Tigranes

Well alright guys, I'll go for a PC Mage - Shale - Dog - Leliana party on Nightmare and see how it goes. I've never used the latter 2 before so I'm excited to get something out of archers (or fail howwibly howwibly).

Gonna begin my third with nightmare, but wondering whether to go with mage or try warrior for the first time, just so I can try a new origin. Human noble, by all accounts, is tosh so maybe Elf. edit: Played an hour and got a two-handed City Elf Warrior up to the Korcari Wilds. The origin's pretty good and convincing, just wish that 90% of all dialogue options weren't fake choices. Playing warrior seems fairly dour, though, I might just play an elf mage now that I've tried. Looking at taking along Dog & Leliana. Maybe I'll respec Sten as a shield tank to have someone that can absorb damage - on last playthrough Shale didn't seem as good at that as Alistair.

If it's only on Steam, I can't get it. Useless interfering piece of rubbish that does nothing I need or want. That reminds me, got to uninstall ETW so I can get rid of Steam... Of course, I've heard numerous people swear Steam is great for them, so bah to logic and impartiality. Has anyone here played the game yet?

The more I play, the more I find that Dragon Age combat is about finding an equilibrium of damage dealt / damage taken and having counter-actions and provisions for enemy attacks and abilities: set up a situation where you are progressively dealing damage while keeping every limb moving, and then keep those plates on top of those chopsticks. In that sense it's in fact a lot like Final Fantasy combat. I like it, actually, I think it fits the game. After a few tries, I brought in Magebane into the mix to get his mana down, Curse of Mortality to stop him healing and a few extra healing potions. Did the job - when you get it right (or when your party is well geared for it by coincidence) it's all surprisingly smooth passage. This time and his dialogue wasn't so bad, I actually enjoy his characterisation quite a bit. It's not quite 'grahr power hungry' and not quite 'necessity for the greater good', but a rather realistic mix. It's a pity his political movements and his interaction with the banns only came in very small portions. That, and surely the archdemon could have had som eother role than to sit there, roar a little then die. Why is it so crucial to the Blight? Why is it such a big daddie? Why do you need the Grey Wardens? It's all explained, but the explanation is not very convincing, satisfying or leading to any gameplay. It's just a mass of blah blah so that you can kill a big daddie at the end. Shifting the balance of the game to 50% gathering allies and 50% politics / archdemon sabotage (e.g. infiltrating Darkspawn camps, where darkspawn are actually more intelligent and organised than a bunch of throwaway grunts) would have made for some great stuff, even in sequels, but sadly the darkspawn are just packs of XP. Oh well, what 'politics' IS there is quite nice, I like how self-serving, nepotistic and close-minded the arls end up being even as they rally around Loghain the baddie.

Good to know. I'm at the endgame in my second playthrough and my next will definitely be on Nightmare.

It's like the confessions of the Middle Ages: what was seemingly a prohibition on the discussion of sex was in fact a license to talk about sex in regulated (but sordid) ways. wouldn't be surprised if the vid was real, though.

Nope, but Stuck trying to destroy at level 19, Hard - I should be able to handle him...

Cone of cold is the best spell in the game, hands down, on any difficulty, really (unless Nightmare is different). If you bring along someone with good healing skills and some decent fire resistance, the mountaintop dragon isn't hard - just slogging it out.

Being Korean, I have enough anecdotal evidence of people who dated for 6-9 years before marrying... heh.

Yes, let's repeat conversations we had months ago! Having spent so much of the marketing I doubt we'll hear anything more about AP until a month or two before the new release date, now. I struggle to see what 'new' info they can bring out without shwoing half the game to the previews.

I wish mine did, they're pretty sluggish about it. I do think sleep/WN would be awesome for a mage solo game.

I bought a necklace for the girlfriend. Figured if she puts up with zero gifts in the courting process and 2 months afterwards, (a) that's a keeper, (b) I'm treading on thin ice. Swarovski is quite inexpensive for all the name value they have to your average pleb. And now I have the Christmas gift sorted, too.

Codex had a good and fair impressions post:

I just didn't like how my allies would then go and hit half the sleeping fellows and rouse them. Using Hold for anything more than specific situations is a no-no because they won't fight enemies even when the enemies are close enough to hit THEM in melee, either. I guess I need to do more work with the tactics.

I'm planning a mage on Nightmare for my third playthrough, taking along Leliana as archer just to try it out. Full respec'ing. Any recommendations on the kind of build I should go for and the party members I should take? From my experiments I'm thinking Cone of Cold, Force Field and Crushing Prison to disable enemies, Arcane Warrior & Spirit Healer for long term durability and usability, maybe throw in... Hexes? Sleep/Walking Nightmare?

Interesting stuff, but my strategy itch has been reserved by Heir to the Throne (EU3's third xpack). Let me know how it is guys.

Spoilers covered. Harlequin et al, use the tags. Banter was hit and miss for me. There was a lot of it, but half of it seemed to try too hard to play off the characters' quirks and end up a little Disney. I'm happy with everyone's characterisation in general, but it's certainly not a game to try and get witty quotes from. My second playthrough hurtles towards the end, having just completed Orzammar. Still entertaining, though trying the different choices and such shows me two things - (a) yes you really can choose between 2 sides in every major juncture, which is nice, and sometimes the choice isn't very clear cut; (b) you don't really get hit very hard with the consequences of your choice, though. edit: Oh, the bridge battle is a massiv eletdown to me because the spawning seems to be bugged. You finish off one group, then it takes an eternity for the next group to come, or sometimes they don't even come until you advance on the bridge to see what's holding them up. Hrm. In fact, there are a couple of persistent bugs that really tick me off: a) when there are a lot of enemies there isn't visual lag, everytihng moves at normal speed, but your abilities have execution lag. i.e. you hit Drain Life, you go through the animation, the cooldown starts, but the damage isn't taken until 3 seconds later. Obviously this means a lot of dead party members. b) Dead party members don't get upa fter battle until you go and stand right next to them :/

That's probably what Cortez was thinking...

A few of the spells in Gromnir's list are indeed useful in particular situations and warrant their place, but I think there's no denying that some spells are quite near useless. Transparency in terms of what exactly each spell does would probably help in maximising use out of the 'weirder' spells and building up good synergies and synchronisations...

Drag and drop the second ring in the second slot, double-clicking doesn't work properly.

You can get by with find traps / knock spells, elemental resistance, etc. It's a completely irrelevant point though. what's important is that in BG the rogue, for various reasons, was an iimportant part of a party that pulled its weight. Arguably, they do too in Dragon Age, but it's much easier to get by without one.

Let's cool down a bit... sometimes, when you're getting nowhere with the other side, it makes you silly to keep arguing... even when you're right. I confess to a lamentable lack of in-depth knowledge on WW2; I was turned off by the whole subject in high school when, partly due to the low level of education required, there was a worrying tendency to blanket Hitler, Nazis and all of Germany as 'evil for evil's sake'. One suspects it would be quite enlightening to unearth a reasonably unbiased look at the relationship between Hitler and the Third Reich hierarchy in the war years, and the power-play that went on there.

I always thought it was silly how many people cry about the sequel transition thing, actually. "Why are you choosing an ending for me?!" Well how else are they going to make a bloody game? "Why can't you accommodate different choices in the previous game?" Doing that with a large number of choices is the fastest path to making those choices meaningless. There's only 3 realistic ways to create a sequel in this situation. (1) just pick an 'optimal ending' and run with a single version; (2) set the sequel far far away; (3) try to accommodate player choice by making it all not matter very much (did you save the mages or not in the first game? Well, having proper ramifications to your choice will involve a huge amount of game reworking, so we'll just acknowledge your choice but it won't really do much.) It's just not realistic to expect more.

Cunning does very little for dialogue, yes. Persuade and intimidate options are aplenty, however. Respec = look for mods, a few out by now.

I don't mind the backpack so much, because it's rare when I have to leave truly valuable things behind... but you wonder why there are only about 3 things of value in all the locked chests in the world, why stealing gets you nothing useful (and why nobody gets mad when you fail steal)... As far as gold surpluses go, it might have been best to make the investments in your allied armies actually worth a damn. The endgame was a big flat fart for me, since after all that buildup about your 'allies' you don't really need them, you're just fighting normal-sized hordes of darkspawn same as the Deep Roads or somesuch. Having allies as a big moneysink where you progressively invest in them (and see the results of that investment, a la crossroads keep), and have them actually count in the end, would have been nice.