where they were when the battle started, but that just means you have to think a little bit about where to position people.
Them: I have 99 blue blocks and 1 red block. Literally every one of my blocks is blue!
You: NO! You have 1 red block so that is simply not true!
In most situations it is the case though with positioning. Most of the fights take place in hallways or similar and enemies generally come at you from both sides in waves. Obviously this is not true in literally every fight, but it is true in most.
Sometimes you can find a little dead end away from the center based spawning system, BUT often times those little dead ends are actually spawning locations for further waves so it can be dangerous.
I am now in act 2. I can think of precisely one fight that didn’t include reinforcement waves - the culmination of the mine quest in act 1. That’s it to date.
I would guess that the average number of waves would be 2.5. Random goon fights were rarely/never 1 wave only, but a non-trivial number of minor set pieces were, particularly in dungeons.
As he said the usual culprits of “right in the middle spawns” are things like shades or spiders. Humanoids in Kirkwall tend to come from “paths” or the perimeter of the fight area. Humanoid spawns right in the middle of the fight were certainly a minority. Whether it was a large or small minority I can’t swear to because I never really found it frustrating to keep people out of melee.
My squishies were usually Anders, Varric and my Rogue main with fully upgraded panacea running and the party often inside its passive regen area; this might have made me more tolerant of 1-2 guys wailing on my ranged followers for a few seconds while I DPSed down other targets, and it might not carry over to Hard.
I remember making fun of idrisz for using his MMO alphabet soup of gobbledygook to describe DAO. It looks like that’s a lost cause.
And yes, I realize they’re incorporating MMO mechanics into their single player game so we might as well use the terms. That doesn’t keep my nerd-slap hand from twitching.
Joe_M
2959
This is very similar to what I’ve experienced so far with ~35 hours played, in Act II I believe. I usually have my melee types charge into the room and I edge my mage in about ten feet and I swing to the right or left so that any reinforcements that sweep into the room miss my alarmingly squishy Hawke. Other than one incident where a couple archers literally fell off a roof onto my head I haven’t noticed humanoids spawning, but it’s possible I’ve missed it in the heat of battle and pause/order spam.
That “MMO alphabet soup of gobbledygook” is just jargon that players invented to quickly refer to things that are not just present in mmos. The fact that it is (rightfully) assumed most peopple on gaming forums will know what they are talking about does speak to the popularity of mmos in “gaming culture” though.
It is easier to say “first you cc the demon princess of doom” than “first you cast petrify or horror on the demon princess of doom in order to disable her.”
Single player games aren’t incorporating mmo mechanics as mmos did not invent party based combat with depth.
