Tigranes

My guess is that they will do Orlais for DA2, then Tevinter for DA3.

I can absolutely be incompetent no matter how well paid or unpaid I am. Someone asked me, would you buy D3 or TES5. We hardly have any info on the latter. Thus, my opinion is primarily based on how much I enjoyed the previous installments, and what I perceive to be the strengths of each franchise. Oblivion, as the last TES game, is the most relevant thing we have in judging TES5. In a response to a post that was just talking about the story of the two franchises, I remarked that Oblivion's story was utter piss, and this would influence my decision on the original question. It is relevant, and it is not a blanket criticism of TES, or a premature burial of any of TES5's potential. I think I mentioned that I'd end up buying and playing both, in the end. On the contrary, I think it is your knee-jerk reaction towards any criticism of Oblivion that is less relevant to the discussion. I stand by everything I said and say because I am offering an informed opinion and defending it without personal attacks and can recognise Oblivion's strengths. *shrug* Anyway, no point dragging it out. I apologise if I caused any misunderstanding, but by now it should be clear that I am not 'bashing' Oblivion unconditionally. Actually, given our religion threads, I don't think I'd want the latter

I have to agree, they are a bother but if you want to use them they can be useful, enough bang for the buck. On Nightmare I was using the Glyph combo to paralyse enemies (long duration), walking bomb someone in the middle of a group (which they often will be), then peg with Leliana until they go boom; most of the time that takes care of ~3 enemies before they unfreeze, all the while the mage will have CoC'd another group for Shale and Alistair to shatter. Going on virulent now to see whether it'll make things any more gooey.

oh ok.

Shale and Sten were the most likable to have around, for me. Leliana is pretty good, Morrigan would be too if she stopped talking in Ye Olde. Oghren's pretty funny but doesn't seem to have as much to say. Level 14 now and halfway through the Denerim quests, before going Orzammar.

Why not? That's 4 item slots and 3 runes dedicated to it.

You'd think so, except you had to crap into the corner of the room while you were at fancy parties and everybody had bowel problems. Where the internet will be too slow for you to go anywhere.

Got 'sidetracked' the first playthrough. Gorth, I currently use this no helmet mod and it works fine. Ignore all the gibberish about using the cloak slot because it can end up being messy - just keep equipping your helmets normally, they''ll show on inventory paperdolls but never in-game. And yes, most players will go to Redcliffe first in their first game without a decent potion stock and with no real crowd control, and still not quite used to the game to boot, because that's what the game will encourage you to do. Then you are awed by the difficulty of the game, until you realise it was just you being shortchanged. I'm not sure if it was deliberate...

Got to agree with Gromnir, the FF / CP combo isn't as effective as it first seems - it's much more useful to have FF and CP separately in place, either to easily disable two enemies or use the FF on an ally for tanking.

You're picking decent spells but none of the really useful spells, or spells that tend to be favoured by players who've tried a few. Which is fine if you just want to fool around, but if you're getting screwed and want to start again... In Primal, Lightning is easily the weakest. Blizzard is like Tempest but freezes people; Cone of Cold can prepare enemies for instant shattering; the first ice spell is also good at low levels to get the mage out of trouble. Fire line + Grease is a good combo as well if you like destroying things from range. Earth is good combination with Ice for obvious shattering stuff, but won't do much damage on its own. No real reason to go Lightning IMO. Go for the Mass Paralysis line, the Glyphs line or the Force Field / Crushing Prison line if you find you are taking too much damage too fast, as they will let you disable enemies and exercise some crowd control. If you find your vulnerable party members (mages, etc) are getting targeted and killed too easily, make your warriors learn Taunt, make them use it, and then use Force Field on them so the enemies are attacking someone who can't take damage. The first healing spell is a must for any mage, all mages. Walking bomb is pretty nice but requires careful maneuvring. Again, it works best with some form of paralysis spell that can hold the enemies in one place while you burst the bombs.

I tried it, and I found the Glyph line to be superior. See, for the Paralysis line, in the end you only use Mass Par, a useful spell, and Miasma, a decent spell. With Glyphs, the Repulsion/Warding combo is the same as Mass Par (in fact, I suspect it's harder to save), though it takes a bit longer and gets allies, too. But you also get Glyph of Neutralisation which is great at taking any spellcasting boss out of the game, e.g. Revenants. I can see how some people might prefer the ease-of-use Mass Par provides, though. Anyway, yeah, I think in general there are a lot of spells that are useful and different, and that means a lot of different mage builds can do a lot of fun diverse things. There are a few spells which are definitely useless and a few trees not worth taking (or taking far), and if Bio patched them up mages would be even more fun, but things aren't bad way they are.

The nightmare playthrough rolls over the halfway mark with a bug-ridden Shale being coaxed through Forest, Redcliffe and Circle Tower. At level 12-13 now and Leliana is once again jumping forward as the big damage dealer, 100+ isn't hard to see. Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold are surely the three best spells...

No dagger for me, but I never connect and haven't even patched. The archer is amazing, by the way. At level 10 Leliana was doing 200-300 damage on Arrow of Slaying on frozen targets; shattering her share with Critical Hits and generally doing more damage than Shale, and as effective as DW Alistair. I managed to get rid of all the revenants in the Brescilian Forest at level 8-9 on Nightmare by having Shale taunt then force-field, Alistair/Leliana plucking away and the mage healing / CoC. Have since done Redcliffe and now Circle Tower with hardly any deaths. Since Shale's bugging again I took Wynne instead, but gave her spells that don't need micro at all - hexes, healing, etc. Bombs and poisons are good, as already attested, but traps yes are useful too if used right. I took down the most troublesome revenant (Bresc. Forest first area, with the skeleton mage) by putting the leghold traps on the skeletons and a big AOE trap where he should awaken.

Awesome, Shale broke again. That's 3 out of 4 playthroughs for a free DLC - getting right up screwed by Bio on this one. This time it's the more common issue where you talk to him and it resets to his first dialogue - common, but by no means fixed and nobody has a clue. Well I'm not wasting more time on fixing bugs, I'll just never talk to him and see how that works out - though that probably means he will disappear. Maybe I won't take him to the Circle Fade...

Clearly a scam, avoid it.

Assuming everyone's read the article, I'd challenge those who say he was 'stupid' to put themselves in his position and wonder what a more 'intelligent' course of action might have been, short of leaving the village. I doubt he would have had access to a lot of resources including the internet and connections to the bureaucracy or private companies, or any money. 14 years of his life on a pretty damn boring hobby, the payoff being safety and economic benefits for himself, his friends and family, his children and everyone in the village for years to come.

Let's not go off topic, we have enough Obama debates. Occasionally I would think about whether I would like to live in any other period of time, but ultimately it's the quality of life and risk of personal harm that does it for me. I know from experience that I can't even stand living in the countryside - no matter the differences in 'big things', I think the massive drop in the quality of daily life and the significant increase in risk of death through murder, accident, war or illness going back any more than 50 years does it for me. You can go back only 3 or 4 generations and chances are I'll get my head blown off with a bullet, get advanced tuberculosis from sawdust or something, have my psychological disorders misdiagnosed and poorly treated, mugged off the streets of London and then beaten to death in some back alley by racists.

I liked the Dwarf Noble origin, thought it was plenty 'gray', but it was all let down by the fact that no matter what you do there is only one outcome. Clearly, you were an idiot all your life if you did nothing to build up enough political influence to prevent the way things went. Oh, and that's enough baiting, kthx.

Really? I went through the building twice as well and I never got any either. Maybe for the locked chests, I was just having a brain fart. Alright, I'll take that back, and keep it in mind when I try the Human Noble and Dwarf Commoner origins (which I haven't yet). Anyway, using the Glyph of Warding / Repulsion combo in the Origins and Lothering and it's great fun. I like how darkspawn go boing boing when they hit the glyph (which, blast Bioware, is just slightly smaller than the width of every corridor in the game), and crowd control really does the job in Nightmare even with difficulty mods. I also respec'd Alistair as a dual-wielding warrior, Punisher and Whirlwinding to glory.

The helicopter is a health necessity, I have this condition where excessive foot activity makes me pant and wheeze. Anyway, I do think that after Oblivion Beth did listen, to a degree, which is why we got a lot more effort at creating real characters in FO3 (and some of them were cool), level scaling was toned down, etc. Even if its not part of the series, I expect them to take the feedback that FO3 was better in such aspects, and try and bring that back to TES5. I just really wish they'd go for a wacky setting now that they're done with the Imperial region (which was supposed to be a jungle anyway, no?) - go nuts with Skyrim or whatever.

Groar, now that I"m forced to restart I can't make up my mind. I just tried playing a 2H warrior on the Dalish Elf origin. Well the whole thing is clearly built for a rogue (you see about 30 locked chests and 5 unlocked ones, and lots of traps, whereas for the city elf you encounter very little of them), and I was disappointed that the dalish you start with aren't the dalish you meet later on, but oh well. It just occured to me at Ostagar that neither sword / shield nor 2H abilities really seem fun to me, but as MC says, I love how badass my character looks as opposed to the idiots mages are. So I'm going to go for a Mage / Shale / Sten / Leliana again and hope the game doesn't break itself 10 hours in... then after I beat Nightmare, I'll go back and make a stealth-based, bomb/trapper DW rogue to solo the game with. Hopefully by then modders will have worked out how to get rid of the forced companions you get stuck with EVERYWHERE - it's nothing compared to Shandra.

Hey, if they don't quarter me for calling bits of NWN2 trash while modding here... In the context of the first paragraph, I think it's evident that it's about the story. If it seemed otherwise, fair enough, but surely it's clear enough by now. Hell, since DA just crashed on me (again), here you go, some of my old posts: Pretty clear what I think is good and what I think is crap in oblivion, I think. Arguments are arguments: you can disagree with me or tell me why I'm wrong, and that's fine, and if you honestly thought I was passing judgement on the whole game, well I've just assured you that's not the case, but if you're just wanting to rant about fads and whatnot, heh.

Don't be silly. I have consistently stated a number of times on this forum that (a) Oblivion is in general a well made and enjoyable game, which I myself put over 60+ hours into, and that (b) this in no way excuses its absolutely horrible level scaling or idiotic story. Considering the fact that I was exclusively discussing the story aspect of D3 and TESV, I consider your corrections in no way relevant. Fad? I can't help it if enough people found the story as moronic as I did. I'm certainly not about to refrain from criticising crap because I'm afraid of 'fads'.

Geez, stop the bitchslapping you two. I actually beat Cauthrien in my second playthrough with the rogue (Hard). Thanks to the poor line of sight and nonexistent shout AI, half the enemies never follow you if you immediately retreat down the hallway. From there it's a matter of rotating Misdirection Hex, Cone of Cold and Force Field to keep Cauthrien from killing everyone in 3 hits while the others are down - then continuing that while everyone beats up on her. She has a lot of health and does insane damage and spells last a fraction, but at least she still takes hits. It gets you a nice two-handed sword.

To clarify: I think how they are created, their relationship with the Maker and the Tevinter Imperium and such, their impact on the world, etc., is very well thought out. What is not well thought out is their actual interface with the player - how they are now, what they do. They don't do anything. There's a difference between 'mystery' and blandness. Because in the deep roads they're just hanging around 'at camp', while here they're in full force doing their thing. Except as far as the game is concerned, the archdemon's only role is to fly around and say GO FORWARD. I'm not disputing the lore, and I'm not saying things don't make sense. What I am saying is that the lore, plot and gameplay should come together in a way where you have sensible lore/plot that gives interesting gameplay. Doesn't happen at all. I concede that the Alienage was better in that sense, my bad for forgetting. Oh, and in terms of lore/plot, you had the entire army go to Redcliffe and miss the darkspawn - what informs the civilians any better that they can evacuate so perfectly? Yeah, DA is real dark, man.