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On March 14 2011 06:51 shreepy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 14 2011 06:23 Blisse wrote:Is there any way to save the three Quanari prisoners with Petrice? The four dialogue options only kills them. Oh fuck... + Show Spoiler +If I didn't kill the guy Emeric was chasing, and helped him, would I have saved Mother? I want to redo if it'll change events, not much time lost since last save. + Show Spoiler +No you wouldn't of, I helped him and she still died.
Thank you! I was going to, but since it's pointless, I would have just wasted time. I often repeat since the dialogue options are confusing and I don't always get the result that I wanted from them.
+ Show Spoiler +Dammit I thought Liley was going to join the team...
Why do we have axes and shortbows if no one on the team can weild them.
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axes one handed can be used by Aveline and shortbows by the dlc character or if you're a rouge?
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The game is definitely better than what the demo suggested. But seriously, has anyone at Bioware even playtested nightmare mode? It's complete nonsense. Just about every single fight involving an assassin you need to use some cheese strategy or get lucky for once. My player character (2h Warrior) is absolutely sickening. When in a narrow room, anything except autoattack requires him to split from the group so as not to take half of my tank's health away or nearly kill my ranged characters.
Whoever came up with tuning Nightmare should be fired. What were they thinking? Hm guys, let's make assassins crazy good in nightmare! Let's reduce the duration of all crowd control, then make stuns not break the casting of stealth so half of the time you waste all your cooldowns because they'll still turn invisible. You can't rush them down if you don't have crushing prison and even then your timings have to be so precise, you'll most likely just get killed. I switched to hard at level 8 now, might try nightmare a bit further into the game or just see if I want to beat the game with an optimized party next time.
Though what bothers me the most BY FAR is the inability to cancel character animations. I need to cast a quick heal or a crowd control spell and my mage is busy spazzing around so the timing is completely ruined.
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On March 14 2011 08:23 chasfrank wrote: The game is definitely better than what the demo suggested. But seriously, has anyone at Bioware even playtested nightmare mode? It's complete nonsense. Just about every single fight involving an assassin you need to use some cheese strategy or get lucky for once. My player character (2h Warrior) is absolutely sickening.
Assassins are not that hard, First time I got ambushed it was also like, wtf? You only need Merril to cast "Hex of Torment" on him his damage will not 1-shot you thats for sure, you need to burst him down fast. On nightmare it's nice to have 3 ranged classes supporting you 2-H warrior. See this link for a 2-H nightmare guide http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/305/index/6396096/1
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Do not even need a guide really - just taunt it then stonewall.
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lololol I just fought a boss like spider, with a tank warrior, me as scrapper warrior, a healer mage and a rogue. Guess who had all the threat? 1st the DPS warrior, 2nd the healing mage.. I hope they patch the threat system asap, because the system is pretty horrible as it is. If you're going for a new playthrough, I'd highly advice to go for maybe two dps warriors instead of a tank, and just get some extra constitution, because tanks are completely worthless right now. It's ofcourse possible I'm missing out on some crucial talent, but as far as I can tell, warriors don't have a passive threat generation as in DA:O, and only one taunting spell.
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Uh, use your other shield abilities? Other people have threat control abilities as well lile rogues. Do not freak out because you need to use your whole party to control the fight. On nightmare especially, the difficulty is quite appealing.
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da2 was a huge letdown for me, and I LOVED DA:0
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Disclaimer - I love "oldschool" Bioware RPGs; I have only played around 10 hours of DA2.
THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
My 2c.
It's not DAO, and it is further away from the old Bioware games BG/NWN etc. That's sad for me personally.
However it is rather like the shift from ME1 to ME2 - different direction, certainly looses some things, but after you play it a while you do adjust a lot more than you would expect.
It's true the demo is a little misleading (I didn't play it all the way through I was so disappointed).
The combat is more actiony. The fact that kiting is a viable approach to combat may give you some indication as to how far we've come from Baldur's Gate. But it does have it's good points, a little more visceral and up-tempo isn't all bad. If you are a strategy-rpg nut like me, the lack of a top-down "battlefield" view, and the inclusion of things like hit combos make you a little sad. But it's not that combat is not fun to do.
There are some bugs/flaws with combat, hopefully soon to be patched. One is there seems to be (?) no hotkey to quickswitch between melee and missile weapons. This is shockingly inconvenient. Also I've noticed if I am using a bow, then pause, go inventory, swap in melee weaponry, go back to the game and unpause, my character stands there frozen, even when I give commands. I have to take a step with "W" to "wake up" Hawke. Hopefully soon fixed.
The ability icons irritated me at first - they don't look at all fantasy-ish. But now I've decided they are like dwarven runes, and they don't upset me so much.
The skill system is a bit like the Witcher's, rather console-looking, but easy to understand and use. I can't say I don't miss the era of huge spell-books and skills and feats lists, but I guess they aren't coming back. And I'm all for simplifying inventory management, which the DA2 UI makes a fair fist of.
The dialogue system is ME-ized which again has it's pros and cons. As with ME, you get a wheel of phrases to choose from, and sometimes the actual words your character says don't match what you thought you were going to say, or the tone is different from what you expected. This can be irksome. I was afraid the whole roleplaying aspect would suffer from a shift to the wheel UI but actually so far the conversations seem interesting and sufficiently complex to feel "real". Two innovations I do actually like about this system. One is the icon that goes with each phrase. As you mouse over the different conversation options the center of the wheel displays an icon reflecting the "feel" of that response, e.g. querry, aggresive, choices and so on. It's an interesting idea and while not wildly useful, is rather clever I thought. More substantially however, sometimes in conversations, on the left side of the wheel, you will have the option to either poll your NPCs for their views, or even hand over the conversation briefly to one of them, should they be more skilled or knowledgable on a particular point. This is a fantastic addition imo, really adding depth to the NPCs and enabling you to feel more of a connection with them.
The music is as good as DAO, definitely the right atmosphere.
Voice-acting is pretty good so far, again like DAO. Intra-party banter is so far amusing.
I love the art/art direction in DA2. The movies that they play during the narrations look like a sort of paper theatre (hard to explain), and I love them. They work really very well. Nicely done!
I wish there were more control options. I guess maybe it's sc2s fault but I don't want to have to use the mouse unless absolutely necessary. It would be nice to be able to operate the conversation wheel with arrow keys or similar. (Actually, I -think- I found last night that number keys work. Not sure, have to check again.)
I miss the origin story gimmick. This plot is much more of a "you are the Chosen One" approach, which I like well enough in Mass Effect, but is terribly terribly cliche in fantasy. The origin story system in DAO lent an aura of "just a normal person thrown into events on a scale beyond their comprehension, of whom extraordinary things are demanded" which is rather nicer I think.
On the topic of cliches, there is a heck of a lot of fetch'n'carry plots, at least at the start. Hate this. I thought DAO did a good job of disguising fetch'n'carries, but DA2 has a lot of "Deliver item A to B, then to C to get your reward". There are lots of problems with these "plots", but the worst is it encourages me to rush through the game. I loved the characters and story in DAO, found it very immersive, and was perfectly happy to play it slowly, enjoying all the conversations and reading the background texts. With the rash of fetch'n'carry-style miniplots in DA2 I found myself running around the city full tilt, completely ignoring the "sights and sounds", clicking through conversations as quickly as I could, so I could move on and progress the story. Bad game design, me no like.
Ultimately, I'm a sucker for a good story. DAO, ME1 and ME2 all won me over with story and character and it looks like, whatever it's limitations as a strategy game (fairly significant, I'd say), DA2 will do the same.
Will post again if any major revisions on my views.
One postscript. Seems like modding is hard for DA2, it's more like ME1/2 than DAO in that respect. This is sort of sad. As it turned out there wasn't a looooot of fan-made content for DAO compared to the huge about of stuff made for NWN/2. But it was still kind of cool. Looks like DA2 modding is likely to be much more limited. Oh well.
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On March 14 2011 10:00 Euronyme wrote: lololol I just fought a boss like spider, with a tank warrior, me as scrapper warrior, a healer mage and a rogue. Guess who had all the threat? 1st the DPS warrior, 2nd the healing mage.. I hope they patch the threat system asap, because the system is pretty horrible as it is. If you're going for a new playthrough, I'd highly advice to go for maybe two dps warriors instead of a tank, and just get some extra constitution, because tanks are completely worthless right now. It's ofcourse possible I'm missing out on some crucial talent, but as far as I can tell, warriors don't have a passive threat generation as in DA:O, and only one taunting spell. It's why i play with 2 mages none of them do real damage just control with and heal. Control really helps with mob control also prevents my mages from dieing all the time. My tank can keep threat pretty well vs a boss so i don't mind. But yeah you need to get more damage to keep threat which really is counter to the good tank abilities. I wish i could view more of my tactics at once have to write it down on paper to get a better view of what i'm doing.
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I tried switching over to a tank character earlier on (level 13ish) from a 2h monster! Worst decision ever. I had all the necessary skills,yet I couldn't hold aggro.
Anyway, it's like there is no point of being a warrior anymore unless you want to play 2h. I loved dual-wield warrior in DA:O, it's so sad that they removed it.
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lol I have been mentioning this whole timehow to make snb war work, on nightmare even. It great. It is just not ezmod like some other specs. Good positioning and lots of micro is key.
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Vatican City State1650 Posts
I just love how I can make Hawke so cute:
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/yZN6H.jpg)
Far cry from the real butch default.
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Anyways play female why would i want to look at a guy for 40 hours of my life.
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On March 14 2011 15:36 semantics wrote: Anyways play female why would i want to look at a guy for 40 hours of my life. Haha, I usually choose based upon which gender has the better voice actor. In Dragon Age II, no question it was the woman.
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i just got dragon age 2 for the first time(first dragon age 2), is there and easy class/fun to play
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fml i just lost isabella.
my save doesn't go far back enough. new rule, MAKE NEW SAVE EVERY TIME YOU SAVE.
+ Show Spoiler +talking to merrill, wtf happened after i beat the crazy arashok and became champion?
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Yea I'm about halfway through the game using a 2hand war as a tank ( also my main char ) on nightmare as its much much more fun. I have a feeling that you could just go 3 2hand wars and completely break the game as well because when I did Fenris' little side quest it was a complete roflstomp, I maybe had to pause combat 1 or 2 times. Like my 2hand war actually tanks pretty decently, seems like there is almost no benefit at all to wearing a shield for defense, and he stuns all the shit around him and knocks it all back so much that he barely gets hit except against a boss. Boss damage though isn't that bad either as you can actually side step most of their attacks and cause them to completely miss. I definitely highly recommend 2hand tanking and getting all of the dps talents first, don't touch the threat talents until after you fill out the 2hander tree.
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+ Show Spoiler +On March 14 2011 15:52 Synk wrote: Yea I'm about halfway through the game using a 2hand war as a tank ( also my main char ) on nightmare as its much much more fun. I have a feeling that you could just go 3 2hand wars and completely break the game as well because when I did Fenris' little side quest it was a complete roflstomp, I maybe had to pause combat 1 or 2 times. Like my 2hand war actually tanks pretty decently, seems like there is almost no benefit at all to wearing a shield for defense, and he stuns all the shit around him and knocks it all back so much that he barely gets hit except against a boss. Boss damage though isn't that bad either as you can actually side step most of their attacks and cause them to completely miss. I definitely highly recommend 2hand tanking and getting all of the dps talents first, don't touch the threat talents until after you fill out the 2hander tree. k thx
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I beat the game once with an elemental mage, now i'm playing with a dual weapon rogue. It's not as fun as DA:O, but i can see myself wasting about a 100 hours more on it
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