Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m A Naughty Boy: Respecs In Dragon Age

By Alec Meer on November 23rd, 2009 at 7:44 pm.

I rather painfully hit a wall in Dragon Age a couple of weeks back, finding my enjoyment stymied by the twin tediums of getting killed far too much and getting bored of wandering endless dwarven caverns and elven forests that required an absurd amount of backtracking through narrow, empty corridors. (Really, would it be so wrong to turn on the instant map travel system in major areas once they’ve been cleared of enemies?) Finding myself with some free time, I headed back in today, only for the former problem to re-rear its annoying head. I knew what was causing it – I didn’t have a good healer. As well as that, my main character, a mage, was a mess of mixed abilities, lacking a core function, horribly prone to inflicting friendly fire with his more powerful attacks and running out of mana horrifyingly quickly to boot. He was screw-up, in short – a liability in every fight.

I’d chosen the wrong skills towards the start of the game, unsure what my build was going to be, no idea what abilities future party members might have (presuming there’d be a dedicated healer along soon; I didn’t go to the mage’s tower, where one can be found, before Elfland and Dwarftown and so ended up with a crapload of melee types in my roster), and naively hungry to make this character capable of everything. I’d tried to shape him into a crowd control type later on, but those misspent early points meant he was still a few levels off being anything like effective. My only options were to press on, suffering an infuriating degree of death and reloading, not to mention burning all my gold on health potions, or to start afresh with a new character. Whichever I picked, I knew the result would be the same: my time with Dragon Age would be as good as over. I hasten to add that I’m quite sure I would have been able to continue with this borked character, eventually levelling my way out of the problem I’d gotten myself into: but I didn’t want to. I wanted to have more fun, not a slog.

So I cheated. Or did I?

I’ve tried to rationalise it to myself, with endless variations upon the theme of the intro above, but I know there’s no escaping that I have cheated. I have pulled the game’s skin away to reveal the endoskeleton below, have performed decisive and powerful surgery that the game did not intend me to, and then pulled the skin back over. Everything looks neat and normal and as it should be, but I have broken the rules, as set by Bioware. My immortal gaming soul is befouled. I know, you can barely stand to look at me.

The exact nature of my cheating, incidentally, is this. I have removed three spells – Inferno, Drain Life and Winter’s Grasp. I have replaced them with Heal, Heal Party and Revive (the latter two from the Spirit Healer specialisation skill tree which, before you point and judge further, I had already unlocked in the game, by purchasing a training manual for 12 gold). Less crucially, and rather more tinkering for tinkering’s sake, I also replaced my character’s two tiers of the Steal skill, because the Rogue in my party has them already, with two tiers of the Survival skill (which turned out to be all kinds of useless. Oh well).

So nothing was added – only swapped, and only swapped for abilities my character could naturally access at his current level. I haven’t given myself an unfair advantage, or anything beyond what the game allows. I’ve just refined my character by creating an alternate universe in which I made better decisions in those early hours of the game. I have, most certainly, irked the purists. At the same time I haven’t created a situation in which I am constantly breaking the game’s rules – and I will remain on the straight narrow now that I’ve gotten onto a straight and narrow that I’m happy with.

Did I do wrong? Did I cheat? Does it matter? It’s an impossibly mild moral dilemma – improving my own experience vs respecting the rules of the games. I’ll admit it troubles me slightly, most especially because the ease with which I’m now blitzing through fights that were formerly incredibly difficult is now almost risible. The group heal and revive powers absolutely change the nature of battles. I pity anyone who plays without them. And now, I am The Best. Go me.

I do feel that Bioware might have been wise to build some official respec feature – say, for a frightening amount of gold, or the loss of a level – into the game, as it does expect you to make some fairly far-reaching choices long before you’ve become au fait with the combat and know what your party setup will be. But then again, there’s something proud and wonderful about making your own organic progress through the game, living with those bad decisions and surviving despite them. That’s how we used to do it, right? But I suppose I’ve become inured to respecification of my RPG characters after all these years of playing MMOs. Once you’ve flown first class, it’s doubly unpleasant to fly cattle class again, and all that. The net result is that I’m enjoying the game more, and so surely my cheating-or-was-it means the game is now better serving its intended purpose. Others will enjoy the struggle against adversity more. I don’t – I’m a hedonist in this regard, prizing my own enjoyment over Doing It Right No Matter What. That niggle, that strange, pointless guilt will likely never quite fade from me as I play, though. I know I’ve rewritten history. What would you do, gentle reader?

Oh, and if you’re taken with the idea of respeccing, let me kindly/maliciously reveal how. EDIT- helpful sorts below reveal this is a much easier alternative. Haven’t tried it myself, but it sounds pretty great.

There is a way to do it with console commands, but I couldn’t get it to work. Instead, I downloaded the 500Mb Dragon Age toolset (you need to register your copy of DA to get it, which requires inputting your CD key again). A click upon File then Open, followed by a browse to my most recent savegame directory (C:\Users\Your Windows Username\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Characters\your Dragon Age Character Name\Saves\Quicksave_1),and then a doubleclick upon savegame.das. Das is gut, ja? Oh, and be sure to take a backup of your savegame folder first, just in case of DATAPOCALYPSE.

In the fugly window that opens, browse to SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR. Click the little + to the left of it, then the one next to SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR_CHAR, then the one next to SAVEGAME_CREATURE_STATS, then the one next to either SAVEGAME_SPELLLIST (if you’re a mage), SAVEGAME_TALENTLIST (if you’re a rogue or warrior) or SAVEGAME_SKILLLIST (if you want to change skills e.g. herbalism and traps rather than combat abilities).

If you then look for the abilities you have on this page, you’ll spot their identity codes. Replace the ones for those skills you don’t want with ones for those you do want. That’s it, basically, but expect to hit problems if you try to give your guy skills beyond what his level/stats allow. Plus, hey, that really would be cheating.

If you want to do this with a party member rather than your main guy, start at SAVEGAME_PARTYLIST, delve down into SAVEGAME_PARTYPOOLMEMBERS, then under 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 etc you’ll see another instance of SAVEGAME_CREATURE_STATS, and can follow the above process. You big, dirty great cheat, you.

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199 Comments »

  1. 23/11/2009 at 19:53 Alexander Norris says:

    Of note: using the toolset may fuck up your game. Instead, use the really well-done and non-buggy Raven respec mod: http://social.bioware.com/project/469/ It refunds all talent/spell, skill and stat points, even taking into account those gained from a certain quest or from manuals.

    Anyway, the Dragon Age combat system is needlessly obscure and not at all well-explained. Given that mistakes made during character level up are more likely than not due to the system not being explained to you, I don’t see how respecialising could be considered cheating. If anything, it’s one of those rare good things to have count out of MMORPGs and deserving of being applied to other types of RPGs.

    It might become cheating if you use it constantly in order to tailor your party to every fight in the game, but as long as you use it to undo mistakes made because the system is badly explained, it shouldn’t be considered cheating. In fact, I don’t see why you couldn’t make a game based around tailoring your characters’ abilities to every fight individually.

    • 23/11/2009 at 20:49 Matt W says:

      This. If a game is giving you a decision where a) the consequences aren’t at all clear, b) it has lasting repercussions and c) it’s irreversible then, all other things being equal, it’s badly designed.

      Given that Bioware created an entirely new RPG system from scratch for this game, and given the ridiculous difficulty spikes which I’m assuming are a result non-optimized character builds, they’ve done a really bad job of explaining how not to fuck up your characters.

  2. 23/11/2009 at 19:54 jsutcliffe says:

    The only person you can cheat in a single-player game is yourself. If your conscience is clean I’d say you didn’t cheat.
    Apparently there’s a respec mod available for those who don’t want to open up the toolkit and fall prey to temptation.
    One thing I’m curious about, however, is whether you can adjust the appearance of your character with the toolset — I picked up the game knowing as little as I could about the characters and story, and managed to basically create a dwarven Leliana (she’s a rogue too, though with a different specialization) — being able to make her look a bit more different would be handy.

  3. 23/11/2009 at 19:56 Jacques says:

    I don’t think it is unreasonable. Games very often expect you to have either read a great deal on the subject before making your build, or expect you to go in blind, both of which are quite silly.
    Anything that makes the game more enjoyable should be seen as a good thing, even if it involves breaking a few rules.

  5. 23/11/2009 at 20:01 Garg says:

    You could have done this without cheating. If you had gone to the mage tower you would have picked up a healer type mage for your party. I hope I’ve undermined your justification for cheating and now cause you to tremble and weep. Although it is annoying that there is absolutely no way to rechoose spells, for instance at level up like in Neverwinter Nights.

    • 24/11/2009 at 03:56 whalleywhat says:

      Agreed. Also, you’re a weak baby and I look down on you and laugh about you behind your back and in your face cause ur bad at games and need to learn2play. Ownage.

  6. 23/11/2009 at 20:02 Devenger says:

    I don’t blame you at all. Hitting a wall with RPGs is horridly painful, and whilst the lack of grinding in BioWare games is a positive because it results in less repetitive/plotless play, it does make it more difficult/impossible to just out-level difficulty spikes and continue with the fun. I’m reminded of MULTIPLE parts of KoTOR where it was impossible for my support role character to survive some battles (especially in cases where Solo Mode was forced), and the only way I could continue with the plot paths I wanted to pursue was exploiting flaws in the combat system (taking your turn then disengaging and running away, for example).

    The problem of other party members intruding so successfully on your chosen skill set, as you say with the Rogue, is a serious one I think BioWare have yet to find a good solution to. Not that I can think of one…

  7. 23/11/2009 at 20:07 EBass says:

    I’ll probably respec Morrigan on my next playthrough as her core skillset she comes with can’t be more badly optimised.

    • 23/11/2009 at 20:35 Jesse says:

      I know! I like the character and want her in the party, but hexing and shapechanging skills don’t cut the mustard. Replacing her with what’s her name, the healer, in the mage tower made a huge difference in my party’s fighting ability, but I’d rather hang out with digi-Claudia Black than old granny mage, you know what I mean?

    • 23/11/2009 at 20:45 Kanamit says:

      All she really needs is cone of cold.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:18 Tei says:

      I have finished the game mostly with morringan and 2 spells: heal and that one that is like a enormeous fire tornado. Oh.. and fireball. Put a fireball in a group of archers, and the firetornado on the others. And then send your mele guys/rogue to the center. That way is easy to finish a group of 20 enemys same-level really fast.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:49 Garg says:

      Tei that also sounds like a way of burning your melee in a fire inferno really fast, unless you’re playing on easy in which case you can face+keyboard your way through most of it. Fireball and heal are both great, but cone of cold is the best.

  8. 23/11/2009 at 20:08 Lightbulb says:

    You can’t cheat yourself. Its really that simple.

    You play games for enjoyment (or in your case because you’re paid to do it but anyway!), respeccing increased your enjoyment, end of story.

    In fact its a design oversight to allow you to make what it sounds like is a broken character.

  9. 23/11/2009 at 20:09 Kadayi says:

    Fair dues. A lot less painful and time consuming than restarting from scratch. I restarted 3 times (albeit I wasn’t massively far in on one) until I was happy that the direction I was going in with respect to levelling up. As games go DA:O really does require you to read the manual more than most when it comes to what skills do what and how to spend your precious attribute points (my D&D addled brain translated Willpower as akin to Wisdom initially, which it quite clearly isn’t and that caused me no end of problems as I was pumping points into anything but that for my combat classes), as well as clearly understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of your team mates, and knowing what there is little point in putting effort into.

    Digital manual here, for any other Digital buyers like myself, who might be struggling: -

    http://store.steampowered.com/manual/17450/

  10. 23/11/2009 at 20:17 Mistmanov says:

    I personally enjoy finishing games with flawed characters, and then starting a new game with a new and improved build. If finishing the game requires lowering the difficulty mid-game, it’s unfortunate, but the lesser evil. If changing the difficulty is impossible, then I’d probably sooner just start over with a new character than respec.

    Exceptions would be when you create a flawed character due to incorrect/misleading information. I don’t mind it if my brilliant idea of a katana-halberd dual-weilding rogue-paladin-sorcerer is totally underpowered in a specific game, but if some description of spell X suggests that it will be totally awesome (while it is in fact totally crap), then I might be tempted to use some outside means to change my loadout..

    (and when respeccing is an accepted part of the gamplay (e.g. Titan’s Quest), I certainly respec all the time.)

  11. 23/11/2009 at 20:17 Alastayr says:

    Alexander Norris already brought the guns to the table. Get this mod. It’s like a modern day Shadowkeeper, without the Charisma bug!
    And the cheating, of course. So it’s not like Shadowkeeper at all.

    But there’s really nothing wrong with this. I constantly respecced my characters in the Baldur’s Gate Trilogy and my NWN characters… their life expectancy was between zero and two chapters. Incidentally, that’s why the limited class choices in DA:O grew on me so fast. It takes away the restrictive choices.

    I think I can still navigate the Irenicus Dungeon blind. Just name a class. (Disclaimer: I played BG II before the first)

  12. 23/11/2009 at 20:26 Po0py says:

    I would think that having a respec option would only invite critics to make assumptions that the game can get horribly imbalanced at times. Couldnt care less, personally. I’m happy with the way my Dwarve Common Warrior is coming along.

  13. 23/11/2009 at 20:26 ZZZZZZZ says:

    You have cheated and therefore failed in the game.
    But you had the idea of cheatin and the resolve and resources to do so, so you won this Level of the great metagame Life. Congrats. But i doubt you broke the highscore….

  14. 23/11/2009 at 20:27 Igor Hardy says:

    That reminds me of how Kirk cheated and won that simulated no-win situation when he was still in the Academy, but later on Spock kept claiming he actually did win that situation through an ingenious strategy. Which probably only shows the Star Trek II screenwriter had too much admiration for hacking skills.

    In other words. don’t let Dragon Age waste your time, cheat as much as necessary.

  15. 23/11/2009 at 20:27 Lacero says:

    I had to cheat to complete the dwarf section of the main plot. You know the bit I mean.
    I was already in easy mode, and my party choice was totally gimped due to me wanting specific characters around that didn’t work well together. I ran with the debug console enabled and continually healed my party until I won.

    I felt the need to join in and confess. Don’t judge me too harshly.

    (and I agree the combat system is extremely obscure. Breaking the standard D+D rules of light / medium / heavy armour is all very well, but you need to explain what you’ve done. The rules are too ingrained now to just throw them away and expect people to notice what you’ve done)

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:46 Atalanta says:

      Oh man, the first time I got to that fight it took me changing the difficulty, spamming health poultices, and at one point getting up and walking away from my computer so I wouldn’t chuck the monitor out the window to beat it.

      The second time I chose my party specifically for that fight and blitzed through it, no trouble at all. So incredibly satisfying.

  16. 23/11/2009 at 20:29 Lilliput King says:

    Hmm. I’m a purist, playing the game through on hard with no respeccing or kerjiggery of any kind, but I don’t see the problem if others want to respec.

    You’re certainly right about the game asking for a rather daunting degree of character design decision making from the player early on, before they have themselves sorted. This is mostly prevalent on mages though – you can’t really go far wrong with the other classes as long as you stick to their area of the weapon specs.

    As others have said, it comes down to whether you’re happy with it, as these things always do with single player. I would have no qualms, personally, if I thought my character was so pants that his presence in the party resulted in a catastrophic failure in most fights. Because, well, losing all the time ruins the game.

    On the other hand, if he was anywhere above the so-bad-it’s-not-even-funny-anymore level, I’d probably keep him as he is, partly because there’s something about saving the world with a character incapable of doing up his own shoelaces that inspires a kind of manic glee, and partly because there’s a hefty conceit involved. It would bug me, more than a little, in the same way that following a level-up guide for an MMO or a build queue for an RTS bugs me. The characters/play styles are no longer really personal to you. They’re a midwich cuckoo influence in your character’s world, replacing him/her with something alien and different which isn’t really yours, and I’d always know it didn’t belong.

  17. 23/11/2009 at 20:29 UK_John says:

    I agree with some above. Live with your mistakes or go to a new area and a new quest and hope for new spells, new team mates, etc to deal with the wall. I had to do this with my rogue character, and so got past the wall.

  18. 23/11/2009 at 20:31 Dante says:

    I’m curious about this here toolset can you use it to add items to your inventory?

    The reason being that I’ve accidentally left a quest item behind in a inaccessible area.While it’s a non-vital sidequest, having it still open really irritates me, and I did do everything required, I just failed to pick up the item.

  19. 23/11/2009 at 20:31 Primar says:

    I half like the idea of it being a “proper” RPG, where choices are meaningful and permanent and can’t be undone.

    On the other hand, I’m well aware that stuff can go wrong through no real fault of my own, and there’s no way I’m willing (due to time constraints) to restart the game anew. Examples would be spells/talents that sound great but are actually rubbish, or – in my specific case – putting points into Herbalism or whatever, not realising that NPC party members /also/ had the same skills, making them effectively worthless. Stuff like that irks me, since it’s two wasted skill points I could put to better use. Yes, I’ll know for the next playthrough, but honestly I have 30 hours invested in this character, and I’ve (apparently) barely scratched the surface of the game.

    On a related note – am I the only one who finds crafting immensely irritating, in that you can’t use the crafting skills of your party members when in the camp, despite them having more advanced levels of it, or crafting skills your PC doesn’t have? I keep having to buy all my reagents, shuffle my party, leave the camp, make stuff, then go back to camp to reshuffle my party again. Is there a better way I don’t know about?

  20. 23/11/2009 at 20:31 Mr.Bigglesworth says:

    What’s up with that snorty German comment ?!

  21. 23/11/2009 at 20:34 Noc says:

    Dragon Age: COMPLEX ETHICAL DILEMMAS.

  22. 23/11/2009 at 20:35 Heliocentric says:

    if a game is broken, or a character broken I’ll happily dip into a hex editor. The only place I hold anything against cheating is when its multi player. Then you are screwing up someone else’s experience.

  23. 23/11/2009 at 20:38 Monty says:

    You may want to reconsider Winter’s Grasp, it does some decent damage and is a prereq for cone of cold which was essential for my playthrough. I don’t think I’d would have made it through on normal without it and paralyze and force field for crowd control. I had a similar problem with a lack of a healer till about half through my game, and those were the spells that pulled me through.

  24. 23/11/2009 at 20:39 Lobotomist says:

    As previous posters already said, there is perfectly good respec mod.

    And no its not cheating.

    Game not having respec option has only one reason , and thats: To artificially force you to replay the game again.

    Its the oldest trick in the book (since diablo) And since you are a buisy guy, and have no time to play same game twice. Respec is perfectly OK

  25. 23/11/2009 at 20:39 Yunny says:

    I do feel that Bioware might have been wise to build some official respec feature – say, for a frightening amount of gold, or the loss of a level – into the game, as it does expect you to make some fairly far-reaching choices long before you’ve become au fait with the combat and know what your party setup will be.

    I do feel that Bioware might have been wise to playtest this game more thoroughly and identify the fact that it’s so unbalanced for any melee-oriented parties, or parties without healers, or rather, any party that isn’t the optimal meat-grinding machine that their designers had intended for you to use.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:04 Lilliput King says:

      Are you playing it on Nightmare?

      I played it on hard with me (2 handed warrior) Sten (2 handed warrior) Alistair (sword ‘n’ board warrior) and Morrigan.

      Morrigan had the first level of the Heal spell, and no other buff-based abilities.

      Didn’t find it that bad, hit any walls or any such nonsense.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:51 Garg says:

      It sounds like you’re saying that Bioware should have made it so you could mulch on through with any old hodge podge of a party: surely it’s patently obvious to anyone who doesn’t want to play it on easy that you’ll need a way of healing in battles?

      Look if you want to go for your all fist+shield party go for it, but don’t expect Bioware to balance for it.

    • 24/11/2009 at 00:06 Yunny says:

      It’s funny when I say that the game is poorly balanced, people like to infer that I lack the proper skill to play this game. I was able to figure out the mechanic pretty quickly and adjusted my party to fit the “intended” party composition so that a playthrough requires decent strategy without being frustrating. But it’s patently obvious that you’ll have a much easier time getting through 80% of the game’s encounters, where crowd control is key, when you have more mages in your party. For a more melee-centric party, especially early game where your damage output is limited, you are forced to “pull” enemies, as if playing some sort of MMO. It’s a tired and un-immersive mechanic that should be employed sparingly, but in this game has become almost a necessity.

      One of the starts I created as a rogue, I find myself constantly being ambushed by triggers and dialogues, upon the completion of which my party automatically teleports into a cluster so everyone in my party can get AE stunned by the mages. Pops me out of stealth, too. “Well, that’s silly,” I thought, when it happened the first time. But this happens again and again. If my character’s chief weapon is surprise (surprise and fear; fear AND SURPRISE!), I would hope the game is designed so that I can take advantage of it.

      I have played plenty of RPGs and have gone through almost every RPG offering from Bioware / Black Isle / Interplay. I would argue that, having designed the ruleset from scratch, Bioware is a little too aggressive creating their encounters when the ruleset itself is vague and lacks fine-tuning. Comparing this game to Mass Effect, for example, where almost every NPC available to you would have a place and can pull their weight in your party, Dragon Age leaves much to be desired: for such a combat-heavy game, archers and woefully underpowered; rogues are marginally useful (lack of crowd control or the ability to quickly mow down a target, unless that rogue is your main character with massive stat boosts); and why have Leilana or Zevran or your War Dog in your party when you can have Alistair/Sten, Wynne, and Morrigan in your party?

      The game isn’t too difficulty, it’s just not balanced enough for you to have fun unless you have an optimal party (or your idea of fun is meticulously micro-manage every encounter, with no action queues, no less, of which there are easily a dozen or more in each “dungeon”).

  26. 23/11/2009 at 20:40 Lobotomist says:

    And by the way…

    Play with two mages. One for damage and second for healing and protection.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:54 Funky Badger says:

      Morrigan and Wynne get shit dead. For real.

      not sure its worth the loss of Zevran though, useless tart that he is.

  27. 23/11/2009 at 20:40 Eplekongen says:

    I have often found myself doing this in most SP-RPG’s I’ve played, and I’ve never felt unjustified. Because I followed the rules you yourself also seem to use. Only change to something that you could have been, had you made different choices. Not story choices, mind you, stats, talents, spells and the like.

    For example, I messed up the specializations on my warrior, and wanted to change my Champion to Berzerker, through console, but waited until I had actually unlocked Berzerker before then getting it. It’s not that tricky a line really. Ans as jsutcliffe said, in an SP game, your conscience decides what is cheating, and what is not.

    Also, remember Risen? Major possibility to completely mess up your character, and therefore the game. You don’t even have any party members to even out anything you messed up.

  28. 23/11/2009 at 20:44 Clovis says:

    Just so we know, what difficulty level are you playing at, Alec? I don’t even know if the game has them. Can you change mid-game? I don’t understand how many games still don’t allow you to change your difficulty at will.

    Also, I’m surprised at the comments so far. I know in the forum that some users will find what you did to be absolutely horrible. You’ve ruined the game by doing this. It is only by struggling through your ridiculous situation and overcoming it that you will see the true greatness of the game and such. You sir, are a carebear, and are the reason RPGs suck nowadays. I tried to claim that RPG’s should be a little more informative to avoid the problem you descibe and was told I should stick to playing Fable.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:05 skalpadda says:

      You can change difficulties whenever you want. On normal you’ll sometimes end up with enemies that can kill non-tank party members with one hit or have some very nasty crowd control and area of effect abilities. If you don’t have a character who can counter those specific things you’re screwed if you don’t get lucky or aren’t very good at microing. I consider that the only balance problem with the game, and it’s hard to know if and how often certain spells will be useful so it’s easy to neglect going for a spell that could be extremely useful later on, by which time it’s too hard to get to it in the skill tree.

      Dropping the difficulty to easy if you run into something you can’t manage will make it a lot easier to get by though, and the very difficult encounters are pretty far between in my experience.

  29. 23/11/2009 at 20:45 leeder_krenon says:

    you bloody cheat, you should be drummed out of gaming for this! i am never reading the site again. this is worse than thierry henry.

  30. 23/11/2009 at 20:49 Andrew Barrett says:

    There are plenty (well a couple) of arcane tomes you can pick up to give you some extra spells. By the time you can really afford them, you should know what you’re doing and choose the spells that will help you.

  31. 23/11/2009 at 20:55 skalpadda says:

    Um-hum, hum. I only skimmed the comments above, so someone may have mentioned it already, but you can actually fast travel to most locations, either by just finding the nearest exit and clicking where you want to go or by returning to camp. At the end of the deep roads stuff in the Orzammar main quest you can talk to… dwarf.. dude.. sorry can’t remember the name right now, anyway, you’ll have the option to port back instantly.

    I knew what was causing it – I didn’t have a healer.

    While I don’t think respecs aren’t a bad idea, since many skills aren’t well explained, the need to have someone with some healing powers in your party should be pretty obvious early on. I’ve been going through the game on Normal, got one zone left and haven’t had any major problems with just the basic heal (one skill point) on Morrigan and poultice spam when needed.

  32. 23/11/2009 at 21:04 cjlr says:

    I think it’s probably justified. I was lucky with my choices so far, and I’m not too gimped, but you really can screw yourself, especially on a first playthrough, when you literally do not know what will be any good before you try it, nor do you know what potential party members are out there to round things out. It’s nice to be able to fix that without writing off part/all of the time you’ve invested up to that point.

  33. 23/11/2009 at 21:14 Magnus says:

    I’ve gone for the scattergun approach to mage-creation myself.

    however, on easy (with no friendly fire) my damage spells get me through the sticky parts.

    I do wonder how useful all of the primal spells would be if I had FF on. I can imagine the area effect ones wouldn’t do me much good, especially given the often rather small combat areas.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:26 Jeremy says:

      I will on the occasion straight up freeze my own characters, or burn them, if the good outweighs the bad. Sometimes, freezing an ogre who has Sten in his hands, and is about to chomp his face, is only beneficial for both.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:32 skalpadda says:

      I don’t have a lot of area of effect attacks that deal friendly fire, but if my tank is the only one in the danger zone I won’t hesitate to use them, since she has so much health now that anything that isn’t a boss monster takes ages to kill her and I’ll have plenty of time to heal away any splash damage. I think friendly fire only does half damage on normal as well, so I can imagine you’d want to be more careful on higher difficulties.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:24 Taillefer says:

      Area of effect spells don’t need a line of sight. I cast them through walls into other parts of the map. Blizzard will stun and damage an entire room. Cast Tempest in there too for extra damage and mana drain. (Inferno does less damage if they’re frozen).

  34. 23/11/2009 at 21:18 Fumarole says:

    It’s not cheating in a singleplayer game. This is one reason why PC gaming is so great, afterall.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:21 Fumarole says:

      That being said, this is not something I would do. Part of the joy for me in RPGs is to deal with the consequences of choices made, for goof or for ill. Dragon Age presents these choices/consequences so much better than most other RPGs.

      But make of it what you will, better to play the game how you want than not at all.

  35. 23/11/2009 at 21:21 Jeremy says:

    Not a cheat I say, a person should be able to change some things as needed in a single player game, it’s only a reasonable expectation. I’m sort of a planner myself, so I didn’t really run into this problem except for maybe a few poor spell choices such as Earthquake which sounds awesome but is completely useless, didn’t end the game for me though.

    I’m on my second play through right now, trying a different strategy and I’ve pretty much found this out about the fighting in the game. Either you need a healer or incredibly high damage / crowd control. Healing allows a little bit more variety in the fights I think as you can sort of “undo” bad decisions by healing or reviving a player, although generally, if you’re losing 2 characters you’re probably going to lose the fight (I have had my fair share of 1 character w/ 10 hp left scrapes). If you’re playing damage / crowd control then you really have to be more on top of your game and be ready to drink those pasty poultices down. My only wish is that there was some kind of Stamina potion, unless I’ve somehow missed a crucial facet to this game.

    Anyone else ever been filled with an unending rage when a character seems to somehow lose all their health in between your 1 second pauses? Happened a couple times, and it reminds me of the good ol days of Nintendo rage :)

  36. 23/11/2009 at 21:22 Tei says:

    I quickly realized in the Flash game ( I forget the name ), than having a healer/mage on the group was crucial. So I speced morrigan based on that.

  37. 23/11/2009 at 21:31 toro says:

    You, dear sir, are a failure! :)

    I was in the same situation, but you need just 3 lvls to repair the situation. Anyway, the potions should not be bought, that’s why there is alchemy in the game.

    ps. just joking… damn cheater.

  38. 23/11/2009 at 21:31 suibhne says:

    Spell selections are difficult to make in DA, for two main reasons – the opacity of spell combos which are deliberately undocumented, left for discovery by the player, and the paucity of helpful information in the spell descriptions. The former is forgivable and maybe even interesting, but the latter is downright irritating. I’ve been playing through on Hard, with only a few battles requiring reloading (and some of those requiring more than one reload…), but I really avoided committing my Mage characters (mostly Wynne with a little Morrigan sprinkled in) to any new directions until I’d read a lot of forum posts on the different spells and their synergies.

  39. 23/11/2009 at 21:41 Vandell says:

    Want to break DAO legitamately? Make a dual wield duelist rogue w/ 20 base strength, use Morrigan as control (GET CRUSHING PRISON) and have fun. No healer required.

  40. 23/11/2009 at 21:47 Ben L. says:

    “This. If a game is giving you a decision where a) the consequences aren’t at all clear, b) it has lasting repercussions and c) it’s irreversible then, all other things being equal, it’s badly designed.”

    It’s also a lot like life. Not very gamey, not very forgiving, not very mainstream, but bad design? I’d say just different, perhaps unpopular design.

    What’s the alternative? All choices have clearly defined outcomes, have no major repercussions, and are all reversible? That’s a poor way to design a CRPG that attempts non-linearity as well.

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:48 Ben L. says:

      Argh, meant to reply to Matt W above…

    • 23/11/2009 at 21:56 Alexander Norris says:

      In terms of gameplay, all choices should have clearly-defined outcomes. We’re not talking about plot, morality or a living world, here; we’re talking about an entirely arbitrary set of mechanics. The player should always make every mechanical choice fully-informed.

    • 23/11/2009 at 22:49 Matt W says:

      The intent behind that is that all three requirements have to apply simultaneously for it to be considered “bad design”. If it’s irreversible and unexplained but meaningless it has no impact; if it’s irreversible and meaningful but clearly explained it’s enabling player agency, which is a good thing usually; and if it’s meaningful and unexplained but reversible, the player can correct their mistake.

      If it’s all three, however, then you’re essentially telling the player to roll a die, and (in this case) telling them five hours later that the number they rolled was wrong and now they’re fucked. If used carefully in a role-playing decision-making context (the eventuality the “all other things being equal” clause is there for), then it can be an extremely powerful tool. If used carelessly in a character advancement system – particularly in a long-format game where the combat encounters can effectively block progress completely if the player guesses wrong – there’s really no justification I can see for it.

      (Also, I’d have been a lot more forgiving of the whole thing if, when making a mistake in build or execution, the game gave you some kind of clue as to why you can – for example – take an ogre and a dozen darkspawn without breaking a sweat, but get shredded by a pack of wolves in a random encounter. At that point it’s very clearly telling you that you’re doing something wrong, but gives absolutely no indication [that I've managed to find] as to what exactly you’re screwing the pooch on.)

    • 24/11/2009 at 17:13 Ben L. says:

      Thanks for the clarification, I mostly agree with that.

  41. 23/11/2009 at 21:58 medwards says:

    I’m playing on hard and have made a few poor decisions but am managing. Does that mean I don’t want to respec? Hell no, I want to respec so bad, but I’m so close to finishing without respeccing that I can’t bring myself to do it. But some fights are just too damned crazy. I also don’t like the division that no-respecs generate. On the one side you have the people who weren’t informed enough to make a good decision, and its a raw deal for them, then you got all the elitist pricks who lucked out and ended up with good builds (no it was not planning, you either have played once, or you lucked into a good build. The information provided is so shitty that thats just the way it is) who are busy preening themselves over how much more amazing they are then these other people. It’s kind of an asshole thing to pull off (and a similar thing happened to me in Mass Effect), so I’m hoping they learn from it soon. Basically you’re punishing the casual crowd to make the elitist crowd feel better about themselves. It’s not a good enough reason for as punishing a game design decision as this.

  42. 23/11/2009 at 22:03 We Fly Spitfires says:

    I don’t think that’s cheating. In fact, I think it’s something that should be available in game… when I first read this article’s title, I thought that it was.

  43. 23/11/2009 at 22:04 Tony says:

    Yay for the respec mod.

    I spent some of my mages valuable attribute points on Cunning just so I could get top level talking skills. Then 10 minutes later I do a quest that provides large permanent increases to most stats, so those points in cunning were wasted.

    Yes its not gamebreaking. But for me alot of the attraction of an RPG is min-maxing my character. If I’d known these stat boosts were coming I wouldn’t have spent my points the same way.

  44. 23/11/2009 at 22:05 Pace says:

    I agree that lots of combat details and level-up decisions weren’t explained nearly well enough. (Biggest flaw in an otherwise great game.)

    Still. Pussy.

  45. 23/11/2009 at 22:13 FRIENDLYUNIT says:

    The only crime you may have committed is robbing yourself of some of the enjoyment of a second play though.

  46. 23/11/2009 at 22:27 Wisq says:

    Frankly, I’m already playing through using a dual-wielder with an artificially boosted strength (via the toolset). Why? Because it’s the only possible way to play a dex-based fighter and not end up with horribly nerfed damage due to the dexterity bug, in which daggers are supposed to be 50% STR and 50% DEX but are 100% STR instead.

    And yeah, I used console commands at the start to remove and replace useless skills given to me by the game without asking. Like assuming that a city elf will be a melee fighter and a Dalish elf will be a ranged fighter. Um, no thanks. Isn’t the whole point of role-playing games to come up with and play our own role?

    • 23/11/2009 at 22:34 Wisq says:

      I should add that you don’t actually need a mod or the toolset to do a (legal) respec.

      The console lets you add and remove skills/spells/talents, although it requires either touch-typing or very careful hunting-and-pecking since you can’t see what you’re typing.

      The stats bug lets you readjust your stats to your heart’s content. Increase a stat by 3, hit reset, and you can now decrease it by 3. Increase it by 3 again, reset, and you can now decrease it by 6. Etc.

      The toolset is still your only option if you want to change the sum of your stats, though.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:59 Funky Badger says:

      Way to miss the point of roleplaying in general, dude.

    • 24/11/2009 at 04:53 Wisq says:

      Excuse me? I don’t even know which part you’re referring to, here.

      If it’s a response to my editing the stats: Yes, I know the difference between role-playing and roll-playing. But the role I wanted to play was that of a young, talented warrior who fights with finesse, not with strength. (And that’s only the combat aspects. The personality is defined separately in my head but is in keeping with that style.) The game supposedly supports that, via dual-weapon combat with daggers, yet due to the non-dexterity-daggers bug, the only way to be a melee fighter is to focus on strength. So I worked around it specifically to support my character concept.

      If instead you’re referring to my distaste for the game forcing you into a certain role (a la Dalish as hunters or city elves as cutpurses) — yes, I recognise the background is going to have an effect on the average character from that background. Yet in being the main character of this adventure, your character stands out specifically because he or she is unusual. Why, then, should I settle for the roles the game has laid out for me rather than choosing my own, even if it differs from the typical one? (Besides, you may note that although the Dalish storyline equips you with a bow to start, your second weapon set is a pair of elven daggers.)

      In either case, to say that I miss the point of roleplaying because I’d like the game to not arbitrarily ban my character concept (either by mechanics or by game world assumptions) is rather silly (and rude).

      I should point out that my background prior to computer RPGs was MUSHes where characters were designed and played in free-form, with no statistics to optimise or refer to, merely good consensual roleplaying where your character concept and your imagination were all you had. So yes, I do take a little offence in the notion that I have “missed the point”.

  47. 23/11/2009 at 22:36 Pantsman says:

    Have I cheated by reading this before playing the game and thus learning in advance what are important spells to get?

  48. 23/11/2009 at 22:46 castle says:

    Though I honestly doubt that a majority of players are having this sort of problem, there are some things Bioware could have done better here. What stands out to me the most is this: not only are you denied access to a healing mage until well into the game (and if you take Jim’s route, more than halfway), you are given no inkling that you’ll have access to one at all. I’d imagine this leads many to send Morrigan in less-than-ideal directions. As far as I understand it, the basic best-bet party (not going into anything too advanced) is a crowd control mage, a healing mage, a rogue, and a tank. 3 of these things you are given more or less immediately; 1 you are not. It’s a baffling decision on the part of Bioware.

    That said, even though I spent some skill and ability points in less-than-ideal ways, I’ve still been playing on hard without much difficulty. Honestly, you don’t need perfectly-spec’ed characters so much as you need a few key abilities (minor spoilers ahead):
    - A warrior with taunt, high strength/con, and some shield abilities like Shield Wall
    - A rogue with some offensive abilities like dual wield and backstab-related stuff (probably not so essential, but good to have)
    - A mage with effective crowd control spells. Putting more points into Ice and Spirit (Force Field/Crushing Prison), which Morrigan is already started on, works well, but there’s other options.
    - A mage with healing spells, and preferably spirit healer specialization

    Honestly, if you work with the above 4 characters, they don’t have to be perfectly spec’ed at all. They just need a few specific abilities to get by–you certainly don’t need to plan it all out from the first level. Your tank will taunt enemies to him and absorb damage, and can be buffed/healed by your healer. Your mage will control large groups. And your rogue will dish out the damage. Of course, if you’re trying to play with a different setup, such as using only a single mage, leveling well becomes much more important.

    The real problem, as I said, is that you don’t get the final piece of the puzzle until you’re well into the game. Before I found Wynne I was scraping by on hard, draining potions and trying battles over and over. After adding her (luckily for me pretty early), I’ve had little problem.

    What would be the best answer to this on Bioware’s part? Funneling players to the Circle/Wynne somehow? It’s too bad they couldn’t have engineered the plot in such a way as to place her in your party sooner.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:02 Wisq says:

      It’s also very unfortunate that the basic effective party requires these four roles, but that your party is also limited to four including the main character. If your character doesn’t fit any of those roles (e.g. a non-tanking DPS warrior), you’re deadweight in your own party. And even if your main character covers one of the roles, you’re stuck either avoiding a certain NPC party member (and all the fun of having them along) or nerfing the party as a whole. Frankly, I miss the days of the six-character parties back in the Baldur’s Gate series.

      But on that note, why does there even need to be a specific limit? Sure, it made sense back in the BG days, when there were exactly six slots along the side of the screen for the six party members. But it’s not like there’s ever been a good in-game justification for why you can’t run a small army, provided you can find the people to recruit.

      Besides, there’s still a limited number of NPCs in the game, after all. Wouldn’t it be much more natural to impose a “soft” rather than “hard” limit by having certain people refuse to work together for in-game, in-character reasons? You could achieve the same effect without breaking the immersion.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:09 Taillefer says:

      It tries to send you to The Circle as part of the Redcliffe quest. Although, I didn’t use that option. The Circle was the last thing I did before the Urn and Denerim instead. I went to the Dalish first (not something I recommend, irk).

  49. 23/11/2009 at 22:49 Spacegirl says:

    I have stopped playing DAO because I am getting crushed by two bugs. Massive graphical artifacting and crashing (happens basically every 45 mins and generally requires a computer restart to fix) and the Crazy Shale Bug. I want to use Shale in my party but don’t want some1 in my party where after a giant hard fight, i accidently click on them when trying to loot and it effectively crashes the game.

    However, I played a fair bit of the game before I stopped and definitely felt some crazy spikey difficulty. Archery was a massive (imo) bust on Leliana and I didn’t go to the place where you get a Healer early, so my party of Me (2-Handed Warrior), Alistair (Sword and Board), Leliana (Archery) and Morrigan (Jack of all Trades Mage) was just NOT very effective. I got Shale and the healer and things were looking up, but I just go too tired of the bugs and decided I’d play some of the other sweet games coming out around now and wait for some fixes to come in.

    What I am saying is I can totally understand the possibility of Crushing Difficulty due to Dumb Luck in regards to what kind of character you make, where you choose to go early on and where you choose to put some of your early points.

    I don’t think at all what Alec Meer did was bad. This game has screwy difficulty, it’s basically the #1 complaint about it I’ve seen (outside of these bugs that I have.) He changed a few small things and was able to enjoy the game much better!

    • 23/11/2009 at 22:59 Taillefer says:

      Hmm, my party was generally Sten (2-handed warrior), Morrigan, Leliana and myself (sword and board) and was effective enough to play through Hard (turned it to normal for two battles, though). I’m pretty sure I’d have had a much harder time if Morrigan had no cold spells though.

  50. 23/11/2009 at 22:53 Taillefer says:

    How long does it take to realise you made a bad decision? You can completely turn a mage character around in a few levels. Maybe you could have gone to a different area to level up (and read what the spells do)?

    I’ve come to the conclusion that using the tactics is weakening people overall, especially if friendly fire is a problem. Blizzard was possibly my most used spell in the game (along with cone of cold), although that’s down to the cheap tactic of casting it through a wall, or from a large distance away, into a room full of enemies before they even know I’m there. If you’re casting an area of effect spell into combat where your own people are… that’s generally a bad tactic, surprisingly.

    Anyway, your reputation is soiled! I shall now assume you cheat in everything you ever do, ever, for the rest of your life, ever.

  51. 23/11/2009 at 22:55 Ginger Yellow says:

    Normally I’d consider a modded free respec option cheating, but frankly I think it’s completely reasonable in DA:O. The spell/talent descriptions are completely useless and things just don’t do what you’d expect them to in a D&D based game. I’ve made a few missteps with my mage, but not enough for me to actually respec (yet, anyway). I’d have no compunction doing so if I hit a wall, though, and the mod was shown to be bug-free.

    Also, as stated above, you’ll probably want to pick up Winter’s Grasp again. It’s a great spell, even for a healer.

  52. 23/11/2009 at 22:57 TeeJay says:

    Dragon Age for me = 6 days of trying and still no reply from EA/Bioware support… :(

    Install fails with “Error … Line 1, Column 40 in inter XML settings”

    Any help and advice greatly appreciated

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:59 mootpoint says:

      I would normally never say such a thing, but considering you’ve paid for it already: *cough* torrent *cough*. Just ’til you get your support of course.
      edit:similar. Didn’t read through it all, but try this otherwise ;)

  53. 23/11/2009 at 23:11 1stGear says:

    More than a respec option, I want to feel like I’m not missing content by leaving party members behind. I’ve never understood this obsession with having a HUGE MULTI-TALENTED ELEVEN-MAN BAND that you can then only take three members of. Congratulations, you are now missing out on quests and dialogue because you can’t bring everyone along.

    I would prefer if the only companions I got were Alistair, Morrigan, and Leliana. And the Dog, solely because he’s adowable.

  54. 23/11/2009 at 23:11 Dan says:

    I can imagine the problems people are having, there’s little or no info in the game on how spells/talents actually work in detail. And I agree with whoever said Wynne should turn up earlier – I just wish she wasn’t someone’s quite pleasant, slightly pious and very dull gran.

    And, yeah, I got lucky. Without doing any research I randomly chose to be a mage, have put all my skill points into primal spells except for one on the first heal spell and haven’t really had much trouble on normal difficulty, even before wynne. I don’t really use her now cos she’s so bleh.

  55. 23/11/2009 at 23:21 EyeMessiah says:

    I used the in-game Raven mod, and have respecced my character and all my party members. The raven only allows you to respend all your points and skill picks, so imo its not that abominable. That said, ironing out the inefficiencies that the NPC party members come built-in to the NPCs does give you something of a leg up.

    I also installed the mod which gives every party member 25 tactics slots. I really enjoy scripting the NPCs so this was a no brainer for me, but again its skill points spent on other things that I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise, so something of a leg-up there to.

    There was an easy solution to all this subtle buffing though. Its called Nightmare mode. With the above mods @ Nightmare difficulty I’m having more fun that I was when I was playing on Normal, so imo it all amounts to some fairly positive cheating.

  56. 23/11/2009 at 23:26 Lilliput King says:

    @1stGear: Adds replay value to have alternative companions, I suppose.

    But in general I agree. Wish you could just pick your companions and leave the rest out of the whole damn adventure, ala the BG series. Feels like a cop-out when they tell you it’s been an honour fighting with you despite never leaving the camp.

    Also about Wynne, I used her for about 10 minutes before I got sick of being talked down to and put her back in the box.

  57. 23/11/2009 at 23:31 Dan says:

    I just had another thought.

    Man buys bog-standard Ford Focus.
    Man’s friend offers him free turbocharged Bugatti engine which somehow will fit inside his Ford.
    Man accepts, installs engine, and enjoys car more.
    No-one is hurt, unless man then enters Ford Focus races.

  58. 23/11/2009 at 23:31 Coded One says:

    EVERY game needs a respec option. Maybe there are a few that use the lack of one as a gameplay mechanic, but I have never encountered a game that could have been made worse with a built in respec option.

  59. 23/11/2009 at 23:37 Dave says:

    I know it’s a different sort of game, but one of the things I deeply appreciate about Borderlands is the cheap respeccing.

    They could have easily gotten fake replay value out of not allowing respeccing at all; it would have been the Diabloesque thing to do. But I’m very glad I didn’t have to play another character to level 25 to find out that, for instance, Trespass is only worthwhile in the Eridian Promontory, and another character to level 25 to find out that I don’t really like the Phoenix build as much as a more defensive Merc style.

    I like playing the game, but I don’t particularly enjoy replaying the first few levels where all the weapons that aren’t pistols completely suck and you don’t have an action skill and you have to sit through Claptrap explaining how the New-U works.

  60. 23/11/2009 at 23:39 Pidesco says:

    Goddammit, how can hardcore gamers suck at playing games so much? As long as you don’t rely on the AI too much (meaning as long as you play the game, instead of letting it play itself for you) DA is a piece of piss, at least on normal.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:43 Alec Meer says:

      It’s interesting/depressing how many people, including Laughing Boy above, are totally missing the enormous distinction between ‘too hard’ and ‘not having enough fun’. Snobbery is blinding, I guess.

    • 23/11/2009 at 23:59 Alexander Norris says:

      It’s a piece of piss on Hard, too.

      However, what does the fact that it is or isn’t a piece of piss have to do with the fact that the combat system doesn’t give you the details it needs to give you for you to make fully-informed decisions? This is like asking people to build D&D characters without access to the books, and then punishing them for having failed to build adequate characters without access to the books. It’s very simply bad design, especially when you’ve built a system from the ground up for a video game (where the number of pages and quantity of ink used is not an obstacle to how much information you have the space to give to the player).

    • 24/11/2009 at 00:06 Pidesco says:

      “Laughing Boy”? Huh, actually, that whole reply flew right over my head.

      Anyway, to clarify my previous comment, I’m saying the game is just plain easy, with nary a chance to die at any point in the game, regardless of character builds, as long as you pay attention to the combat and control the whole party instead of letting the AI do the work. This allows a player to not waste valuable points on the tactics skill thingy and makes the action abit more fun and engaging than just watching the combat unfold. In any case, my comment wasn’t a jab at you directly, but rather at the amount of, apparently hardcore gamers who seem to find DA impossibly hard.

      Also, regarding the game not being fun enough, I’d say the biggest problem DA has, as far as fun factor goes, is that the game’s rules system is fairly limited allowing for few choices, and eventually ensuring that the battles turn into a repetitive, mindless chore.

    • 24/11/2009 at 00:58 Manley Pointer says:

      I guess I am in the snobs camp here, but pidesco is just trolling. “Nary a chance to die”? On their first playthrough, any normal player will die plenty. Maybe if you do advanced frame-by-frame spacebar mashing it will seem too easy. I guess that would also explain why you found the fights tedious

    • 24/11/2009 at 01:01 Alec Meer says:

      Yeah, his experience doesn’t match that of anyone else I’ve spoken to about the game.

    • 24/11/2009 at 01:08 Psychopomp says:

      He probably used two mages, actually. It makes the game laughably easy.

    • 24/11/2009 at 01:13 Pidesco says:

      Oh, c’mon. I’m not trolling. I just played the game like I used to play Infinity engine games. It’s roughly the same combat experience with less characters and options to worry about. And I only pause the combat if I need to give new orders to three or four characters at the same time.

      I really can’t believe anyone who played and finished Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale, for example, can have trouble with Dragon Age.

    • 24/11/2009 at 02:02 Manley Pointer says:

      I still think there are some fights — the guy who drops Spellweaver, Gaxkang, and a spoilery late fight against a certain Ser — that should be a challenge, even if you’re good. Maybe super internet RPGers breeze through them with ease, but for me they took some effort.

      There’s enormous variation between the setups of people who know what they’re doing and those of people just getting acquainted with the game, though. I actually feel that Dragon Age is pretty well balanced: I didn’t get impossibly screwed over despite some missteps, but most of the time it didn’t seem too easy either. Second playthrough I went Arcane Warrior/Blood Mage and am rolling everything…but that’s what they get for not providing a New Game +, the bastards.

      You’re right though, Infinity Engine games were way harder.

    • 24/11/2009 at 02:16 Saul says:

      It’s HARD. And yes, I finished both Baldur’s Gate games. Also, mashing space bar every three seconds is not my idea of fun. I switched to Easy pretty early on, turned tactics back on, and never looked back. And there’s still too many combats and they still take too long.

    • 24/11/2009 at 09:44 Alexander Norris says:

      Gaxxkang is a not-at-all-veiled reference to Kangaxx and is essentially the WRPG equivalent of the JRPG bonus dungeon, i.e. an encounter designed to take a lot of practice to beat. Ser Sheshan’tbenamed is also designed to be an exceedingly hard fight for reasons you no doubt know about now.

      Anyway, I agree with Pidesco; the game is really, really easy. I’m not calling anyone rubbish at video games or anything, but it was much, much easier than any of the IE games. You don’t need two mages to make the game trivial; you need a tank with Taunt and the full Mind Blast tree. Crushing Prison on whatever elite’s running around, then Forcefield on your tank after he’s taunted. You win.

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:05 Psychopomp says:

      Fortunately, someones working on a mod that nerfs mages into reasonable levels.

      Unfortunately this mod both halves the effectiveness of magical healing, but also removes poultices and potions altogether. Yeah, good luck beating the first 5 hours of the game with that, buddy.

  61. 23/11/2009 at 23:50 JKjoker says:

    you cant cheat in a single player game, you are not competing with anyone (unless you consider achievements a competition but then you are kind of … errr.. “strange”) who are you going to cheat ? yourself ?

    if you want it, if you need it, if it improves your fun, just do it

    i restarted the game a LOT of times for respecing until i just gave up making a mage and went with a rogue, descriptions are useless, skills are unbalanced (even worse, some spells look very useful like fireball and other attack spells but then you find out they are useless an hour later)

    when i finally gave up and made my rogue i went to look for mods first (at the time the respec mod was very bugged so i avoided it), instead i got :
    -storage chest in camp (it should have been there in the actual game)
    -pickpocket cooloff down to 1.5 seconds (whats the point of standing around for 10 seconds, jeez)
    -the dexterity fixes (this makes daggers and bows pretty good, it works against you tho but i havent found myself in too much trouble just dont ignore archers)
    -and the maxtactics (all party members have 25 tactic slots), wtf decided to tie this thing to level and skill ? mages need like 15 to set up their skills, of course i tried to set up a carefully thought script for the shapeshifting Morrigan but the tactics seem to be bugged, they dont always work, some seem to cancel each other out

    these made the game a lot more fun, now i just need a mod that causes summoned creatures to use their damn skills by themselves (why cant i give them tactics too ?) and respec Morrigan

  62. 23/11/2009 at 23:53 Boldoran says:

    While Bioware should finetune the spell system in the future, having heal as a tier 1 spell is a pretty good decision. I am playing on normal and I do not have the group heal spell yet but I don’t think it is needed.
    Also Area of Effect spells such as Inferno are a bit harder to use but they do bring on the pain on targets that you manage to trap in them (Fireball, Inferno + Earthquake worked pretty good so far).

    But I agree that it is not obvious which spells will work well with a given setup. Also the balancing of the spells is somewhat wonky in places imho. For example the Manaburn spell seems to have almost no effect while the Manaclash spell pretty much oneshots enemy casters.

    Oh and on the topic of quick traveling:
    It is often possible to quicktravel to areas that you have already cleared. Hit m and then go to the worldmap (button at the bottom center of the map) From there you can quicktravel.

  63. 23/11/2009 at 23:54 Orange says:

    Survival is moderately useful for telling which rooms have enemies and how many. Although I’ve played so many rpgs over the years that any doorway or innocent looking item is treated with the utmost suspicion and paranoia, so I didn’t need it.

    You shouldn’t need to respec to have fun. Just rejig your party composition or tactics. If you’re getting people hit by aoe then cast it earlier and use hold position, or train enemies into it from your taunting tank.

  64. 24/11/2009 at 00:16 Spacegirl says:

    I think a game like this could use One Single Respec at some point into the game

    It’s like how I always felt every1 in WoW should get a free respec around 30 or 40. Just somewere midway through a game it be nice to be able to change a few things.

    In DA:O, it wouldn’t need to even allow a FULL respec. Just a few points you can change on each of your characters would make a HUGE difference.

    DA:O has a strong combat system and a pretty strong leveling / class system (If Warrior and Rogue were each as complex as Mage it would be amazing, as it stands it is simply “strong.”) However, it’s an entirely new system that is sort of a combo of D&D-style and WoW-style systems and it is a Not-Easy Game. This Not-Easyness combined with the game telling you basically NOTHING about your abilities or anything can create really imbalanced situations through little real fault of the player.

    • 24/11/2009 at 00:44 Psychopomp says:

      Thing is, though, 99% of the spells are cockblasting powerful anyway, and the ones that aren’t are still useful. I’m convinced you could go through Dragon Age by only putting a single point into each tier of abilities, taunt aside. Alecs problem was the lack of healing, not a bad build.

  65. 24/11/2009 at 00:39 Psychopomp says:

    I like 4E system of respeccing. Every level, you can swap out a single feat or power.

  66. 24/11/2009 at 00:43 Manley Pointer says:

    WTF Meds, playing on Hard and complaining about elitist pricks :D Also, curious how Mass Effect screwed you over, did you use a snipar build or something?

    I feel like there’s been a lot of moaning about how hard this game is, when it is not really that tough on normal. KOTOR and Mass Effect seem like the only games Bioware has ever made that were easier overall or less “obscure” when it came to level-up decisions. (And Dragon Age is supposed to be a return to the Infinity Engine games, which are generally more challenging than it is.) Some of Dragon Age’s boss fights are tough, but bosses by definition are difficulty spikes. Also, it seems like it would be hard to fuck yourself over as hard as you could in other scaling RPGs like Oblivion, where leveling up too fast could lead to you getting raped by bears over and over.

    I went through my first playthrough as a rogue, I had a stupid build, played on normal, and I let the game autolevel my party members (which is a bad idea, esp. for Morrigan). There were plenty of deaths, but the hardest fights were so satisfying to win — felt a sense of achievement I rarely get in a single player game.

    As long as one recalls ancient CRPG wisdom fights are not very difficult. If you’re facing a lot of enemies, always let them come to you rather than running to them. If they have archers or mages, run your party out of the room and around a corner — hostile ranged will either have to run in close, or stand around doing nothing as you AOE them to death.

    No matter how hard anyone screws up their build, there are a couple of spells you can grab that should make any fight winnable: Force Field and Cone of Cold. Force Field lets you lock out the toughest enemy from the fight for a long time (or make your tank invulnerable); I didn’t know about this until the end of my first playthrough, but it’s great. And Cone of Cold stuns almost everything almost every time.

    If anyone feels like going back to Baldur’s Gate, or any Infinity Engine game you’ve never played, and start without reading up on builds or getting advice, you will enter a world of pain. Even with an optimized build you will die more times per encounter playing Baldur’s Gate than playing Dragon Age without a clue. And then you will cry bitter baby tears.

  67. 24/11/2009 at 01:23 Derek K. says:

    The Raven mod is excellent. I’ve used it several times. I tried out Arcane Warrior, didn’t really enjoy it, respecc’ed, tried the fireball + grease combo (AWESOME), and then found my spec.

    I see nothing wrong with it at all. If the wiki were better developed, or the descriptions were more involved, or the forums had more build info, you might feel bad. But you’re on the frontier. Just respec and move on. ;)

  68. 24/11/2009 at 01:28 HopperUK says:

    I honestly cannot fathom the mentality that cares whether or not somebody else cheats in a single-player game. Personally I’m terrible at most games, and I’m loving Dragon Age on ‘easy’. And this is only 80% because I’m in love with Alistair.

  69. 24/11/2009 at 01:46 Kieron Gillen says:

    I admit, I was annoyed I wasted one of my first level on tactics on my main character. I thought it was a leadership skill rather than an automatic-response thing, as that’s the sort of thing they’ll call it in other RPGs.

    (I’m also not entirely convinced that having extra tactic slots cost a level is at all interesting. Surely you want people who like to play with the system to play with the system? But the people who most like playing with stuff like that aren’t goint to weaken their characters just to get it. The option to minimise microtasking doesn’t strike me as much fun as – say – a new fireball ability or whatever)

    KG

    • 24/11/2009 at 03:36 Psychopomp says:

      Even worse, it’s not a level. You only get a new feat (or whatever they call it) every three or four levels. I went into the game knowing about the tactics so I didn’t get thrown off, but I was part of the minority, that’s followed every little gameplay detail Bioware’s let out since the announcement of the game. I can imagine many people spending that point, thinking it did something useful.

    • 24/11/2009 at 09:50 Alexander Norris says:

      Skill point, and it’s one every 2/3/4 levels depending on whether you’re a Rogue/Warrior/Mage. It’s a terrible system, and is why I wouldn’t really consider installing the 25-tactics-slot mod cheating. If you’d rather automate (knowing that Tactics lacks something as basic as IF/AND/OR and so requires two or three tactics for e.g. Heal or Group Heal), use the 25-tactics-slot mod and the Extra Tactics one (which puts some very useful conditions that BioWare removed for some unknown reason back into the game, such as “X allies at 50% health” or “Y ally dead”).

    • 24/11/2009 at 09:55 Psychopomp says:

      I’d assume they left things like that out, because some very unreasonable people attack FFXII on the basis that a flawless set of gambits lets you automate the game.

    • 24/11/2009 at 10:26 Alexander Norris says:

      Tactics is essentially a concession to people who never played the Infinity Engine games. I have no problem with making concessions to those people; I do have a problem with half-assed concessions to anyone. You either provide the option to automate the game in a meaningful way, or you provide a better basic AI and force people to micromanage everything. “Somewhere in the middle” doesn’t make much sense.

    • 24/11/2009 at 10:29 Psychopomp says:

      It seems to me like it’s the natural progression from the prebuilt scripts Bioware used in everything from Baldur’s Gate to KoTOR.

    • 24/11/2009 at 10:50 Alexander Norris says:

      It is. The problem is that it’s a bit like the natural progression gave up half-way on its way to the next step, and this half-way state is actually worse than what we had before.

      BGII provided comprehensive tools for building your own scripts – by editing a text file. Either stick to pre-built scripts that work and give full-control via an incredibly obscure feature, or give the user full control ingame. Obviously, the latter is preferable; the problem is that Dragon Age doesn’t give you much control at all and makes the basic scripts do little more than “will/won’t pursue enemies.”

      The Tactics system should really have had IF/AND/OR, and the number of slots you get should have been based on what difficulty you play at rather than increasing as you get better.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:51 JKjoker says:

      while i would hate a game that plays itself like say Dungeon Siege, i love being able to automate it telling it exactly what i want it to do, it is a very different thing, i usually set up my guys to support my controlled character and concentrate on micromanaging him, when i saw the tactics options i though they were awesome (that was until i saw how you were supposed to get more slots)

      however they dont seem to work that well, the game would ignore some lines i set up, like when i told Morrigan to turn into a spider when out of mana and turn back after mana recharges 50% including 2 lines for using her 2 spider abilities, she would turn into a spider just fine but she would not use her abilities and most of the time would not turn back into morrigan without me telling her

      telling a character to use bows for medium/long range and melee for close range doesnt seem to work that well either

      also i set up my mage to use fireball when enemies are clustered but ive never seen her do it, and so on, ive seen some ppl saying similar things in the bioware forums

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:01 Psychopomp says:

      “most of the time would not turn back into morrigan without me telling her”

      You probably need give that bit higher priority.
      Should probably look like

      1:Use Least Powerful Health Potion: Health >30%
      2:Transform into spider:Mana >10%
      3:Transform into human: Mana <50%
      (Everything else)
      If it already look like that, then report the bug, something's not working as designed.

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:42 Psychopomp says:

      After looking into it, it appears that guy discontinued his mod, and someone else took up the torch

      http://social.bioware.com/project/667/

      MUCH BETTER

    • 24/11/2009 at 14:34 JKjoker says:

      there are a few reports about the tactics already, so shrug, i already played with the priorities but changes nothing (i use 50% tho your tactics wouldnt work like that) anyway i decided to respec morrigan out of the shapeshifter thingy (those 4 shapes are too underwhelming, maybe later ill try the mod that changes them into golem drake and demons), story consistency be damned

    • 24/11/2009 at 14:37 JKjoker says:

      ack, html killed the less than, higher than symbols, i meant to say i use less than 10%, higher than 50%, the other way around will not work

  70. 24/11/2009 at 01:49 Snidesworth says:

    Not so much respecing, but I downloaded a mod for my 2nd playthrough that prevents NPCs from auto-leveling when they join your group, allowing you to allocate stats, skills and abilities as you see fit. This was mainly brought on by a certain rogue showing up later in the game with no lockpicking skills, rendering him completely useless.

    It allowed me to cheat like a bastard at Ostegar, though. An archery specced tower guard turned what was a punishing battle before into a cakewalk.

  71. 24/11/2009 at 02:16 Taillefer says:

    Hmm. Interesting reading about the importance people place on taunt, as I never used it.

  72. 24/11/2009 at 02:51 Tony says:

    It turns out you can redistribute Attribute points on level up without a mod (at time of writing). Spend 3 points in the attribute you wish to decrease, press reset, now subtract 3 points from that same stat. Now you have your 3 level up points plus the 3 points you pulled out of the stat.

  73. 24/11/2009 at 03:19 dadioflex says:

    I bought DA, Torchlight and Borderlands all around the same time. I still play TL and BL.

    With DA I got to the bridge with the bandits that were shaking down refugees and just don’t want to go back. It’s boring me to tears. The prospect of running around camp to talk to everyone I need to to advance the plot may as well be the fly catching section from the Karate Kid game. I am prepared to click endlessly, but do I need to actually look at the screen while I’m doing it?

    I did like the build up to the battle but then they spoilt the story with that nonsense with the woman soldier abandoning her leader.

    Um spoilers ahoy, but:

    The bit where the scared guy gets killed for pulling his sword out (despite me pulling all his arms and armour into the community backpack because I knew it was coming, because it crashed the first time I played through it) was lame. You don’t kill someone like that for no reason. Even if he wasn’t warden material, he’s still a competent soldier.

    The bit with the healer and her bratty “daughter”? Painful. Let’s create a new RPG franchise and populate it with cast rejects from One tree Hill…

    I played and replayed the old Infinity engine games on Normal and never had much of a problem with them. The NWNs were tough but doable. NWN2 and expansions I found to be completely unplayable. I had to cheat my ass off to get anywhere in those games. Did not enjoy them much.

  74. 24/11/2009 at 03:24 malkav11 says:

    I don’t think respeccing, mod or otherwise, is cheating unless you are a) flagrantly breaking the rules of the game (i.e., pulling points from the start of a tree without turning off other skills in that tree), or b) respeccing every few fights to maximize your power against a given scenario.

    I’m not convinced that there are many, if any, useless spells/talents, (although skills definitely have some issues), but if the spells/talents you’ve picked don’t fit your playing style after all, fair enough.

  75. 24/11/2009 at 05:56 Stompbox says:

    I have found healers to be entirely unnecessary and a waste of an offensive mage slot; potions are absurdly good and easy to produce. Admittedly I specialised my mage in stuns and paralysis effects (everyone should take forcefield, it is just brokenly good) so I generally don’t require much in the way of healing but even on the harder fights like Gaxxkang where CC isn’t useful I only ended up using maybe 6 health poultices.

  76. 24/11/2009 at 06:18 kitchendon says:

    I met up with Leliana, but haven’t added her to my party often.

    I’ve never met or seen this Dog that everyone mentions, though. Guess I’ll look for him on my 2nd playthrough.

  77. 24/11/2009 at 07:25 catmorbid says:

    Meh, what really bugs me is how the game feels more like mission-based fantasy action slasher rather than an rpg. I mean, sure, the parts where you’re not to hack’n'slash your way through are fine – more than fine even – but whenever you stumble upon some opposition, you notice it’s always scaled to your level and instead of adding to the immersion of the world you find every fight (except for the random encounters) more or less the same. Boring.

  78. 24/11/2009 at 08:58 Rinox says:

    Whatever your feelings are on the respeccing thing (I don’t really feel it’s necessary, but it’s your party, game and life), I AM a little susprised at the lack of enthusiasm for the game in general. Because for my part, I loved it, and I felt it left all fantasy RPG’s of the last 10 years in the dust with ease. “Fantasy” because KotOR is a tough call. ;-)

    I won’t say it’s perfect – the tactics thing that Kieron pointed out etc. – but it has an undeniable charm and lure, and once you get into the endgame you only fully start realizing what a massive achievement Dragon Age really is. The more so when you talk to friends about their game and hear about things they did and why they did it, often corresponding with their origin. For example as a dwarven commoner I had some ‘personal’ reasons to make some choices in Orzimmar which I may not have done were I an outsider, which my friend had no clue about. But the events of the other origins still took place. Same for my friend’s origin as a City Elf which didn’t directly impact my game but did have consequences for the Alienage. Etc.

    It offered me choices, tough choices (also because I couldn’t talk my way out of it as a bonehead dwarf) and I had to make some rather…pragmatic decisions with far-reaching personal consequences. It made me rethink tactics in some tough battles. It made me like most of my NPC’s thanks to good writing (Morrigan’s romance is very well done even if it seems a but juvenile at first) and it made me actually somewhat emotional at the end with the final ‘what happened to’ texts.

    All I ask for in a game really. /end praiserant

  79. 24/11/2009 at 09:11 Serenegoose says:

    The ability to respec seems a fundamental ‘need’ for the RPG genre to adopt. RPGs are big games. Huger than your average bear. They’re also very reliant on factors that go beyond twitch skill, which can pull you through an encounter in most other genres. If you have a character you’ve poured 20+ hours in, and you reach a brick wall of ‘no further progress’ then unless you find that fun, the game has failed. Because its objective, in purest form, is fun. it’s not there to be tough, unless you find being tough fun. Nobody writes a book in which the pages can only be turned if you successfully navigate increasingly difficult riddles. Movies don’t freeze 30 minutes before the climax unless you can successfully assist the protaganist in dewiring the nuclear bomb. The answer is choice. If someone just wants to play a game to get caught up in a story, delve through the dialogue, and enjoy the combat, LET THEM! To decree that people aren’t good enough to deserve the ending is absolutely stupid. If you don’t want to respec, don’t. Don’t stop others from having the choice.

    • 24/11/2009 at 09:53 Rinox says:

      I don’t know. I know it’s ridiculous to expect realism from a fantasy or sci-fi RPG, but: seeing as they often (read: always) involve a quest towards maturement/fulfillment/revenge/whatever I find that one of the points of playing RPG’s is creating a character along the way with his or her strengths and weaknesses.

      It just wouldn’t make sense in my head if you could suddenly change around the skills and talents which you built and gained during your epic quest towards whatever. People don’t just wake up and go ‘oh I want to be a bowmaster today instead of a two-handed sword fighter’. It takes all personality away from a character. They are what they are because the road they travelled to get there.

      Besides, if you manage to fuck up your character’s skills so bad that you can’t finished a game that’s just bad game design, plain and simple. Respeccing is a MMORPG byproduct and concession to players so they don’t have to pimp out 4-5 different warrior characters to level 80. It has no place in a singleplayer RPG, except maybe some of your party members’ starting skills. Then again, some skills you get at first are just essential to the character. My dwarven commoner had a rank in stealing, coming from a mafia-ish background. Did I use it, being a warrior? No. Did it make sense? Absolutely.

      Besides, there’s no way you can fuck up so bad that you can’t decently play and finish DA on normal, let alone easy. I killed Wynn at the Circle of the Magi Tower and never had Morrigan cast a healing spell and was a warrior myself. Perfectly doable with just healing potions, even on hard.

    • 24/11/2009 at 11:00 Alexander Norris says:

      It has a place when the system is badly telegraphed.

      It’s a gamist RPG; the system needs to make it 100% clear what you’re doing with your character in terms of the combat system, especially if the game is going to make combat an obstacle to you seeing the plot. That the system in DA does not keep you fully informed is a mistake, which a respec mod fixes.

      I doubt Alec Meer is talking about respecialising before every fight (but I obviously don’t know for sure) – he’s talking about correcting mistakes that you wouldn’t have made in the first place had the system done its job and informed you of the consequences of your mechanical choices. It doesn’t, so respecialising is justified. It’s not a question of “oh, I feel like being an archer rather than a swordsman today;” it’s a question of “I, the epic hero, should be better at what I do and so we’re going to retcon my player’s poor mechanical choices and make me into what I would be – a paragon of competence – had my player been given the information he needed by this game.”

      Although again, I don’t know why you couldn’t simply make an RPG where respecs are a basic mechanic and you’re expected to change your build every fight. It’d obviously need an in-setting justification, such as “you’re play a doppelgänger” but it would likely be mechanically interesting.

    • 24/11/2009 at 11:11 Rinox says:

      Oh I definitely agree with your last paragraph – that could be very cool if well-done. Deus Ex already did a good job at it, but that’s been a while. Guild Wars was excellent at it too, even if it was an MMORPG.

      As for the rest what you said: fair enough. I don’t Alec meant to change setup for every fight either. You’re right to say Dragon Age isn’t always informative about the consequences, and that isn’t the player’s fault. I suppose it’s a mix of below-par design and the new system (D&D was relatively familiar to most of us I think).

      And I can see why anyone would want to ‘reclaim’ a skill or slot that’s gone wasted, especially a tactics slot for your main which is pointless when you micromanage. It’s just that..where’s the line? We might not respec for every fight, but do we really need to build this Übermensch for a main with all the ‘optimal’ skill choices to enjoy the game? But I guess, if it makes you enjoy the game more, then it’s all moot and I should just stfu. ;-)

    • 24/11/2009 at 11:48 Alexander Norris says:

      D&D was relatively familiar to most of us I think

      Which is why their new system not divulging everything to the player is even more of a design crime. With D&D-based systems, they at least had the excuse that we were all familiar with the system to one degree or another; but this is an entirely new, custom-built system. :)

    • 24/11/2009 at 11:53 Rinox says:

      Incidentally, what did you think of the new system as such?

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:09 Alexander Norris says:

      It’s far from bad, although a little too simplistic for my liking. I think its biggest flaw is that it allows little room for additional classes beyond the three base ones and that the specialisations don’t really differentiate your character that much; they’re just talents you use in addition to the core set, rather than talents that replace the core set or make it into something different.

      Other than that, all three classes have well-delineated roles and neither of them makes the others obsolete. The only exception is the Arcane Warrior specialisation, which not only changes your Mage’s role from support to tank but also makes you a better bag-o’-hitpoints than a proper tank due to the crazy resistances it gives you (and with a few AoE spells, the loss of taunt is hardly an issue).

      The fact that Mages are really very useful doesn’t seem to have much to do with the system itself, but with the way the encounters were created and balanced – rather than pitting you against a small number of skilled opponents, you often face hordes of inferior enemies whose damage, when added together, can very quickly overwhelm you; hence the over-reliance on crowd-control that makes Mages so very handy.

      I also didn’t like the differences between types of weapons. Longswords essentially render maces and axes completely irrelevant by having better damage, a better crit rate and a faster attack speed; the other two types would really benefit from a straight-up buff.

      As it is, I feel maces are the closest to being a reasonable alternative, as the increased armour penetration means they do more damage than longswords to heavier-armoured targets, but they need the same crit-rate as longswords to compare.

      Axes need a straight up damage buff; they have inferior armour penetration, swing speed and crit rate to longswords. Increasing the Strength multiplier while putting the armour penetration and damage on par with longswords, all this at the cost of their crit rate, seems like it would be a net improvement in balance.

      I haven’t really played around much with two-handers, but I imagine they suffer from the same problem of swords being the default superior option. Armour and shields seemed fairly balanced. Bows are useless without the Dexterity hotfix, but once you have it installed, shortbows and longbows are evenly matched given different builds that take advantage of their stats. Crossbows seem a little weak owing to their slow speed of fire.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:32 Rinox says:

      Good points. In my experience the difference isn’t so big on two-handed weapons, simply because mauls have insane armor penetration (around 15% or so iirc). That alone makes up for their relative lack of damage.

      I personally found the warrior and rogue (when fixed) skilltrees to be very nice and fluid. The mages, however, could have done with some more streamlining. I don’t think it’ll mess up your game if you pay at least some attention, but their skills can be a little overwhelming in their diversity (while warriors and rogues tend to be pretty straightforward).

  80. 24/11/2009 at 09:33 Rodafowa says:

    I missed out on the dog because I accidentally stumbled into the next cutscene and didn’t get the chance to go back for him. :(

    Spell Combo Of Awesomeness: Cone Of Cold + Stonefist. For a long while I was routinely carrying Morrigan and Wynne around (two mages, no waiting) just for that.

    • 24/11/2009 at 10:24 Stick says:

      Oh yeah. I had a lovely tactics setup for the freeze ‘n’ smash combo:

      IF Enemy: Immobilized, THEN use Stone Fist (or – for the non-wizardly – any weapon skill capable of forcing a crit). Winter’s Grasp on autocast (nearest enemy, whatnot), a bit of manual deployment of Cone of Cold and… BIFF! POW! KERSMASH! Even worked on Rank Oranges a few times.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:32 Taillefer says:

      You can shatter petrified enemies too. In case you miss one with the cone of cold, or something. I’m assuming petrification lasts longer than frozen… I wonder if earthquake can shatter…that would be something.

  81. 24/11/2009 at 10:42 Ash says:

    I have to side with the people that don’t understand why so many find this game so hard. I was playing IceWind Dale II for the first time on the week before Dragon Age came out (yes, I know, shame on me) and it was a lot harder, even with the benefit of me knowing the D&D rules like the back of my hand, and a fully customizable party.

    I only used Wynne for a section of the game, and it was just so I could try her out; Morrigan plus the first healing spell was more than enough for a full play trough, including all the dragons and revenants and Gaxxkang. And I do think that pausing often to micromanage is fun. That’s what the IE games were all about. If you play them in real-time you might as well go play Warcraft III, no?

    To the point, I do think a respect option would be nice, not really because of the main character – I like sticking with them, kinks and all – but becasue of the unbearable amount of crap abilities the NPCs come with. I wanted to used Zevran on my second playtrough, but I got him and now I’m sticking with Leliana until he goes up 4 levels so I can get his lockpicking to a decent tier. In a game were the major reason to have a rogue in your party is to open chests, it’s insane to give you a rogue NPC with no skill at all in that area a quarter into the game.

    Anyway, those are my two cents. I found DA a nice challenge on normal mode the first time around, and quite easier the second time around. Maybe on my third time I’ll go for hard mode, but I really don’t see much interest in hard modes that do nothing more than make the beasties harder to kill and the player easier to kill.

    • 24/11/2009 at 10:54 Alexander Norris says:

      Actually, the main reason to have a Rogue is damage.

      The chest loot tables are either bugged or deliberately shit, but they very, very seldom contain anything of interest or worth. You end up looting one blank vellum from locked chests regardless of your level or location.

    • 24/11/2009 at 11:45 Ash says:

      While rogues are the best DPS class, the difference is not as huge as in many other games. A DPS-oriented mage with infinite lyrium or a well-specced warrior will do just as well.

      Meanwhile, while most chests do not have anything special, the sum of what you find in all of them contributes a good deal of money to buy potions and good gear with. A rogue is a moneymaker first, dpser second.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:05 Carra says:

      I’m doing fine with Morrigan who has the four healing spells on normal difficulty. The games difficulty is just right for me. Maybe even too simple now that I’m doing the Mage Tower last.

      Having one rogue feels useful. She can open locks or disable traps. She’s also bringing nice DPS. And the ranger specialty is really useful, having an extra member really helps.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:06 Taillefer says:

      Hasted rogues are super-stabby.

  82. 24/11/2009 at 11:04 H says:

    At the end of the day, if it’s your game (as in, if you bought it) then you should play it however the hell you want. If you get more enjoyment tweaking your character to rectify bad decisions, crack on. Likewise if you want to whack God mode on, feel free. The only problem with the latter, as far as I can see, is God mode tends to damage your enjoyment somewhat. I’m tempted to start over as I’ve not got a healer either, but then I haven’t got any ranged damage specialists either; I went for a melee group and they’re pretty damned nasty.

    You do what you like, at the end of the day, as long as you’re enjoying it. If you stop enjoying it, you’ve done sommat wrong.

  83. 24/11/2009 at 11:49 Gassalasca says:

    I found the game on Normal too easy, with Wynn and Morrigan being absolutely indispensible. Mages are too powerful. <_<

  84. 24/11/2009 at 11:53 Whelp says:

    Having a healer in your party is not really neccessary in this game, at least not on normal difficulty IMHO.

    Also, I found that it’s really hard to make a mage completely useless, practically every spell is useful in some way; even taking all the (seemingly redundant) primal spells is useful; even if only for overcoming certain enemies’ resistances/exploiting weaknesses.

  85. 24/11/2009 at 11:54 Carra says:

    I’m also bothered with the fact that it’s impossible to get a healer.

    My group has tons of warriors. Me, Alistair, the grey giant, the stone golem and a dwarf. Plus some rogues who can DPS. And I had one mage which was best for DPS. So I had to let Morrigan learn the healing skills a few hours into the game to continue comfortably.

    Sure, I’ve now found a healer mage in, you’d never guess, the mage tower. But I’m already over fourty hours in the game. Adding a healer a lot earlier in the game would have been great. Maybe even create a fourth healer class which is there for buffing, healing and CC.

    As for respecs, I’m still quite happy with my characters. I picked up all the sword & shield spells for my main character which seems to be the way to do it. I did waste a point in that “get another tactic” skill. Still, there are no decent alternatives, the skills seem to be chosen poorly.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:01 Kieron Gillen says:

      Carra: It’s an odd choice, isn’t it? I mean, you can get her a lot earlier – I went to the Mage Tower second – but having a semi-essential character (at least, for people who are trying to approach the game as a trad RPG) – but it’s odd to make it possible to miss her for so long. I gave Morrigan a single heal before i met her, just as a minor measure.

      (Admitedly, it’s not that I was having trouble without Wynne – I was doing a lot of herbalism. It just felt strange)

      KG

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:12 Alexander Norris says:

      It’s a prickly issue. How much of game balance do you sacrifice to your setting?

      On the one hand, the game could definitely have benefited from losing a warrior and gaining a mage. On the other, the setting explicitly makes mages rather rare, hence your only having access to two.

      It’s very much a problem that every low-magic setting runs into, in my experience.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:26 Rinox says:

      Since none of you mentioned it: I don’t know if you realize/know this, but it’s entirely possible to kill Wynn before even knowing she can join you, right at the start of the Circle of Mages quest. I did. :-/

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:28 Ash says:

      At least they avoided the cliched “the good-natured healing girl saves you / you save her at the start of the game”.

      I maintain that a kleptomaniac tendency to pick everything up, combined with Morrigan’s herbalism, is enough to get you past almost anything the game throws at you. And being that the healing spell only requires one point in the spirit tree, it’s not only easy to get it with Morrigan, but common since if you are feeling even a little bit of difficulty.

      It’s not like you got a group heal / ressurection spell early on in any of the old Bioware games, either. A Druid/Priest in those games could heal a lot less than Morrigan does, and potions were few and far between, up until the higher levels. And on those games you had to run all the way back to town to get people back up after dying.

      I don’t want to sound all “you young kids have it too easy, back in my day…”, but it feels that the people that complain about it not being like the games of old don’t really remember properly how those games were.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:31 SanguineAngel says:

      I think that it’s actually a stroke of genius. Well not genius, but it’s cleverish.
      It’s bucks the traditional Fantasy RPG trend. I also happen to think that the spell, ability and weapon descriptions are likewise trying to do something different.
      In a genre that has previously been dominated by the idea of a traditional RPG party based combat – buffer, tank DPS etc. you have a selection of characters that doesn’t necessarily fit that traditional system. They are certainly familiar enough in that respect and it is possible to create that party, however it is also very easy to create a party for other purposes and NOT suffer a penalty. The healing focus in this game is very much on poultices. You have no need for a healer. Certainly you may be used to using one and so the system feels odd to you. But the game should not necessarily be criticised for this. In fact, the game has opened up several options for you in terms of healing.
      Regarding the descriptions, I have the feeling they were left purposely vague. Now, I will certainly jump in and say that the system is confusing and I often found myself unsure of what an ability or spell would do – which is sloppy. But they have very obviously been trying to steer clear of number crunching. Which I admire and like. The descriptions of spells and general character development felt a lot more organic to me, rather than the cold calculations needed in DnD.
      I think the devs kinda wanted their players to go “wow, fireballs sounds awsome, I want that.”
      So yeh, it could have been done better, and we are used to differing methods. But I like what they tried and I have actually not yet come across a single useless spell or ability. Depending on the enemies or the situation, I think I have used all spells and abilities to great effect at some point.
      Oh and as far as my ability with the game:
      Playing on hard I have found the core combats to be frequently a breeze but often challenging and never insurmountable. However, some of the optional enemies, such as revenants have destroyed me completely! Which I like.
      It has it’s flaws for sure but i love a LOT about this game.

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:39 Kieron Gillen says:

      SanguineAngel: I actually kinda agree – the problem is more that there’s that sort of magic healing there at all. Designing a game which doesn’t even include a healer would make people start playing the game in that way, rather than waiting for the mage or stuff.

      Also: Can anyone think of a healer character who isn’t just a very nice person? I mean, I’ve met a whole load of doctors. There’s as many as are like House as Miss Nice Nice.

      (House as a healer NPC, of course, would be genius)

      KG

    • 24/11/2009 at 12:57 Ash says:

      @KG: Off the top of my head, I remember Viconia in the BG series; “healer” might be stretching the term, ofc, because a cleric is a cleric and you just use the healing spells if you want to do so. But she was a “healing class”. Same with the cleric of Tempus you met in Naskel, and joined your party if you saved her from petrification. Can’t remember her name, but she was hardly “nice”.

      Now, want a better challenge? Find me a MALE healer. And most of the doctors I know IRL are male. :/

      Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t recall many characters in those RPGs introducing themselves like “Hi, I’m a healer”. Much like in Dragon Age, the option was there, but you took what you wanted from them. The difference being that it would be almost impossible to go trough those games without a healer, while in Dragon Age it’s more of a difficulty modifier than an essential.

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:34 SanguineAngel says:

      Kieron: Yeh I see what you mean. I mean, I really like the options that are available to me when I play the game. If I have a mage who can heal (Or I AM a mage who can heal) then I can rely on them. But if I don’t like them, they’re not in my party for whatever reason then I have more traditional means of healing.

      However, this does raise the balance question. Without a mage who heals, the poultices are essential, and a vital part of your player economy. You have to earn money and you have to spend money on vital supplies. If you do have a mage who heals then suddenly these poultices are no longer vital and you start stockpiling. And the money starts growing.

      I can see a couple of things the devs tried to do to combat this:

      1. The inventory layout means that having a massive stash of potions if you need them is not a big deal. Once you have a stackable item, it only takes one slot, no matter how many you have. However! If you don’t need them then all those potions take up valuable storage space, since storage is at a premium in the game. Quite clever. Works to some extent.

      2. Lyrium potions. The Poultice of the mage. Because mages require mana to cast spells and mana works just like a health bar, the idea is surely that mages qould require a steady supply of lyrium to survive and continue casting. This is actually, in my opinion, a very good move. Unfortunately it fails in execution because mages rarely need them in my experience. It’s easy to develop your character to have massive stores of mana, and it regenerates really quite quickly.

      I think that this is fine at the easier difficulties, however at higher difficulties, I’d have thought handicapping mages mana growth and regen would be a sensible idea. Meaning that lyrium would become vital and returning a sense of balance to the game, difficulty and economy.

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:56 Nick says:

      Anomen was a male healer =)

    • 24/11/2009 at 18:56 Carra says:

      It is possible to play the game without healing and just using potions. I just think that it would be quite a bit easier if I had a healer at the beginning. Either by starting as a healer mage myself or by doing the Mage Tower first. Picking your first of the four locations shouldn’t make the game harder.

      In retrospect things might have gone a lot easier if I used herbalism earlier on. I only figured out later that you can craft as many health or mana potions as your wallet allows. None the less, the game is a ton of fun on normal and never feels too hard.

      But I admit it, the main reason I miss a healer is because I wanted to create a classic tank, mage dps, rogue dps, healer group. And that’s impossible with only one mage.

  86. 24/11/2009 at 12:41 Rinox says:

    The Medic from TF2?

  87. 24/11/2009 at 13:02 Bronte says:

    On the fence.

    If there was an in-game respec, like in Borderlands, I’d use it all the time. But to actually tinker with the savegame data? I don’t know about that…

  88. 24/11/2009 at 13:35 mlaskus says:

    Two mages with cone of cold make every fight a breeze, it is also good if one of them is a dedicated healer like Wynn and the other should have at least the simple heal spell.

    Cone of cold freezes your enemies, it allows you to beat them up without worrying about getting hit back.
    I’m not sure if anything resists it freezing effect. I used it to good effect even on dragons.

    • 24/11/2009 at 13:54 Akhenaten says:

      Indeed…. Cone of cold is invaluable…especially when dealing with a large number of combatants. I find that the paralyze and slow runes are also nice additions to dual wielding characters. Now to deal with those stinking archers. LOL

  89. 24/11/2009 at 13:50 Akhenaten says:

    Very nice write-up on the pains of leveling “properly”. I found that, much to my own chagrin, since I have started taking a severe beating, financially due to purchasing health and physically due to poor spell selections, that I have been dropping the difficulty from normal to easy as a “fix”. After between 2 and 8 reloads a mind looks for an “adapt and overcome” strategy. I think I’d rather move along the respec lines than lose the piece of mind one gains from NOT playing on easy. I find, personally, that I am using Shale, Leilana, Morrigan and my Female Elf Warrior with a pension for dual wielding. Allistair is worth his weight, once you give him a decent weapon and shield, but otherwise he was only worth his MANY MANY deaths. : ) I think that I will be respeccing tomorrow morning when I can get back into the thick of it… It’ll be nice to leave the difficulty on normal…. cheating be damned, I need the piece of mind.

  90. 24/11/2009 at 15:53 latedave says:

    Haven’t played it yet but my flatmate seems to think its quite hard and he and I have played through BG1, 2, both Icewind Dales and the Neverwinters without too much of a problem. Incidently completely disagree with whoever said Oblivion was hard, as a mage it was stupidly easy, I only ever used three spells the whole game, heal, minor electric charge and then electric charge and I didn’t die throughout the whole thing, thats not a boast, just shows you the inbalance of systems in RPGs!

    • 24/11/2009 at 23:25 Manley Pointer says:

      I said Oblivion could be hard if you didn’t know what you were doing, because scaling monsters make the leveling system ridiculous. If you set all the skills you plan to use the most as your major skills — which the game encourages — you will level up very quickly and get tiny stat increases. Because all the monsters in the game scale, you can get massively screwed over; it is counter-intuitive because leveling fast in most other RPGs is a good thing. I know a few people who chose the wrong skills in Oblivion and just had to reroll. (On the other hand, the game could be massively broken by leveling slowly and maxing stat gains each level.)

      I only mentioned it because a lot of comments complained that choices made while leveling in DA:O are poorly explained. I think you could say the same of the old IE games, NWN, Mass Effect, the Elder Scrolls games, and many other RPGs. If you go into an RPG with no outside knowledge of its systems (gleaned from friends or FAQs) and you happen to choose the wrong things (cause you think turning into a bear looks awesome) you can always screw yourself over. There is a legitimate complaint that DA:O doesn’t provide a lot of hidden stats, though.

      But like you said, balance is always an issue in RPGs. The community for any RPG figures out a few builds that break the game, and dismisses a lot of skills as junk. I can’t think of any RPGs that struck me as “balanced,” where all classes/builds were viable and all the spells that looked good on paper were as good in practice.

      A lot of the argument here seems to be between extreme cases who either messed up hard (“I made all the wrong choices so I’m fucked”) or knew exactly what to do (“I made all the right choices so fuck you”).

  91. 24/11/2009 at 16:34 The Sombrero Kid says:

    there is no cheating in a single player game, unless you’re cheating yourself out of enjoyment, in this case you seem not to be, in the future games will have complete random access and it will be the players responsability not to abuse it

  92. 24/11/2009 at 16:46 Tei says:

    My first experience with cheating was inmortality.
    I tried a inmortality cheat in Turrican.
    My impression of imortality is based on that. Living forever, but stuck on a deep hole sucks.
    Inmortality sounds good on paper, but wen you try it, everything lacks color, the challenge, the meaning, everything is pointless, a chorse. I am not built for inmortality.
    Turrican is also a game I finished withouth cheating (in another different game session). The feeling of achievement, after surviving all the hordes, and horrible and amazing levels of Turrican… Is something I will never forget.

    So heres two thing I have learn about life, thanks to a videogame:
    – Winning feels good.
    – Living forever sucks.

    The moral of the history is.. go berseker, and try to win, live once, make it count.

  93. 24/11/2009 at 17:36 Masked Dave says:

    I always, always, always had this problem with the DnD ruleset, my characters were broken messes with no hope of ever being the best they could be simply because there were too many options and numbers that I didn’t understand.

    So I find Dragon Age’s lack of options massively better.

    Saying that, I avoided this problem by playing Dragon Age: Journeys with all three character classes and so got to properly appreciate and learn the system before making my choices for real.

  94. 24/11/2009 at 18:13 SheffieldSteel says:

    Those who’re in favour of respeccing cite the lack of numerical information in skill, spell and talent descriptions. Does that mean that respecs are only necesary on the first playthrough? Wouldn’t a better solution be to provide the information that some feel is necessary?

    I can’t shake the feeling that many / most of those who want respeccing have come from WoW where it’s the only alternative to starting a new character. DAO by contrast allows the player to save, experiment, and reload their game if necessary.

    That said, choosing to increase a particular attribute, learn a particular spell, or improve a particular skill is no different from choosing whether to burn the witch or massacre the village that accuses her. You have to try and figure out which set of consequences you’re more or less prepared to live with. To me, that is the essence of a roleplaying game.

    If you want a way around that, I hope you enjoy your version of the game.

  95. 24/11/2009 at 19:22 Corporate Dog says:

    I too have sullied my gaming soul while playing Dragon Age.

    For three nights in a row, my party sought to defeat the Revenant that took up residence in the courtyard of Redcliffe Castle. My party (made up of my dual-wielding warrior character, my dog, Alistair, and Morrigan) had its collective ass handed to it more times than I could count.

    This was not anything like fun. And as much as I wanted to keep playing, I found that I was enjoying House reruns more than Dragon Age.

    At least, that was the case, until I tossed ‘revenant’, ‘courtyard’, and ‘Dragon Age’ into Google, and discovered the “trick” that I had missed. The Revenant was dead on my very next playthrough. I’m having fun with Dragon Age again, but I still feel empty on the inside.

    Regards,
    Corporate Dog

  96. 24/11/2009 at 19:29 TheSombreroKid says:

    personally i had real trouble with branka, but i just persevered until i found out that lyrium veins give you health, me getting them instead of her meant her health bar wasn’t as difficult to chip away at as i thought and mines was lasting longer, i saved the whole party first time round after learning that, but i learned the hard way.

    • 24/11/2009 at 21:48 SheffieldSteel says:

      If you’d completed the Mage tower first, things might have been different for you. I suspect you will find that too easy…

  97. 24/11/2009 at 21:37 Gassalasca says:

    One thing I find very strange is that there are no stamina potions. I mean if you don’t have a healing mage you can still use health poultices, but if you don’t have a healing mage, there’s no way of raising stamina during battle. And even if you wear light armour, and spend a decent amount of points on willpower, you’ll still run out of stamina pretty soon.

    • 25/11/2009 at 00:06 Earl_of_Josh says:

      Deep mushrooms my friend. Though I never use them so I don’t know how much they give back.

    • 25/11/2009 at 05:47 Taillefer says:

      This was intentional to make items which enhance stamina regeneration more powerful, and so that light armour has more benefits. But it’s rarely that useful outside of sustained battles, anyway. And hardly needs to be a consideration at all on lower difficulties.

      It’s not balanced very well.

  98. 24/11/2009 at 21:40 Vinraith says:

    A large part of what makes RPG’s interesting and fun, IMO, is planning out character progression. Respeccing is generally not a good thing, as it undermines the meaning of any choices being made for your character. However, in the case of an RPG with a poorly documented skill and progression system (and a shortage of NPC’s of certain types, apparently), I’d argue it’s a necessary evil. Of course, the best fix is to document your RPG mechanics better, and ensure a reasonable diversity of NPC roles for the player’s party are available.

    Short version: respeccing shouldn’t be necessary if you designed your RPG properly to begin with.

    • 25/11/2009 at 20:05 Ash says:

      This is a very fair point. We as gamers clamor for choices and consequence to those choices, but when there’s any chance to make permanent mistakes, the majority moans for a way to undo them.

      The game is not impossible due to choices made. It’s just easier or harder. Just like real life – many times you are not aware of the implications, or ramifications, of your choices. You’re still stuck with them and have to make the best of them.

      This is where the “gaming should be fun” argument kicks in. My answer is selfish: it is fun for me. Not every games has to, or should, be fun for everyone.

  99. 26/11/2009 at 04:42 Lanster says:

    Exactly what I was thinking.

  100. 27/11/2009 at 00:42 SanguineAngel says:

    Anonymous Coward said:
    This is a very fair point. We as gamers clamor for choices and consequence to those choices, but when there’s any chance to make permanent mistakes, the majority moans for a way to undo them.

    The game is not impossible due to choices made. It’s just easier or harder. Just like real life – many times you are not aware of the implications, or ramifications, of your choices. You’re still stuck with them and have to make the best of them.

    This is where the “gaming should be fun” argument kicks in. My answer is selfish: it is fun for me. Not every games has to, or should, be fun for everyone.

    Amen

  101. 27/11/2009 at 13:56 Jarzi says:

    When *you* play a game which sole purpose is for *you* to have fun, who cares if you give your character billion hitpoints and the holy hand grenade of Antioch if that makes you enjoy the game more.

    As long as you don’t start bragging about your achievements without telling about your modifications of course :)

  102. 29/11/2009 at 02:42 panik says:

    So now the game is easier for you. You feel all powerful. You have erased the challenge and will soon finish the game. You can then get back to playing with your dollies in sims 3.
    Well done you, you hardcore gamer.

  103. 30/11/2009 at 00:34 Mctock says:

    Believe it or not I was in the same boat. But I got through. Do you want to know how? I went back 1 and 1/2 missions so I could add Wynne to my party. I still haven’t finished the Circle, but I have enjoyed it immensly. Whether or not you’ve made it far enough in the game for it to be worth going back to the tower, or whether or not you had done the tower at all, I’m not sure though.

    But admittedly, the only reason I did that at all was because I’m not computer savy enough to have successfully cheated. nif >sneaky<

  104. 30/11/2009 at 19:42 beetleboy says:

    How about playing a mage with a bit of healing yourself? This Wynne character seems both hard to access and rather boring to have along..

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