Enoch

Ah. Branded '72, I presume.

Bioshock had an inventory??

What is known about how importing savegames will work? I understand that we'll be re-leveling Shepard to a great degree, and that ME2 offers several new abilities. But will stuff like unlocked 'bonus talents' matter on imported characters (e.g., if I make a Sentinel with the Assault Rifle as the bonus talent, will she keep it)? Or is this just about Class, Gender, Paragon/Renegade, and certain plot/quest/NPC decisions?

I agree with regard to the whiskey. However, there are some values to be found. For example, Jim Beam's Rye is pretty good, and usually only about $10 for 750 mL. And the Wild Turkey Rye (at about twice that price) is as good as any I've had. Straight Rye Whiskey is the only way to make a classic Manhattan. For sipping, I prefer the Old World stuff.

It's one of the standard methods for preparing baked goods. In recipes, "to cream" basically means to smack the crap out of something in your stand mixer for a while. The method is to "cream" your fat (usu. butter), then add sugar and cream that some more. Then you add the eggs, and eventually your dry stuff and any additional liquid to finish the batter. Explanatory link. Old-fashioned baking recipes would sometimes just be a list of ingredients, followed by "creaming method."

Wow, those ginger cookies I made yesterday are good. The plan was to ship them to my family (as the wife and I will be visiting the in-laws this x-mas), but that plan is in serious jeopardy. They're essentially a basic butter cookie (the "creaming" method). But with dark brown sugar (plus a tbs. of molasses) in place of the regular sugar, with 2 tbs. of dry ground ginger added to the flour, and with 1/4 cup of finely chopped candied ginger added after the batter is assembled. Soft, moist, sweet, but with a lovely spicy kick in the teeth from the assertive flavor of the ginger. Pairs well with a nice hoppy pale ale.

Just finished the batter for a batch of some very ginger-laden sugar cookies. It gets a night in the fridge before cutting and baking tomorrow. I'll also be making some chocolate-dipped coconut meringues. And then some beef stew.

Had a weird editing error in that last post. Bolded portion fixed.

Yeah, but a player without metaknowledge isn't necessarily going to know to go get Wynne early. (If you stumble onto her later, you lose your shot at And people are using MMO terms because that's what Bio's ruleset most resembles. I agree that all the warriors would fit into the "Meatshield" category of the traditional D&D foursome (along with Healbot, Nuker, and Skill-monkey). But the 'threat management' system that Bio wrote screams for MMO-style specialization between damage-dealers and damage-sponges.

Shale can do it. But recall that Shale was supposed to have been cut from the game before it was delayed to this fall, and even now comes as 'premium content' that people who didn't buy the game new have to shell out $15 for. Without the golem, Bio gave us only one natural melee tank NPC and only one natural crowd-control-focused mage NPC-- the two roles that, in the rule system they devised, are most crucial to success. The PC, of course, can take one of these roles, but not both. So, yeah, they really wanted this game to be the Morrigan and Alistair show. Too bad that neither character is particularly likable.

So I did. Heh. If it had taken any effort at all to download, I'd never have gotten it (see: Blood Dragon Armor). But it just popped up in my inventory without asking, and I was planning on doing a high-dex dagger-wielding rogue, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Ice and Fire Arrows/Bolts are great to sell early in the game. It took me a while to realize that the value was per arrow, and not for the whole stack. I tend to underuse consumables, so I hardly notice when they're gone, and the payout is quite nice. Other thing I realized embarrassingly late: How to look up. My Dwarven rogue is just about to enter the Tower in Ostagar. That freebie DLC dagger is destabilizingly powerful if you pump your Dex to unlock it at level 4. (It requires 26.) I might have to forgo its use on principle for a little while. (Although I already sold the plain ol' grey iron dagger I was using before the level-up, so I guess I'm stuck with it for a little while longer.) Before I could use it, I was noticing how going from Normal to Hard and from Mage to Rogue had increased the difficulty (Jory came out of the Wilds with 3 injuries); now the fights breeze by in a haze of 20+ HP backstabs.

Very good idea, I should have thought about that. Would make the 'dramatic' ending cutscene of the origin comic gold too. I haven't played that one, but I doubt it would be as good as introducing some nudity into the Mage origin.

I considered letting

Maybe the dragon's behavior depends a bit on where you are when you summon it. My group happened to be standing in the narrow part of the path, close to the entrance to the Gauntlet. The rock walls on either side of the path there might be too close for swooping.

The epilogue I got for the guy said he grabbed a ship out of Denerim and sailed somewhere up north before the darkspawn siege. (No doubt paid for by the 50g worth of equipment of mine he walked out with.)

Descent? Did the dragon fly around when you guys were fighting it? That would've been pretty cool-- it stayed put for me.

Locks is a Talent, not a Skill.

So I've mostly worked out what I want in my rogue. But I'm still trying to decide on initial skills. Rogues start with Poison 1, get one Skill based on origin (Dwarf Nobles get Combat Training 1), and get to pick one more at each odd-numbered level (including 1st). I want Momentum ASAP, which means I need to get Combat 2 and 3 quickly. So, if C2&3 are to be my level 3&5 skills, what else do I take at level 1-- Stealing, Traps, or Coercion? I'm willing to wait on Traps until I have enough Stealth to make it useful. I do think it'd be fun to run around the Origin and Ostagar taking everything that isn't nailed down. But not having any Coercion before level 7 is probably going to be frustrating. If I do skip Stealing early on, I'm not going to take any of it with my main character at all. I'd welcome comments from anybody who remembers the early bits of the game better than I do-- what are the relative benefits of early Coercion and Stealing?

From what I understand, it's simply "THE Dragon Age Setting" abbreviated, which was originally done by posters in the old discussion boards, and was eventually adopted by Bioware after they found themselves calling it that. Wow. That's even dumber.

This is probably a dumb coincidence, but it occurred to me last night: Thedas. The Das. The The.

Yeah, I used some of the info in that post, but I wasn't about to duplicate some of those calculations. (The attack timing stuff in particular lost me.) And I didn't want to include specific equipment or the constant use of the DLC power (which I haven't bought).

@vir, if this Bioboards thread is to be believed, Cunning has no effect on stealth-- it's all skill ranks and no attributes. Although the author there was unable to determine how laying traps while cloaked works, so it might play in to that calculation.

No, you can't. My rogue had all 4 skill ranks and Cunning of 28-30 (I don't recall which), and there were locks that she didn't have the skill to pick. Which annoyed me no end! Just to highlight one line from my ridiculously long post: I had confused the Locks formula with the Coercion formula. You need 4 ranks, plus 30 CUN (or maybe 31; not sure if the checks are 'equal to' or 'greater than') to pick all locks.

OK. Melee Rogue Construction Research (Cobbled together from http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Age_Wiki , http://dragonage.gulbsoft.org/doku.php/ , Google, and some BioBoards threads) Caveat: This is all calculated without any Soldier's Peak special items/abilities. Attributes STR: Prerequisite for Armor (20 gets you best light armor; heavier armor has heavier fatigue) Prerequisite for non-dagger melee weapons (31 STR for best longswords) Increases Attack (0.5/point) Increases Damage (1/point with most melee, 0.5/point with daggers) Boosts Intimidation (eq. to 1 rank of Coercion per 25 points over 10 (@35, 60, 85)) DEX: Prerequisite for Roguey and DW Talents (36 gets you all) Prerequisite for Daggers (30 for all) and Bows (34 for all) Increases Attack (1/point) Increases Damage for Daggers (0.5/point) and Bows (1/point) Increases Defense (1/point) CUN: Prerequisite for lots of Roguey Talents and Skills (22 gets you everything) Increases Armor Penetration (0.14/point) With Lethality, takes the place of STR for damage calculation (1/point for non-daggers, 0.5/point for daggers) With Exploit Weakness (2nd-tier Assassin ability), adds damage to all Backstabs (Presumably, not to non-backstab criticals??) (0.17/point) Boosts Lockpicking and Trap-Disarming. (NOTE: my previous post on this was WRONG. Formula is (10*ranks in skill) + (CUN-10), with the toughest checks at 60.) Boosts Persuasion (as STR for Intimidation) Weapons Weapons have different ability modifiers, which are applied to the STR/DEX damage adjustments above. Daggers are 0.85 (so each pt of STR or DEX really only increases damage by 0.425); Longswords (ignoring axes & maces for the moment) are 1.0. Weapons have different speed modifiers. Longswords have -0.1; Daggers have -0.5. I don't know how this really works, but I would guess that it is applied to base of 1.0, so that for every 5 longsword attacks, the dagger gets 9. The base damage ratio between the weapons is pretty close to the reverse of this (best daggers do 6.4; best swords do 11.2). More attacks also means more payout on enchantment runes, but also that enemy Armor factors in more often. Daggers have the advantage in base Crit chance (best is 4.8%, versus 3.2%) and Armor Penetration (8 v. 4). I'm sure that Dual Wielding affects this, but I have no idea how. Combat All Rogue flanking attacks are Backstabs. With Coup de Grace (3rd tier, min. lev. all attacks on stunned or paralyzed foes are backstabs. All attacks coming out of stealth are either backstabs (melee) or critical hits (ranged). 4th tier Duelist ability makes all regular attacks Criticals "for a moderate duration." Critical Hit v. Backstab is weird. Damage formulae are the same, but Crits are not Backstabs and Backstabs are not Crits. If a blow can be either (e.g., coming out of stealth), I think Backstab takes priority. More notes: Crits shatter; backstabs do not. Ranged weapons cannot backstab, but can crit. Backstabs can only be done with regular attacks, not with activated abilities. Narrative Conclusions With the Dex Fix now official, I think Dexterity looks like the winner here. Dags v. Swords looks like it's close enough to be a draw to me, with the tiebreaker being that your tank can still use the best swords you find if you go with 2 Daggers. Plus, DW Mastery (for Drizzty fightin) is expensive. So, if you're going daggers, DEX is better to sink points into than STR in pretty much every way, once you have 20 for your armor (much of which can come from . For CUN, you'll get it to 20ish for ability prerequisites. The question is what then? 30 is minimum to handle the hardest locks and traps, and 35 lets you save a skillpoint in coercion. (Both nice, but not necessary.) With Lethality and Exploit Weakness, points in CUN get you more damage than increasing DEX, but those Talents are costly. And DEX retains the advantage in Attack and Defense, such that additonal CUN is probably only worthwhile when you already have a near-100% hit rate against whatever it is you're fighting. Talents I Want: Stealth: 3 ranks Devices: 4 DW Sweep: 3 (Momentum is really good) Dirty Fighting: 3 (for Coup de Grace) DW Training: Not sure about the true effects of these. 2 tiers, at least, look useful. Below the Belt: First two tiers don't look particularly useful. What amount of CUN (minus STR) is necessary justify 3 Talents here? Assassin: 1-2, depending on CUN. Dual Striking: Has some nice auto-crit attacks, but hardly necessary. Skills I Want: Combat Training: 3 Poisons: 1 (The reason to spare Zevran) Trapmaking: 1 Stealing: 1? (Supposedly worthwhile in the Origins and Ostagar. After that, I can use Lel when I want to steal.) Coercion: 3-4 So I think I'm going DEX-heavy, with Daggers. I'll eventually get CUN up to either 30 or 35, with equipment. Going for Momentum as early as I can for survivability.