I got a little bored today and decided to roll a mage to try it out. Getting through the prologue is a bit of a slog. Would be nice to be able to skip some of that. They did do one cool thing though. My saves are completely separate on the second character. That's a pretty nice QoL touch that many RPG's get wrong. I was trying to keep my saves number down on my first toon but they are still getting up there.
The game in general seems to suffer somewhat from pacing issues at times. After 45 hours my first guy is only level 14 and has not even unlocked his special. I know I could have done it at 10 but I forgot about it after the first cue. Then I had to open the area I need and I was tooling around there trying to find the quest items. They are not marked.
In another note one of party decided I was a richard, told me off and left the stronghold. Not one I was using fortunately but that was a bit surprising. Oo
In another note one of party decided I was a richard, told me off and left the stronghold. Not one I was using fortunately but that was a bit surprising. Oo
I was wondering if you could lose a party member beyond selecting one of the "This will make [Character] leave the Inquisition" options.
In DA:O you could theoretically end the game with just you*. That didn't seem to be the case here.
*I think that's right.
Morrigan - Tell her you don't want her in group or refuse her pre-Archdemon offer Leliana - Don't invite or desecrate Ashes Wynne - Don't invite, desecrate Ashes or side against her in Tower Zevran - Kill upon meeting or have him turn against you Oghren - Don't invite Sten - Don't invite Alister - Make Loghain a Grey Warden Loghain - Sacrifice to kill Archdemon Shale - Don't activate/invite Dog - Don't start human, don't get herbs to cure sick dog
Anyway, I realized today that I had never activated any of my pre-order or Deluxe Edition goodies
I'm saving up my Dragon parts until I get some Tier 3 patterns. I'm not even sure where to look; I thought they would be unlocked with the Forces perks, but apparently not.
You can get them from Emprise du Lion and The Hissing Wastes. I haven't been to the Wastes yet, so I can't say what you get there specifically, but I found some good ones for my mage in Lion.
Jophiel wrote:
Anyway, I realized today that I had never activated any of my pre-order or Deluxe Edition goodies
I used the red lyrium staff for quite awhile. The same with the Dragon armor. The armored horse makes an annoying noise when running, but can take a ton of damage, might even be invulnerable. I switched out to the red hart mount and get dismounted from a single hit, something that never happened, even when riding over enemies, with the armored horse.
I went on a dragon killing spree. They're all dead now. If you go after the one in the Hissing Wastes, use your mount. That place is huge and empty. It takes forever to get anywhere out there.
Most amusing ambient talk so far:
Dorian: Sera, where you do get all of your arrows? You have hundreds. Sera: From your a*s. Dorian: My a*s should open up a shop, apparently it's quite prolific.
Also holy **** I love "To The Death". Turin was right, thanks for the tip. ^ up for you. Just hit a 3879 Shield bash on a temple boss. I was never seeing numbers from my personal toon like that before. I have a ring to enhance bashing and I lurv me some bashing but good god that number is like 3000 higher than I was seeing before I took the "To the death" skill point.
I realize that Morrigan and Leliana weren't BFF's but I find it peculiar that neither one has a breath to spare for the other, even if only to sh*t-talk them while conversing with me.
I realize that Morrigan and Leliana weren't BFF's but I find it peculiar that neither one has a breath to spare for the other, even if only to sh*t-talk them while conversing with me.
Imagine the romance scene between them. Angry scissors!
A few extended thoughts after 40ish hours of gameplay:
1. Holy ****, there's so much content. I've cleared the majority of the available zones entirely, killed a handful of High Dragons, even explored a few puzzle dungeons, and I still haven't stepped foot into at least three full zones. It's nice that the developers went through the trouble of creating these massive zones with plenty of area to explore and quests to complete, but a lot of the content feels at best loosely connected to the main quest of stopping the Big Bad. Plus, most of the quest rewards and world loot get sold immediately (I have about 30k gold saved up and nothing to spend it on), and given the strength of crafted equipment, the only time I find new gear other than the odd dragon drop is when I buy a new pattern. Without knowing how much main plot is left to uncover, I feel like all I'm doing at this point is building levels to flesh out my skill tree. This isn't to say that I'm not enjoying the game, but it feels a bit bloated and meandering.
2. The obvious solution to the above is to just plow ahead with the main story and ignore the unexplored areas. However, this would mean leaving several existing quests incomplete, including companion quests and the relic shard collection. Plus, I want to kill all the High Dragons, not only because they drop the best crafting materials, but also because killing huge dragons is boss as hell. All of the "main story" activities from the War Table have had recommended levels, which gives you some idea of when you're ready to progress. After the Senior Prom, this isn't the case (or at least not at the point I'm at), so I feel like I need the levels to ensure I'm up to snuff. Case in point: one of the dragons in Emprise du Lion is level 21, so I feel like I should be at least the same level before progressing.
3. More on crafting: the wide availability of metals throughout the game world, and to a lesser extent cloth dropping from enemies, makes it relatively easy to craft heavy and light armors with the stats I want. Plus, you can gather these while you complete quests without going too far out of your way. But obtaining leather is a frustrating process. Most of the wild animals that drop higher tier leather are only in specific areas within each zone, and you have to run the bastards down to kill and loot them, so it turns into straight MMO-style farming. This would be nearly as bad if they dropped leathers in higher quantities, but as it stands, I constantly find myself using some crappy Tier 1 leather to fill a crafting slot instead of going out and farming up the better materials. Good thing I only use one rogue in my typical party set-up.
4. The more I get used to the lack of healing spells (outside of Vivienne's focus power and the odd class ability), the more I'm really starting to like the barrier/guard system. Sure, it forces you to have one of Cassandra or Blackwall and at least one mage in your party (provided your Herald isn't a tank or mage), but "forced" party composition isn't really a departure from the two previous titles. And the finite nature of healing potions makes each one important: do you keep your ranged damage topped off, or just move them farther away and save the potions for your tank? Plus, it places more emphasis on planning ahead with how you assign your non-healing potions to various characters, and gives you ample incentive to stop and pick flowers.
5. I love the ability to set tactics for your party, especially the ability to disengage spells from the AI rotation. I also love that they completely scrapped the cross-class combo system from DA2. However, I do wish that the AI was a bit more clever about conditionally waiting to use certain abilities until they have the most optimal effect, i.e. when their target is incapacitated, frozen, etc. If I wanted to maximize the effectiveness of every spell, I suppose I could disengage auto-cast on just about everything, but that would mean breaking the flow of combat and stopping every few second to issue orders. I suppose it doesn't matter on Normal difficulty, but I can see it being critical to success on the higher levels.
6. The hair selections for female elves (and probably all female characters, but I've only made an elf) are awful. There's exactly two hair styles that go past the ears, but about fifteen that are some variation of a buzz-cut. I know that the game is trying to be very progressive with all the gay sex and GLBT NPCs, but that doesn't excuse the dearth of non-butch hairstyles. I imagine some enterprising person, and maybe BioWare themselves, will release additional hair options at some point. In a similar vein, the "North American" female elf voice is hilariously androgynous.
7. I achieved maximum romance with the Ambassador, and was rewarded with a romantic snuggle. Similar to something that Joph said above, I don't feel like there's much challenge in pursuing the romances short of just massing the kissy-face options in conversation. For ***** sake, in the final romance quest, I challenged an Antivan noble to a sword duel over the hand of my true love, and the entire scene had three dialogue options and no chance for actual gameplay. Snore.
8. It's nice to see Morrigan again, but I wish she had more to say. Of course, my current playthrough is based on a DA:O character that didn't romance anybody and didn't agree to the blood magic kama sutra ritual, so I'm sure she'll be properly heartbroken when I play through again with a backstory in which the Hero of Fereldan tapped that ***.
Regarding leathers, the easiest I found was: Tier 1: Anything, really. Although this was probably the most annoying since they're mainly off blue dot fauna that runs away. I wound up just killing a bunch of goats in the Hinterlands with Varric. Snore. Also the Druffalo around Haven but those are tedious to solo. Tier 2: Outside the fort in the Western Approach has a bunch of phoenix. They leather with pretty decent combat stats; I think it's +bleed. Tier 3: Those ice-river nug thingies in Emprise du Lion on the frozen river outside the initial camp are infinite "rare" Tier 3 leather.
Emprise du Lion also has that long stretch of tunnels that are filled with dawnstone, silverite and bloodstone. Once you kill all the bad guys in them once, none respawn making it an easy jog to run collect a bunch of Tier 3 ores. I also take advantage of the "no enemies" bit to make unusual parties to hear the banter between the three mages or Varric and Sera or other combos you wouldn't usual adventure with.
Regarding leathers, the easiest I found was: Tier 1: Anything, really. Although this was probably the most annoying since they're mainly off blue dot fauna that runs away. I wound up just killing a bunch of goats in the Hinterlands with Varric. Snore. Also the Druffalo around Haven but those are tedious to solo. Tier 2: Outside the fort in the Western Approach has a bunch of phoenix. They leather with pretty decent combat stats; I think it's +bleed. Tier 3: Those ice-river nug thingies in Emprise du Lion on the frozen river outside the initial camp are infinite "rare" Tier 3 leather.
Emprise du Lion also has that long stretch of tunnels that are filled with dawnstone, silverite and bloodstone. Once you kill all the bad guys in them once, none respawn making it an easy jog to run collect a bunch of Tier 3 ores. I also take advantage of the "no enemies" bit to make unusual parties to hear the banter between the three mages or Varric and Sera or other combos you wouldn't usual adventure with.
Edited, Dec 1st 2014 12:53am by Jophiel
I also notice some shops have decent materials. I know the Dalish camp sells Phoenix scales for like 40 or 80 coin a pop.
I realize that Morrigan and Leliana weren't BFF's but I find it peculiar that neither one has a breath to spare for the other, even if only to sh*t-talk them while conversing with me.
"Dost thou know I once partied with a wench that was, like, so crazy? Whatst a religious nutcase she was, matey. Arr."
Also I suppose this means that my Warden never told Leliana "Hey, I ever tell you about the time Morrigan totally banged Alister and got knocked up and her baby was imbued with the spirit of an Old God? Good times..." during their post-Blight romance
'Cause that's the sort of thing I'd want my spymaster to tell me when I'm fighting old gods and have Morrigan shacking up in my castle.
Speaking of strange things, why is Vivianne's bedroom on the balcony overlooking the main hall? That's gotta make it hard to get dressed in the morning.
Maybe they didn't want the information spread around. Honestly, if I was at all involved in getting Morrigan knocked up with some super god fetus I wouldn't want anyone to know about it.
Speaking of strange things, why is Vivianne's bedroom on the balcony overlooking the main hall? That's gotta make it hard to get dressed in the morning.
Sera room is in the corner of the second floor of the bar with windows on all sides but the wall facing the bar. I also don't understand why solas get's the whole entry way to the library to himself.
Also in times of war and when you have a crap ton of people in a fort. Vivianne has pretty nice set up. Especially taking over a balcony which is better suited for scouts or tactition should a battle break out.
Also I wish they give a little more perspective on the size of the throne. I look like a small child as an elf sitting on those giant things.