I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins, and I'm playing as a Rogue. On the normal difficulty, I find this game incredibly challanging. It seems the only class that can do any considerable damage to enemies are mages, and I typically have one mage in my party (Wynne), and she always dies quickly, even after constantly monitoring her health with potions and healing spells. Once she dies I just get swarmed by enemies, and without AoE spells, I just get overwhelmed and die. This pretty much happens every other battle and I have to retry a few times to actually win. The particular battle I'm stuck at at the moment is the main hall in temple where I get Urn/Ashes (barring some sort of plot twist; no spoilers please - first play through). I've even noticed this with different combinations of characters.
Does anyone else have a problem with the difficulty in Dragon Age? Or am I just a newb?
The combat system is.. you have to sort of set up the strategies and actions you want your team to do automatically in a way that makes sense. http://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1rv257/just_started_dragon_age_origins_on_pc_does_the/
I hated at first. Then I wanted to see it more.
Then something changed and EA puked all over my system and something went wrong with my origin account way back in the day and led to my general hated of EA. I have DAII but it's got the same issue now as well. I think I rebought dragon age on steam and EA has still been impossible. Makes me sad I'll never play those games because EA sucks so bad. And are abusive.
Thanks for the for the reply Wendell. I've spent tens of minutes fine tuning the party's tactics, but I have few issues with the automated options. For an example, I would like Wynne to cast her Earthquake spell when she sees a cluster of enemies, but I can't quite figure that out, and there aren't enough tactical slots for my main character to automatically switch between archery and melee, and even though he's quite proficient in both, he does considerable more damage with melee weapons, especially when the enemy is stunned, so needing him to automatically switch when an enemy engages him in melee is kinda critical. So in the end, I have to do quite a bit of micro-managing in real-time.
Maybe I haven't dedicated enough time tuning tactics, but I have spend a good half or so, and situations always change, and it would very monotonous work re-tweaking tactics every section, not only because of the variety of enemies, but also the different party configurations, and the relationship building aspect kinda encourages party switching.
I guess the gist of what I'm getting at is there is a very steep difficulty curb between easy and normal and easy is, well, too easy, and normal is reaming me, especially when multiple cultist mages and reavers, which both do massive amounts of damage in their respective classes. I don't dislike the combat system, I just find the difficulty too hard. I was wondering if anyone else could echo the feeling, or if I'm really that unskilled. I haven't had this problem with Mass Effect, or KoTOR, but I suppose those systems aren't as detailed.
in all honesty i play dragon age like its a turn based game pause at start of battle give commands watch for that command to be finished then pause and give new commands. oh god is it micromanagement to the umpteenth degree but its combat that i like :) . makes me feel like im playing a jrpg while still playing a great story and a great looking game.
jerm in all honesty the time it takes to setup a well balanced auto combat system with the ai is in the hours range. your play style has to match all of the auto ai's moves every single time with little room for deviating from your preset combat strategy. so it boils down to practice at combat Patience and constant awareness in relation to preset combat abilities. or just pause the damn game and make the combat slower more organized and over all more enjoyable.
You're probably just a newb. In addition to setting up automatic strategies, you have to be really careful how you build your characters. So spend your attribute points wisely, and make sure that you're stocked on traps and bombs.
Why don't you just crack it? If you've purchased it legally you should be able to apply a crack that gets rid of the awful DRM. It's a single player only game anyway.
I was hoping it wasn't *that* insane. I've never been a huge fan of RPG's in the sense of looting and strategy elements as I don't have the patience, however I love how my actions affect the story in RPG's, so ones such as Mass Effect were amazing.
I'm far more interested in the story and character development/relationships than I am the combat, so I think I'll just play out easy. Thanks for the input. :)