Tigranes

Dwarf Rogue dual-wielding man is working out fine on Hard difficulty. At level 5 with choose-all-your-abilities-not-take-the-retarded-prepicked-bio-ones mod, I have Dirty Fighting, Combat Movement, Below the Belt, Lockpicking I, Stealth I, Dual-Wield Sweep, Flurry and Momentum. What that really boils down to is turn momentum on, go stealth, enter combat, backstab; dirty fighting to stun and backstab; find distracted guys and backstab; if surrounded dual-wield sweep & flurry. Momentum ensures that overall I'm doing as much damage harm as Alistair, if less durable. I assume once I'm out of the origins and the enemies start being more lethal I'll have to care more about survivability, too.

How do people net 60-80 hours in their playthroughs, by the way? I finished mine at 40, and I did just about every quest I could find, so I'm positive I did most. I also did a fair bit of backtracking looking for things or finishing loose ends up. I assume most people dont' skip voiced dialogue as fast as I do, and plan out battles a lot longer. Anyway, I understand how Easy might still be too hard for some people, especially on a console. I just hope this doesn't 'teach' Bio to tone down the difficulty in DA2 or whatever. A pity is that if half of those people complaining on the forums had stuck to it, they might well have found the difficulty more enjoyable after a little while. Dwarf noble dual-wielding rogue now in the Tower of Ishal, and only a couple of individual drops from just running way too fast, as opposed to near party-wipes the first time (Hard). Looks like I've gotten used to it. The dwarf noble origin was much awesome, much better than the mage IMO.

What makes you think that about Alistair and Morrigan? I didn't think we find out anything about Alistair's lol

I don't disagree at all with your last point, it does make sense in the game and with the lore. I just disliked its contrivance as a plot point. Anyway, it's not a massive deal, since unlike Fallout 3, there are sensible reasons and alternative solutions.

Finished the game with my mage. Good stuff. Spoilers for anyone who hasn't, below: Anyhow, great game, with failings we knew about from the start (bit too serious for its own good, bit too try-hard mature sometimes, bit too generic sometimes) but still damn fun. Starting a new one with a rogue now.

Alright, finished the game today so I'm starting again with a Dwarf Noble Rogue, Assassin/Duelist. I have the mods that let me choose all my abilities from scratch, for both PC and NPC, and Bio's dexterity hotfix that buffs ranged attacks and restores the proper str/dex dagger bonus. I'm thinking that I'll dual-wield daggers and go for Momentum (third Dual-Wielding tree, third skill) as the key: combined with Combat Movement and Lethality, I think it will just give a super-fast slasher dealing good damage without the need to use active skills (except for Dirty Fighting to stun and Stealth to backstab). Then later the Duelist and Assassin trees can give me more options. Of course the main thing is indeed skills, I started with points in Conversation, Stealing and Weapon Skills, but eventually I'm going to want Poisons as well, and the lockpicking talents, etc., as I don't want to lug around two rogues. We'll see.

Another way to eat my hat. Serves me right, actually, how would I tell a real French accent from a fake? On inventory - I got along fine with 80 most of the time, but that's because I didn't bother to pick all the locks (most of them have meh loot anyway) and throw out salves, etc.

The high dragon is more difficult than Flemeth, Flemeth was a breeze for me with the lv17 party. It's just the camera angle that screws up anything you try to do at ISO. I'd suggest that revenants are nearly as much a pain. I've dealt with 6-7 so far, including the , anyone know what you do with this?

I got a near instant party wipe the first time with that arcane horror, then found it surprisingly easy to snipe him down the second. Good times. I play pretty recklessly so I've had at least ten party wipes I think. I should be able to get by without most of them my second playthrough, planned for a dual-wielding assassin. I'm near the end now, having completed Oh, having taken Leliana along for a little while and doing her quest, I do have to agree that she is a pretty good character and not the Imoen-sop she appeared to be. I still don't like her 'softie softie' voice (made worse by the faux French accent) but good characterisation.

17 on hard, and I felt I was over-levelled for it, since I'm still pretty clumsy, so yes, definitely. I wouldn't be surprised to see well-prepared parties defeat it at 12-13 as Oner has (on Hard).

I'm near the end of the game and the shine hasn't worn off. It stays solid throughout.

I beat them on Hard with mage PC, Wynne, Sten and Alistair. Basically two tanks slamming it out at angles to each other, while PC stands behind the dragon cone-of-colding regularly to keep its offensive powers to a minimum. Wynne rejuvenates, heals and revives as required. As Gromnir (I think) said, big bosses have so much HP (MMO/Final Fantasy style, in fact) that the only real tactic is to find a stable equilibrium where you don't die and deal decent damage, and keep at it. Obviously lots of health and lyrium potions for backup are necessary. I didn't have force field at that time and I haven't used hexes much in this game, but I imagine they could change things a bit too. It'd be ineresting to see whether they could help any party effectively nullify the dragon's offensive threat.

Cone of cold or any other immobilisation effect appears to interrupt the Grab as well, or at least stop it long enough to heal?

All your posts are done been posted before, yarrr. screens look pretty 'generic', but they're prealpha and not meant to be released, so i wont judge for now. Though I question how anything serviceable can come out of Interplay anymore.

I don't have any DLC enabled because Stone Prisoner still doesn't work, and I still get the dwarf. Also, dragon armor was rubbish, what a disappointment. In fact what's with Dragons only giving out 240xp and a bunch of crap loot? Learn from BG2..

I've seen him 4-5 times, I think he just triggers. Anyway, the AI's cleared up after I got rid of them mods, we'll see how that goes. Just killed the big bad with a level 17/18 party on Hard, Cone of Cold gets him every time so it was just a matter of balancing out the healing and whacking till he went down. Maybe I should have got him earlier, the loot's not that great, but maybe that will turn out good. Nearly done with the side-quests and about to go ahead with that showdown.

Several points I picked up: Mages; 1/ Every character should have 'least powerful health poultice' on Health < 25%. 2/ Every mage with Drain Life (e.g. Morrigan) should also cast it on Health < 50%. 3/ Wynne is probably the 'must-have' character for any difficult encounter just for all that healing. Set the tactics for heal, rejuvenation, etc., and watch her go. 4/ I haven't worked with this yet, but maybe train Wynne along the mana steal tree and that could be a quite competent self-maintaining healing machine; heal, heal, steal mana, heal. 5/ Cone of cold is the best mage spell, period. Use with 'target immobilised'; 'shield bash', 'mighty blow', 'stonefist', 'deadly strike' for 4x shatters within 5 seconds of most normal battles. 6/ blizzard and other area of effect spells can work BG-style, out of range and out of sight. 7/ having two mages cast rejuvenate on each other is pretty good when out of lyrium potions. Points into the first healing spell and the rejuvenate spell are probably worthwhile. 8/ shapechanger is absolutely useless and one should never even waste quickbar slots on it. Poor balancing. Rogues; 1/ Archer rogues are viable but do not get good until at least level 10. maybe just use Leliana from then onwards? 2/ Dual wielding rogues are probably your best bet. Pump points into STR and CUN, not DEX - daggers are bugged so that you get strength modifier for damage, as opposed to half str and half dex. Next patch shoudl fix this, as it's been acknowledged by bio. 3/ Lockpicking isn't that crucial, since most chests don't contain anything that good. I'd think lockpick level 2 or 3 is enough, plus the cunning bonus, just enough to finish the thieving quests in Denerim (which have fantastic prizes). 4/ Dirty Fighting works. Often. Fighters; 1/ Strength 42 is the magic number for wearing the best stuff. 2/ warriors are probably the ones we leave alone the most, so tacitcs coudl be set up for all their abilities, especially the disabling or group-hitting ones. 3/ I find that getting a lot of passive abilities and just a few active ones are probably the best - the stamina gets drained pretty quick with all the armour anyway, might as well make them just great at whacking.

I'd rather if you didn't associate my complaint with your unending crusade, actually. IMO the AI is quite good, though it could do some things better. A normal death, actually, though I'm in the habit of quickloading before the death message comes up, so maybe not. I'm about to go back and try reloading, and also clearing out all the mods, etc. Bioforums suggests that it's usually a toolset / mod related issue.

Ugh, all of a sudden my party is deciding to commit suicide. Melee fighters will stand there and not attack anyone even when not on Hold, and when I get mages to cast spells I see the floating text and they move, but no magic is actually cast. Or, Morrigan is ordered to cast shock but won't, will move around, turn away from the enemies then cast shock into the empty air. This better be fixable or the game is going to become unplayable. I'm stuck because, well, I can't hit them.

Yes.

So a mob lynch is democratic?

1) Stacking of the same types of armour does not help. 10 Potions count for 1 inventory slot, but 3 leather gloves count for 3 slots. 2) Items in chests should hold, but not sure about leaving on the ground. 3) If you are on floor 4 you are not far away. Just throw away items that you aren't very valuable - e.g. things like lifestones and frozen lightning are so cheap that you're much better off just keeping things of substantial value. In the time it takes you to go back and forth to sell everything you might as well go do something else, it'd be more profitable.

Actually, now that I think of it, yeah, they're not even fleshed out enough to be cmopared to orcs. Tolkien orcs were in fact quite intelligent beings with their own dietary systems, military and disciplinary structure, political machinations and even factionism. For the darkspawn, what's the difference between a 'genlock' and a 'hurlock' (or whatever)? In fact what are they anyway? Who knows. They're not even 'focused killing machines' because they don't have any distinctive tactics, technology or whatever. They're just things that go around going bash bash.

Hard is great for me, i'll probably try assassin solo run on Hard after a couple of playthroughs. I tend not to like anything *too* punishing. The Deep Roads, I've found, are big, *very* big. Having forgotten to stock up on some ingredients I have no injury kits, and most of the characters are now nursing enough broken bones to entertain a platoon of dogs. Shouldn't be too far away now though, Still disappointed the darkspawn are no more than orcs in the game, with no thought, culture or whatever of their own, fleshbags that exist to kill other fleshbags. But at least the dwarves are pretty interesting.