Monte Carlo

^ Yes, a warm fuzzy consensus has indeed been achieved.

Awesome. That looks like a lot of fighting. In tunnels.

^ Yeah, the human noble is a bit men in tights, but I enjoyed monstering the guards playing poker and bedding the elf servant wench. I felt suitably arrogant and to the manor born actually. Obviously, I would also liked to have had the option to cut pater's throat, the inheritance dontcha know? However, having cast myself as an amoral gentleman thief, I was upset that nobody in Castle Cousland, not even dear mama (who, in her leather get-up, gave me a bit of an Oedipus complex) mentioned my sechewing of the martial, soldierly career path in favour of lock-picking, murder and sneaking. Not even a little aside. Oh well.

My bad, I meant I've got -2.25% fatigue not +. Again, I'm kind of flying wearing poorp quality night vision here, but one thing I have noticed with my high cunning rogue is sick (I mean sick) stealth abilities. Again, I'm sure a tier 4 with high dex might have the same skill, I'm not sure but I can just hide in plain sight. It's a big part of the character build. There's one duel coming up where I'm more or less relying on it...

^ I'm assuming they're like the undead you can create, i.e. a controllable 5th party member with talents etc. That was something else - killing enemy archers then raising them as a 5th party member saved my bacon numerous times on my first playthrough - the undead get some talents of their former incarnations. At Wrath O Dagon: You get two specialisms, one at 7th level one at 14th so yeah, you can do both.

I think ranger / assassin is a solid archery build, extra dex plus a critter ain't bad... I presume the assassin skillz apply to ranged attacks too. Being able to mark of death somebody with an arrow then unleash your critter on them could be an interesting anti-mage gambit.

I really don't get the math, but high cunning lets me disarm traps without a single point in the skill (good XP fodder), I get some cunning based dialogue options and I win every coercion check (persuade). Perhaps not the best use of stat-dumping, my cunning is now in the high 30's un-adjusted with dex in low 40's, str mid-20's I use The Edge offhand and Ahod axe with the best runes I've got (paralyse / slow / +5 fire damage). My damage sits high 30's to low 50's and my defense rating is 100% (improved drakeskin armour). Most importantly of all my stamina adjustment, fully kitted out, is +2.25% or something, so with lethality and momentum switched on I'm a chainsaw. I am the single most effective melee character in my party, but I need the tanks a lot. I can still go solo commando around most missions, though. Boss fights are another matter entirely, though.

I agree with Enoch. I went the 'canon' story route and those two characters were as nice as pie (or as nice as Morrigan gets). I think it's fair to say that Bioware sort of want you to play the game a certain way, and like a lot of writers they want you to love their NPCs as much as they do. That's their style, I no longer bitch about it, and I like the ending but the game is still a bit too... rigid for my personal tastes. Let's be honest, in a better CRPG you'd be able to kill Morrigan. And push Alistair off a cliff. Etc. Morrigan and Alistair are foisted on you even more than certain key NPCs were in BG2... I've not played Mass Effect, nor am I likely too but apparently this is similar and has become the Bio house style. Cheers MC

^ As I posted earlier in this thread, having a good rogue with high Stealth skill (3+) and decent Cunning makes crowd control very different from the vanilla 'Tank & Mage' melee / fireball inferno route. You can manage the mobs using stealth, backstab and traps: lead smaller groups off into ambushes and weaken them gradually until your main party is ready to deal with them en masse. Even with no archery talents I was able to use a crossbow to finish off enemy mages I'd already back-stabbed to middling health, then re-stealthed and ran off. Brescillian Ruins and the Cultists up on the mountain were all dealt with this manner, and they are pretty big mobs. Archers are good for taking out mages... line up your archer to critical strike one whilst, simultaneously you backstab, with poison and follow up with dual-weapon sweep, then get your tank to draw on Aggro with his taunting. All the time your healer is just buffing / healing. Like I say, not everybody's cup of Earl Grey but very good fun and a different experience altogether.

In which case, if you want a proper challenge, play as a Rogue (archer) with a party of Wynne (no respeccing, just follow the heal / buff route - imagine she's a D&D cleric), Alistair and one of the other rogues (I'd suggest Zevran configured for the all out Tier 4 Stealth, DW god). It will play as a very different, more tactical game. Mage PCs own this game, so take them out of the equation. EDIT: Configure your archer as stealing / lock guy to maximise your income and concentrate of the AK47 critical hit archery route, pump DEX to the 40's. Configure Zevran as a high CUNNING melee rogue, by mid teen levels he'll easily have 100% defence with the right kit, let him also be trap / poison guy.

What will you call your secret police? How long will it take you to incarcerate journalists and non-party political activists? Where will you site your re-education camps? How long will it take before you develop a Robespierre or Beria type character and start eliminating your political opponents? Will senior members of the regime have special property rights, or their own freeway for their limousines? How many walls protected by dogs, barbed wire and machinegun nests will you need to keep people in your socialist nirvana?

With regards to Crushing Prison - It still does the same damage over a much shorter period (9 s). Which means that it's actually deadlier than it was before - it might not paralyse you for as long but it's just as likely to kill you and, for a player character, add some alacrity to the "chug poultices quicker than taking damage" racing mini-game.

Sounds great, but is there any fighting in tunnels? And I can't pay, like $10. That's just buying into the whole profit paradigm, man.

Too late!

Oh no, looking at the bottom of the thread I can see 'Volourn' in italics... he's about to post and tell us how wrong we all are. Again.

You should be able to manage this using the tactics slots, but because I tend to manage mage AoE spells personally I'm not sure how you manage the friendly fire issue. Hold on... (boots up DA to look at tactics slots...) Right, the simple answer appears to be the range variable - setting it to medium / long range for AoE spells should do the trick, depending on what you want the trigger for (i.e. large groups or spellcasters). Just remember that when combat kicks off that the character's tactics will be doing that and move the rest of the team accordingly. I have Morrigan configured to auto fireball all enemy groups larger than 3 at medium / long range and I don't have a big problem but I do have to remember to keep my melee fighters back when I see a mob. I can see why the frost cone spell might be a problem - personally for that part of the battle I'd pause and control the caster - melee characters are much easier to configure in the tactics slots.

Yorkshire, is that anywhere near Holland?

Deganawida makes a good point: I don't think it's beyond the pale to think, hmmmm I'm making a greatsword-wielding warrior... I know, I'll pump CON so he has loads of hit points! PHNAARRRRPPPP!!! Goes the fail buzzer. 2H warriors are frail precision weapons, only the sword and board guy or high dex acrobat rogue can move around in combat with relative impunity. This is why the class structure is so gimpy - why can't I make a 2H weapon rogue who gives up some specialist skills in favour of high dex combat movement and can dish out 2H damage? The answer is obtuse design. As it is the optimal 2H warrior within the ruleset is still pretty frail in what is a melee-intense game. A high dex naked rogue can zip about OTOH, with hardly any problems... I should know because I'm playing a high level DW rogue at the moment. The set-up appears to be this - you have two fighters - sword and board dude drawws aggro. 2H guy steps in and puts down a massive smackdown. Mage zaps / freezes / napalms mobs and rogue either (a) stands back and goes flak-cannnon with archery thief or (b) ninjas in and out of the mob crit hitting using tier 3/4 stealth. I've worked on this variation (two sword and board warriors my first playthrough, a very potent combination - they were very difficult to take down) and it boils down to one sword and board tank dawing aggro - he is the tactical lynchpin of Dragon Age. Some of the Bio shills on the official forums mock noobs --- shame on them, they obviously got the luxury of spending five years studying the rules. Cheers MC

I don't know, I just suspect that it's time for a game where you choose a gender, appearance and a background that fits into the the game and... go. Your character develops within the game. Stuck in a forest surrounded by wolves? Try and sneak and you become a bit better at sneaking. Attack a wolf and perhaps get a bit better at fighting. Pet and feed the wolves and become a bit more attuned to nature. I dunno. Later on you bump into a druid. Want to spend a load of time and resources learning about that? You can. Now or later. Learn enough to heal an injury and move on or put more effort into it and learn to summon a bloody great thunderstorm. Perhaps you won't have as much time to learn Cool Sword Moves but, hey, that's life. I think people are more than ready for such a game, if the core purpose of that game (as J.E. describes it) is to build a cool character in a fantasy game world and Do Stuff. I too had my best pen & paper experiences with class-free rulesets - your character could be good at a couple of things or a jack-of-all-trades. Just like in reality, you could pick up skills along the way as you need them, some of them being contradictory (a priest who learns to steal, a barbarian who learns art appreciaton). Why not? It anchors you so much more into the game and increases immersion. Rather than win a pretty 'achievement' pin on a website for stealing fifty items why not get a real in-game skill, consequence, nickname? As long as you aren't guessing all the time then it would be fun, rather than choosing to be a rogue on day 1. look at Dragon Age and it's much-vaunted origins. My character is a noble in a castle... why is he a rogue? How did he learn to pick locks rather than fighting with Big Swords? Why doesn't anybody mention my ignoble class decision? You see, it's just odd. It's a set of mechanics, not a story. At least FO3 tried to do it differently - it didn't bother me because I only played it once.

I have at last found a helmet that looks half-decent. The Executioner's Helm

^ Dammit, I did Shale first, have had the helm all game. And now had to give it to Alistair for the +2 STR so he could wear the warden's armour. Drat. Luckily, my rogue is a handsome devil and looks rather dapper sans headgear for now. All the rogue helmets look especially silly.

Strange, for the first time in this game (Level 15 Human Rogue, only Orzammar and Sacred Ashes of the major quests left to do) I'm short of cash. I have Tier 4 locks and Imoen-Chick has Tier 4 stealing. We have embarked on crimewave across Ferelden, no container unlocked and no pocket unpicked - plus I've done all the rogue quests (i.e. the barman and Slim) I can up to this point in the game. And I'm still short of dough - possibly because I'm trying to fit every NPC out in half decent gear (more difficult than it looks). Mind you I do have a humungously massive stock of poisons, bombs and poultices. It's absolutely true about the Warden Armour by the way - it scales. Five levels ago I flogged it to Mikhail Dryden and poor old Alistair had to suffer the comedy Juggernaut armour, which looks like a suit of armour you might see decorating a castle corridor in an old episode of Scooby Doo. Anyhoo, just bought it back (for 27 gold for the lot - ouch!) and it's now Tier 7 Dragonbone Nutter Turbo B*stard armour, the boots give +50 stamina still. That will probably see him through to the end of the game. Still worried about cash - pickpocketing is sort of worth it, but you really do nick as much crap as you do decent stuff. There are a couple of Tier 4 locks in the Templar's Quarters of the mage tower with half-decent stuff in and the lockbox behind the bar in the Gnawed Noble is like . Cheers MC

LOL! Redcliffe is a saturday night pub fight in comparison to the rest of the game!

^ I see what you're getting at, but personally I wasn't expecting much more than EPIC DRAGON BATTLE followed by cutscene. So the epilogue thing was for me a really cool bonus, I loved it to bits. But, yeah, the combat was a grind... I mean Dave Gaider is the man who wrote the end battles for BG2, right? Those were The Business. DA isn't a patch on those. Not by a long chalk. Hey, Dave, you gonna write an alt.ending mod like you did for BG2?

Hmmm, taking out revenants at low-level just went out of the window, they nerfed rebalanced the duration of frost spells. Yikes!