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Dragon Age II |OT| The Revenge of Shit Mountain

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Moonstone said:
Difficulty in RPGs - that will never work out for all. It totally depends on your group set up.
I had no problems on hard so far, the dragon in the deep roads was annoying and 2 or 3 times I died because of an enemy mage I didn't spot fast enough. rule of thumb: Geek the mage first.

Most fights on hard are way to easy for my current group - I mostyl don't use AI Tactics, potions or crowd control spells. Just Haste and 2 rogues.

Who gets haste? I haven't seen that one yet...
 

Gvaz

Banned
Creation tree is so lame. If your main is a mage do entropy, spirit healing, and only go into force for the interrupt prevention. Spirit is a tossup, and primal or elemental are okay.

That's the best spec for bosses anyways, and allows for the best utility.

Works for me on hard on bosses, and your hp regen with spirit healer is so fast, as long as he runs away for like 2 seconds, suddenly all his hp is back. However, it feels rather useless because you should be paying enough attention to keep mobs from ganging you anyways, but it helps for that one or two times a fight.

Haste and heroic aura aren't necessary until end game bosses anyways, and even then not really necessary either. Maybe on Nightmare? Idk. Since I fucked up and missed out on the SUPER SECRET boss because I didn't destroy all the books (there's 5, and taking or reading any of them keeps you from the quest) the only major boss left I have is the High Dragon in the next act, or maybe some little ones before then and the final boss.

This is too easy :\

edit: Actually I guess what I'm saying is creation is terrible on anything but nightmare.
 

gdt

Member
Haunted said:
I didn't even know you couldn't choose/equip/manage your companion's armour anymore.

That's just fucking sad.

Thank god. I hate fiddling with that shit. Straight upgrades ftw.
 

Hixx

Member
Mid to late Act 2 spoilers --
The fight with those cultist followers & Ser Varnell was such a pain. Felt like it went on forever. I actually shouted at the game when the last of the million waves or so spawned.
Don't mind the combat but the encounter design is fucking horrendous, amateur even.

Story is kicking on late on in Act 2; there seems to be a lot going on finally. Shame someone spoiled a big part in this thread - is it too difficult to spoiler a whole sentence rather than one word of which the preceding sentence made incredibly obvious? Honestly.
 

Songbird

Prodigal Son
Zefah said:
This game is still terrible on Nvidia cards? How the hell did they screw that up? I'm running a Radeon 5870 and the game runs great for the most part (not quite as well as the original, though), but is anyone with an Nvidia card *not* experiencing problems? It's crazy that they could have let such a universal issue slip through testing.

Does the latest beta patch help at all? It got rid of that annoying asking for discs in nonexistent drives issue at least.
I think it's because AMD endorse the game and wrote DX11 code for it, it really sucks. The tesselation fails and creates black polygons instead of ground texture too.
 

Salaadin

Member
HixxSAFC said:
Mid to late Act 2 spoilers --
The fight with those cultist followers & Ser Varnell was such a pain. Felt like it went on forever. I actually shouted at the game when the last of the million waves or so spawned.
Don't mind the combat but the encounter design is fucking horrendous, amateur even.

Story is kicking on late on in Act 2; there seems to be a lot going on finally. Shame someone spoiled a big part in this thread - is it too difficult to spoiler a whole sentence rather than one word of which the preceding sentence made incredibly obvious? Honestly.

I hated that so much. The fight starts with you against like 20 enemies and then they keep spawning. I ended up memorizing their spawn areas and cast Glyphs right on one of the the points. Theyd appear and bam, instantly paralyzed.

It wouldnt have been too bad if they were mostly melee but I think at one point, 4 archers spawn near the entrance which was where my mage was. I didnt like that one bit.
 

Darkkn

Member
Didn't manage to beat the end of act 2 the way i wanted, but fortunately there was an alternative way to do it(that was kinda hard as well).

Annoying thing about storytelling in this game is the fact that in act 1 and 2, there is so many quests active at one time that i can't remember what is going on in which quest. Game would benefit on pacing content better and focusing on delivering a fewer story threads at one time.
 

Pollux

Member
Out of curiosity
is there any way to save Hawke's mother, or is she going to die no matter what you do?
 

Durante

Member
Zefah said:
This game is still terrible on Nvidia cards? How the hell did they screw that up? I'm running a Radeon 5870 and the game runs great for the most part (not quite as well as the original, though), but is anyone with an Nvidia card *not* experiencing problems? It's crazy that they could have let such a universal issue slip through testing.
Basically, their DirectX11 features are optimized for AMD cards at the expense of NV. Particularly the SSAO algorithm. But their renderer is pretty suspect in general (blocking occlusion queries etc.). It runs worse than it should even on AMD cards.

I get ~25 FPS at 1920x1200, everything maxed, 4xAA w/ transparency AA. That's not a lot of FPS, but since I'm playing on Nightmare and mostly look at static (paused) scenes I prefer the eye-candy to having a smoother framerate.

There are 2 things that seem to help quite a bit with NV performance: get the latest beta driver and set "frames to render ahead" to a large value for this game (5+). The latter would suck in twitch reaction based games but it doesn't really matter for DA2.
 

Hixx

Member
Darkkn said:
Didn't manage to beat the end of act 2 the way i wanted, but fortunately there was an alternative way to do it(that was kinda hard as well).

Annoying thing about storytelling in this game is the fact that in act 1 and 2, there is so many quests active at one time that i can't remember what is going on in which quest. Game would benefit on pacing content better and focusing on delivering a fewer story threads at one time.

That's why I try to do 1 quest line at a time - sometimes I would flat out ignore a quest turn in if I was doing another one in Act 1. I got burned a few times in DAO when I would pick something up and be thinking 'what the hell was that for?' so I changed tact for DA2. Act 1 got a bit crazy but in Act 2 keeping on top of things was much more manageable imo.
 

Songbird

Prodigal Son
Durante said:
and set "frames to render ahead" to a large value for this game (5+). The latter would suck in twitch reaction based games but it doesn't really matter for DA2.
Could you please tell me more about this setting? Like is it in the nVidia control panel?
 
Gvaz said:
Works for me on hard on bosses, and your hp regen with spirit healer is so fast, as long as he runs away for like 2 seconds, suddenly all his hp is back. However, it feels rather useless because you should be paying enough attention to keep mobs from ganging you anyways, but it helps for that one or two times a fight.

I think this is a glitch when the game thinks you're no longer in combat and auto refills your health. Healing Aura doesn't auto refill your health like that.

It's happened to me once when battling one last assassin. He stealthed and vanished to go backstab one of my characters, and another one of my characters who was dead popped back up and all my crew started regaining health. He then landed the backstab and the fight was on again. It was kind of random.
 

Gvaz

Banned
Sir Garbageman said:
I think this is a glitch when the game thinks you're no longer in combat and auto refills your health. Healing Aura doesn't auto refill your health like that.

It's happened to me once when battling one last assassin. He stealthed and vanished to go backstab one of my characters, and another one of my characters who was dead popped back up and all my crew started regaining health. He then landed the backstab and the fight was on again. It was kind of random.

No spirit healer has +100 HP regen as a talent. If it makes any difference, my Con is like at 10 or something.

I have had that bug you're speaking of, because an enemy would take a few seconds too long to spawn or would do so out of line of sight, but this happens when I take damage and run away, the healer's hp comes back, at least in chunks.
 

hermit7

Member
zmoney said:
Out of curiosity
is there any way to save Hawke's mother, or is she going to die no matter what you do?

On a similar note
Is it possible to save Bethany? If you don't take her into the Deep Roads perhaps
 

Zeliard

Member
Lostconfused said:
Hahaha wow I certainly didn't expect the High Dragon fight to be that incredibly boring but there it is. Dull as dull can be.

All the dragon fights suck. Just whittling down huge health bars. The dragons don't do anything interesting in combat. You might as well be whacking away at a mountain.
 
hermit7 said:
On a similar note
Is it possible to save Bethany? If you don't take her into the Deep Roads perhaps
If you don't take her into the deep roads, she gets captured and joins the Circle. If you bring Anders with you to the deep roads, she can become a Grey Warden.
 
So far game has been like doing side missions after another, Main plot has been meaningless and bland.

What part of the game story am i? Tells something about main plot when theres no way to tell how far you are in the game.
I dont know if i wish the game story to end or start at this point.
I just helped Isabela
to get new ship and main plot just after becoming champion
 

REV 09

Member
Zeliard said:
All the dragon fights suck. Just whittling down huge health bars. The dragons don't do anything interesting in combat. You might as well be whacking away at a mountain.
was the same in Origins.
 

Zeliard

Member
Durante said:
I agree with most of your points, but I consider this one particularly important. A different camera perspective or a larger zoom limit or even a freely movable camera are such simple additions, and that they refused to implement them speaks of their complete disregard for PC players and people that like to do strategic placement.

It was telling enough when their reasoning for the removal of the overhead iso view was this:

"For budgetary reasons, we focused our work on a 3rd person view, that asks for very detailed and nice textures so that the player can admire the game with a close-up view," Laidlaw said. "With an aerial view we should cover much more ground and so [must] create other textures. Now, the game mainly sold on console, so we're going the way of the audience."

I remember so many cries of "why don't you wait for the game to come out" when people were bringing up statements like this as concern about DA2's direction, as if somehow the words coming out of the lead designer prior to release aren't significant. Lots of heads buried in sand during that time.

REV 09 said:
was the same in Origins.

Yeah but if nothing else I would have expected to see some improvement in at least that area. The series is called Dragon Age, after all. Should probably try and make your dragon fights more interesting. :p
 

Gvaz

Banned
I don't know what you expect from the boss fight.

I rather enjoy the boss fights because it feels tactical more than the rest of the game, even though they're all just tank and spanks.
 
Gvaz said:
I don't know what you expect from the boss fight.

I rather enjoy the boss fights because it feels tactical more than the rest of the game, even though they're all just tank and spanks.
Most boss fights can be simplified to the following flowchart

Use potion if health is low -> use a healing spell if potion on cool down

And then you just wait until the boss dies.
 

Grisby

Member
I'm pretty sure I' close to the final fight. I really enjoy Meredith as a character. A really fine voice actress and I think she has one of the best character designs as well.

However, I have a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth regrading the bugs I've had. The last part of the romance stuff won't trigger with Merriell because of the bug at the beginning of Act 3. A shame, because I really enjoyed her last quest and would have loved for it to play out normally.

Two other small side quests also fail to trigger or register. I think Bioware fit a lot of story content in the time they put themselves under but damn if they didn't mess up some important stuff.
 
Grisby said:
However, I have a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth regrading the bugs I've had. The last part of the romance stuff won't trigger with Merriell because of the bug at the beginning of Act 3. A shame, because I really enjoyed her last quest and would have loved for it to play out normally.

You saw one scene out of order, it doesn't break the romance, or at least it didn't for me. The final scene is right before the end.
 

MechaX

Member
I have a question to ask about Merrill's Act 3 quest. And no, I'm not in a romantic relationship with her.
Okay, so it ends really badly and ends up with the deaths of the entire Dalish clan. But Merrill just... doesn't even react to this. I go back to her house, and she's still as cheery as ever.
Is this... supposed to happen or is there an actual resolution to this?
 
MechaX said:
I have a question to ask about Merrill's Act 3 quest. And no, I'm not in a romantic relationship with her.
Okay, so it ends really badly and ends up with the deaths of the entire Dalish clan. But Merrill just... doesn't even react to this. I go back to her house, and she's still as cheery as ever.
Is this... supposed to happen or is there an actual resolution to this?

There is a scene, but it's bugged. A lot of people (including me) are seeing it at the start of the act.
 

subversus

I've done nothing with my life except eat and fap
Zeliard said:
"For budgetary reasons, we focused our work on a 3rd person view, that asks for very detailed and nice textures so that the player can admire the game with a close-up view," Laidlaw said. "With an aerial view we should cover much more ground and so [must] create other textures. Now, the game mainly sold on console, so we're going the way of the audience."


LOL!!

Because they have shittiest textures in business unless you play with hig-res textures pack on PC.
 

EekTheKat

Member
Having a voiced main character with some good lines made the game far more enjoyable than Origins to me, which I sort of lost interest in 2/3rds of the way in.

It just wouldn't be the same not hearing Hawke's interactions with various characters.
 

jackdoe

Member
subversus said:
LOL!!

Because they have shittiest textures in business unless you play with hig-res textures pack on PC.
Even then, there are a bunch of suspect textures on characters. Especially Isabela. People may notice her breasts, but I tend to notice the crappy textures on her arms much more frequently. It looks awful.
 

megalowho

Member
Zeliard said:
"For budgetary reasons, we focused our work on a 3rd person view, that asks for very detailed and nice textures so that the player can admire the game with a close-up view," Laidlaw said. "With an aerial view we should cover much more ground and so [must] create other textures. Now, the game mainly sold on console, so we're going the way of the audience."
Amazing, considering I'm constantly thinking that the textures and geometry in DA2 would be fine with an overhead camera but are just far too angular and below standards for a modern third person game. No physics, no interaction with the environment, awkward character animation, not enough animations. I really have no problem with the camera being the way it is, but they have to actually create a game that can support close up inspection if they choose go this route.
 

subversus

I've done nothing with my life except eat and fap
jackdoe said:
Even then, there are a bunch of suspect textures on characters. Especially Isabela. People may notice her breasts, but I tend to notice the crappy textures on her arms much more frequently. It looks awful.

or magical staffs. They look horrible.

The game feels like it could have another year of development. I sort of enjoy its story and overall gameplay but it plays like a spin-off, not a successor to DA:O. I like cinematic presentation but dialogue choices are completely borked. I like graphics on DX11, there's some good technical stuff there, but the game is starved on polygons and some textures.

I like the idea of being in the city and outskirts all the game but it feels a bit claustrophobic and samey. I like flashy combat but speed and spawning enemies hurt tactics. NPCs are better than in Origins but I don't give a damn about Hawke.

And so on.

This is a first Bioware game which feels like it lacks quality.

I think that doctors are too focused on their MMO and not that interested in other projects. Or they just got tired of the stuff.

I want to see how ME3 turns out. I had no second thoughts about it but now... I don't know.
 

MechaX

Member
Ugh. Total fucking head-desk moment towards the end of the game.
Long story short, I'm trying to keep Fenris on my side even after siding with the mages. My friendship meter with him to close to max, but not quite, and him and my FemHawke were in a relationship.
Too bad I happened to miss out on a single gift in some random dungeon that would have let me max his friendship stats (and just my luck, the only save I have near that spot is corrupted!).

I call foul for putting in an actually important item in these copy-paste dungeons where you have like 9 chests filled with absolutely useless shit like "Torn Trousers". Oh yeah, can't even revisit Warehouse #4320 so good luck if you happen to miss some important item tucked in a barrel next to a broken sword chest somewhere.

Edit: Phew, ultimately, crisis averted.
Fenris decided to rejoin at the eleventh hour. So I can ditch crappy Carver for the moment.
 

FINALBOSS

Banned
FlyinJ said:
Who gets haste? I haven't seen that one yet...


Ya. Mage. It's a green icon. Anders is pretty much my healer/group buffer.

Haste + the rogue spell that increase damage on a single person + all of Anders buffs + Rogue Precision Strikes + Battle Synergy = win city.

I blow everything up.
 

FINALBOSS

Banned
If Dragon Age had every encounter/boss fight like a boss fight in a WoW Raid, the game would be godlike. The encounters in WoW are so fun--I haven't played in about 2 years, but raids I played were so great and well designed.
 

Darklord

Banned
jackdoe said:
Even then, there are a bunch of suspect textures on characters. Especially Isabela. People may notice her breasts, but I tend to notice the crappy textures on her arms much more frequently. It looks awful.

I've noticed that. And have you seen the mai characters sisters hands? My god, it's like a rotten corpse.
 

angelfly

Member
I just finished the game and didn't think the ending was too bad. I really wish I could play through again with the same character (finished at level 20) like in ME. Had there been a new game+ option I'd be playing through again right now.
 

jackdoe

Member
Darklord said:
I've noticed that. And have you seen the mai characters sisters hands? My god, it's like a rotten corpse.
So are Isabela's hands. Some of the robes and armors just have poor hand modeling and textures.
 

hermit7

Member
Ending fucking sucks btw. I was excited too see a 4th act, but the ending was so abrupt. That is what makes me the most annoyed. I actually enjoyed the game, the side quests were interesting in that it provided a wealth of things to do, and the main plot was interesting enough.

Hopefully we will see some content that bridges this and the third game ala ME2-3.

I want to play more as my Warden though, and I wish there were some more callbacks to my character in DAO. Shit even a cameo using the save would have been good to see, no speaking is necessary.
 
Blood Mage's vortex of doom spell or whatever is called is so insanely overpowered. If you're not paying attention it can wipe out your entire party in a blink of an eye.

Side note, I really wish they included a phoenix down item or whatever. If you're healing mage goes down in the beginning of a tough fight, just restart and save yourself the headache.
 

eek5

Member
Sir Garbageman said:
Blood Mage's vortex of doom spell or whatever is called is so insanely overpowered. If you're not paying attention it can wipe out your entire party in a blink of an eye.

Side note, I really wish they included a phoenix down item or whatever. If you're healing mage goes down in the beginning of a tough fight, just restart and save yourself the headache.
preventative: life ward potion
revive after fallen: mythal's favor

??
 
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