I’ve been somewhat… obsessed with Dragon Age: Origins lately. The voice acting is entertaining (Claudia Black as Morrigan and Steve Valentine as Alistair, in particular.) The story is engaging. The slightly dark take on yet another Tolkien-esqe fantasy world provides and interesting, if somewhat overwrought, spin on the old fantasy tropes.
I’m also having more fun with combat than I often do with computer-based RPGs. Maybe that’s because I’m treating the combat as if it were really a tactical mini-wargame. Because of that, I’ve been having a blast – and been successful – even in some very tough fights. Here’s what I’ve been doing to be successful.
What follows is my take on effective combat in Dragon Age for the PC version. Combat in the PC game becomes much more of a tactical strategy game than the console version, so bear that in mind. I’ve avoided any plot spoilers, focusing on tactics to take down enemies as effectively and quickly as possible.
What’s Not Here
This is about combat management. I’m not going into details about character builds or what type of mage/rogue/fighter to build. I will talk about specific build traits I found useful, but my general approach to character building is to build a character, not a walking set of stats.
Similarly, I don’t talk much about party makeup. While I would tend to bring along two mages, a fighter and my main character (an elven Rogue), that was more an artifact of the story. For example, I’d almost always bring along Alistair and Morrigan, because I found the dialog interplay between the two of them hilarious.
If I play through again, I’ll probably use a completely different party. On the occasions where I mixed up the party a bit, I did have to adjust tactics (not having a healer, for example, meant bringing along lots of healing poultices.)
Prior to Combat
Before you dive into combat, you should prep the party for combat. But how do you know if you’re going to have a combat?
Easy. Have a rogue in your party. More importantly, have a rogue with a couple of levels of stealth skill. Halt your party, put your rogue into stealth mode, and have him scout ahead. If you’re running through winding passages – all too common in this game – you’ll want to have your rogue be the party scout fairly often.
A rogue in stealth mode (hiding in shadows) will also often trigger enemy spawns. Some enemies can also hide in shadows, or are invisible. But they’ll sense your presence, even if they don’t see you, so they’ll often suddenly appear – enabling you to fix their location.
If have at least two levels of stealth (three is better for this tactic), you can even throw grenades or set up traps to soften up large groups of enemies. When the bomb goes off, they’ll move toward you (the direction from which the grenade was thrown), but still not see you. This allows you to draw smaller groups of enemies toward a waiting ambush.
Similarly, moving a rogue into enemy held areas using hiding in shadows allows you to spot and disable traps ahead of time. Some rooms can be full of various traps, and disabling them makes for a more effective assault when the time comes.
Use "hide in shadows" to scout enemy held territory
Managing Resources by Sneaking
In one case, I ran my rogue through a long series of areas loaded with numerous lesser enemies. At the very end, I ran into a boss battle – which automatically brought my party up to that fight, bypassing all the lesser, tedious battles. Sure, those smaller battles might have generated some experience.
But I was in that particular area with relatively few healing poultices and even fewer lyrium potions (to regenerate mana for my spellcasters.) Bypassing the smaller battles allowed me to husband my resources and save them for the bigger fight.
Buffing the Party?
The idea of buffing your party before entering combat seems like a good one. Spells like Glyph of Warding or Heroic Offense may seem like a good idea before a battle starts. In practice, it’s not so useful. What seems to work better is to pause immediately after entering combat, and applying buffs.
However, beware of the one-action queue. It’s too easy to try to give multiple commands (eg, issue a spell, then tell the character to move), only to realize that the character is moving without casting the spell. You can only queue up a single action when you pause. However, you can pause any time you like, so if you prefer a turn-based approach, just hit the space bar after an action is performed.
Good tips. On the subject of buffs, don’t be afraid to use weapon coating potions before a tough fight because you’ll find a ton of them. (I usually forgot to use them and eventually sold them off…)
On the subject of choke points, there’s one catch: the game lacks any sort of “zone of control” mechanism to prevent enemies from moving past your characters. So the smallest genlock will easily push both of your warriors out of the way if he’s targeting your mage in the rear! Using a warrior’s Taunt skill should make him the target and prevent that.
Nice coverage of tactics. I agree with the above, I never really ended up using the weapon coatings, and ended up selling them. Probably would have been useful on a couple fights. On other tip, I found it amazingly useful to bind the pause and quick save to my two extra mouse buttons. Being able to pause, queue up all my actions in a fight and unpause with just a couple clicks on the mouse really streamlined combat. Then being able to quicksave easily allowed me to never really lose progress when a fight went badly or I ran across one of the infrequent crashes.
hey, good tips, Im about to plat DEO, I just bought it and wen have the time with holidays I will engage to to it, thanks
BTW dont get lost so much time, I always check for new articles.
After playing enough MMOs the pause thing gets really old. I like my fights fast and furious!
Still, I’m engrossed as much as Loyd is for the same reasons: The characters, the voice-acting, the world.