The Gaming Den

Posted: **Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:53 pm**

Wanna see them horns, Arioch.

I don't have any pictures, but I had my Inquisitor all decked out in white and gold - it was pretty awesome. Nothing but the best for the Herald of Andraste, after all.

Posted: **Fri Apr 10, 2015 5:25 am**

I've played the Jaws Of Hakkon DLC. It adds a new zone with a couple Avvar tribes, some quests, and stuff. It was fairly fun, if a bit short for the price.

Annoyances: The map is a goddamn maze. Every time they've got an outdoor area where things are at multiple levels, it just goes completely to hell. They haven't resolved the fact that Knight-Enchanter is completely broken. Also, they continue their habit of having very important pieces of story in DLC, though in this case at least they didn't introduce the prospective main villain for next time or blow up a star system.

So, Hakkon is an Avvar god, and it turns out those are straight-up Fade spirits and the Avvar do not seem to be in any way confused on this point and know that if their gods die they can conduct elaborate rituals to make new ones. What's especially interesting here, though, is that he got summoned and given a physical body, specifically a giant fucking dragon. You may recall that the Old Gods and at least one Elven god are also giant fucking dragons, which leads me to suspect they are in fact the same kind of thing. It irks me that they had a game heavily focused on religions in the setting and then released a DLC that strongly implies one that barely showed up is in fact the most correct.

Also, you are looking for the final resting place of the previous Inquisitor, and it turns out that he sealed Hakkon in temporal stasis. He could do that because it turns out he's a mage. Specifically a Dalish mage and close personal friend of the Orlesian Emperor of the time. Because this is postgame DLC (the zone is level 20) that particular earthshaking revelation has no impact whatsoever on either Mage-Chantry relations or the whole Elven business in the Winter Palace.

Posted: **Sat Apr 11, 2015 10:38 pm**

2-Handed warrior works just fine in DA:O. Is it as good as a blood mage arcane warrior? No, it's not, but it's good enough to win on nightmare with no real difficulties.

Spamming Pommel Strike and Mighty Blow gives you a good amount of crowd control, especially with the stunning blows passive. Indomitable makes you immune to most enemy CC, which you need to do any real damage in a fight. Most of the actives and some passives are traps. You basically spam Sunder Arms for damage (it hits twice, so it deals way more damage than the description implies) and 2-handed sweep when you have enough stamina. Don't use critical strike, sunder armor, or deathblow. Or powerful swings. You won't have enough stamina if you're running indomitable, precise strikes, and threaten. You especially won't have spare stamina if you run berserk. Your second specialization will be Champion for the aoe knockdown; the first one can be whatever. I like Berserker, but whatever floats your boat.

You need Wynne and Leliana, and the last can be anything. Early on it may be good to have Alistair tank for you, but later you become the tank and you're better off with Morrigan, Shale, or Dog.

Posted: **Sun Apr 12, 2015 3:09 am**

I'm going to rant about this shit even though Joda was asking about DA:O way back in December.

Anyway, "need" is way too strong a word for Leliana given that her preselected talents are shit terrible. If you're going for a pure ranged team* she'll eventually end up in your squad almost by default, but for much of the game she's better off as a bench warmer or as a subpar backstabber. Honestly, if you're going to put up with melee doofuses on your team and relegate Wynne to support you may as well do it right and run Shale and Oghren/Sten alongside your warrior warden and never bother to spec someone as a pure tank at all. Some setpiece battles will be a bit tougher that way and may require consumables, but the umpteen trash battles will virtually play themselves, which is a decent tradeoff.

*Ranged (read: mage dominated) squads really stomp some ass in DA:O, so don't think I'm discouraging that route. A hilarious number of encounters can be won outright by throwing down a Glyph of Repulsion and having the whole team stand in it while you shoot people. Meanwhile, winning ranged duels is hilariously easy because even lazy people like myself can manage Walking Bomb and other bad ass AoEs so long as there's no stupid melee teammates trying to face tank our own spells.

Posted: **Sun Apr 12, 2015 2:00 pm**

You can also trivially clear some entire areas with the absurd "storm of the century" spell combo.

Posted: **Sun May 03, 2015 2:39 am**

I grabbed DAO because it was on special on Steam. So a few questions:

1. Once you reach the encampment and meet the king, is that basically the end of the character-specific origins bit and everyone is now on the same path (or set of paths based on character choices made as you go along)? Or does it continue to be different based on that choice?

2. Are elves good at anything other than magic? I kind of want to try out the background possibilities for them as fighter/thieves, but it really looks like their stats say YOU ARE A MAGE. If the only difference in story is that first small chunk that gets you to level 3, that doesn't really matter, just a couple of fifteen minute throwaway segments.

3. For the mage, I went along with the blood mage friend. Is it possible to go "no, fuck you", go tell on them and have things work out differently, or is it typical "But thou must!" stuff we grow to expect from games?

Posted: **Sun May 03, 2015 3:35 am**

1. You're pretty much done. Occasionally people will tell you "HELLO YOU ARE AN ELF" or something like that, and a dwarf noble has one merchant in Denerim that gives him/her better buy/sell prices, but you're pretty much at the end.

2. Racial stats literally don't matter. a +2 isn't going to matter when it's not unusual to be rocking 40+ in endgame (or if you have all the expansions, 80+).

3. It's a "but thou must" thing. Ser Greagoir is a gigantic douche and will order you be made tranquil no matter what you do, even if First Enchanter Irving backs you up (the alternate timeline involves you snitching him out and Irving telling you to follow him and see what he's going. It's bullshit.

Posted: **Sun May 03, 2015 3:56 am**

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:1. You're pretty much done. Occasionally people will tell you "HELLO YOU ARE AN ELF" or something like that, and a dwarf noble has one merchant in Denerim that gives him/her better buy/sell prices, but you're pretty much at the end.

Pretty much. Though if you're a mage then Redcliffe has some worthwhile surprises.

Posted: **Sun May 03, 2015 4:08 am**

All of the origins matter a bit later, but it's not a huge deal. Basically, when you go back to wherever the origin was set there's going to be a bit of local content relating to it, but mostly in the sense that some of the locally important characters already know you and you may have sworn blood vendetta against them.

The alternate route through the mage origin is mostly the same except that you're doing it as a sting operation because for political reasons only the mage would get punished if they cracked down immediately. Now, depending on how you play it, it is actually possible to avoid being seriously threatened with tranquility, with the conversation consisting of you pointing out that you were acting under orders and the First Enchanter backing you up and convincing the commander to let you go, but you still join the Wardens.

Posted: **Sun May 10, 2015 5:12 pm**

I do wish you had the opportunity to just avoid that stupid-ass escape plot altogether, but hey.

Apostate mages seem to have a more interesting life, as the Chantry is just the standin for Grimdark! Catholic Church.

Posted: **Sun May 10, 2015 11:06 pm**

What I wish is that Jowan and you switch roles and instead you seduce either Cullen (pleasing many a fangirl) or Lily and you come up with the plot to escape possibly dragging Jowan along. At the end you're caught and Jowan freaks that none of this was his idea, blasts everyone including you with blood magic. He escapes and Duncan saves you from execution. Instead the origin is all about Jowan and you're just the putz along for the ride. It's a serious failure.

Posted: **Mon May 11, 2015 1:00 am**

Out of curiosity what happens if you let the demon in the trial ride along? I always figured it was an idiot test that lead to a game over.

Posted: **Mon May 11, 2015 1:32 am**

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Out of curiosity what happens if you let the demon in the trial ride along? I always figured it was an idiot test that lead to a game over.

Apparently no matter what dialogue options you choose, you never actually let him in.

Posted: **Mon May 11, 2015 1:43 am**

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Out of curiosity what happens if you let the demon in the trial ride along? I always figured it was an idiot test that lead to a game over.

That's what it should have been but no its total bullshit. No matter what you say the Pride Demon reveals itself. All that happens is it basically tells you that youre an idiot before sparing you. Fans have thus headcannoned it was not actually a pride demon but a spirit of wisdom or something that was testing you or a pride demon so smart it knew you were on a harrowing and that possessing you would mean death. Lucky PC since others have had their heads chopped off.

This isn't as bullshit as it sounds since a Pride Demon does later possess a much more powerful mage than an initiate. If it was the same Pride Demon they may have had their eye on Uldred and been willing to let go smaller prey. Also all the spirits/demons you encounter in the Fade seem to be aware of why you are there. They may have caught on to the situation.

Still it's stupid to have no payoff to the whole setup. It really goes against the setting's lore just 10 minutes into the damn game. If they couldn't animate a 5 second game over they should have just skipped the damn Harrowing. Or expand on the possibility of it being the same Pride Demon later.

Posted: **Mon May 11, 2015 4:09 am**

Honestly, I think it would have been interesting if you found the one Pride Demon who could sneak past the templars so now you also get to be a demon-possessed mage with wacky powers and possession struggles at odd times.

Unfortunately, that would be less interesting than animating Morrigan's boobs.

Posted: **Sat May 16, 2015 10:05 pm**

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I do wish you had the opportunity to just avoid that stupid-ass escape plot altogether, but hey.

Apostate mages seem to have a more interesting life, as the Chantry is just the standin for Grimdark! Catholic Church.

Well yes and no, Chantry are a bunch of oppressive douchebags (with one or two notable exceptions usually members of the party) but apostate mages are a legit threat to themselves and others especially when they get panicky. You don't actually see much of this in Origins aside from what happens at redcliffe. And what happens in redcliffe is probably the worst case scenario in that you have a small child mage whose mother is in denial who has probably the most incompetent apostate "teacher" they could have possibly found for him so it's no wonder that situation goes nuclear.

DA2 focuses more on the "no mages really are dangerous you guys, not bad or evil but definitely dangerous" side of the mage/templar debate. Kirkwall is a model of what happens when the vicious cycle of restrictions = more pushback = more restrictions is allowed to continue unchecked.

DA:I is more about "the chantry is broke as fuck but having no system at all isn't a valid replacement" and then giving the player a limited hand in deciding what that system would be, with Leiliana's remade chantry, Cassandra's reformed Chantry, or Vivienne's "exactly the same but better" chantry, and whether or not you disband the templars, or allow mages to remain independent.

Inquisition also holds up tevinter more prominently as an example of "absolute power corrupts absolutely" on the mage side of things where characters like Dorian and Fenris are stuck forever fighting a giant intractable and deeply entrenched power system actively preserved by the blood mages who benefit the most from it.

Posted: **Sun May 17, 2015 1:38 am**

Vivienne's chantry isn't exactly the same, it's different in one major respect: mages are allowed to be priests. Rank and file mages are still completely controlled by the church, but the church itself is now controlled by mages. It's pretty much the Tevinter system, ironically enough. That's not a huge improvement for the common mage, but if their superiors are themselves mages it probably slightly reduces the chance that they get executed for no reason. (That was an earnest slightly, not a sarcastic slightly. They're still gonna get executed for no reason fairly often because their leaders still have no incentive to take risks)

Posted: **Sun May 17, 2015 8:32 am**

I like Vivienne. Yeah, she's a bitch but she's generally right about things. Too bad her spec is something the AI can't really do very well.

Posted: **Mon May 18, 2015 1:44 am**

Vivienne burned her bridges with me and danced on the ashes in her first at-base conversation. I asked her about the Mage-Templar war and she proceeded to give a tremendously smug lecture about how the Grand Enchanter was an idiot for not just sticking with the status quo without so much as acknowledging that they might care about the extermination of two/three circles in the last two decades. She may have been correct about the strategy, though I rather have my doubts, but she left me entirely convinced she didn't understand why the First Enchanters decided to revolt. I was already a bit put off by how she'd acted in her recruitment mission, so I left her to rot for the entire game and didn't even recruit her my next play-through.

People elsewhere have suggested that she said that because she thought it was what I would want to hear, but there was no rational reason for her to expect a Tal-Vashoth mage would want to hear that.

Posted: **Wed May 20, 2015 4:45 am**

You get the sense in more of her dialogue that Vivienne is actually a mage who's terrified of magic. Demons in particular, you see that most in her interactions with Cole and it's a trait she shares with Iron bull, with whom she gets along.

She tempers her fear with iron clad control, but she makes the mistake of assuming that A: Any mage who isn't afraid of their magic is a dangerous liability and B: What's good for her is good for the population at large despite this being demonstrably untrue.

I liked Vivienne but her opinions are definitely polarizing and she holds them with the same iron willpower that she does everything else so there's no "maybe I'm wrong" tree to venture down.

Posted: **Sun Sep 20, 2015 4:32 pm**

I've now played the two new DA:I DLCs, The Descent and Trespasser.

The Descent has earthquakes destroying lyrium mines, so you descend into the Deep Roads to check it out. Then you reach the bottom of the Deep Roads and keep going into a buried city of dwarves with lyrium-enhanced armor and weaponry, including a burst-fire crossbow.

It turns out that the Stone the dwarves refer to is actually one or more giant monsters so big that not only is half the DLC inside it, you get near the heart and look down and see clouds. Apparently it bleeds lyrium and dwarves used to be a hive-mind of wizards connected to these guys. I'm guessing they severed the link after the original Red Lyrium incident.

Tresspasser starts with you going to a big council meeting at the Winter Palace set a while later to determine how the Inquisition will work going forwards. Orlais wants to basically vassalize it and Fereldan wants to disband it. In my playthrough, the elephant in the room was that I'd killed most of the Templars and Divine Victoria offically disbanded the order, but no one even brought up the fact that the Inquisition was the Chantry's entire militant arm and also no one had especially minded having armies of Chantry soldiers stationed throughout their territory in the past. But anyway, this is quickly interrupted and you are required to totally fuck up at politicking in the process of handling the interruption.

A Qunari soldier in full armor is found dead during the council. You determine he emerged from an Eluvian and take your team to find out what's on the other side. You find a bunch of Elven ruins that reveal that the old Elven gods had been extremely powerful wizards and Fen'Haral led a slave revolt against them, then go and destroy a Qunari lyrium mining operation. Yes, normally that's only possible for dwarves because everyone else dies very quickly from exposure to raw lyrium, but the Qunari have vast reserves of intelligence, perseverance, and explosives, and have worked out a way to mine the stuff without exposing their workers to it. This plan is led by the Viddasala, who is apparently the Qunari minister of dealing with mages.

Then you come back to discover that Qunari agents have smuggled explosives into the Winter Palace, and one of your soldiers stumbled into this and has caused a diplomatic incident because no one noticed the bomb. You then go into the Eluvians again and wind up inside a Fade library, where you discover Fen'Haral created the Veil to seal all the Elven gods inside the Fade. Also the Qunari are planning to assassinate every important leader at once. On returning, you learn that apparently you have been obligated to try and horribly fail to keep all of this a secret and the council members are justifiably pissed. This made me very angry because I never saw a reason not to just tell them that we'd found a Qunari plot of some kind and would put the council on hold for a bit.

Now you go and attack the Qunari staging ground, and find out that apparently the reason they've been able to use so many Eluvians is because their Saarabas have been studying and repairing them, and are now working on a grand spell to thicken the Veil. I have to call bullshit on this one; the Qunari cut out their mages' tongues. They should not be the foremost center of magical research. Also, it turns out they extract a component of their gunpowder recipe from the venom of a poison High Dragon. Oh, and if you haven't done Iron Bull's personal quest, he shows up and tries to kill you because duh.

Finally you fight a bunch more Qunari and reach Solas. He informs you Mythal got killed before he raised the Veil (presumably why she's a Fade dragon-god now), he's totally hardline pro-elf, and he's going to destroy the world and make a new one. Then he cuts off your right hand, which inexplicably forced my mage into retirement from active duty. You decide whether to disband the Inqusition or tell everyone that you take orders from Divine Victoria and they can go fuck themselves. Sequel hook: Solas is too familiar with the Inquisition and you need guys he's unfamiliar with from Tevinter, which is facing a new round of Qunari attacks.

They've also made some mechanical changes, probably in patches rather than the DLC itself. A lot of abilities now have an unlockable pair of upgrades you can switch between. Also, they've finally done something productive about Knight-Enchanter, though it's still pretty set in terms of raw power. The blade now does only 150% weapon damage by default, but dealing damage from other sources builds up a charge that makes it do extra damage, so there's an incentive to mix things up.

Posted: **Sun Sep 20, 2015 5:29 pm**

So long story short, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, we wrote a story for our stupid, secretive, bad at diplomacy fighter, and you are going to play the same story.

Posted: **Sun Sep 20, 2015 11:17 pm**

Damn Im glad I jumped ship halfway through DA2 and never looked back.

Posted: **Thu Mar 24, 2016 2:17 pm**

I just picked up DA:O, as I am perpetually an entire console generation behind and I'm only now working through all the PS3 games I missed.

Here's my question: Is the coercion skill worth taking? I know it adds the persuade and intimidate options to dialogue, but I'm wondering if that's just window dressing or if it's like Mass Effect where you're skull fucking yourself if you don't have the social win options?

Posted: **Thu Mar 24, 2016 2:40 pm**

Hiram McDaniels wrote:I just picked up DA:O, as I am perpetually an entire console generation behind and I'm only now working through all the PS3 games I missed.

Here's my question: Is the coercion skill worth taking? I know it adds the persuade and intimidate options to dialogue, but I'm wondering if that's just window dressing or if it's like Mass Effect where you're skull fucking yourself if you don't have the social win options?

Coercion is pretty useful yeah. It's probably not as central as it is in Mass Effect, but it's more important than it is in (e.g.) KotOR.

The Gaming Den

Dragon Age