cleveridea
Member
can anyone comment on if the mage can get some melee skills with a specialisation? Loved mages in DAO but found melee bit boring even as arcane warrior as just auto attack (versus cool trigger skills like warrior and rogue gets)
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Dragon Age II |OT| The Revenge of Shit Mountain
- Thread starter EviLore
- Start date
Just turn on subtitles. Honestly I get kind of pissed if games aren't completely close captioned, especially if sound isn't normalized and if some VA has a wonky accent.
The combat is much better, but the fights are not improved. Why yes, I love spawning enemies and fighting mobs in waves rather than as a whole. How about they get rid of the extra spawns per fight, and just make it that one instance?
Or instead of a bunch spawning every fight, decrease the amount of hp of the normal mobs but have a handful of lieutenants and triple that in number of mobs. I'm pretty sure I could handle that, especially with long cooldowns on abilities and small stamina pools.
edit: to the poster above me, No. They auto attack enemies within like 1-2 meters by whacking with the staff, and damage is based off the staff auto attack rating.
The combat is much better, but the fights are not improved. Why yes, I love spawning enemies and fighting mobs in waves rather than as a whole. How about they get rid of the extra spawns per fight, and just make it that one instance?
Or instead of a bunch spawning every fight, decrease the amount of hp of the normal mobs but have a handful of lieutenants and triple that in number of mobs. I'm pretty sure I could handle that, especially with long cooldowns on abilities and small stamina pools.
edit: to the poster above me, No. They auto attack enemies within like 1-2 meters by whacking with the staff, and damage is based off the staff auto attack rating.
EvaPlusMinus said:
My thoughts are along these lines too. It definitely plays similar. Its just faster and animations are better although a bit ridiculous.
Graphically, the game can look like ass at times and then you change areas and it looks awesome. Theres a pretty wide gap as far that goes.
The story needs to pick up fast or Im going to lose interest.
cleveridea
Member
woah I just found that there IS a specialisation for mages that gives kinda-melee powers! Dont think URL is spoiler as just is name of specialisation type bbut just in case
Nice! Restart as mage and hopefully non-stupid looking character this time.
http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Force_Mage
Nice! Restart as mage and hopefully non-stupid looking character this time.
In the interests of parity, I'm going to play devil's advocate here and point out some of the good things about Dragon Age II (YES, Virginia, they do exist!):
- Quest Writing: The execution of the quests (both main and side) is bland and generic, but the actual writing behind them is quite interesting alot of times. You'll go on a quest to convince some guy's wife to come home to him and stumble upon a blood mage sect. Alot with Templars, Mages, and the oppression happening in the Circle. There's some interesting stuff here.
- Moral Choices: Is tough to get some good grey area moral choices, but DA 2 is succeeding better than DA 1 in my opinion. I've really had to put some thoughts into some of the choices and, at times, sacrifice pay for a legitimate quest because of ideals. Its not always more than binary choices, but there is a good clear rationale for the choices provided.
- Party Members: I'll be honest, on the whole (big qualifier there), I'm finding the supporting cast of DA 2 better than DA 1. There are exceptions on either side (Sten from DA 1 is badass, your sibling from DA 2 is annoying) but overall I liked them and their character concepts. Screw the Varric haters.
- Class Skills: Customization of classes suck, due to the class limitations (i.e., no dual-wield for warriors), BUT I'm finding the skill trees to be interesting, and though not deep, allow you to choose multiple trees and skills. You are forced into a certain weapon role, but you get a interesting choices in exactly what you do with that weapon.
That's some things I can think of, off the top of my head.
BTW, I know the stated romances have been announced, but I saw a Love Response (Golden Heart) for Aveline when
. Are we sure she can't be romanced?
- Quest Writing: The execution of the quests (both main and side) is bland and generic, but the actual writing behind them is quite interesting alot of times. You'll go on a quest to convince some guy's wife to come home to him and stumble upon a blood mage sect. Alot with Templars, Mages, and the oppression happening in the Circle. There's some interesting stuff here.
- Moral Choices: Is tough to get some good grey area moral choices, but DA 2 is succeeding better than DA 1 in my opinion. I've really had to put some thoughts into some of the choices and, at times, sacrifice pay for a legitimate quest because of ideals. Its not always more than binary choices, but there is a good clear rationale for the choices provided.
- Party Members: I'll be honest, on the whole (big qualifier there), I'm finding the supporting cast of DA 2 better than DA 1. There are exceptions on either side (Sten from DA 1 is badass, your sibling from DA 2 is annoying) but overall I liked them and their character concepts. Screw the Varric haters.
- Class Skills: Customization of classes suck, due to the class limitations (i.e., no dual-wield for warriors), BUT I'm finding the skill trees to be interesting, and though not deep, allow you to choose multiple trees and skills. You are forced into a certain weapon role, but you get a interesting choices in exactly what you do with that weapon.
That's some things I can think of, off the top of my head.
BTW, I know the stated romances have been announced, but I saw a Love Response (Golden Heart) for Aveline when
she is appointed as Captain of the Guard
I still do not get the comments saying the combat is just more of the same from Origins. It feels like a completely different game. The increase of combat speed means if you want to actually play it the same way Origins was played on higher difficulties you need to be pausing like every second to issue orders. The game is way to hectic in pace for anything other than broad strategy unless you want to go crazy trying to undertake the unnecessary task of micromanaging every little thing.
It may at a glance look like the same combat, it practice it's very different.
I get angry every time I see this menu still. The way the trees are laid out is simply insane. Why do they need to look like runes when a simple vertical tree would have sufficed. There are only a few actual skills in the trees. Most of them are simply upgrade boxes that could have been folded back into the main skill icon and simply increased the rank. The whole thing takes what should be an easy to read information screen and needlessly complicates and obfuscates pertinent information for the sake of looking cool.
It may at a glance look like the same combat, it practice it's very different.
I get angry every time I see this menu still. The way the trees are laid out is simply insane. Why do they need to look like runes when a simple vertical tree would have sufficed. There are only a few actual skills in the trees. Most of them are simply upgrade boxes that could have been folded back into the main skill icon and simply increased the rank. The whole thing takes what should be an easy to read information screen and needlessly complicates and obfuscates pertinent information for the sake of looking cool.
The recycled dungeons are really disappointing. I thought they learnt after ME1 not to do this crap and it appears they did with ME2 and now it seems they haven't?
EDIT: also combat is different because you kill way more enemies so they spawn more in the middle of battles and that makes any positional strategy useless.
EDIT: also combat is different because you kill way more enemies so they spawn more in the middle of battles and that makes any positional strategy useless.
I'm 6 hours in and am thoroughly enjoying the game. I also loved Dragon Age Origins. I can certainly see where the complaints are coming from though. The town feels less alive, the areas not as large and certainly (as of yet) don't feel like I'm part of something bigger, not matter what a certain NPC says. I also agree that the "orgin" or into part could be more flushed out. Maybe not even the escape part, but it really bothered me that I didn't get to do anything during my year of servitude, would of been nice to at least have to do a few of the tasks there. The Dalish design and annoy me and the Irish accents are humorous to me; and it sucks that the hottest chick is my sister, lol.
Things I'm indifferent too - the change of combat; you certainly don't have to micro manage like the last one. It seems (at least at this point) like I don't even need to have a tank along. Some may say this is a negative, but I'm still having fun with the battle. I like the ability tree redesign, I like the skills I have. There is always the option to up the difficulty so you have to micro manage more. Me, I enjoy and play for the story more than I do for micro manage combat so it doesn't bother me. They also seemed to have removed the need to manage your party's equipped armor; meh, don't bother me too much. Some will say the graphics aren't what they could be (Shit Mountain anyone?) - they are along BioWare normals, ME wasn't the best either. Some design direction I don't agree with, but on the whole they are good enough for me. Though I could do without the slowdown in cut scenes at times
I am enjoying the writing a lot. The funny and witty banter between party members is still there. The dialogue options are good, and some of the sarcastic lines from the middle option are gold.
All that being said, I am having a lot of fun, and found myself up way later than planned cause I was sucked in. Hopefully the writing quality stands up through the remainder of the game, and I get out of Kirkwall more; I look forward to finding out.
Things I'm indifferent too - the change of combat; you certainly don't have to micro manage like the last one. It seems (at least at this point) like I don't even need to have a tank along. Some may say this is a negative, but I'm still having fun with the battle. I like the ability tree redesign, I like the skills I have. There is always the option to up the difficulty so you have to micro manage more. Me, I enjoy and play for the story more than I do for micro manage combat so it doesn't bother me. They also seemed to have removed the need to manage your party's equipped armor; meh, don't bother me too much. Some will say the graphics aren't what they could be (Shit Mountain anyone?) - they are along BioWare normals, ME wasn't the best either. Some design direction I don't agree with, but on the whole they are good enough for me. Though I could do without the slowdown in cut scenes at times
I am enjoying the writing a lot. The funny and witty banter between party members is still there. The dialogue options are good, and some of the sarcastic lines from the middle option are gold.
All that being said, I am having a lot of fun, and found myself up way later than planned cause I was sucked in. Hopefully the writing quality stands up through the remainder of the game, and I get out of Kirkwall more; I look forward to finding out.
What I am trying to say is that the much slower and deliberate pace of Origins allowed for you to meticulously plan and position every member of your party if you wanted. DA2 this approach feels like a fools errand as the speed is simply too much unless you are pausing every second to issue more orders. It really feels like if you lose focus for a few seconds while unpaused the whole thing starts to get away from you like you were driving a super car at top speeds.EvaPlusMinus said:
JumpJeff84
Member
Sorry, I've been away from the internet all weekend....
Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version of the differences between PC and console versions? I played the first on PC (I have a PC that can run it fine) but I played the 360 demo and liked the combat on that...
Other than graphics, what are the differences?
Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version of the differences between PC and console versions? I played the first on PC (I have a PC that can run it fine) but I played the 360 demo and liked the combat on that...
Other than graphics, what are the differences?
Lostconfused
Member
Is the "flanking" mechanic still in DA2? Because if its not then yeah its a rather dramatic difference between the two games.endaround said:
Kinspiracy
Banned
Note to developers - if adding fog to an area kills your framerate, remove the fog. It's not worth the trade-off. I'm looking at you Sundermount.
Lostconfused said:
I think it is, given that there's a warrior skill that removes the flanking advantage for sword and board, just as there was in DA:O.
Exactly what the bonus for flanking is, I have no idea. Wasn't it an attack advantage in DA:O? That seems kind of pointless in this one, since hit percentage has to be close to 100 percent in DA2 for everyone.
Lostconfused
Member
Yeah it was a bonus to attack rating. Scaled up to +15 to attack I think, so a character properly positioned would still be able to hit an enemy that's several levels higher. So it would be really useful against high level boss enemies like revenants or some such.Patryn said:
Edit: Again if attack rating doesn't make a difference anymore than I don't see how you can say the combat is the same.
DanielJr82
Member
Question: Is "persuasion" part of the game?! It had its own skill tree in Origins, so I'm wondering if I have to invest in cunning even though I'm playing a Warrior.
Hmmm? I didn't notice this in my experience. I wonder why Bioware chose not to make Aveline a love interest? I haven't met the other two options yet, but I really do like Aveline. Ah well.JoeBoy101 said:
Flanking is there; use something like a typical tank and get behind someone, you'll land more critical hits. So it does have some advantages. I think it's better having your mages attack from behind though because of their attack speed iirc. Just take your tank and run through the mob so they're between you and the mages and go to town.
Until the next mob spawns next to your mages.
Until the next mob spawns next to your mages.
Lonewolf_92
Member
cleveridea said:
Like EvaPlusMinus said, that isn't going to do what you want. Try mix/matching from Entropy and Primal instead. The Petrification related abilities (especially once it's upgraded) from Primal and the Hex abilities from Entropy will make melee fighting MUCH easier.
Exactly. I want opinions on the combat from people who play on Nightmare, not any other difficulty. That's the only one that even has a chance of being remotely similar to the first game IMHO, since it's the only one with friendly fire.Ceebs said:
That's exactly what I didn't want to hear. Positioning is basically the most interesting gameplay element of party-based cRPGs for me.hamchan said:
cleveridea
Member
Lonewolf_92 said:
hmm good to know thanks.it sounds like they are kinda like biotics with the corresponding specialistion. also rogue get a ME2 style
Exploding combat drone from shadow class
I tried it for a bit and then went right back to hard. It's literally a fucking nightmare to manage. You have the hordes of mobs that come out of nowhere ruining any sort of positioning you had setup, and it feels like everything a mage does is AOE so if you have more than one melee you are going to murder your party no matter what. The heal spell is almost useless with it's obscene cooldown forcing you to chug potions. Overall the brief time I tried out Nightmare was not challenging in a good way, it was simply obnoxious and just not fun.Durante said:
So when you end up fighting dragons in this game, is it actually inside the city?
Yeah, it pretty much is like that. Can't count how many times I've had enemies basically spawning on top of my player mage, and then he keeps getting whacked and can barely even move away due to being easily staggered since he has low strength. Positional strategy is almost pointless because you can never strategize based on the enemies you are seeing then, since you have no idea how many more will pop up, and from where.
Durante said:
Yeah, it pretty much is like that. Can't count how many times I've had enemies basically spawning on top of my player mage, and then he keeps getting whacked and can barely even move away due to being easily staggered since he has low strength. Positional strategy is almost pointless because you can never strategize based on the enemies you are seeing then, since you have no idea how many more will pop up, and from where.
That's exactly what I said in the demo thread when people were telling me not to worry about the missing FF since Nightmare turns it on. If all but one of your difficulty levels do not have friendly fire then obviously your encounters will be designed without it in mind. Conversely, in DA:O having at least some FF was the default.Ceebs said:
Durante said:
Enemies teleporting into battle. That is the end of the discussion for Bioware with regards to balancing battles for FF. If you're fucking teleporting enemies into a fight, there's no real way to make FF work well, as opposed to them having to come from an area on the map.
EvaPlusMinus said:
I've spent about that in Origins and almost that in DA2 (even more if you count demo usage).
Here's why the two are different: (This isn't meant to be a "one is better than the other" but simply stating the differences in combat)
Origins:
- Slow Combat speed
- Slow damage, unless your party is underleveled or undergeared, damage comes in slow predictable chunks
- Enemies you see are what you get. No respawning mobs during combat unless it's an endgame bossfight.
- some abilities as a whole are useless. Glyphs? Rock Armor? Some random warrior abilities or the various bard abilities, etc Who the fuck uses them? A few were much better than the others while the rest were situational.
- enemies didn't explode or gib unless you had walking bomb on them. To be honest, I preferred this over what DA2 does, though getting monkey cheese screenshots from this are rather amusing.
- maintaining aggro on the tank is a little frustrating at times, since threaten is like Righteous Fury except SnB tanks have zero AoE (making it almost useless for threat generation), and taunt iirc is single target (or at least acted like it was)
- positioning is nessessary
- lots of shuffling, can't attack from any position, only front or back
- you had to invest in skills to keep from being knocked down or interrupted
- items only required one stat to equip
DA2:
- lots of skills were consolidated into stats instead
- items now require two stats to equip based on class (mage: wis/mag, rogue: dex/cun, war: str/con) which means you're forced into two stat builds, rather than one required and another is up to you.
- Fast combat speed
- Fast incoming damage, especially on high difficulties.
- Abilities now have actual purpose, and are a lot more useful than they were before.
- Even SnB warriors have AoE abilities now, Shield bash, some earthquake thing, etc making threat generation a lot easier to manage.
- Threat generation is improved and even has abilities to help mitigate damage and drop aggro on all classes, though flawed. Aggro drops should be party based, not distance based. If they're going to keep aggro distance based, then Taunts (Taunt, Goad, Armistice, etc) range should be doubled, as with aggro drops.
Take this as an example:
You have a mage and a rogue standing next to each other, and a tank further out. Suddenly melee spawn and start attacking your ranged, interrupting them constantly. You Mind Blast to drop aggro on your mage, and the mob runs to your rogue. The rogue then evades, annnndd the melee moves BACK to your mage instead of either of them or even the tank! Basically you have to run to your tank, aggro drop and run back out. This is some really lameass vanilla WoW shit, though I think even then they didn't have this issue. Except, the problem with running into melee range is that by doing mind blast, it can actually draw the people in melee range onto your squishy mage/rogue making it a risky endeavor.
- abilities seem like they have a long cooldown, because at the start you have so few of them, and combat is so much faster it makes the cooldowns seem harsher. Couple this with respawning mobs in the middle of fights requiring you to not blow all your cds before the second, or even third wave (right when you need them) that this can get pretty tedious, especially when all you're fighting is trash during or outside of a boss fight. Granted, tedious trash mobs aren't fun, but then again neither is just AoEing them down in a "they're in my way" sort of sense.
- Certain spells need a bit of an improvement, such as heal in the creation tree. The Cooldown should be about 10s less, cost about 10 more mana, and do about 50-60% healing upgraded. An alternative to this would be if you healed one guy, it auto heals the lowest party member for 50% of whatever you healed for. Another alternative would be Heal casts a free Barrier on the tank like the spell in Arcane for about the same length, or even "Heal does more damage to targets that are under the Barrier ability". Or even just add a thing to normal healing and don't change anything else just "Heal's cooldown is reduced by 10% when cast on players who are incapacitated" which would help on dragon fights or others where the party member is being thrown around and can't do anything and are hard to stun to break this overpower ability being used on them.
- everyone has increased mobility and channeled spells and things like Ogre charges are avoidable and are announced by the enemy properly.
- positioning doesn't matter so much, though you still deal more damage from attacking from the back. However, because everyone is either dying very fast, or moving around so fast from their own abilities or because of knockdowns, that the only real positioning that matters is keeping your group out of AoE.
- Shuffling is still in the game, but because of the speed of combat you don't notice it unless your party is a small hallway or something with a lot of mobs.
Sorry it took me so long to write up this post, I've been doing other things as well. Hopefully this outlines the differences between the two and the issues with each. I may have forgotten things, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yep. There are just way to many spells and abilities that are AOE. I have been playing a bow rogue and at lvl 8 I have a single ability that is not AOE. How in the hell am I supposed to use this character with FF on when positioning changes faster than the animation for a simple attack.Durante said:
webrunner said:
Yeah. Top right is nice guy/diplomatic, middle is neutral/smartass, bottom right is angry/hardass.
Left middle is, of course, investigate. It's the same damn structure. I hate it so much. It turns conversation sections into a repetitive chore. Oh, he has an investigate option. Well clearly you better go pick those investigate options before you pick one of the options on the right side of the wheel, because those will move the conversation forward.
You end up picking the investigate options not because you're that interested, but because they might unlock a quest or whatever and you don't want to miss it. It's so predictably structured and repetitive that it's just boring.
You are fighting Darkspawn? I have not seen any since the intro. It has been spiders, humans, and shades for the past 5 hours for me.DennisK4 said:
Time for me to say something good about the game though. Whoever did the Qunari redesign needs a special mention. When everything in the game looks awful, making a race seem original and cool looking is quite an accomplishment. They are the most interesting thing I have come across in the game so far.
Kinspiracy
Banned
DennisK4 said:
Considering
the Darkspawn got defeated during that one year break you took while earning the bribe money