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 thenoobbomb wrote:
Just finished my first playthrough. I'm left wondering...

Spoiler:

Was Corypheus right? Does the Maker not exist? And does Thedas need a god?

A seat needs done on to sit in it...

Exactly.

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Exactly.

I assume the Maker is off smoking some form of god drugs. Or creating another Golden City away from those Tevinter.

My insanely completionist first playthrough is at like 70 hours with me about halfway done with the Exalted Plains. Level 17.5, haven't touched the Emerald Graves, Hissing Wastes or Emprise du Lion. In mostly full tier 3 crafted gear and making a mockery of most enemies I encounter.

What Pride has Wrought is up next, but I will probably wait until I at least kill all the available dragons.

Man I hate the tactical view and the lack of tactics, but I do love building a terrifyingly powerful Inquisition.

I decided I didn't want to play 70 hours worth of this game. It's
pretty, sure. Not sure what I wanted. Maybe something more
tactical, less real time. I did enjoy the Inquisition part of the
game. I thought that alone might have carried me through the
story, but it didn't.

Maybe the next one will hook me?

 malfred wrote:
I decided I didn't want to play 70 hours worth of this game. It's
pretty, sure. Not sure what I wanted. Maybe something more
tactical, less real time. I did enjoy the Inquisition part of the
game. I thought that alone might have carried me through the
story, but it didn't.

Maybe the next one will hook me?

The Inquisition aspect and overall feel of the world is enough for me, which is great - because the gameplay f'ing blows. Five years or so on from Origins and things are worse all across the board. The gameplay is terrible in comparison; probably why I like outlevelling everything - I like challenging interesting fights and stuff; but when my mage defaults to charging into melee range unless I switch to her every couple of seconds and order her not to - or everyone in my party will stand around staring off into space while my tank is being attacked, until she starts swinging - bad. Bad console port.

Still though, gameplay, world, story - it's got two out of three.

The gameplay is more interesting when you play it on hard mode at least.

While some of the tactics are annoyingly lacking, I find it possible to rig things up a bit to suit.

Firstly, set the stamina/mana bars on everyone to either a 0% or 10% minimum.

I'm playing a magey/spirithealer/lightning/knightenchanter type. So my tactics setup usually works like:

Tank (Cassandra, sword/shield), Defend the PC. Have Bodyguard / Challenge / war cry be preferred abilities.

Range DPS (Sera, normally), follow the PC's target.

Melee DPS (Iron Bull or Blackwall, normally), follow the PC's target.

Then, making use of the 'Y' and 'L' buttons, plus the occasional use of tactical view (double clicking right mouse button means 'got to this point and hold position there'), seems to make the tactics doable. But yeah, it's not as in depth as I'd like, compared to DA1.


As far as the difficulty goes, I basically just rushed a Level 13 crestwood dragon with no preparation, with my squad being level 18 now. However, the level 15 dragon in the Exalted Plains required more planning.

I have to say that some fights are a pain in the ass only because of the bad AI.
Many times my rogue PC got killed by dragon's breath cause he thought that standing close to Blackwall while he was provoking the beast was a brilliant idea.

I'm running the stealth shenanigan build for my rogue right now. Enjoying it a lot.

It's not that I necessarily want fights to be hard, but I want them to be
fun, and ramping up the difficulty doesn't make them so.

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Just finished my first playthrough. I'm left wondering...

Spoiler:

Was Corypheus right? Does the Maker not exist? And does Thedas need a god?

Ok, the card game that Varric invites you to, with the whole party present? Worth all 100+ hours of game play.

 Psienesis wrote:
Ok, the card game that Varric invites you to, with the whole party present? Worth all 100+ hours of game play.

Yeah, I had that. It really humanizes the whole party. 10/10.

Also...

Check your quarters in Skyhold frequently. You do *not* want to go there for sexy-times and have the Quizquisition lurking in your closet.

Just sayin'.

I was wondering where he ran off to.

I found him in the stables when I first arrived at Skyhold, not seem him since.


Although... I do have this recurring bug where NPC's randomly don't decide to spawn in (Iron Bull is a common one for this).

Then they randomly appear as if they've just Warped in, star trek style from across the map.

Yeah, I had that problem with Cole. Even though the radar-map showed me that he should be right in front of me... he wasn't.

Then I went and talked with Sera, and came back, and there he was. Then again, it's Cole, so maybe that is how it's supposed to be.

 Bromsy wrote:

 malfred wrote:
I decided I didn't want to play 70 hours worth of this game. It's
pretty, sure. Not sure what I wanted. Maybe something more
tactical, less real time. I did enjoy the Inquisition part of the
game. I thought that alone might have carried me through the
story, but it didn't.

Maybe the next one will hook me?

The Inquisition aspect and overall feel of the world is enough for me, which is great - because the gameplay f'ing blows. Five years or so on from Origins and things are worse all across the board. The gameplay is terrible in comparison; probably why I like outlevelling everything - I like challenging interesting fights and stuff; but when my mage defaults to charging into melee range unless I switch to her every couple of seconds and order her not to - or everyone in my party will stand around staring off into space while my tank is being attacked, until she starts swinging - bad. Bad console port.

Still though, gameplay, world, story - it's got two out of three.

If your Mage is charging in then that is your misunderstanding of the tactical menu to be fair. You can set all of these preferences in each character's tactical options just like in Origins. I have not once had my ranged fighters do anything but stand back at range and fire at the first thing that moves, like they are meant to.

Its not 'just like origins' it is in far broader strokes. I used to do some fairly clever things with the origins tactic menu.

In saying that, I've yet to really have trouble with DAI tactics although there are some abilities I know just don't work sensibly when the ai use them. Most notably, charging bull and Line In The Sand are particularly badly used.

Oh, on that subject, is there a way to add more than 8 abilities to your ability bar?

 thedarkavenger wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Exactly.

I assume the Maker is off smoking some form of god drugs. Or creating another Golden City away from those Tevinter.

Games of Divinity, man. Games of Divinity.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 thedarkavenger wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Exactly.

I assume the Maker is off smoking some form of god drugs. Or creating another Golden City away from those Tevinter.

Games of Divinity, man. Games of Divinity.

The Tevinter are like his petulant children. "If you can't accept my rules, I'm leaving."

So yeah, just did the part where you make a choice in the Fade.



That choice is probably one of the better pieces of game immersion I've ever seen. It's been years since I last wanted to yell at the story of a game to stop doing something.

Did they ever fix the "Hold position" bug? A few weeks ago, the AI just decided to ignore any "HOLD" command and just rushed into each and every enemy in sight.

I find the hold command is a bit pants, as telling them to do anything else except hold, such as open a gate, overwrites it.

However, I've found the tactical camera, then Double click on a spot for 'hold' combined with the hold command does help.

Yeah, I'll admit that's one of the less awesome things.

Just got to Skyhold after doing everything I could in the Mire, Oasis, and Hinterlands (barring the shards in Oasis, that place fething sucks and the dragon in the Hinterlands) and that put me just a little under level 12.

Gotta say, I'm impressed at the size of the game so far, Hinterlands feels as massive as it should, the Mire was suitably creepy although I would've liked more to do there, and the Oasis was actually a nice change for a bit before I got frustrated with the stupid maze of bs you have to run through to get everything. All in all, I'm having a blast.

One question though, I'm running a 2-handed warrior with Cassandra, Cole/Sera and Solas/Vivienne; I murder most, if not all of the enemies encountered. My only problem with that setup is my Warrior feels very squishy at times, I went down the WW side of the 2h tree and used the...whatever tree has the chain-pull skill. I've considered respeccing and going down the route of the tree that has Bull Rush and it's support skill that builds up guard to offset the apparent low defense and health I currently have.

Anyone else run a 2-hander and having any issues? I suppose if anyone runs Blackwall or Iron Bull that way there might be issues, but either way, some insight would be helpful.

I did notice my 2 hander Blackwall and Ironbull can feel slightly squishy at times. However, there are things that you can do to mitigate it.

I've often found that tanky-Cassandra (on hard) only dies when a full party wipe is pretty much imminent, so I don't give her many health improving upgrades, - Her belt is usally a 'Guard belt' though.

So most of my health ones go onto Blackwall/Ironbull. I usually take a 'superb belt of healing' (+20% healing) combined with a ring of life steal (+2% heal on kill) and that seems to keep Blackwall in the fight.

Also I started both characters down the Guard path, but didn't put more than 2 or 3 points into it. - Just enough to unlock the Guard ability. Even a few segments of guard helps, as it can regenerate during the battle.

Now that Iron Bull has unlocked his 'Reaver' specialisation, he works well with a belt of health (+100 health) and I believe one of the reaver abilities can let him self heal from nearby corpses, or something.

My PC is a mage though, so I tend to look at things from the magey point of view, so my main strategy in the game for keeping people alive effectively comes down to this.

Barrier. Barrier. Barrier. BARRIER.

Knight Enchanter is stupidly broken and/or stupidly fun. I'm only playing on hard, but I just took down the level 19 dragon in the Storm Coast at level 16, with 2 health potions and everyone except my (Knight Enchanter) Inquisitor going into the fight at 30% HP. Cassandra managed to keep herself floating until about the 50% mark, after that it was a solo effort.

Spirit damage really does seem to be really freaking awesome against most enemies. I do like going Gandalf with the spirit blade

I've been playing a girl qunari 2-hander for my 2nd playthrough and I'm about half way through and I kinda feel like I'm done with her. Seems like I made all the right decisions first time, and the wrong ones this time. Everyone but sera seems to hate me. I was thinking about starting over as a dwarf stabby rogue.. are they any good?

I was also gonna try it on the hardest setting... do you always have to use the tactical view for the hard fights? I kind of like to just do my thing while the other 3 companions do their own thing too, and just throw out the occasional "attack my target" order

I've not played it on Insanity (it's a bit insane for me ), but in hard mode, I tend to be fine in most non boss/dragon fights by just having the 'automatically pause the game when doing an AOE ability' option on.

It can also help doing a tactical view in the opening moments of a fight to make sure that my barrier (Barrier, Barrier, BARRIER), covers the whole squad and that Sera manages to get her 1800pt damage shot on unwounded targets off before the stabbifying happens.

You can also build weapons, for anyone of any non-mage class, that adds points of Guard per hit. This works out well for a two-hander, as you still get the damage mitigation and such, on top of any Barriers your mage is casting, and the AOE damage that two-handers offer.