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Dragon Age II

I've been sticking with rogue/thief characters as long as I can remember, and I'd say they tend to do fairly well in most Bioware games. Even in Baldur's Gate - by the end of the game your traps and backstabs are doing absolutely insane amounts of damage.
 
Damn I have way too much spare time on my hands. Since Wabe has been posting non-stop about this game I've beat DA2 once, completing almost every quest, about 50% through a 2nd playthrough on Hard, beat a Domination Campaign (take 60 provinces) in Shogun 2 and now am starting Mass Effect 2 since Bioware gave it to me for free.

And I can't believe you played Origins...and DA2...and didn't know what a blood mage was. Honestly, how many enemies are there in DA2 that aren't blood mages?!
 
I was only joking. I thought it might be amusing... you know... somebody who started a thread about DA2... and says on page 60 that he doesn't know what a blood mage is... ha!
 
WabeWalker said:
I was only joking. I thought it might be amusing... you know... somebody who started a thread about DA2... and says on page 60 that he doesn't know what a blood mage is... ha!
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Or someone who hasn't played the game :D
 
FWIW, I'm playing through Awekening and almost done, and I like the game compared to DA2...in DA:A you AT LEAST have some direction; some underlying plot to follow. Short? Yes. Fun nonetheless? Yeah. Though I will say Awakening has too few companions...but I guess that goes with it being short. I enjoyed the expansiveness DAO had...DAA lacks that, and DA2 from what I played of it ALSO lacked it. I may just toss DA2 in the pile of "this is bullshit" games I've got.
 
Just finished Act 2 last night. Would give gameplay an 8 of 10 but my goodness folks are right they reused the same dungeons way to much. I'm liking the story so far and Isabella is awesome to have around. I'm a rogue as well and we totally rip MOBs up at this point.
 
I completed DA2 this weekend. The final battles are a complete joke after the hellish last fight near the mine, Merrill's Quest, the Dark Tome, Rock Wrath, etc. I don't think anyone dropped below 50% health and I didn't use a single potion.

Pretty abrupt ending, too. I was expecting another chapter involving darkspawn, but then the credits started rolling.

I'm a little puzzled about the price of a lot of items. Some of those 150K items aren't even that good and you'd pretty much have to spend like 1/2 the money you get in the whole game just to buy 'em. There are a few items worth picking up in shops, but you almost always seem to find something better the instant you finally buy something big. I think the only major purchase I really got use from was one of the matching daggers at the end of the game.
 
Domingo said:
I'm a little puzzled about the price of a lot of items. Some of those 150K items aren't even that good and you'd pretty much have to spend like 1/2 the money you get in the whole game just to buy 'em. There are a few items worth picking up in shops, but you almost always seem to find something better the instant you finally buy something big. I think the only major purchase I really got use from was one of the matching daggers at the end of the game.
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Well aside from a few potions and consumables, there is nothing else to buy in the game though aside from those items
 
Yeah, I ended up buying up a boatload of potions throughout the game just because the stores seemed to actually sell out and I had no idea if I'd ever need them later. I won the game with 50 or so left, but I did end up using 10 or more in the big battle near the mines (no spoilers).

I'm honestly hoping that there will be be some better options in some future expansions. DA1 lots of top notch stuff that was only available in shops, so maybe some future add on items will follow suit...or so I can hope.
 
DA2 had the foundation for a great game. It was just so obviously rushed. Extremely short main plot points - Deep Road?! Lack of items, more companion armor options, maps, maps, maps, maps.

I just started playing ME2 and I've seen the variety of environments Bioware can put into a game. If only they had 12-18 months instead of 6, DA2 could have been fantastic. Shoot, even the ship in ME2 has about as much detail and areas to go as all of Kirkwall. :p
 
JayteeBates said:
Just finished Act 2 last night. Would give gameplay an 8 of 10 but my goodness folks are right they reused the same dungeons way to much.
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Soon you'll fight the Varterral again. At the exact same place as the first time.
 
Other than the first meeting with the Arishock, most of the dialogue is pretty bad. I've been replaying PS:T as a mage, and I can safely say there was very little thought when writing DA2 :( Most of it seems banal and forced, as if the characters don't fit their dialogue.

DA2 on Hard seems like a joke, how long does it take for the game to give you a difficult fight? Not that Origins was ever very difficult...
 
LeninGHOLA said:
DA2 on Hard seems like a joke, how long does it take for the game to give you a difficult fight? Not that Origins was ever very difficult...
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It goes from a joke to incredibly hard for one fight, then immediately back down to a joke again. I beat the game on Normal and did the full Rock Wraith fight. On Hard Rock Wraith, after having my 2H warrior die non stop in the first few seconds, I just bumped it to casual to get it over with. I knew the pattern, but grinding it out again for 20 minutes+ just didn't appeal to me.
 
DA's difficulty was literally either painfully easy or painfully hard. Normal dungeons and encounters involve just sending your whole team into the fray using the default AI while making your mage blast everything to hell.
However there are 4-5 boss fights that are yank our your hair annoying because they take so long and it's so easy to die in them.
There are a couple of crazy hard encounters where you're killing roughly 50 time-spawned henchmen and a leader, too. Those remind me a bit of the first game, only the enemies come in waves instead of being there for the duration of the battle.

IMO - the team likely got Act 3 pretty polished and worked backwards from there. The early parts of the game are far more sloppy than the later parts, although it's clearly a rushed product all-around. It still feels like there was supposed to be a darkspawn filled Act 4 to me. Considering how much shorter the game is than DA1, I bet they likely planned one but have likely relegated that to a DLC add-on mission.
 
TwistedAegis said:
It goes from a joke to incredibly hard for one fight, then immediately back down to a joke again. I beat the game on Normal and did the full Rock Wraith fight. On Hard Rock Wraith, after having my 2H warrior die non stop in the first few seconds, I just bumped it to casual to get it over with. I knew the pattern, but grinding it out again for 20 minutes+ just didn't appeal to me.
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Is the Rock Wraith the first hard fight?
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Is the Rock Wraith the first hard fight?
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It was for me. I cruised into that fight thinking it would be as easy as the random little dragons and giant spiders I'd slaughtered before.
...and then I started to realize that there was seemingly no way to win that fight (with my chosen team) in under 10 minutes and without downing a fair number of potions along the way.
Plus, because of how it attacks - unless you've faced it before, it's hard to know how to avoid some of what it does, especially considering the damage you take.
 
Domingo said:
It was for me. I cruised into that fight thinking it would be as easy as the random little dragons and giant spiders I'd slaughtered before.
...and then I started to realize that there was seemingly no way to win that fight (with my chosen team) in under 10 minutes and without downing a fair number of potions along the way.
Plus, because of how it attacks - unless you've faced it before, it's hard to know how to avoid some of what it does, especially considering the damage you take.
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From the way it has been explained to me, it sounds much like Lord Sanctus Seru, minus the bane weapons.
 
Domingo said:
DA's difficulty was literally either painfully easy or painfully hard. Normal dungeons and encounters involve just sending your whole team into the fray using the default AI while making your mage blast everything to hell.
However there are 4-5 boss fights that are yank our your hair annoying because they take so long and it's so easy to die in them.
There are a couple of crazy hard encounters where you're killing roughly 50 time-spawned henchmen and a leader, too. Those remind me a bit of the first game, only the enemies come in waves instead of being there for the duration of the battle.

IMO - the team likely got Act 3 pretty polished and worked backwards from there. The early parts of the game are far more sloppy than the later parts, although it's clearly a rushed product all-around. It still feels like there was supposed to be a darkspawn filled Act 4 to me. Considering how much shorter the game is than DA1, I bet they likely planned one but have likely relegated that to a DLC add-on mission.
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This was how I felt as well... until I solved the riddle of my party.

Merril as a blood mage with a huge number of points in constitution, can be sent into the middle of the fight with six buffs - then you cycle through her AOE spells, starting with the one that sucks in all the surrounding NPCs. She's nearly invincible.

Anders stands off to the side and cycles through his AOE spells as well, then starts to heal party members with Panacea, and even resurrect them when they go down..

Fenris goes in with his two hander and swings away.

Your rogue targets the high level NPCs and bosses with the assassin skills.

In DX 11 mode this a real sight to behold. You get multiple spell effects onscreen. But on Hard I'm now winning every single fight the first time through, although some fights are touch and go, which is the way I want it. I'm not frustrated any more. For the super difficult boss fights, against dragons and the like, I swap out Fenris with Aveline.
 
Yes, Rock Wraith is the first hard fight, in my opinion.

The big problem is if you go in with a party beforehand that isn't well suited to the fight. I was trying to run without Anders in hard, and it was pretty much impossible with the party I had. Maybe that is me being dumb, but it is nice to try things a bit different sometimes.
 
Rock Wraith is really pretty easy if you know what you are doing. Last time I fought it on hard and beat it in a couple of minutes without any deaths. Just got to get the technique down right and keep your guys away fromt he laser splinters.
 
My melee would almost immediately die every time on Hard and wouldn't even make it to the first AOE stage.
 
I beat it on hard with both a DW rogue and a 2HD warrior. I actually beat him the 2nd time without a tank... Fenris, Hawke (rogue), Varric, Anders.

The strat is pretty simple IF you have enough DPS. I used a lot of pausing. Just balls-out DPS him until the first "splinter explosion". Select your group and hide behind a pillar. As soon as that is done, start DPS on rockwraith and have 1 DPS kill the Profane adds. If you have fast enough DPS, he will barely come out of stasis before he starts the cycle over again. It makes it really easy.

The final time I needed 2 DPS to kill the profanes quickly, which was Hawke and Fenris.

I haven't tried it on nightmare yet, that would be a special challenge if using a 2 handed warrior.

The dragon was much more difficult for me without a tank. The stock AI for your teammates makes them do retarded things like running into the fire breath and clustering together.
 
The spawned enemies are my least favorite part of the game at this point. You have no where to put your back to as they spawn from brick, I like the hard fights I just dont like enemies spawning magically.
 
With the dragon I found that actually letting him kill one tank (or just bringing 3 people to the fight) helped me a ton. Early on I had my main shooting arrows, my mage kept using Hex/Torment/etc. and Fenris and Aveline going to town in close.
He ended up biting Avaline to death pretty quickly, but spend the rest of the fight going after Fenris almost exclusively. I ended up just circling around him and manually dodging while getting in a few licks here and there. Occasionally he'd fireball the others, but the fire runes kept that from doing too much damage.
When the dragonlings and matures come out I swapped my main to 2 daggers, had Fenris use crowd clearing attacks, and had my mage use area affect spells. Again, the fire runes and equipment keep you from taking too much damage from fireballs.
It's a long fight - but for some reason when you only have one melee fighter the dragon spends like 99% of the fight going after them. Keep using potions and circle strafing.

I still think the toughest fight possible is the (no spoiler) end of Act 2 battle using a 2-hander. He's easy, but the fight takes FOREVER with a ranged character...but a 2 hander really has very little safe to use in that fight. It's likely winnable, but I bet you'd need like 20 potions.
 
I love this game!

I just defeated the high dragon on hard - it took about twenty five minutes with Aveline, Anders, and Merril. I faced three separate waves of dragonlings. The second wave included a dragon, and the third wave included... count 'em two dragons! Each wave must've had at least twenty dragonlings in it. Just insane. I had Pancea activated for Anders and he was constantly healing the party members. He must have resurrected dead comrades at least six times.

In the last five minutes of the battle, as I was whittling the dragon's health down, I began to grow excited because I saw that I had him. When he went down I jumped out of my seat and thanked the gods that I don't have a fucking family to bug me while I'm playing super awesome titles like this one. Just a great experience.

Love this game.
 
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WabeWalker said:
I love this game!

I just defeated the high dragon on hard - it took about twenty five minutes with Aveline, Anders, and Merril. I faced three separate waves of dragonlings. The second wave included a dragon, and the third wave included... count 'em two dragons! Each wave must've had at least twenty dragonlings in it. Just insane. I had Pancea activated for Anders and he was constantly healing the party members. He must have resurrected dead comrades at least six times.

In the last five minutes of the battle, as I was whittling, the dragon's health down, I began to grow excited because I saw that I had him. When he went down I jumped out of my seat and thanked the gods that I don't have a fucking family to bug me while I'm playing super awesome titles like this one. Just a great experience.

Love this game.
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I read this post and all I could think is "wait, is this a MMORPGer?" (especially the "thanked the gods that I don't have a fucking family" part :p). Your description sounds like a boss fight in a MMORPGer, it reminded me of going into the Gunbad cave in WAR, lol.
 
Some of the bosses are completely pointless, just sacks of HP that take forever to kill. Just switch to casual and mow them down, no reason to waste 30 minutes bashing them down.
 
WabeWalker said:
When he went down I jumped out of my seat and thanked the gods that I don't have a fucking family to bug me while I'm playing super awesome titles like this one. Just a great experience.

Love this game.
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LOL, fail. My wife supports my hobby. I am rarely 'bothered' while gaming. It's also really fun telling her about my games and watching her roll her eyes and call me 'bobo'.
 
So I fired Origins up last night and went at it with some of the things I learned from DA2. It's a lot more straight-forward than my first experience was. I'm enjoying it now.

Tudz said:
I read this post and all I could think is "wait, is this a MMORPGer?" (especially the "thanked the gods that I don't have a fucking family" part :p). Your description sounds like a boss fight in a MMORPGer, it reminded me of going into the Gunbad cave in WAR, lol.
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The Dragon Age franchise are very MMO-like games in their mechanics.
 
Almost done my second play through and my party feels unstoppable. I will probably go for play #3 after this. The game grew on me, and the performance boost from the latest nvidia driver is really nice (initially sucked with SLI).

Main character = full Spirit Healer, force mage for the +100 fortitude talent, Creation tree. Group buffs and heals. Haste is completely ridiculous. If someone actually dies, they get rezzed with no injuries.
Anders = Fire/Ice/Lightning spells, does not use Vengeance so he can heal normally.
Merill = Debuff and spirit trees, no points in her blood magic tree.
Triple mage covers all the spell options, so the last slot really doesn't matter. Aveline for boss fights or a rogue for exploration.
 
Mark_Warner said:
The Dragon Age franchise are very MMO-like games in their mechanics.
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Which is fine if they use the parts that are well thought out. Waves upon waves of spawning enemies for every encounter is lame. It works for certain battles, like if your enemy was a summoner, but it gets tedious after a while. It's why old EQ players have nightmares of Vex Thal clears.

Every time I see a wave of enemies spawn from a path I just ran down (which was clear of enemies), I cringe. With DA2, the way to fix this would have been unique level design. But, with the way it was made, they need each encounter to be somewhat unique... which is hard to do if all of the maps are heavily recycled. I think they are stuck with waves of respawns in this game due to the lack of varied maps.
 
I'm so jealous of my friend right now. He just got into PC gaming and I told him that he MUST play DA:Origins. He now frequently texts me updates on his adventure and what he is up to in Ferelden. It is really taking me back to when I played. I miss everyone in DA:O so much. Sten, Shale, Morrigan....my boy Oghren!! All of the characters and adventures we went on I will never ever forget. :(:( What a masterpiece that game was.

10+ hours in to DA2 and, so far, it is just a such a total let down in that regard. I feel no connection to any of the characters. We're all stuck in what seems like a prison of a city with no real reason to want to do anything.

It was the memorable characters and EPIC story that drew me in and kept me glued to DA:O. Sadly, there is no glue in DA2. :(
 
KenG10 said:
10+ hours in to DA2 and, so far, it is just a such a total let down in that regard. I feel no connection to any of the characters. We're all stuck in what seems like a prison of a city with no real reason to want to do anything.
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I dont know, I feel a lot more connection with the DA2 NPCs. Isabela, Aveline (the marriage quest, LOL), Fenris, Varrick, even crazy Anders and Merill. They have more interaction and little quips than DA1 ever had.

DA1 NPCs were one-dimensional and you barely got to know them. In my last play of it I killed off all the annoying ones...left Leliana to die in Lothering so much for that, eh?, killed Zevran he shows up anyway, despite importing save, purged the Circle and the old woman, killed Shale in favor of a glorious golem army, and left Alistair to rot. Sten/Morrigan/Oghren is all anyone needs.
 
I really think the waves of enemies things was partially done to keep the console and PC versions as close as possible.
In the first game on the PC you'd have a screen full of enemies (sometimes 15 or so) and on the console they'd only have 1/2 as many. Sometimes they'd use a "fog of war" type effect to add in other enemies from a distance as you got closer. While it's the same game at heart, it was like playing on "very easy" as a result.
When the enemies come in waves, it limits the number of stuff on screen better and probably makes the console versions closer to what the PC has.
It sucks, but I bet that's one reason they did it.
 
Ritorix said:
I dont know, I feel a lot more connection with the DA2 NPCs. Isabela, Aveline (the marriage quest, LOL), Fenris, Varrick, even crazy Anders and Merill. They have more interaction and little quips than DA1 ever had.

DA1 NPCs were one-dimensional and you barely got to know them. In my last play of it I killed off all the annoying ones...left Leliana to die in Lothering so much for that, eh?, killed Zevran he shows up anyway, despite importing save, purged the Circle and the old woman, killed Shale in favor of a glorious golem army, and left Alistair to rot. Sten/Morrigan/Oghren is all anyone needs.
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Varric, Merril, Fenris, Aveline, Sebastian, Anders, and Isabella, all feel much more like friends of mine than that one dimensional lot in Origins did.

Mike Laidlaw said that where Origins was about telling a story using space, DA2 is a story that's told through time. DA2 is every bit as 'epic' as Origins, but it's a more mature type of epic - it's about character progression over the span of ten years, and how the city of Kirkwall changes.

I think that the twelve year old kids who loved Origins so much couldn't grasp that concept. For them, epic meant criss crossing the map like Chevy Chase getting lost with his family on summer vacation. "Let's go visit the elves... let's go visit the dwarves... damn, I'm out of lyrium, let's go visit the elves again... blast it, I need a new blade, let's go visit the dwarves... crap, I need a new bow, let's go visit the elves... wait a minute, I forget to speak to that dwarf, to finish off the quest, let's go visit the dwarves."

During the course of Bore-igins, I must have criss crossed the map at least thirty times. It got to be comical. I must have visited Denerim on at least forty occasions. At one point I was thinking, damn, if only I was getting air miles for all this traveling I'm doing.

Ooh, epic.

Um, no.

Dragon Age 2 is way more epic, because the story unfolds over time, and because your party members are actually caught up in events this time. It's smarter, it's more mature... it's just not a dumbed down piece of shit that's aimed at The Harry Potter generation who need to have their stories spoon fed to them.
 
Wow. In the early days of this thread I was almost sure that Wabe was trying to conduct reasonable dialogue, but now it just looks like pure trolling to me. Why do you go out of your way to make people who preferred Origins sound like idiots? Your "points" are only valid if you look at DA2 through seriously rose-colored lenses. Looks like the useful stuff is done appearing in this thread. If someone else had created the thread I wonder if it would have been different.
 
Riddleofsteel said:
Wow. In the early days of this thread I was almost sure that Wabe was trying to conduct reasonable dialogue, but now it just looks like pure trolling to me. Why do you go out of your way to make people who preferred Origins sound like idiots? Your "points" are only valid if you look at DA2 through seriously rose-colored lenses. Looks like the useful stuff is done appearing in this thread. If someone else had created the thread I wonder if it would have been different.
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LOL!

So now it's trolling to like DA2 and hate Orgiins?

No, seriously, the criss crossing of the map in Origins was laughable. I was surprised that more people didn't think of some cheap Saturday Night Live skit when seeing their characters going from point A to point B, then back to point A, then back to point B, and then back to point A before having to go back to point B again.

Seriously, that's epic? No, that's not epic. That's just stupid. A 12-year-old kid might find that to be epic, but anybody else should see right through that nonsense.

The way Dragon Age 2 progresses is a much more mature form of storytelling, because the 'epic' nature comes from character progression, and from change in the city, rather than from fast traveling and bouncing around the map like some class of pinball.

I really wish that you guys would stop calling people trolls for having different opinions than you do.
 
dioxholster said:
hey guys im in a fantasy genre mood, Dragon Age 1 or 2? which is more exciting and stuff?
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I would go with Origins for that.

The first game felt more like a fantasy game to me.

The second game, however, is a better RPG, and its story is vastly superior. The characters, as mentioned above, are much stronger in the sequel as well.
 
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