The Countdown is over! Dragon Age: Origins released (Spoiler Free Discussion)

[Mordrak]

I don’t get the “playing as” suggestions. You have multiple party members. You can play as everything if you want (at least on the PC). What the player character is mostly matters for story and personal RPing. If a two handed warrior was boring, micromanage your other characters more. There are one or two segments where you are left alone though. That could be an issue.

[Quitch]

I’m not sure I liked the direction they went with skills though. It felt like a four character MMO. With pausing. And with the limited party size combined with the limited NPC count, I just didn’t feel like I got a lot of room to play with party and skill combinations, they often seemed to pick themselves.

[Alistair]

I’m just playing King Arthur - The Role Playing Wargame and it struck me that people who enjoyed the combat in DA might like to give it a go. It’s pausable tactical combat, with not a huge number of units as far as I can see, with spells to be fired off etc. There’s a demo on steam. It has little quests, superposed on Total War style gameplay. If you thought of it as Dragon Age, the Wargame, it’s doesn’t seem to be a million miles away from that :)

[hong]

Well, a cunning dagger rogue has high penetration I think. Unfortunately I went in with the dream of having a high-strength rogue duel wielding two powerful medium weapons, kind of like a combat rogue in WoW. Apparently this is the lowest DPS build possible, and I’m guessing it’s because of Cunning’s modifier to armor penetration.

Kind of a shame, really, although the high strength lets me wear good armor as well as use some of the more powerful one handed weapons (Axameter, baby!)

High-Str dual-wield can work, but yeah, that’s more of a warrior option than a rogue one.

[JoshV]

I gotta agree with this, although I went with the rogue DW route instead of the warrior. After I got the 2nd rogue party member, I replaced my two handed Qunari warrior and the kill speed went through the rough as my two DW rogues work in tandem.

The best thing that the 2H warrior had going for him was the very large armor penetration of his huge maul, which was great for Revenants. I may still have to bring him along just to deal with those, actually. My rogue may as well be wielding wet noodles against Revs with their ridiculously high armor values.

One of the mage enchantments adds armor penetration for the whole party. Though this is where I complain about the lack of information provided, as I have no idea how much gets added. That’s really my big complaint for the system is that it hides all the nitty gritty details, and has vague descriptions for things, so you have to do a lot of trial and error, (without a respec option built into the game!) to figure what works well, and what doesn’t. Now that i’ve played through most of the game, I feel i have a decent grasp but it took a while to get there.

[Delta]

Apologies for resurrecting the thread, but it’s been a while since I played a dice based RPG and I’m a little confused. Finding myself in an astonishingly tough fight, what’s the general thing to do? Change tactics? Get new items? … Grind?

[Wolff]

Which fight?

[Delta]

:) I restrained myself from saying this because you’ll all go 'Aw, that one! How sweet! He’s being pounded by that!".

… If you must know, it’s the Hurlock Emissary and his Hurlock Buddies in the Korcari Wilds.

What? I’ve just started! :)

[Wolff]

So iirc its you and the bunch of Grey Warden Noobs. You can use one of your guys with a bow to pull some of the mobs toward you. Be sure to use the hold command to keep everyone from charging into the traps and whatnot.

[Delta]

Ah-ha! I’ll try that later… I reckon things will get better with Morrigan.

[Shimarenda]

:) I restrained myself from saying this because you’ll all go 'Aw, that one! How sweet! He’s being pounded by that!".

… If you must know, it’s the Hurlock Emissary and his Hurlock Buddies in the Korcari Wilds.

What? I’ve just started! :)

You probably need to change tactics. Getting new items isn’t something you can count on in Dragon Age, and grinding doesn’t really work because there’s really nothing to grind on (monsters don’t respawn) and enemies scale to your level. In addition, there’s nowhere to go from the Wilds except back to camp.

My advice, which may or may not work for you, is to put Alistair on the Emissary and have him use any shield talents you have to interupt casting; you should at least have Shield Bash. Use the other three characters to kill all the Emissary’s buddies; then gang up on the Emissary. Don’t be hesitant to use health poultices.

That is actually a tough fight at that level, especially if this is your first time playing.

Edit: wow, I type slowly.

[Angie_Gallant]

Pulling and controlling the fight is more important in Dragon Age than it is in many modern RPGs, so this fight will be good practice for you. You will also want to either make sure that you set up your companions tactics very, very specifically OR you will want to pretty much turn them off and do a lot of pausing and handing out orders. Your companions tactics do not update automatically at level up, so if you are going to let them have some automation you’re going to want to check them often to make sure they are optimized.

[Dan_Theman]

For whatever it’s worth, I replayed that one myself - it’s not easy, and if you handle it in the usual action RPG “wade in and bash away” technique then you’ll get slaughtered every time. As mentioned, your opponents WANT you to charge across that bridge and fight.

When you face tough fights in the future, I suggest always looking for different tactics and spell combos if you’re forced to replay.

And yes, Morrigan will likely help matters. ;)

EDIT - wow. Yeah, what everyone else said while I was typing slowly.

[ABailey]

Get the Mana Clash spell as fast as you can, BTW. It kills the crap out of white-level spellcasters in one hit, usually kills yellows in one hit but not always, and gouges out a huge amount on orange level ones. It is a beautiful spell of beauty.

[Delta]

Thanks for all your help - I feel pretty ready to give this a go - once my stupid Civil Rights work is done, of course. I’m a dwarf rogue, so at this stage I’ve no spells or anything, but holding back and/or setting Alistair on the Emissary sounds like a good plan.

EDIT: My first thought on seeing him was ‘Ah, Emissary! The Darkspawn are going to talk to me!’. How naive.

[GuildBoss]

Pulling and controlling the fight is more important in Dragon Age than it is in many modern RPGs, so this fight will be good practice for you.

This. I recall getting slaughtered the first time in that particular fight after just charging forward and getting overwhelmed. 2nd attempt went much better by using MMO-ish tactics of “pulling” a few of the baddies at a time.

[Delta]

This. I recall getting slaughtered the first time in that particular fight after just charging forward and getting overwhelmed. 2nd attempt went much better by using MMO-ish tactics of “pulling” a few of the baddies at a time.

Ah, see, I don’t play any MMOs. The last game that I played like this (which I absolutely loved) was Neverwinter Nights - and that must have been at least five or six years ago.

[TurinTur]

Dragon Age Anime Announced (?!!)
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/64136

[Dan_Theman]

Dragon Age Anime Announced (?!!)
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/64136

Shacknews is normally okay, but given the potential content I wanted to double check - is that link SFW?

[jeansberg]

Lol. I got a nice highlighted comment right at the bottom of the article.

““Americanised” anime has always been utter crap. I’d be surprised if they pulled this off well bu…”