The difficulty is really uneven starting out and DA can be fairly frustrating until you get a sense of how they want you to play the game. Difficulty depends on what class you play, what build you have, and where you go. I wouldn’t even be embarrassed to swap to “Casual” difficulty when playing a starting mage. Warriors and rogues are a bit more survivable out of the gate.
You might want to look into defensive sustained spells to help out. Rock Armor has served me fairly well in the past. And any mage needs at least the basic Heal spell. I’d also recommend at least a couple damage oriented spells so you can kill things fairly quickly.
Don’t count on the warriors holding aggro well until later in the game. Kiting is one option. The other is using cold or paralyze spells to control the battlefield.
I’m fairly new to magery, I’d largely just let them do their own things while playing my rogue and warrior PCs, so this is just based on recent observation.
Not particularly different from the other characters, unfortunately. But I agree - it’s one of the best origin stories along with IMO the City Elf origin (especially if you play that one as a female).
Has cone of cold and the other paralyze spells been nerfed in the game? At least when I last played, the paralyze spells where the must-have spell for a spellcaster (and almost make the game too easy).
Not sure to be honest. I haven’t messed too much with Paralyze yet. Cold still seems pretty overpowered. The freeze-shatter combo is hard to beat though I’m not using that very much this play through.
Marcus
1825
Well how does everyone have their NPC tactics set? I think that might be part of my problem as sometimes my dudes just start going all over the place.
Are you playing on the PC? If so I recommend disabling tactics for everyone and micromanaging the party. That way they won’t do stupid things and fight more effectively.
Disable tactics immediately.
Oh, I don’t know about that. I found the healing tactics to be useful, at least, and some of the special moves when you apply them to Elite or higher enemies. It’s when they waste actions on minor enemies that it becomes annoying, so those are the ones you need to disable.
I’m on a console so disabling tactics isn’t an option for me. I kinda need them doing what I need them to do. I don’t even try and play on Nightmare or, often, Hard difficulty levels though as you need that granularity of control to avoid friendly fire and other NPC Bad Ideas to handle them and that only works well on the PC.
Generally I start with defaults and work from there. For example with a mage I may set him up as a damage dealer or controller but set up a Heal Allies command if there isn’t one there already. Later in the game when there are more powers to juggle I’ll get a little more in the weeds and experiment a bit with effective strategies. Okay, Dog (and/or Alistair), always rush the enemy mage first. Okay, Morrigan, first freeze the big clump of enemies and then hit them with a shattering spell combo.
In fact, the weediest parts of the game can be manually sticking spell combos in or trying to micromanage an NPC into switching between modes depending on the circumstances.
One simple line you should look into once you’ve got a surplus of health potions is to get your NPCs to automatically use a weak potion if they get under 25% health. That will tend to keep them standing until a mage can get off a heal spell.
Marcus
1830
So I disabled tactics and I bumped it down to easy. I am having a better time with the combat but it almost feels too easy now. It seems like there is a pretty large jump from easy to normal.
Do you have taunt and threaten? It’s practically impossible to hold aggro without those two abilities.
Alas, off the release schedule (for now). EA may be waiting to see if there’s an unexpectedly “soft” week in the big fall video game consumer frenzy.
Marcus
1833
Yes I do but the stupid computer seems to turn them off at the wrong times. I think I have it working better now though.
Making your tank a champion for the stun (or maybe it was knock down, i forget) shout helps a ton too. Also helps to remember that in dragon age if your tank does zero damage nobody will pay attention to him.
Even with all of those abilities your tank won’t hold 100% of everything on him 100% of the time, but that is generally ok even on the harder difficulties. Mages won’t die too easily with a couple caster defense buffs.
Instant area Crowd control spells (If you only have a single mage in your party you really want to get the sleep line instead of the paralyze line because of the casting time) do help a lot as well.
Tactics are indeed useful, but you probably don’t want to try to automate your party members. I generally automate most of my warrior abilities though. Things like stun shouting when surrounding by 3 or more people and taunting when surrounding by 4+. If you have a mage you don’t control 100% of the time, having your mage auto earth bolt something that is frozen (the default ai does not have a when frozen check, so if you don’t use the ai mod, you will need to use rooted if i remember right which works unless you use a root as well).
I strongly recommend downloading the extended ai mod which adds tons of different conditions and allows party members to act much smarter (such as an option to attempt to backstab for the rogues). I don’t remember the name of it though.
In my first playthrough that was my experience. Dragon Age was either frustratingly hard (even on normal) or mind-numbingly easy (on casual). Just push on through. Once you a few levels on you it will get easier all by itself. While enemies do scale they eventually fall behind what you can do so that critters that gave you grief as a new character are little more than afterthoughts later on. Unless you up the difficulty. But then bosses can become the problem.
Playing Awakening as a high level party I find my sweetspot is normal difficulty. Most grunts aren’t much of a tactical challenge, it’s true, but we are kick-ass heroes so they shouldn’t be, IMHO. However, boss encounters can still be very tough or even wipe me on occasions but I still have a chance to blast through them the first time through without having to do a bunch of trial and error stuff or leaving, prepping (new potions, new items, etc), and coming back later.
Ugh, really? I may end up skipping it all then and just playing Civ5 until March (or other random games as they come up). I’ve not been so interested in the expansion/DLC that I can convince myself to pay for every one individually…that’d cost more than the original game, I think.
There are three different kinds of DLC (plus the “gifts/pranks” stuff which I can easily take a pass on):
- New content for the main campaign. The Stone Prisoner, Warden’s Keep and Return to Ostragar. If you didn’t get the Stone Prisoner and/or Warden’s Keep as freebie codes with your purchase I feel for ya. Shale’s a great character introduced in The Stone Prisoner and I’d definitely miss her if she wasn’t around. Clearly the game was designed assuming she’d be in there as so much content interacts with her. Return to Warden’s Keep’s main contribution is the storage it offers. The actual adventure is fairly short but well done.
Return to Ostragar is, well, it’s okay. As with the other two it would have been much, much, better and to have included this stuff in the original release as on its own merits there’s not a huge amount to get excited about. There is a sense of catharsis as you get revenge on the Darkspawn for what they did to the wardens and Fereldin there though. Two characters (the two that were there for the battle, naturally) will have unique discussions as relates to events here with each other as you explore. Not sure what if anything anyone else has to say about what’s there so pick wisely if NPC interactions are what you like.
There’s also a new adventure, the Golems of Amgarrak, you can port the old gang into which plays as a separate game (like Awakenings) but takes place during the main timeline. I guess they picked up on the fact that replaying a bunch of the same content to get to a little bit of new content jammed in there wasn’t the best of ideas. This concept is a bit jarring too though. Reviews are mixed and I haven’t played it yet. Sounds like more of a “tough combat challenges” thing rather than strongly narrative like the rest of DA which doesn’t put it high on my list.
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What comes after the main campaign. Awakening is very good, actually. It’s the big epilogue to events in Dragon Age. You’re the new warden commander of the Vigil Keep. This can be an imported character or a new (Orlesian!) one. I’ve run across four new party NPCs, so far, and one of the old gang returns. The adventures are on a par for quality with Dragon Age and the same basic theme, adventures in support of a larger strategic goal, holds true here as well. It’s also a great proving ground to mess around with different character builds for new characters as you’re dropped right into an extended series of combats as you begin. Lips flapping comes later.
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Side stories. Leliana’s Song. Haven’t played it yet but will get around to it eventually. Fans seem to really like it and I like the character quite a bit.
Sarkus
1838
Since this is the spoiler free thread Brian, you might want to edit a few things. :-)
To clarify a few things, new copies of the game include The Stone Prisoner while Warden’s Keep was always sold seperately as a release date DLC (with the exception of some deluxe editions IIRC). More importantly, Stone Prisoner, Warden’s Keep, and Return to Ostagar can be played without having to replay the game. When you finish DAO the game creates a save where your group is in camp and gives you access to all DLC locations (including those you’ve completed). So you don’t need to start a new game to play Ostagar, for example. Anything you do is supposed to have happened some time prior to the end of the game, though.
I am really happy about the new DLC. I went down a certain path with Morrigan that made me very curious as tow hat was going to happen with her next, so I am happy to find out.
I loved DA:O, played it every night until I beat it recently after the birth of my daughter, and quickly gobbled up all the DLC and the expansion. While I needed a bit of break shortly after I started the expansion and haven’t gone back yet, I found the DLC all entertaining and worth getting.
Sarkus: I took out the only potentially offending line I could think of (it’s not much of a spoiler especially compared to much of the rest of this thread).
Now, uh, why did you quite the whole thing? Isn’t there still a semi-spoiler in the thread?
