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....the health system says no. With no healing magic or recovery, I keep having to stop the interesting exploration to jog back to camp before every significant fight, and right now, I think I've got myself into an unwinnable situation. I've made it to the boss fight in the Templar castle, but I'm out of potions, there's no way to get any (used the cache in the hall), and 3/4's of the party are on just-revived health. So I go in, everyone flops over before I can do anything serious to the boss.

What should I be doing differently? Am I missing something super obvious? Because right now it looks like because I didn't perfectly predict the encounters and how much health I'd lose in each, I need to to lose over an hour of progress and desperately conserve potions.

At what game difficulty are you playing? With Barrier, Revival and upgraded regeneration potions, two sword and board fighters, I didn't have any problems with resources on normal difficulty.

 Elemental wrote:
....the health system says no. With no healing magic or recovery, I keep having to stop the interesting exploration to jog back to camp before every significant fight, and right now, I think I've got myself into an unwinnable situation. I've made it to the boss fight in the Templar castle, but I'm out of potions, there's no way to get any (used the cache in the hall), and 3/4's of the party are on just-revived health. So I go in, everyone flops over before I can do anything serious to the boss.

What should I be doing differently? Am I missing something super obvious? Because right now it looks like because I didn't perfectly predict the encounters and how much health I'd lose in each, I need to to lose over an hour of progress and desperately conserve potions.

Camps replenish potions.

Nature magic and barriers make healing and shields easy.

Knight Enchanter is easy mode.

The way I like to explain Dragon Age Inquisitions health system is, instead of your typical RPG, think of the health system more like a FPS, like the Halo games (or indeed, Mass Effect).

In these sort of games, your health bar isn't your primary defence, it's your backup, it's your 'keep me alive long enough so I don't die' thing.

Your main means of defence is something else, usually some sort of energy shield.

Dragon Age Inquisition works the same way. Except instead of an energy shield, you instead have 'Barriers' for Mages, and 'Guard' for Warriors. Rogues... Err... try to avoid being hit...


There are abilities and upgrades that increase your Guard / barriers as the game goes on. - Some may even let your mage / rogue gain Guard - These are really very rare and very awesome.

The things you want to look out for are weapons that let you 'Gain Guard on Hit' - In other words, each hit your guy performs, increase your guard (energy shield).


It's a bit of a new way of thinking that could have really been better described during the tutorials.

So, in summary, get as many people under barriers as much as you can, as often as you can.

 Compel wrote:
The way I like to explain Dragon Age Inquisitions health system is, instead of your typical RPG, think of the health system more like a FPS, like the Halo games (or indeed, Mass Effect).

In these sort of games, your health bar isn't your primary defence, it's your backup, it's your 'keep me alive long enough so I don't die' thing.

Your main means of defence is something else, usually some sort of energy shield.

Dragon Age Inquisition works the same way. Except instead of an energy shield, you instead have 'Barriers' for Mages, and 'Guard' for Warriors. Rogues... Err... try to avoid being hit...


There are abilities and upgrades that increase your Guard / barriers as the game goes on. - Some may even let your mage / rogue gain Guard - These are really very rare and very awesome.

The things you want to look out for are weapons that let you 'Gain Guard on Hit' - In other words, each hit your guy performs, increase your guard (energy shield).


It's a bit of a new way of thinking that could have really been better described during the tutorials.

So, in summary, get as many people under barriers as much as you can, as often as you can.

Rogues have stealth.

Dual Wield Rogues have stealth recycling.

Archer rogues have insane DPS. If something survives you and your party long enough to get to you, then you dun goofed.

 Compel wrote:
The way I like to explain Dragon Age Inquisitions health system is, instead of your typical RPG, think of the health system more like a FPS, like the Halo games (or indeed, Mass Effect).

In these sort of games, your health bar isn't your primary defence, it's your backup, it's your 'keep me alive long enough so I don't die' thing.

Your main means of defence is something else, usually some sort of energy shield.

Thanks for the advice. Having healing or passive recovery on hand at all times was the cornerstone of DA1 and DA2 combat, so I wasn't really prepared for how incredibly stingy DA3 would be with health recovery. Tactical mode feeling much clunkier doesn't help with managing combat or fighting as a team either. Looks like I need to just restart the mission, upgrade my stuff, pick different talents and spells and just devote some time to unlearning.

Also, it's more funny than gamebreaking, but does the game feel rather glitchy to anyone else? I've had characters sink into the ground, had a dialogue scene where Varric was pushing me away from the person I was talking to, and completely freaked out the pathfinding in a partially blocked passage. It was quite funny to watch the AI characters trying to dogpile into an un-crossable gap on one side of a boulder, while ignoring the huge gap on the other side.

The game is overall amazingly buggy. Just to name other few, during Solas personal quest the cut scene didn't start and I had to re-load, another was during the Mage's temporal nonsense quest, where, if you fade step off the platform, you're thrown in a loop between falling and re spawning at the point where you start to fall.

The game's always been ridden with bugs. Bioware promised to fix the bugs, then released a patch that fixed a few and then stopped reacting to bugs altogether.