Caltrops - Dragon Age 2





	[quote name="Worm"]Having just finished DA2 I figured I'd go back to the DA:O game I could never finish. I find myself involved in a questline with some elves and come up to this boss. Every Boss in Dragon Age Origins is designed in the most unfun way you can think of. Once you're done with them you're not so much satisfied as you are annoyed that you had to win another battle by dumb brute force tactics. DA:O's combat relates to the current choices in DA2 <img src=http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/3963/puzzlebox.jpg> So A is the main enemy force, that enemy force can hit me with spells and every single archer has an AOE stun which leave my group vulnerable for a few seconds, further the guy in the middle is a Boss type so he has a shit ton of health and takes a long time to kill regardless of the fact he's just a guy in a robe. I can hit them with some spells but I still have to move through either C or D to get to them. The entire time my team is going to be getting stunned regularly and take AOE damage. When I do get there the first thing the mage does is drop a cone of cold on my party which again incapacitates them. This fight is going to turn out this way every time because it's not a fight, it's an RPG version of a Chess Problem. However I did finish this fight by stacking AOE damage on the main force, walking down the steps and just hammering on the mage, while I let my archer kill their archers. This has always been the major issue with Dragon Age, uncreative combat that fell heavily on MMORPG tropes, but all implemented by a development team who was either too full of themselves or too stupid to properly balance things. DA:O's design is really important to DA2 because they just learned all the wrong lessons. They went a further down the MMORPG rabbit hole, when they should have either broken out into straight Action RPG combat (the animations are pretty enough) or at least produced something a little more similar to Baldur's Gate. Instead they made things into more of an MMORPG and just simplified stuff so you didn't have to do dumb puzzles fights now and then. Enemies still have a MMORPG style ranking, so there is common enemy, elite, boss, elite boss. However most of the common enemies just have tiny ass health bars. This continues throughout the entire game and has the direct result of making AOE very overpowered especially when combined with the bad resistance system (more on that later). However the game realizes that you can basically fireball down an entire group of enemies. So to counter this every group of enemies consists of 3 or 4 waves, in the city they jump down (presumably from some scaffolding) but anywhere else they just pop into existence. Certain boss fights result in adds spawning on alternating sides of you, and the most reasonable and tactical thing to do is leave the room where the fight is occurring and lead them all filter through a tiny corridor of AOE death. Essentially the best way to play the game is rogue, warrior, and two mages. The Two mages are so you have two heals and two Rain of Fire spells, it's literally all you need. The rogue is only for locked doors and the warrior is only for someone who doesn't get knocked over all the time. Now there is another reason why AOE is so fantastic, becuase basically everything you do in the game triggers a stun-type effect. Ice stuff freezes, fire stuff burns people, rogue attacks disorient people, big attacks knock people back. So essentially putting down the Rain of Fire spell is not only massive damage but it's an impenetrable wall in which your enemies will be nearly invulnerable from common enemies, who are your only real worry in the game since they are plentiful and sometimes cast spells. Funnily enough you never GET the rain of fire spell cast on you. There is one moment where the elf girl turned on me during a quest and she cast rain of fire first thing, it immediately one shot my party since they were all in stun-lock and taking massive damage. Now stuns/knockbacks/whatever are basically 100% chance unless you fight an enemy who is immune, which basically any elite or higher enemy. When you fight an enemy who is immune it usually is only a pain because of all the stun-locking it does to you. Stun resistance is based on Strength, so you always need a warrior in your party, since he is the only character who can resist a knock back. Unless you want to put Strength (a useless attribute) on to your rogue or mage so they don't get knocked around. I guess there are some options in your spec for the non-warrior characters but it's a lot of investment just so you can walk away after being hit once. See the issue here is any enemy that can knock you back can walk up to you and attack you again with the same ability that knocked you back before you even stand up. Basically this means if your rogue gets attacked by a dragon because of some stupid thing with the threat table (more MMORPG shit that shouldn't be in the game) chances are that the rogue is dead, since you can't do anything because you're in a constant knock-down state. All of these fights revolve around selecting any non-warrior who is targeted by the boss and running him away manually. Don't get me wrong, pressing the R button and watching enemies fall apart like porcelain dolls is pretty entertaining, but it sure as shit isn't some RPG paradigm shift like every magazine handing out 10s for this game says it is. The combat is schlocky at best, requires little thought, and only becomes difficult on idiotic fights with dragons where you just have to have more patience than the cocksuckers who designed the encounter. <img src="http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/110/screenshot2011031515290.jpg"> When this is what I leave in my wake you wonder why anyone in the city fucks with me. [/quote]