Yeah, but even when it's a fresh start, there's still a load screen between diamond quarter and the center area... I mean it's ridiculous when i leave orzammar from diamond district, i have a load screen to get to the big open center area, then a load screen to get to the hall of paragons, then a load screen to get to the world. Even when the load screens are on fresh memory, it takes 10-15 seconds to load between areas. I heard loads are even worse on 360.
Just not an elegant design... oh well
Yeah going through Orzammar is tedious because of the load screens.
Originally Posted by Nermy2k
So what are your guys tactics for the revenants in the dalish forest, cos i'm getting wiped over and over.
What class are you? If you're a mage, you should be able to CC the shit out of any non-boss encounter between Morrigan and the Warden. I probably don't do it as well as I could because I don't like switching to Morrigan, but I open with Sleep, then nightmare something weak. Then I'll pop cone of cold, Crushing Prison the strongest non-elite (this should shatter, meaning between that and whoever you Horror'd for the nightmare, you've killed 2 enemies already), then use the fire cone spell followed by the electricity cone. I then mop up with Lightning, Winter's Grasp, and Arcane Bolt as cooldowns recharge.
I also make use of Tempest (no need to go further in the lightning tree) and Mind Blast. To be honest, I haven't found any of the level 4 spells to be that appealing in the damage trees. Chain Lightning takes waaaay too much mana and waaaaay too long to cast for the measly 100-120 total damage it might inflict (last I used it was maybe level 10.) Earthquake is ok, but there's nothing else in the Nature tree worth grabbing (though I do use the Stone Hurl or whatever spell with Wynne because I pushed her all the way to Earthquake.)
I've gotten both the Warden and Morrigan up to Crushing Prison, so between the two of them, I can trap the strongest enemy between 2 Force Fields, a Crushing Prison, and, if all else fails, Morrigan's Sleep. By that point, if I haven't cleared everything else, I can at least move the tank to grab aggro off the strongest enemy, and play mop-up with the Warden and Morrigan.
Also, it's worth noting that I haven't grabbed Fireball yet. I felt there was more utility in spells that didn't half-kill your own party whilst knocking everyone done, including yourself if you get melee'd. It would be a good opener, except that Nightmare is a better crowd control opener. Also worth noting with Nightmare... it will work on yellows (but won't kill them, since its in the 120-190 range for damage) but more often than not gets resisted by bosses and oranges (Yes, the description for Horror says that sleeping targets get no resist, but it still doesn't fucking work.)
Also, as an addendum to that post: if you're not a Mage, I hope you've specc'd Morrigan toward a crowd control build. You don't need two mages to use that, but it certainly helps when you can stun lock entire rooms. I would also shift Wynne away from healer (really, after Heal, Group Heal, Res, and Group Rejuv, a healer is a healer is a healer) and get her some of the more basic crowd control and AoE spells (especially Horror, since it's level 1, can drop huge damage on low level filler creeps that Morrigan Sleeps, and costs practically no mana, and Shock, since it's level 2 and gives her a good direct damage spell in Lightning so she won't waste her time not-healing with Arcane Bolt.)
Also, to be fair, this build isn't particularly exciting unless you blow it (or, worse, AI Morrigan Cone of Colds you.) You will spend a lot of time in pause menus, but you'll end a lot of battles before your tank even engages (if Allistair is your tank, that's a good thing.)
I'm mage.
The revenants seem to resist a lot of my CCs..petrify, and crushing prison never seem to get through. Only force field, but then you can't dmg it.
Does sleep work on the revanants? I haven't tried yet, I assumed it didn't since it doesn't seem to work on undead.
I think Atmosfear is mistaken in this regard; the only CC that will work on orange mobs from my experience is Force Field. I cannot recall any time that Sleep has worked on an orange mob. Crushing Prison only applies the DoT without the incapacitating effect. Apparently Paralysis also may work on certain orange creatures, and some orange creatures are vulnerable to freezing effects (from CoC or Blizzard in Frost), but I have not tried either of these.
Of course, I wouldn't be suprised if some orange mobs were more vulnerable to CC's than other orange mobs, so perhaps some orange creatures can be sleeped...
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Sleep does technically work on orange mobs except it lasts for about 0.3 seconds (not long enough to cast anything else)
also it does not work on any undead i've tried it on, but revenants have ridiculous resists anyway so it's never hit them successfully
Yeah pretty much.
I get curshing prison on asap but yeah it just applies the dot...
So I end up using a lot of potions (most of them) each time i fight a revenant.
Which is gay.
What am i missing here.
Ah okay, hadn't noticed this.
Yeah, revenants are super-gay, where gay means "powerful and awe-inspiring," of course.
They are vulnerable to physical damage, but they deal out so much damage themselves and have nasty abilities that they are rather tricky.
Popping tons of potions sounds about right, as that is the solution to many of the game's more difficult points. If you have it, Misdirection Hex would help significantly reduce his damage output. Also, it's probably wise to just have the tank in melee range and everyone else at range. But yeah, keeping a full stock of potions and just burning through them is what you need to be doing.
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I tried keeping my mages at range but he just massed pulled them back.
I didn't see any point in moving them further away again, it would be wasting dmg time.
oh okay. i forgot the revenant's abilities... i thought he had only pulled party members when there were no targets in melee range.
but yeah you really have to move your mages back when they are pulled in, as they will be killed with his melee AoE otherwise.
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well i mean i will try it next time but my party is generally 3 mages and the tank...
i can only see this as a lot of running back/being pulled forwards from the mage while alistair just melees him...
will be very slow and boring...
His pull ability has limited range, so just back the f up.
yeah i guess.
wont he just move in range though
i will try moving back further though, cos i'm sick of getting pwnt by these gimps
Well he's usually too busy klumping your tank in the corner and beating the stuffing out of him
yeah
they seem to have taken a special disliking to my mages.
Sleep doesn't hold orange mobs for long but it does interrupt spells.
Just saying guys.
yeah thats handy to know, cheers
Okay seriously how bad are dwarves at building the deep roads. No only did they apparently carve out the deep roads with little to no regard for the gigantic caverns that open up (conveniently) right fucking next to them, but they didn't even build them well enough that they aren't constantly collapsing shut.
darkspawn did it
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Darkspawn? Are you kidding? Cui bono? Are they smart enough to undermine the brilliant Dwarven engineering but not smart enough to figure out that it provides them no benefit? And that doesn't change the fact that there are large, open natural caverns that they apparently built around instead of taking advantage of, which then presumably led to the weakness of the walls in the first place.
I get that it's necessary from a developer's standpoint because otherwise they would be long, relatively boring corridors with nearly identical encounters ever few hundred feet. But I can't help but this of the product placement scene in Thank You for Smoking... "It's gotta be set in the future." "Why?" "The health issue is to prevalent in modern times. Everyone would be asking the protagonist why he's smoking. We have to set it in the future, once the health concerns have blown over."
and in Fallout 3, supposedly all the computers are enormous because miniaturization hadn't been developed, but the autonomous robots in the game wouldn't be able to exist without miniaturized electronics.
and in Mass Effect, the top administration of a galactic union of governments with trillions of citizens each, if not more, consists of three people.
three.
so just accept that the darkspawn hordes could destroy dwarven engineering just due to their sheer, overwhelming numbers and that they also are responsible for making the caverns you see right next to the underground roads after these roads were built.
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hey syclyd, enormous computers still exist today, they are just a million times as powerful as they were a long time ago
hey nermy, there are supposedly NO small computers in the Fallout universe. you do see things that resemble old PC's but they are just terminals that are worthless unless they are network to a room-sized computer.
for more information about this fascinating topic see http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence
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Well Fallout 3 is easy to ignore because of the ambiguity of technology in general. If you are suspending belief that people would choose to invent the transistor, then the path of technological innovation is sufficiently muddied to accept the robots. Radiation also doesn't cause many of the side effects that are attributed to it in the game; that doesn't mean we can't suspend disbelief for that purpose.
As for Mass Effect, I'm not familiar at all with the game, so I couldn't evaluate that statement. Seems improbable, sure.
For Dragon Age, like most fantasy games, we accept magic, fantasy races, fantastical poisons, and antiquated political systems that have been facing selective pressures to change often for centuries. We also accept that Dwarves are creatures of passionate historical beliefs, long lives, strong constitution, subterranean ecology, and unprecedented skill in dealing with stoneworking despite an utter lack of technology to support their achievements. Fine.
But logic still applies universally in these situations. You accept the background information, and then require the modified pieces to act according to an identical logical framework. That is, if the penalty for murder is death, people in the game world still act in the interest of self-preservation by not walking around killing everyone they see. Simply put, if something exists in the game world, there has to be a reason for it to exist. The Temple exists because followers built it as a tomb for Andraste's ashes a few hundred years ago (as opposed to, say, Zelda, where dungeons exist because, oh yeah, that'd be cool.) There are people to kill in the Temple because it was empty until a fanatical cult has taken it over as its home. What's the reason for the collapsed tunnels in the Deep Roads?
1. The dwarves aren't very good at stoneworking and just didn't build the Deep Roads with very good quality. Considering how generic the rest of the races are in DAO, and the elevation of Paragons for their stoneworking abilities, and the fucking existence of Orzammar, I think we can rule this one out. The dwarves are sufficiently skilled to build long-lasting Deep Roads.
2. An unexpected, outside force (Darkspawn, you've offered) undid the careful, quality work of the Deep Roads. Why would this happen?
2a. Random event, natural disaster, Act of God. AKA the Deus Ex Machina. It doesn't really satisfy the suspension of disbelief, because we would expect dwarves to have enough experience to account for these sorts of things, but we also can't really argue with it. That's what the game offers us, except without even offering the story (considering there are 3000 words in the script, I'm certain a codex or even random NPC would've mentioned something about the danger of the collapsed Deep Roads tunnels because of _____.)
2b. Intentional effect caused by something or someone. This is the Darkspawn idea. The Darkspawn broke the tunnels to... well, why exactly? You have suggested that the Darkspawn constructed the caverns after the Deep Roads were built, preserving the supposed skill of the dwarven construction. Okay, sure. Why? (I would disagree that that's even a viable answer, considering the various species of spiders living in the caverns and the relatively recent incursion of Darkspawn.) My issue here is that you can't have it both ways. Either the Darkspawn are smart enough to intentionally damage the Deep Roads in order to force travelers into the caverns where they lurk (meaning, the caverns were there first, and the dwarves are pretty awful at stoneworking) or the Darkspawn are not smart enough to intentionally damage the Deep Roads (for the sake of simplicity, I will concede that they are smart enough/instinctive enough to bridge the collapses), which suggests that the dwarves just didn't build them strong enough to survive the misguided, idle destruction of a relatively weak enemy.
Any way you cut it, it doesn't work.
in the end, it's an aesthetic choice. they wanted to give a visceral sense to the player the lost greatness of the ancient dwarven empire whose vestiges are now overrun with darkspawn. it's the same reason why they have large computers in Fallout 3 even when it's obvious there must be electronic miniaturization for robots to work. they wanted to use an aesthetic in keeping with a 1950's view of the future, which included gigantic computers and intelligent but bulky, clunky robots.
or if that's not good enough for you, there was an evil stone altering wizard named Mxyzygltyrp that accompanied the darkspawn horde and destroyed the great works of the dwarves as well as making caverns where there were no caverns. his name has been lost to the anus of history... until now
Last edited by sycld; 12-12-2009 at 09:07 PM.
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oh yeah also interesting fact about fallout 3:
med-x was originally suppose to be called "morphine," but as is typical of the australian government they threw a little girly fit so bethesda gave it its current name as a concession.
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So it's explained by a deus ex machina that makes it better
yes.
it's a deux ex machina in a way that the FEV and the convenience of saren becoming the sovreign incarnate it could be defeated by the main character and his party are not.
or how the rubble and collapsed passages in either Fallout 3 or DOA or any other video game are precisely so that there is always a way to your goal no matter what.
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Except the rubble and collapsed buildings and tunnels in Fallout 3 are clearly explained by the fact that there was, uh, a nuclear fucking war that, oh by the way, also happens to be the major driving force behind the entire damn storyline. THERE'S NO FUCKING REASON THE DEEP ROADS SHOULD BE BROKEN except that it makes the level design slightly (and I do mean slightly) more varied. How do you not see the difference?
no i do see the difference and i get what you're saying, but again it's an aesthetic choice more than anything. it not only adds some visual interest as you've pointed out, but it also gets the message across in a striking visual way that these are old abandoned and over-run ruins of a once great empire, and on that level i simply accept their state without detailed explanation as to its cause.
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also relevant comic strip is relevant:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/12/2/
"can't you have gay sex with alistair?"
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It annoys me that Wynne and Morrigan are practically required in all parties, but Allistair, despite being so core to the story, is so bad at tanking that you're almost obligated to leave him out once you get Shale. Not that I ever do anything that Allistair approves of, but still.
alistair doesn't die as often now that wynne has all the healing spells and i've maxed out the sword and board tree, but my rogue is still just as good at tanking because of her high dex / evasion
welp either morrigan or wrynne can be left out
if your warden is a mage, that is
and yes, again: DAO is waaaaytoo mage-centric. apparently a lot of the lead designers were faggots that thought they were mages because they liked to play them in video games.
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Assuming you can knock off all the spellcasters before they cast anything. Hello nightmare combo, how are you doing?
yeah the only saving grace about this game is that enemy spell-casters are glass canons while your own mages can take a surprising amount of hits before going down. (I guess Rihanna's class was mage)
chris brown was a two-handed warrior
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