Idleray

I also play a rogue PC on PoTD. It's true that he's been knocked out the most times according to party stats, but I generally focus fire whatever my Rogue's targeting to prevent "drawing aggro" ever becoming a big issue. In the late game phase (act 3) and my rogue doesn't really have this problem anymore since you have a bunch of buttons to get out of bad situations: escape, shadowing beyond, priest spell - withdraw, knockdown etc. The biggest reason I stopped getting knocked down however is a fundamental change in mindset: I don't view my Rogue as exclusively "melee" anymore. If there's a hallway I can block then I'll clog it up with my tank and shoot & blast away with spells and ranged. If it's a more open engagement then I'll throw most of my disables at my Rogue target to prevent the enemy really having time to do much to my rogue before it gets killed.

Rogues dominate when it comes to single target dps. It's actually kind of stupid. Your post makes no sense whatsoever. My Rogue is sneak-attacking practically 95% of the time. The remaining 5% is when I'm too lazy to apply debuffs. Keeping debuff uptime on enemies is easy when you have 6 guys, so unless you're soloing you're doing it wrong.

Hi, I fought a lone shadow in the Great Hall of Caed Nua (on PoTD trial of iron btw so this is especially insidious) and it became untargetable after I hit it with Tenuous Grasp. It reappeared and cycled through prone animation repeatedly while being untargetable. I could not exit out of combat, go anywhere. So I had to quit and load (which is another oversight for Trial of Iron, but thankfully it exists since there are debilitating bugs like these) P.S. so for more information, I hit it with tenuous grasp, and then try to attack it with my monk and Eder. Eder my have used knockdown. Once the shadow came out of confusion it used instant teleport and the bug occured.

Sorry. I typed up a lot of useless convoluted stuff just now and then I realised: in Trial of Iron the quit button should be replaced by a Save and Quit button (which is what the Save button itself does, so basically get rid of the quit button.)

I relate with the OP's problem. I don't mind reading. In fact I do it all day browsing forums like reddit and reading news. I loved the writing in Torment and gobbled it up. However the writing for the BG series I never truly cared for unless it had to do with your companions (i.e. dramatic). I find myself skimming and skipping a lot of POE's text, especially when it doesn't pertain to your party or isn't of the main plot. For example I pretty much skip all the side quest text to get to the important stuff. I have never read any in-game books, either here or in BG. In fact I think Obsidian should have chose to at least deliver snippets of lore during the loading screen, because I'm pretty sure the majority of players including myself are never going to check them out because breaking flow of play to read lore is boring (and especially so if you haven't emotionally connected with the characters yet.) I actually love reading the lore behind games. PS:T and BG got me to look up all the D&D settings books and I gobbled them up, but delivering lore to players in the way POE is just kinda wasteful IMO.

Disregard anything else apart from the simple observation: Trial of Iron should not have a "save" button and a "quit" button. It should only have one button: the "Save and Quit" button(which is what the save button already does, so just rename it to that and get rid of the quit button). Problem solved. Get it in next patch devs? First of all, the issue of "if cheaters wanna cheat Trial of Iron they'll cheat anyway" is not relevant, don't wanna bring that up. Trial of Iron is currently just plain not functioning because clicking "quit" doesn't delete your save. FTL does this properly. If you quit, your save is gone. Right now you can just quit and load from last save. This is 100% an oversight because the option to load is greyed out (you can only delete), but quitting+loading amounts to doing the same thing.

OH MY GOD WHO THE HELL CARES seriously. No-one cares. Not when the poem was in. Not when it got changed. Nothing was censored. Mods can nuke anything they want on a private board and it still wouldn't be censorship just as moderation on a private board is not censorship. Seriously this stupid non-issue is not worth taking sides on. I hated the erika person that blew this up in the first place, then I hated the dumbasses who attacked erika as if using the word "SJW" gives them street-cred, now I hate people discussing things like "censorship" or "Obsidian has no principles I'm not buying their games" again. CARE ABOUT SOMETHING THAT MATTERS. Go volunteer at your local Church or whatever. Let games be about gaming. FK.

ok, so according to people so far, there are 250k Steam sales, which account 80% of total sales, which means 100% is 312k. Steam and GOG's cut seems to be 30%. The price is currently $45. So 312,000 * 0.7 * 45 is $9,828,000 in terms of total revenue so far, or we might as well call them profits since the development's been paid by Kickstarter. Now the average salary in California where OE is located is $51,900 So 9829000/51900 is 189, so its enough to pay a staff of 190 a years worth of salaries, or a staff of 60 three years (my estimate for the manpower needed to make another game). Sounds good to me Incidentally does anyone know the full-time staff size for POE?

Bioware's marketing did not tarnish the Dragon Age name. Dragon Age 2 did that all by itself. ^ Pretty much. Theres a reason Bioware managed to come from being one of the most loved companies after Mass Effect 1 and 2, which was done because of the success of these 2 games but add to that Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights 1 and KOTOR, which are all epic games, to being one of the most joked about companies recently. Bottom line is, make bad games, you'll have a bad name. Bioware has it now because of the greatest joke of the century: Mass Effect 3, but add to that DA2, SW TOR (cant believe they wasted 200 million on that ****) and DA:I (which is the embodiement of mediocre) haha oh look it's another one of those guys who think ME3 was "the greatest joke of the century". No-one would give a toss about ME3 if it wasn't for the stellar quality of the series up to THE VERY LAST 5 minutes of the game. Conveniently enough everyone brushes that aside.

Bioware's marketing did not tarnish the Dragon Age name. Dragon Age 2 did that all by itself. Yes. But the marketing provided those unfortunate videos where hapless developers who were understandably psyched about their game became fodder for the kind of hate-fests that resulted in people leaving the company due to death threats. The game on its own merits was decent at best, disappointing at worst. It was rushed, it had problems, but it was an okay game deserving of say a 7. Too bad it had the misfortune of bearing the DA name and all the expectations associated with the original. Those expectations were in part fanned by EA(or was it Bioware)'s overpromising, and I understand that broken promises hurt. I'm not gonna stand by however and let people trash even the good parts of that game just because it had bad parts and of problems of expectation vs the actual game itself.

Ok I should have known better to start this. I began by pointing out that someone's passing remark (DA2 being less tactical than DAO) was untrue, now people are saying all kinds of things I never said. I never compared DA2 to POE, nor did I say that DA2 didn't have a myriad of design flaws. Also, marketing is bad if it tarnishes the name of your brand because that's what you rely on in the end. I do not believe Biowares goal is to destroy their brand. They tried a few new things in DA2 and got burnt, and I don't doubt that rushing the game out had a few things to do with it. Trying to make Biowares staff out to be "morons" and calling their marketing "whorish" is just hyper-inflating and slandering, and the kind of circle-jerking BS that gets people riled up enough to eventually attack Bioware's staff personally. They(Bioware) did mess up when they underestimated the devotion of their fans and how readily that devotion would turn to hate, but the gibbering pitchfork crowd and their tired attempts to one-up each other in proclaiming how DA2 is the Worst Thing Ever and that Everything About It Is A Failure looks just as bad.

To be honest, my own complaints about difficulty are minimal: I'm enjoying the game alot in that regard and plan to experiment with different builds. I'd like shorter loading times though.

It was basically either that or throw them all at the player at once This isn't even remotely true. There's a bajillion alternatives to the craptastic wave warfare design AND the mindless "dump everything at the player at once" design. But they all require competent designers to actually 1) Give a Sh*t and 2) Be creative with the enemy types and their placement; and 3) Program the enemy AI to be a little more....adult-like. This is all Out of the Question for Bioware, however, as they'd see encounter creativity as a waste of time, And a waste of money, And a waste of effort, considering the fanbase. This is Bioware creativity for DAII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMcVZQI6ybw So you're treating Bioware devs with no PR experience exactly like a Politician? Grab onto his every word? Speaking of which one of Biowares biggest failures IMO is actually their marketing department, and how they over-promised on so many things with their releases. When they under-delivered (but still delivered a decent package) that was when the inevitable fan backlash and turdstorm erupted, but it's about as justified as a bunch of partisans grabbing onto a political gaffe. P.S. Also this really really gets me because bringing up a video like this is exactly what I would expect of someone who belonged to one of the "pitchfork crowd" when DA2 and ME3 came out: disparage/threaten the staff directly. This was what made me realised opinions from the crowd can sometimes be worse than garbage.

How are spell combos different from cross class combos? OK, spell combos don't just create party synergy (example: freeze + mighty blow = shatter), they also create a new spell. (Example: sleep + Horror = Nightmare) But again, welcome to DA2, where every detail is cut in half. Reviewing the combos in DAO, there actually were a few more than the ones I stated. I used paralysis explosion fairly often, and shockwave to counter the enemy's crushing prisons. So I take back what I said about there only being a few. The nature of a Combo however is the synergy between two different things. I think the dichotomy is apparent again. You need something new, but I just want something effective, and the damage you get from cross class combos is exactly that. There's nothing wrong with it as a design choice. I see paring down too many unnecessary and insignificant choices down to a few interesting weighty ones as a plus.

Yes.

No-one dictated such a guideline. You can hate on DA2 all you want. Hate on the story. Hate on the environment design. Hate on the companions. Those things are genuinley bad and make it arguably a bad game in that regard. However the moment you insert unsubstantiated BS such as "it's less tactical than DAO" is the moment I call it out.

Umm, I don't even own an Xbox. I haven't owned a console since 1997 which was an N64. However I reserve the right all the same to call out "PC master race" hipsters like you all the same. DA2 was a bad game. It was bad in a lot of places. Combat however was where it made an actual improvement.

What? That makes no sense. That's like saying This game has Swords....as Bows. You freeze a bunch of enemies and then shatter them. Except in DA2 its with an ability rather than stone fist/critting like in DAO. How is this different? Or are you talking about retarded combos like "storm of the century" that amount to an "I win" button? The combo system in DA2 was way more interesting functionally and tactically than DAO. You NEEDED cross-class combos to deal the amounts of damage needed to succeed and setting them up was fun (Staggering an enemy then unleashing Explosive strike on them with a rogue for tons of dmg) and challenging (trying not to cone of cold your own party and then trying not to AOE your party with Mighty Blow). Compare this with DAO spell combos, which basically boiled down to the shatter combo and storm of the century. Everything else was there for novelty value. "Oh I discovered a new combo! Cute! Probably not gonna use it again"

It's 10 times worse. Because It's more limited. Mages have less spells., Fighters and rogues have less customization options. They removed friendly fire(!). They removed the tactical view camera. They removed stealth. They removed finishing blows. They reduced the bestiary. They removed tactical positioning. They removed the ability to miss (literally. You can no longer miss.), they removed spell combos. Then they sped everything up and gave us the "awesome button" so that we wouldn't miss the removal of what little tactical combat the first game had. So much wrong with this post. Mages have just as many spells. Fights and rogues have less GIMPED customization options. Friendly Fire is THERE in NIGHTMARE. Spell combos are THERE as cross-class combos. Stealth EXISTS on rogues(maybe not implemented how you want, but its there). Hits CAN miss. At this point you're just spouting out plain falsehoods so i'll stop wasting time

You don't need any spells in DA:O, (I had the most fun with my all-rogue party playthough) but that's not the point. At all. Even simple, unbalanced combat can be fun, if the system in place is deep enough to allow you to play (or role play) how you want in combat. DA2....does....not....let....fighters....Dual wield. Or use Bows. What kind of insipid, moronic design is that? If it wasn't for the fact that the game has about 10,000 examples of precisely this same type of Retard-motivated limitations from the ground up, (combat and otherwise), I'd have given it a 0/10 and condemned it for that ALONE. Look, I respect the fact that you value freedom to play games however you like and be able to try out what ever playstyle fits you and have room for experimentation. That's a different set of things that I look for, but both are valid, and I'm ok with that. But raising that to the level of "this is not designed how I want. 0/10" is a bit much. Saying it's less tactical than DAO is plain wrong.

Sorry, having recently finished both DA:O and DA2 on nightmare in preparation for DAI(which I dropped out of disgust in the first hour from console control scheme), I disagree. I liked both. I liked the story and characters in DAO, and the combat and tactics in DA2. Let's not kid ourselves here, DAO's combat was a complete cheese fest once you knew what you were doing. There was nothing tactical about it. My PC rogue literally auto-attacked his way through the whole game coz none of his other abilities WORKED in terms of having better dps than plain auto-attacking. DA2 actually has consistently challenging combat. Just because they implemented non-sucky looking, faster-paced animations does not mean it's less tactical than DAO(the opposite is true). Sure DA2 sucked from rehashed areas and average meh story/companions, but its combat was one of its high points and one where it improved over DAO. What? "Consistently challenging combat?" Are we talking about the same game? The one where, by design, you could win all normal difficulty encounters without ever using a single ability of any companion (unlike your characterization of DA:O)? The one where hard difficulty involved the same AI but with inflated HP? Teleporting enemies from the sky? It sounds to me like you're an action gamer, but attacking a clever tactical game as one where you can autoattack and playing up the "awesome button" DA2 is tough to swallow. DA2 was *hated* by users, with a wretched metacritic score. DA:O was loved by users. It's not just my opinion - and Bioware has basically apologized for what they did with DA2. Here are the average user reviews from metacritic: PoE: 8.6 DA:O 8.6 DA2: 4.4 DA:I 5.8 I actually find a strong correlation between my views and averages like these, even though I know that people game the system with 1s and 10s. This also shows that it's entirely possible for users to rate games highly (they don't attack everything). We're talking about the same game perhaps but not the same difficulty. You characterised me as "an action gamer" as if it's some kind of pejorative. First there's nothing wrong with being an "action gamer". Second I'm as hard core as a strategy gamer (specialising in turn-based ones like Civ) as they come. This is why I played the DA games on Nightmare, and why I threw away DAI because that was obviously not designed with core gamers in mind. I auto-attacked with my Rogue in DAO because that was the best thing to do from theorycrafting Rogue dps. DAO has fun combat certainly but at the end of the day wasn't balanced. Some abilities were just plain overpowered and most of those came from mages. If you had Morrigan and Wynne you could spam CC and AOE spells on enemies from half a screen away, which was pretty damn cheap. You can't do that with DA2 because many of the encounters didn't give you space to retreat into, or they dropped enemies on top of you forcing you to act on your wits. Review scores never tell the full story, and METACRITIC USER SCORES ARE WORSE THAN WORTHLESS. Please do not bring those scores up as if they had any semblance of credibility. Metacritic users are unprofessional, love hopping on bandwagons, love hating on big companies just for the sake of it, love giving binary 0s or 10s just to "balance" the score and are easily susceptible to "mobilization" attempts from certain boards. POE was lucky to have escaped purely because it was an indie effort with a feel-good story behind its creation (misty-eyed RPG veterans behind such classics as Fallout/Baldurs Gate/IWD kickstarting new nostalgic RPG! Get on this if you're hip!). Other games by bigger companies will get 0s just because they're published by EA which according to hip gamers is Evil Incarnate. I will never forget the insanely stupid reception that ME3 got(I was disappointed in the ending too, but not enough of a dumbass to BURN MY COPY of it). Basically Metacritic user scores are an avenue for your political views as a gamer, if such a thing makes sense (big company bad, small indie company good, COD-generation bad, My-generation good etc.) They are at the end of the day not beholden to professional standards (IGN, Gamespot), and even those are wrong sometimes in my opinion - I bought The Stanley Parable because of rave reviews and because I enjoyed games like Dear Esther and Gone Home, but what I got was a stinking piece of smarmy ass BS that was more interested in being "meta" than actually interesting.

Also I hope they work on that option of disabling autosaves soon. I'm pretty sure it's contributing to the loading problems.

Wait, you're blind? Ok I know the writing is good but I didn't know it was THAT good.

I was halfway through a serious reponse to your first post, but... I just can't. I can't wrap my head around the fact that someone actually liked airborne darkspawn. It was basically either that or throw them all at the player at once in which case they'd promptly be bombed by AOE. This way you can't just AOE everything all at once. I never quite understood the animus against it.

Well I'm playing the patch beta and I can say that there is no discernable improvement.