Monte Carlo

^ Hmmm. There are so many Baldur's Gate influences... BG2 took you some distance from BG1. I'm pretty easy about it, but yeah the 'French' Orlesian accents are grating. Although the Zorro / Anitvan thing would get old quickly too. Rialto bay LOL! Like I said: Dragon Age 2: The Deeper Roads: Fighting In Tunnels has to be the way forward. Cool acronymn too... DA2:TDR:FIT = Teh Awesome!

Why do terrorists have such awful haircuts?

^ It depends, it would seem, on your Cunning score. I'm a level 2 with high Cunning and can get away with quite a lot but I'm aiming for the virtual ring-of-invisibility effect that level 4 gives you. I can't throw bombs at the moment at level 2 and Cunning of 26. Cheers MC

^ Mages are so rare and controlled in Ferelden that every other mob has several "Mercenary Mages" on tap, and every other hovel is a Blood Mage coven. Nobility hire mages to work as tutors. On street corners mages stand, openly, with a Sack 'O Quests. Honestly, the underground mage oppression thing reverberates through the game. It's like making a game about a famine that, when you boot it up, has a strong abundance of food theme. Whoever is in charge of the gate guard at Hogwart's needs relieving of their post!

Am finding that my Swiss-army knife rogue is working out OK, as long as your not looking for an uber-ninja build. I can do melee, good fire support with a bow, stealth grenadier is fun and I'm rich. I also have 65% of party damage.

This map of Thedas gives you some clues as to what DLC / XP / DA2 stuff might come next, especially when you think about the end-game postscript...

^ If it's any consolation, I tried that fight at level 8 on Normal and had my arse handed to me. OK, it was my first playthrough and I also fell foul of the, er, environmental peculiarities of that battle. I went away, came back at level 12 and returned the serve quite easily.

^ Gromnir and Alan have played 2H warriors more than I. They've bespoked them. However, having finished the entire game with Sten in my party continuously I have the scars to show how 2H warrior works. He's ironically a bit like the rogue - he relies on lots of modal powers and needs to pump more than two primes stats (CON, STR and WILL to recharge powers). My advice? It's pretty obvious, but boost armour as much as you can, plus your prime stats plus look carefully at your tactics tab so your stamina-sapping powers are used judiciously.

^ My impression is that Cunning, in combat, simply allows you to (a) increase your chance of a Crit and (b) reduce enemy armour reduction. It also allows me to disarm traps without putting any points into the skill, useful for low level XP harvesting.

I have already solved the DA mage balancing issue earlier in this thread. 'X' is Mage POWAZ and 'Y' is ridiculousness of Mage Apparel. X and Y rise in tandem until the game actually melts and distorts the space / time continuum. Honestly, mages should literally look like Mr Krusty off The Simpsons to balance their awesomeness. This would be an especially potent way of balancing the class in a MMO context.

OOOps, sorry Lucian please delete although my title was much better

Please continue, it was just getting fun on page 35 or something. MC

I play Hard on mobs and sometimes switch it down to Normal for boss fights depending on what it is. I don't play with optimal parties and find that the re-specced spellcasters just break the game. Anyway, I'm taking the passive DW skills and want Momentum - not bothered about modal extra damage as my passive backstab is more than adequate. The critical chance archery tree is the other one. Add this to my panzer-grenadier antics (you really can have fun with bombs and poison) and I can easily take along good old Sten (frail!) and another rogue as well as Morrigan. Two rogues is a challenge I'm interested in playing for a bit. Cheers MC

^ I know, I'm as baffled. Am assured that with high cunning and the right items my Critical Hit chance can max out at 50% which with my already high attack speed, backstab and momentum will stack into a sick DPS build (am also going for Tier 4 stealth for the old Klingon cloaking trick). STR, apparently, doesn't come into it at all. This is from my occasionally drunken perusal of geekily mathematical post on Bio social-networking thing. Cheers MC

Trying to build the perfect jack-of-all-trades Rogue. It's not easy, what with there being no meaningful explanation of the games mechanics and my irrational fear that the DEX hotfix will break my game So in the end I though a smidgeon of STR so I can wear a bit of armour now and then, lots of DEX and a fair bit of CUNNING. I'm going to carry very light weapons and almost no armour. I want to be able to: * Fight. Properly, in melee combat without tanking obviously * Use bombs and poison * Shoot Stuff, like a ninja sniper assassin * Sneak about * Open every lock in the game This is what a rogue should be. I have been experimenting and it's tough --- you just don't have the points to do everything you'd like to do. Anyhow, I've made a satisfactory character who is of course silly rich (left Ostagar with 23 gold pieces without selling my Red Dragon Armour and with the two bargain rucksacks). I've been very picky with combat skills, tending towards the passive (less micromanagement). I've yet to go archery, but that's my next set of skills to get the Critical Shot O Death ability. A surprising thing I've discovered is that my dude does far more damage, very quickly, with two small weapons as opposed to one big weapon and one small one (decision = stop pumping STR) and, even wearing some weird barbarian fur ****tail dress I found in the Korcari Wilds I saunter about in combat without actually getting hit very much (decision = pump DEX). Even low level stealth is quite useful, it has changed the combat dynamics a great deal. One hugely annoying feature is that if you equip a bow and specialist arrows it empties your alt.weapon slot. Oh well. Combat works a bit like this - I sneak about and lure bad guys into the rest of the party. I then cut about hurling bombs and backstabbing before retreating and shooting stuff. As someone who usually tanks, this takes a while to get used to... leaving the poor old warriors to play pin cushion for you. Anyway, that's how the rogue is working out for me as a non-specialist 'D&D' style thief... my advice is don't fixate on having to go down one route and collect all the powaz... mix and match. Cheers MC

^ Yeah, good point. There are two ways around this: 1. There's a feat, I'm not sure what it's called but you can get it from the rogue skill tree at level 4. Combat tactics? It widens the arc for possible backstab, which is pretty effective... it works pretty well as long as you get a tighter flank in for the attack. Less micromanagement. 2. For mob battles I just stealth the rogue and move him in behind the mob. When it all kicks off and they are mobbing a taunting, heavily armoured character I'm already in position, and using the feat above I'm getting in good hits. I can then fall back and use archery (with Imoen Chick I did this all the time with scattershot etc). Still a bit of micromanagement, but not as dull as constantly clicking on the rogue to make sure he's in exactly the right place. Cheers MC

^ Alan, so what you're saying is that an Icewind Dale syle game using this engine would be pretty impractical? Because I could create an awesome, game-breaking team of bespoke characters? I can see this mod coming pretty soon, just like in BG2 you could 'multiplay' your own party as a single player. T'would be a shame, although I suppose you could just make the battles harder too.

Have created a human rogue. Am trying to be as 'Neutral Evil' as possible. So I'm fighting through the fiery ruins of the family schloss. My father lies, mortally wounded in the next room. My mother (I just know it!) will want to stay with him. What am I thinking? Well, she's wearing a suit of armour, a mace, shield and a longbow. That'll get me enough to buy a new backpack in Ostgar! So I strip it all off... Ha ha ha ha. On a less serious note, am thinking of mixing and matching DW and archery skills to make the character a bit more flexible. Any ideas - the critical hit archery route looks good. Cheers MC

I think the journalist had a sense of humour - check out the online comments she chose to quote (especially re. Dog).

^ There's a guy who loves the Sacred Ashes trailer and wanted to make the in-game characters more like the way they're depicted in it. He's modded the characters armour and facial features etc. using the toolset, he's done a good job IMO. Actually the African looking Sten in the trailer is much cooler than the in-game one. As for the 30 Seconds to Mars track, I like it.

^ The eternal economic conundrum of Dragon Age - loot stuff so you can afford to buy a 5 gp rucksack so you can loot some more stuff. So you can afford a 7 gp rucksack. Ha ha ha.

Sten, wearing a Jadgpanzer Hull and wielding a comedy axe, got the last smackdown on the Archdemon after I'd done all the work. He looked pretty cool in the slo-mo slaying animation. Forget gimpy rogues... keeping the Stenmeister alive through that final battle was my biggest achievement.

I want the XP to be called "Deeper Roads: More Fighting in Tunnels." In my golfing apparel. Anyway I finally finished it, the final battle was fun but the mechanics of the epilogue were the best in any CRPG I've played, all the sub-stories about Stuff You'd Done and talking to the NPCs about the future. Well done Bioware, mission accomplished. Now make another one. Cheers MC

Hi Obsidian developers. Most of us have now played Dragon Age and enjoyed it to varying degrees. For me it was great fun despite the ruleset not because of it. Quite an achievement if you think about it. I'm not asking you to comment on DA whatsoever (unless you'd like to ) but if you were to make a similar game with an original IP then what principles would you follow? Would you choose to abandon classes? What other games have got it right and which have got it wrong? Am interested in your thoughts. Cheers MC

Skills & Talents, there's another half-arsed desgin decision... Why is stealing one and lockpicking the other? The oddness of Combat Tactics slots has been dissected elsewhere. The whole thing is fugly, it's a fun game despite it not because of it and I strongly suspect an overhaul for the inevitable DA2. Ditch the Rogue class and allow folks to make a light-fighter warrior with recon skills or a sneaky stealth mage or an archer / support mage. It really does solve the problem.