What you say sounds very odd- the reverse- to my own experience. I cleft through the beginning of the game with no difficulty whatsoever. I never had need of injury kits and dropped most bosses/elites in a matter of seconds. After that things started heading downhill. As of now, my party has adapted to handle the random ambushes by qunari mercenaries and health-eating assassins; 2 S&S (main character and Alistair), a Two-Hander (Sten), and Wynne. Before that it was Morrigan and Leliana instead of the last two. The problem I seem to be encountering is that we deal too little damage to keep the hordes off of our defenders, in spite of the heaviest armor available to us, and the healer is unable to keep up. There's also the matter of enemies ignoring the line and rushing by to maul the poor mage before she can cast any helpful support (even as we use Threat and Taunt, yes).

One thing I dislike about warrior so far- the division of attributes. Rogues and Mages seem to require only a few points to but a couple of important attributes. Warriors on the other hand, need to consider dexterity (for talents), strength (for armor and damage), willpower (for excessive stamina cost), and constitution (to avoid being eating alive by rogues and mages). This means less immediate power if I distribute the points needed for certain abilities and skills without wasting a level's worth on something I won't use.

Non-spoiler advice?

I am thinking of rerolling a Dalish ranger/duelist, or "the Abhorsen" (arcane warrior/shapeshifter ), though I hear that is a tanky build, and tanks thus far have been somewhat boring. I'll admit, my primary reason for playing a warrior was simply for the background and because I enjoy how shield and armor look.

And I suppose I'll download that armor, then. Is it just given, or do you have to obtain it from someone/thing?

Actually, you want every character to specialize in just a couple of statistics, even warriors.

For a melee rogue you want just enough strength to wear the best light armour (20), 32 dexterity for the second to last duel weapon talent, 20 willpower for abilities, and then max out cunning. You'll definitely want to pick up the Lethality talent, which replaces your strength score with your cunning score for attacking. Then you'll want to wield two daggers which buff backstab damage. I think crow daggers each buff it 15%, and the Roses Thorn you can buy in Orzammar buffs like 40%. Duelist and Assassin specs work really well here.

For a ranged rogue, Bard and Ranger go really well together. You'll want about 30 willpower and 30 cunning for all the sustained abilities you'll have going, and the cunning for good bard buffs. Other than that, max out dexterity.

For a mage, it depends on if you want a pure caster or a tank mage. Either way, from my experience, shapeshift is not a good spec (but it's certainly possible to use it and beat the game), but you can't cast spells or anything, or cure yourself, in animal form.

For a caster mage like your healer, you want 40 willpower and max magic. Give them a tactic to use mindblast if they get surrounded by enemies. Cone of cold and crushing prison are two talents you should also consider. Crushing prison essentially removes one enemy from the fight and basically kills them, and cone of cold can freeze a large number of enemies at once. You'll want to do the cone of colding yourself though, since friendly fire is possible. Other than that, have all their tactics set to heal.

Also, for your ranged characters like the healer, make sure you have their style set to "ranged" or something to that effect.

For a warrior tank, you want 42 strength so you can wear the best massive armour (juggernaut, blood dragon, drake's, etc), 20 constitution, and max dexterity. The dexterity will mean you are hitting more people more often, keeping them aggro on you, and it'll also mean they are missing you more often, extending your life span.

For a melee warrior like Sten, you want about 18 dexterity, 25 willpower, and max out strength.

Other than that, just make sure every character has a tactic to use health poultices if they get too low, and have your mage set to use lyrium potions if she gets too low. You can always use herbalism to craft more - in fact if you do your shopping right you can turn a profit on lyrium potions. And you said you were using taunt and threaten, but make sure Alistair also has tactics set to use these before anything else.

The reason you may not be seeing a lot of damage output is because your only real damage dealer is Sten, who isn't really as good at it as a rogue is.

I would suggest taking Alistair out and adding in a backstabbing rogue like Zevran, or another mage who focues on nuking rather than healing. You can be the primary tank, and even Sten can tank a little if he needs to.

Very thorough- my thanks. It seems to be common place for players to start 3-10 new characters before finishing the game once, what with it being easy enough for the least of us to ruin them with a handful of misplaced points.

I've decided to begin with a ranger/duelist. I know that Bard is supposed to be an excellent build, but I love rogue melee too much. After one play-through I think I will wait for the expansion and some new DLC (which will hopefully include a patch for Shapeshifter) before starting my Mage.

A question for the veterans among us- how plausible would you say it is to play through the game with a party comprised entirely or almost entirely of a single class?


What I had in mind were:


Maiden, Mother, and Crone

Shale - Primary tank
MC (Arcane Warrior/Spirit Healer) - Ice Cone, Crushing Prison, other control spells, secondary tank.
Morrigan (Shapeshifter/Bloodmage) - Damage and debuffs, aimed towards certain spell combinations.
Wynne (Spirit Healer/Arcane Warrior) - Pure support and healing, except for basic offense. Back-up tank.


Band of Brothers

MC (Champion/Templar) - Sword and Shield
Alistair (Templar/Champion) - Sword and Shield
Sten (Berseker/Reaver) - Two-handed, paired with Alistair as aggressive.
Dog - Devours knocked-down foes, paired with MC as defensive (so that he will always be close by when someone hits the ground) Alternatively, Oghren.

The Jesuits

Alistair (Templar/Champion) - Primary tank, included for obvious reasons.
MC (Assassin/Duelist) - Two-handed, skilled in stealth and traps and able to use poisons.
Leliana (Bard/Ranger) - Ranged, summons bear as secondary tank.
Zevran (Assassin/Duelist) - Skilled in poisons and able to set traps.

I am fairly confident in the Mage Team, but as to how difficult it will be without a Mage in the party...

The problem with that kind of thing is that:

A. You won't have a rogue in some teams, thus won't be able to open any chests. This doesn't -really- matter as I can't recall anything particularly useful coming from chest loot, but it's something to think about.

B. Some of your teams don't include a healer (Wynne, really, though Morrigan is somewhat passable unless you plan on playing the upper difficulty levels). Now, I don't think this'll be a huge problem if you're playing easy or normal, but anything above that will be damn near impossible. There's still the issue of the harder boss fights (dragons mostly, though 2 of those 3 fights are optional as it is), which on normal still have the potential to kick your ass without a healer.

C. The last team is a personal dislike of mine, really. Last I heard, daggers were bugged in that there was supposed to be a dexterity modifier for their damage, so you could build up a huge dexterity and do great damage with double blades. That somehow didn't actually work, and I haven't heard of a fix, so rogues with double daggers are really screwed in that department. Although rogues using bows have done upwards of 500 damage using Arrow of Slaying (I think that's what it's called, been a while since I've played), so that's pretty handy.

Really, you can get by with just about any combo you want unless you plan on playing above normal difficulty, then you really, really need at least a solid healer in every team. Other than that, some boss battles might end up being a little tough, but not impossible.

Yeah, got the game new. Talk to EA support they fixed me up. I came to learn REAL quick that the game will terrorize you if you don't use tactics. I keep restarting the game and picking new builds/romances because it's fun

If built correctly a team with 3 mages is the most powerful in the game.

Quicksave like a MF though.

Shale is obviously the hax-tank with pillar mode on.

Did any of you win the "kidnapping" fight towards the end of human campaign on the hardest difficulty? It took me several tries and came down to the wire, but I finally did. The chick knight with the two hander was an absolute beast and I couldn't bring Shale so it was an incredible pain. I ended up kiting her back into the house and bursting her with all reaver toggles on and a dog pin-down. She came up at 10% life and still nearly killed everyone. I didn't have any of the crazy disabling magic though, as my party was mostly shale tanking while my retarded zerk/reaver dual wield damage spammer did work.

How do you people play at that level of difficulty? Is the game more forgiving or balanced in favor of the player on PC or XBOX? Do you spend time devising the optimum build, acquiring the optimum armor, and assessing each situation just to get by? Is it magic?

At normal difficulty, I went AW main character (Marion Amell) with Alistair, Leliana, and Morrigan. We get our asses handed to us on an every-other-fight basis. Maybe I am not used to games like Dragon Age (reminds me think of Diablo 2 in certain respects, which I did terribly at as well), but I did play Bioware's Mass Effect, and gameovers or even the loss of a single party member in battle was not "normal".

I am tempted to lower it to casual, but then you lose friendly fire and the challenge. Challenges are nice, loading screens are not.

I had to quit my S&S Warrior because I could not complete the Fade arc on normal.

It's all about roles. You have to define roles for each of your character and build them specifically

The most important are the Tank and the damage dealer early on. Once you get wynne, she's near essential for healing. You can have a rogue, but if you don't mind missing chests, I recommend an "off-tank" to help soak up damage. My tank is shale, she can take hits from about anything with the right crystals. I always play the damage dealer because I like having the most control, being either a melee rogue, A DW warrior, or a nuke mage. If you don't want an off tank, you can (with some creativity) turn morrigan into a controller, giving her spells that stun, confuse, paralyse, and the like, to take the enemies out of the battle for a bit. But ALWAYS define their roles early on. You can't give a warrior shield wall, shield defense, threaten, taunt and then expect him to do much more than sit there and soak damage. Later in the game it can be...fiddled with a bit, because you start getting skills that work to complement your role rather than define it.

Well, I would like to think I've chosen effective skills and specialized them properly... my own character is an effective controller and tank and Alistair does his job well enough, but I do sometimes wonder if Leliana is even there. Leaving any stone unturned isn't really acceptable, so not having a rogue in the party isn't an option. The others are mostly a result of aesthetic choice; they fit my MC in temperament, and not having Alistair and Morrigan at each others' throats detracts from my enjoyment. I really wish the game hadn't started them off with the skills they have, so that I could have molded them into more useful builds.

Most of the trouble crops in our encounters against mages and the swarms of infantry that always seem to accompany them (which suddenly became common, and I had not anticipated as I built myself for physical encounters). It usually goes something like "we stun/immobilize you before you can get off a single spell, then our melee units casually walk passed your defenders (ugh, this shouldn't be allowed in any game- passing a defender pursuing you ought to result in instant death) and gank your disorganized party in seconds.

Well, I would like to think I've chosen effective skills and specialized them properly... my own character is an effective controller and tank and Alistair does his job well enough, but I do sometimes wonder if Leliana is even there. Leaving any stone unturned isn't really acceptable, so not having a rogue in the party isn't an option. The others are mostly a result of aesthetic choice; they fit my MC in temperament, and not having Alistair and Morrigan at each others' throats detracts from my enjoyment. I really wish the game hadn't started them off with the skills they have, so that I could have molded them into more useful builds.

Most of the trouble crops in our encounters against mages and the swarms of infantry that always seem to accompany them (which suddenly became common, and I had not anticipated as I built myself for physical encounters). It usually goes something like "we stun/immobilize you before you can get off a single spell, then our melee units casually walk passed your defenders (ugh, this shouldn't be allowed in any game- passing a defender pursuing you ought to result in instant death) and gank your disorganized party in seconds."

The other way to break the game is to set traps. Move solo, and use the solo person to lure away small numbers of enemies away at a time. In a lot of places, when you can lure away grunts from tough mages, going for the mages afterwards makes it hilariously easy. Plus playing as a Rogue is incredibly boring unless you stealth around and set traps anyways (I really did not enjoy a) get into backstab position, b) sit there).

Getting dicerolled by some of the nastier endgame caster cc/damage combos is pretty annoying, but on the hardest difficulties you pretty much have to control everyone in steps by using pause, not just using tactics. It's also more D&D based than the action lets on. Bonus and malus for position and moving. Min-maxing is also a huge deal, almost expected at higher difficulties.

c) Spend 60 seconds fleeing for your life when every enemy on the field decides you're a much easier target than your defender, who slowly trails after them.

The "combat advantage" is nice, but what this game really needs to go with it is auto-crit/knock-down-inducing opportunity attacks.

Praise be Forcefield and Crushing Prison, though. The two reasons I haven't had to restart for the 15th time.

This. I am making a desperate effort to survive long enough to get Mana Clash. Fortunately, my AW just learned Shimmering Shield, which instantly turned her from a squishy, sub-par warrior into the Invincible Shield Goddess. Coincidental acquisition of Spellweaver has made her a fierce one, to boot.

Does anyone know if and when shops restock items, particularly health poultices and/or the ingredients necessary to make them? I still might not make much longer without a steady supply.

I have to admit, I didn't do any difficulties over Normal because there wasn't an achievement for it. XD

However, in some of the tougher 1v1 battles, I would have my rogue (me) kite the enemy around in circles throwing bombs over my shoulder until dirty fighting refreshed, kick the person in the groin, then backstab them.

I want to get this game and play it even more now, so I can get the Blood dragon armor in Mass Effect 2, hehe. I guess want will have to over ride my lack of cash. I take it I shouldn't even bother renting it?

Well, if you're getting it for the armor, you won't get that from renting it anyway.

Finished the game tonight, certainly the best I've played for a while.
My vote for the most powerful spell goes to forcefield hands down, being able to take even bosses out of fights for a while never got old.
Played it on normal and didn't ever switch to anything harder, but I'll replay on hard and will check out nightmare for some fights.