Dragon Age

[Darkside]

its kinda funny when you get to the point where you meet people and after that you sneak behind them and pickpocket add a grenade to their inventory then watch them go apeshit and try to run away from a grenade in their inventory. sandman kills are kinda weird though, that is probably the game I had the most fun in being evil in. mass effect basic, same, gameplay. KOTOR 1&2 its fun but I like being a dick in fallout more.


well I have a character with every race and class except for the dwarven ones. I have a city elf rogue, and a dalish elf rogue (the difference is that one is an archer and one is a evil guy with good sneaking).

I have two mages one is a lvl 25 that basically cannot die, and I have beaten the game with, and the other I just started out with that is like a lvl 5 or so

and I have one warrior that is a lvl 20 who I beat the game with that used two-blades, and he dealt a crap load of damage. 

[GENO]

Speaking of archers, I haven't really found the archery in the game that useful. Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way, but I just don't see why anyone would want to use it. If you've got a light-weight character, like Leliana for example, it seems much more useful to build her as a standard rogue. (Especially if she has a duelist specialization.) If you want a character that can use long range attacks, just pick up one of your mages. I mean, mana regenerates after every encounter. Arrows don't. Why would you waste your time/money buying arrows?

Of course, the game also gives you the option to give each character two weapon sets, so you can have a rogue character carrying double daggers but ALSO a bow. I've never seen how doing that is practical, though. For one, I don't want to take up inventory slots that could be used for carrying loot for some spare equipment I'm only going to use sometimes. Plus, for your AI-controlled teammates, they don't switch to their alternative weapon sets on their own. To make them switch weapon sets, you have to go into their combat tactics and set a tactic for "If X is true, switch to alt weapon". But then, if you want to use any special abilities for that weapon, you have to set those, too, UNDER the weapon switch command. Putting a weapon-switch tactic is a terrible waste of tactics slots, it seems to me. The character gets the ability to switch out weapons, but they can't really use their abilities to their best potential. But maybe there is a better way to do it I haven't discovered yet. Even if so, I have a hard time imagining that it will change my mind about its usefulness.

So I've got this far in the game easily enough without ever using a single bow or alternate weapon set. It's nice that they put that in there, but I haven't really seen the point. 

[Darkside]

yeah I agree with the alternate weapon points you made, they didn't really make it easy to do, or important either. The only time I have found it useful is if there are two different types of monsters in a place and you have two good weapons with different buffs on the weapons. even then I don't switch from range to close, it just two different main weapons.

though I completely disagree with you on archers, they are really nice damage dealers, and can hit multiple enemies easier than mages can. they also have alot of useful stunning and diversionary moves. when I had leilani as my archer she dealt the most damage in my team (you know in the loading screens how it shows how much damage you deal). if you put the right stats into dex, and two others I can't think of them at this moment they can do more than a warrior with two handed weapons. also if an enemy gets close to you make sure you have dirty fighting I think it is, then run away a bit and then keep firing, and if you have rapid shot you fire ten times faster. It also works really well with the bard class or the ranger class, because it doesn't really require all that much stamina.

I don't much like to over brute force enemies with three warrior types and then a mage plus it kinda overcrowds in some fights. an archer is a good way to deal a crap load of damage and still be able to control the healing of your warriors. I would recommend making sure your warriors have something that can pull enemies back on to them if the archers do to much damage. really its basic WoW tactics.

[GENO]

I usually keep a second fighter (usually sten), a mage (usually Morrigan), and leliana in my party. The other fighter, I will set to run off and fight freely. I usually keep Morrigan as my mage, who I've given a lot of skill in Entropy magic. She keeps her distance and significantly weakens all the foes on the field using Entropy spells, but she will also heal allies when their HP drops below 25%. She can mind blast or frost blast enemies that get too close, and she also has an entropy spell that lets her draw extra HP from every fallen enemy on the battlefield. She rocks the death magic pretty hardcore.

I realized early on that Leliana is supposed to be played as an archer, given that she starts off with mostly archer skills. But I dunno, I just didn't want to play her that way. Instead, she's a double-dagger duelist (fun to say). I thought, since she's my girlfriend, it might be fun to try and create some tactics that always teamed us up on the battlefield. I could have had her support me by standing at a distance and shooting at whatever dudes were ganging up on me, but there was something more appealing about having her right there next to me, the two of us slaying darkspawn back-to-back.

So I've got her set to attack any enemy that is attacking me, followed by any enemy I'm targeting. BUT if any enemies attack her in the process, she will use dirty fighting, another stun move whose name I'm forgetting at the moment, and then she evades. So what ends up happening is that I'll run into a swarm of darkspawn, swinging like an ogre, taking all the hits, just like a tank, but Leliana dances around me, backstabbing, stunning, distracting, picking off the weaker ones, etc. At first I was worried that throwing her right in with the tank would be dangerous (since the enemy AI is programmed to prioritize tanks), but she actually falls less than anyone else in my party (can't remember the lest time she went down, actually) and has delivered the deathblow on some of the toughest enemies. So it works, plus it has the additional bonus of giving the "me and my bitch watch each other's back" sorta feel.

Maybe Leliana is just a bad ass in general?

[ak88]

*Warning, Lots of misspelling!*

I'm still in my first playthrough with my female elf mage. Storywise, I started evil but I couldn't stay that way. I've shifted back and forth between good and evil for a while, but I think I'm slowly edging towards the good side.

(SPOILERS REST OF POST)

I killed Wynne and annulled the circle. I felt bad afterward because I would have rather pissed off the templars instead. But Cullen did have a crush on my character, so I'm kind of glad he survived. When I got to Redcliffe, I was happy to see Jowen again because his knowledge of blood magic always interested me. I had him kill Connor's mother since I wanted to learn blood magic myself and I couldn't go ask the circle for help since I had already slaughtered them. When the Arl was cured of his poison, I asked him to spare Jowen, but he refused to free him. Instead, he handed him over to the circle which didn't make sense because the circle no longer existed. Ultimately, I'd like to have Jowen find that girl that he loves, but I don't know if I'll be seeing him again.  Right now, I've sided with the King's son in Orzimarr because he wanted to change stuff, so hopefully he'll be more successful than Obama has so far. I just got Ograhmer in my party and we're looking for his wife.

As for the whole relationship thing, I'm choosing between Leliana and Alistair. I don't really care much for Zevron. Leliana is already a dual weilding/archer hybrid that picks locks, so Zev feels useless to me and I don't find him that interesting so far. Being male in real life, a part of me wants my character to get with Leliana but I like Alistair's personality much more, so I think my character will end up with him. It's kind of weird that he's a virgin though.

As for my party, it is usually Alistair/Leliana/Morrigan or Alistair/Leliana/Dog. Sometimes I'll use Sten also, but not as much. Dog (I named him "Dog") is a freaking beast when it comes to tanking. He has some equipment on him that gives him 30% physical resistance so he usually outlives the rest of my characters whenever things are going bad. My main character is pretty much a jack of all trades other than tanking. She contributes about 65% of my party's damage even though I initially wanted her to be more of a supporting character. My party also relies on her for healing and debilitating the enemy. Overtime, Morrigan has blossomed into a great addition. She takes some of the burden off my main character by healing others and freezing the enemies. Leliana isn't bad, but her primary use for me is to pick locks. I haven't made her that great at combat yet, but occasionally she does get a few vital kills in. I had Alistair take the default sword and shield route and he was pretty useless at first. But now, I'm getting better at being a support mage rather than a damager, so I'm starting to depend on him more and more.

[Darkside]

I liked dog too, but never really wanted to use him very much, prolly because as either a male or a female you can't really change social reaction with him.

my favorite party was wynne, alistar, and leilani. alistar and my guy would tank and wynne would heal and protect while leilani would deal sick damage while my two tanks made sure they pulled all the enemies. no one even touched my back row the entire time (except a couple bosses).

[ak88]

Are you guys still playing this game? I'm still about 60 hours in on my first playthrough. I have all of the allies except the one's from the Brec_something woods.

Did any of you manage to beat the high dragon or flemeth? I keep getting destroyed on those two.

[GENO]

Are you guys still playing this game? I'm still about 60 hours in on my first playthrough. I have all of the allies except the one's from the Brec_something woods.

Did any of you manage to beat the high dragon or flemeth? I keep getting destroyed on those two.

I beat it a few weeks ago and just sold it back when I picked up FFXIII. I facepalmed when I got to the end of the game and realized I hadn't gone back to defeat the high dragon, since I totally wanted to do that, but I completely forgot about it and I didn't  have a recent enough save, so I begrudgingly let it go.

I was able to defeat Flemmeth on my first try, though. But I think the reason is that for a long time I forgot I had the grimmoire for Morrigan, so I didn't really get around to the quest until toward the very end, when all my characters were high level and tricked out with sick armor.

I defeated her with my usual team: Me (tank), Sten (tank), Liliana (rogue, i.e. backstabber), but since I didn't have Morrigan this time, I took Wynne with me. I also set everyone's highest tactic to heal (I had a lot of poultices) and set them to heal when their health dropped below 50%. Even with that tactic in play, and even with Wynne healing, I still had to manually throw out a few poultices myself (for me and the others). At the end of the fight, Sten was the only person left standing, and he dealt the finishing blow with about two ounces of health left in him. 

Flemmeth doesn't f*** around. Well, sexually she does (apparently), but you know what I mean. 

*edit*

I also was going to say that I had the exact same feelings about Zevvy. I got him in order to have him, and I maxed out his approval just to do it, but he wasn't really that interesting a character in the sense that he felt sort of tacked onto the story rather than a real participant in it. I mean, I guess that makes sense, since in several ways that's EXACTLY what he was, and was intended to be. But at the same time, I just didn't feel much connection with him, and I never used him, because all of his skills were already covered by my redheaded girlfriend. So why bother? He did have a few perks over her, such as being better at trap-setting and whatnot, but I never used that shit anyway.